by K. Webster
“It lived?” she hisses, her eyes going wide.
“Apparently so,” I grumble. “We’ll need to be watchful that it doesn’t come back when we’re out there.”
She shivers. “I hate that bird.”
“Me too.” I strip out of my zu-gear and kick off my boots. “Should I warm you?”
I don’t expect her to agree, but when her nog moves up and down, my heart flips inside my chest.
But why?
Why does the idea of pulling her tiny body against mine feel like the most wonderful gift I could ever receive?
What about Aria?
“Hadrian…”
Her voice cuts through my mind, silencing all thoughts. “Yes, feral one?”
She smiles. “Come warm me up.”
“I thought you were afraid of me,” I challenge as I all too eagerly bound over to her.
“If you try anything funny, I’ll kick you in the balls again. That was effective.”
“Wicked female,” I growl, smiling.
She lifts the blanket and lies on her side, giving me room. It’ll be a tight squeeze, but I’m willing to give it a go. I settle on my side beneath the blanket, facing her, and wrap my arm around her small waist. She gasps when I haul her to my chest. Her tiny fist grips the front of my minnasuit and she tilts her nog up to look at me.
“I knew you’d be warm,” she murmurs.
My gaze falls to her pouty lips. Pink. Pretty. Soft.
“I don’t need to have the truth-teller to know you want to kiss me,” she says, her blue eyes sharp and assessing.
Rather than answer and reveal a truth I am not ready to give, I slide my palm to her rump and squeeze it.
“Hadrian!”
I lift a brow. “I’m warming you up.”
“My ass is fine.”
“It’s an agreeable ass,” I confirm.
“Agreeable? That makes it sound like it’s mediocre.”
Confusing female.
“Your rump is far from mediocre,” I assure her. “It’s plump. I like squeezing it…to warm it.”
She narrows her eyes. “Plump, hmm?”
“Plump is not a nice word?”
“You think my ass is nice?”
“I think your rump is a lot of things, nice included.”
A smile tugs at her lips. In this moment, she is playful and sweet. A far cry from the hard woman I first met. And what about me? Cuddling up to her and teasing about her rump is the old Hadrian—the Hadrian who didn’t get his heart broken by something he can’t have and grow hard in the process.
What if I was never meant to have it because I was meant to have something even better?
Right now, with Lyric watching me with unguarded interest, it’s hard to imagine anything better. She smells sweet and I crave to bury my nose in her hair to inhale her scent.
“Still cold?” My voice is husky. The playfulness has evaporated.
“Yes,” she whispers.
“Where?”
“My back.”
Slowly, I slide my palm up her rump, but when I reach the bottom of her shirt, I slip it beneath the material. The moment my claws rake along her bare skin, she shivers.
“Is my hand cold?” I rasp.
“N-No. It’s warm.”
“You like it?”
“Yes.”
I run my fingers up along the slightly protruding bones in the middle of her back. Between the blades of her shoulders, I gently rub her there. Her shirt has ridden up, exposing her stomach to me.
“Is your stomach cold now?” I ask, my voice barely a whisper.
She nods.
“Should I warm it?”
She nods again.
I slide my hand around to her front and splay my palm out over her skin. Her breath hitches. I briefly wonder how it would look swollen, filled with my mortling. Need and possessiveness lodge in my throat, eventually escaping as a husky growl. When my hand inches higher, she jolts. My cock reacts to her body, straining in my minnasuit.
“Am I hurting you?” I ask over the pounding of my heart.
“No.”
My hand clutches her ribs and my thumb brushes along the underside of her breast. Her body quivers.
“I’m warm now,” she breathes. “Hot even. Thank you.”
Begrudgingly, I slide my hand away from her breast and settle it on her hip. I’m feeling conflicted. Did I imagine the mutual need? Was it one-sided? I’m lost in thought when I smell it.
Heady. Addictive. Obvious.
Arousal.
I’ve scented it on the other females back at the Facility before. It’s a scent I recognize and often crave. My eyes dart to hers. She squeezes her eyes closed as though she can shut me out. I brush my nose against hers.
“My nose is cold,” I lie.
She laughs. “Where’s the truth-teller?”
“Back at the prison where it belongs. I can say what I want and you’ll never know the truth,” I tease, inhaling her.
“You’re simply keeping me warm,” she says, her tone firm. “That’s all this is. Nothing. Don’t confuse things.”
I open my eyes and pull away to look at her. Her face tells me everything she won’t. All her truths written so plainly on her telling features.
This is so much more than nothing.
It feels like the beginning of something with a promise of everything.
9
Lyric
So fixing the antenna is a total frigging failure, just like Hadrian had said it would be. I’m hurt, though I won’t admit it out loud, and there’s no way Hadrian can repair the damn thing while trying to keep my injured ass safe.
Thinking about my ass only makes me remember how it had felt in Hadrian’s hands, so I try to push the thought away.
Focus, Lyric.
“We have to go back,” I finally say into the silence.
“What about the comms unit? We were nearly to the top.”
“We’ll have to climb straight back up the mountain and you were right. It’s too dangerous.”
His eyes study me as though he knows I’m hurting, but won’t admit it. He could convince me to keep going, to push through it, but instead, he says, “We’ll return to the prison. When you’re healed, we can go back up to fix the antenna.”
I give him a wan smile. “That’s sweet of you, but we’re going to have enough trouble getting back down the mountain, let alone planning another trip up. It’s too risky and I don’t want you to get hurt, too.”
Hadrian lifts a hand to my jaw, thumbing the bruise blooming along my cheek. “If I asked you to trust me, do you think you’d be comfortable letting Theron and me fly the Mayvina to the top of the mountains? We can make contact with the Facility, repair the antenna, and schedule a time for you to talk with your sister.”
Trust him?
How can I trust a man…a monster…I barely know?
My eyes flutter closed as the gentleness of his touch takes me off guard. When was the last time I let someone touch me? That I felt comfort from another person? Too long ago for me to remember off the top of my head. And certainly not since I’ve been at the prison. Finding Aria, and then caring for the prisoners has been all I’ve focused on for so long, his caress shocks me to silence.
I force myself to mellow, to think. I don’t know if it’s the bump on the head or the exhaustion I feel deep in my bones from the trek up the mountain, but I can’t seem to put two words together.
“Lyric,” he says in a dark rumble.
“How am I supposed to trust you?”
“You’ll never know until you try. That’s sort of how it works, sweet one.”
“Don’t call me that,” I say absentmindedly as his hand slips down my cheek and rests on my shoulder. I like his hands on me too much, I realize, and get to my feet. It’s like I’ve gotten a taste of something I shouldn’t have, and I like it—too much. So much that I want him to put them on me again. And again. And again.
And that’s th
e last thing I should want.
“How are you feeling this solar?”
He doesn’t seem to notice anything is wrong and I join him at the door of the decontamination room to look out the window. Focusing on the trip back to the prison is much safer than what I was considering before.
“I’m fine enough to go back. You don’t have to baby me.”
“I’m not babying you, I’m protecting you. It’s what Breccan would do.”
The for Aria isn’t voiced, but it doesn’t need to be. He may not be her…mate, or whatever, but he may as well be. He came here to find me…for her. He’s trekking all over this mountain…for her. He saved me…for her.
“Let’s just get back as fast as we can.”
He doesn’t argue.
No doubt he wants to radio Aria as soon as possible.
We both suit up in silence and I use the quiet to get my disordered thoughts in line. It’s not Hadrian’s fault that I’m so conflicted. He’s been nothing but helpful and cooperative for the most part.
“The Big Bird should have moved on by now, and as long as we travel quickly, we’ll get out of the range of the armworms.”
I double-check my helmet. “What makes you think he’s left? What if he’s out there waiting for us?”
“Do you really want to be around to find out?”
Good point. I gesture for him to lead the way.
Suddenly, the strange beasts on this planet don’t seem as much of an obstacle as the towering alien in front of me.
I know something is wrong when the flashing red lights atop the guard towers catch my eye. I’d been so lost in thought, having successfully navigated our way down the mountain, that it takes a long second of staring for me to place the visual with meaning. By that time, Hadrian is already fifty feet in front of me, moving so fast he looks like a shadow racing to the closest entrance of the prison.
My heart drops to the bottom of my stomach.
Oh, God, please let everyone be okay.
Did the guards somehow escape and regain control? Has Theron double-crossed us somehow? Is Hadrian part of the trick? Could it all be a trap?
Scenarios—each worse than the last—whip through my mind until everything is a blur, my head pounding with the effort and the lingering effects from the fall. My thighs burn with each step. By the time I reach the decontamination bay, my whole body is shaking.
There is no sound coming from the other side of the decontamination bay door. It’s utterly still. I key in the code Willow programmed to allow me access and the door slides open. We go through the decontamination process as quickly as possible. The door to the prison opens into a dim hallway. A flashing red light bathes us in its ominous glow.
“Stay behind me,” Hadrian orders, the knife in his hand glinting in the red light. He pauses long enough to take off most of the suit and I do the same.
Clad only in my prison uniform, I take out my own knife and grip it with my palm slick with sweat. As Hadrian advances into the hall, my ears strain to collect sound, but there’s nothing but my harsh breathing and the scuffling noise of our footsteps echoing off the walls. There’s no sign of any of the others, which worries me more than anything. They would have seen us enter the prison walls from the sensors that monitor the perimeter. Someone should have been here to greet us.
When Hadrian starts to take the wrong passage to the command room, I tug on his suit and he follows my direction wordlessly. I can feel the tension not unlike my own emanating from him in waves. Each step takes the effort of a thousand for fear of what we might find once we reach our destination.
There is nothing but a subtle hum from the computers in the command room and a slight glow from their screens. Hadrian surges ahead and signals for me to wait for him. It takes all my control to keep from pushing him aside and barging in. He pushes through the door and my body locks up as I wait…and wait…and wait. Then he comes to me and motions for me to come inside.
I hold my breath until I see Willow sitting at the computers. I study her face and although she doesn’t look injured, something still isn’t right. Like someone scrambled her features and put them back together wrong. “What happened?” I ask briskly. “Are you okay?”
Even though I can tell she’s not.
She nods, but says, “It’s one of the girls from C-Block. She’s sick. Very sick.”
A tightness in my chest eases, but Hadrian grows more tense beside me. We’ve dealt with illness in the prison before. The kind that sweeps through the prison like a plague at regular intervals. Colds, stomach flus. It’s not ideal, but nothing Zoe can’t handle. She’s a trooper in the center of chaos, the calm at the eye of a storm.
“Is everyone else all right?”
“So far, it’s just the one infected, but Lyric…we’ve never seen anything like this before. It came on so quickly.”
Illness doesn’t seem like a threat compared to the monsters we just faced, the guards we once overtook. That’s the only explanation I have for the relief I feel…until I glance over at Hadrian and find, if at all possible, that his face has bleached of what little color it has. His skin is ghost-white, and if I couldn’t see his chest rising and falling with each inhalation, I would have thought he was dead.
“Hadrian?” I breathe, terror clutching at my throat.
“Take me to the sick one,” he says in a voice wholly unlike his own. It’s as ghastly as his expression. “Lyric, I need Theron, please. Lock us up, put us in chains, whatever you have to do, but I need him…and so do you.”
The ghost of a shiver courses down my spine, its bone-dead fingers clicking against each of my vertebrae. I cannot voice the fears that have lodged in my brain, so I nod to Willow, who leaves without protest. It’s the begging that has undone me, the naked terror in his eyes. It tells me what I don’t want to hear, screams the name of a foe I’d rather not meet.
We wait in silence until Willow returns with an apprehensive Theron, who grows even more grave at the expression on Hadrian’s face. “Is it true?” Theron asks, his eyes on Hadrian. “Is it true what this one has told me?”
“I don’t know for certain.” Hadrian turns to Willow and me. “Where do you keep your sick?”
Willow’s lips are dry, and she licks them before stuttering, “In the infirmary on the basement level. That’s where she is.”
“Take us there,” Hadrian requests with infinite calm and surprising gentleness. “Please.”
Willow meets my eyes and nods at the request in them. She’ll stand watch in the command center. I turn on my heel and the two behind me follow in step without another word. Theron’s uncharacteristic silence unnerves me. In the time he’s been here, he’s been talking, teasing, or laughing.
He isn’t laughing now.
The doors to the elevator spring open once we reach the level for the infirmary. We haven’t had much use for it after we locked the guards away. There were very few wounds to tend once there was no one to brutalize us. Now, Zoe uses it mostly to patch scrapes or treat colds. Nothing like the misery that had been here before.
Nothing like the scent of disease that clings to it now.
I observe Theron and Hadrian sharing a wordless glance that I ignore as I travel deeper into the open space full of hospital beds to the isolation unit on the farthest wall. There’s a single light on inside and Zoe sits on a chair holding watch just in front of it. She gets to her feet when she hears us approach and I know, without a doubt, something is wrong by the lack of fight in her voice. Just like I’d known with one look at Willow.
“You’re back,” she says dully. She doesn’t even glance at Theron and Hadrian.
“Yes. What’s wrong here? What happened?”
Zoe gestures toward the isolation unit, where a woman is asleep on the bed in a cocoon of blankets.
“It’s Lena. She came down with a fever after you left. I dosed her with fever medication, but nothing seems to touch it. If anything, it’s gotten worse.”
I wish I
had the knowledge to tell her what to do next, but I’m no doctor. Zoe is the only one of us who has any sort of medical training and if she’s stumped…I push that thought aside.
“Keep giving her the medication. A pain reliever, too. Maybe it will go down in twenty-four hours.”
Zoe tries to smile, but it falls short.
“It won’t go down,” Theron says from behind us.
“What are you talking about?” Zoe asks.
“A fever that burns so hot it almost singes the hand. Comes on quick and brutal, remorseless. There will be others. You must isolate them as soon as possible to contain the threat. After the fevers, there will be sores, all over their bodies. Then madness.”
“What is he talking about?” I ask Hadrian.
He meets my eyes and there’s desolation in his. Death.
“It’s The Rades.”
10
Hadrian
“Hadrian,” Lyric whispers, her fingers biting into my bicep. “What do we do?”
The terror in her eyes matches my own. Everyone is looking at me for answers. Even Theron. I don’t have answers. I have instinct.
“You and I can start assessing everyone,” I tell Lyric. “We’ll be looking for any signs of illness. Fever, dizziness, confusion. They’re stage one.” Then, I point to Zoe. “Anyone who has fever and is developing sores will need to be treated by Zoe. They’re stage two and can remain in the infirmary until stage three.”
“Stage three?” Lyric asks.
“Madness.” I nod at Theron. “Third stage. Theron can head that stage up as they may need to be restrained.”
I start to walk off, but Lyric stops me. “But how do we prevent from getting sick ourselves?”
Theron bows his nog. “You can’t.”
“What?” Lyric hisses, stepping closer to regard me with a stern look. “What does he mean?”
“Means it’s airborne,” Zoe offers, her voice soft. “Willow and I reviewed the tapes. Stella and Henry never saw any of the other people. No one went into their empty quarters. Henry either brought it into the prison or it came in when the door was left open. Either way, it’s in the ventilation and everyone’s been exposed.”
