by Selena Scott
“You were in the camps?” Phoenix asked with his trademark lack of tact.
There was a long pause where Jesse seemed to eye each and every one of them. He seemed to be caught between wondering what he’d gotten himself into and wondering if he could trust them all. “Yeah. I was.”
“Jesse, while you were in the camps, did you ever hear of the Director?” Diana asked briskly. Down to business as usual.
They’d filled Jesse in on what they knew back in Portland. He’d been very quiet, and now that Ida really thought about, extremely eager to help them get Dawn back.
He paused for a long time again and then he tipped his chin to the side, cracking his neck. It was the first time Ida had seen him look menacing at all. She’d kind of been thinking of him as a big teddy bear up until now. He looked straight at Diana. “Yes.”
“Why didn’t you say anything until now?” Orion asked.
Jesse just raised his eyebrows.
“Oh, come on, Orion,” Wren cut in. “Is that information you would willingly volunteer if you were in his position? We don’t know him and he doesn’t know us.”
“I don’t like to talk about my time in the camps. Shit. Forget talking about it, I don’t even like to think about it. It had been a long time since anyone had talked about the Director to me. I figured you all could probably use me. It’s why I offered to drive. I wasn’t up for spilling my guts. But I’m here, aren’t I?”
The answer seemed to satisfy Orion, who leaned back against a counter, pushing some of his weight into Diana. She wrapped an arm around his waist and held him. In that moment, Ida watched as the tension broke over Orion’s face. She saw every bit of worry and desperation he was feeling. His little sister was missing. And she had disappeared with Quill, who, in their eyes, was the enemy. Plain and simple.
“What can you tell us about the Director? Any information could help us,” Diana said.
As Jesse began to talk, Ida’s mind raced.
Jesse’s assessment of what the camps could do to a person’s soul vibrated in Ida’s gut. Cruelty against shifters was why she’d started working at the center. It sickened her to her core the injustices that shifters suffered at the hands of the government for so long. Her own brother, a shifter himself, had been killed while he’d attempted to escape being brought in to the camps. Could she really write Quill off because of what the camps had done to him?
He’d come back to save Dawn, hadn’t he? Ida had seen it with her own eyes. Quill had thrown himself between Dawn and the men attempting to drag her away. In the end, he hadn’t let anything happen to her.
Orion’s expression flashed in her mind again, Phoenix’s stiff posture, Diana’s assertive tone, Wren’s aggravation, Sasha’s dismay. These were the reactions of people who loved Dawn. Who would fight for her.
But there was no one in Quill’s corner. And as far as Ida knew, there never had been.
She couldn’t let that stand. She would be on his side, in his corner. She wasn’t going to let his story be written by anyone but himself. She might be the sweetest of the group, but she was a fighter when she wanted to be. And she would fight for Quill.
She looked up to see Jesse studying her, looking at her with dark, unreadable eyes that seemed to almost know what she was thinking.
She wanted Dawn back. But dammit, she wanted Quill back too.
She just hoped Phoenix could forgive her for that.
***
Quill cracked his eyelids to soft, white light and was confused when he saw it was daylight filtering through white curtains. He didn’t know where the hell he was, what time of day it was, or why the hell he could barely move his arms or legs. But he certainly knew the hand that was laid against his cheek.
“Easy,” Dawn’s voice said quietly and he felt the mattress dip with her weight as she sat down beside him. “Don’t fight it. Just rest.”
Her hand, still resting on his cheek, slid around to his forehead. A moment later, a cool washcloth slid over his face and then was laid over his eyes, blocking out the light. It was only when the cool cloth relieved the ache that he realized his eyes hurt.
He faded away again. When he woke the next time, the quality of the light had changed. He realized that it was probably late afternoon. He shifted on the bed and sat up slowly. The washcloth plopped off of his forehead and onto his lap.
A shadow moved next to him and he tensed, but quickly realized it was just Dawn rising up from a chair next to the bed. She picked up the washcloth and put its cool side down on the back of his neck. Quill hissed, it felt so freaking good.
“Where are we?” Quill asked, blinking around at what looked to be a pretty fancy hotel room. He winced just thinking about how much of their cash Dawn had probably used to get them in here for the night.
“Somewhere in Arkansas.”
“Arkansas?” he asked through a dry mouth. His head was absolutely pounding.
Seeming to read his mind, Dawn handed him a cup of water. “Ibuprofen?”
He nodded. “You’re a goddess,” he said as she handed it over. “Arkansas is back in the direction we came from.”
“I was trying to lose him.”
Him. Harris. The asshole who’d tranqed him. Everything came back in bright, vicious strokes of color.
“Easy. Easy,” Dawn said again, putting a firm hand on his shoulder and pushing him back onto the bed. “I’ll tell you everything if you promise to just lie there and listen, all right? I don’t want you wobbling around the hotel room and hurting yourself.”
He shot her a stubborn look but obliged her, crossing his arms over his chest. “Go on.”
“Well, I don’t know if you remember, but that guy, Harris, he tranqed you. He was following us. I don’t know if he wanted to kill you or what. But yeah, he tranqed you and then called somebody. When you rushed him in the alleyway, he pulled out a knife but I shifted and scared the shit out of him. Right before you passed out, you mentioned that you thought there was a tracker in your hip—”
“Fuck.” Quill ripped the sheets off of himself and promptly realized two things at once. One, he was buck naked under there. And two, at some point after he’d passed out, Dawn had used a knife and dug the tracker out from under his skin. He looked up at her in awe. She was freaking badass.
She wasn’t looking back at him, though. Her eyes were on the ceiling, avoiding looking at his naked ass.
“You know,” she said, addressing the sky. “I’m kind of wondering how the hell a guy who has assassins after him forgets that he has a tracker embedded in his body?”
He laughed at her diplomatic tone. She couldn’t have made her opinion on his intelligence any clearer than if she’d straight up called him a dumbass.
“I didn’t realize it was still active. They used it to track me when I was still in the camps. He had them implanted in those of us he worked with. But before, whenever it was used for tracking me, it would get hot under my skin. If I was in a dark room, I could see a faint glow under my skin. It wasn’t covert.” He pushed at his aching eyes and drank more of the water. “When the camps were closed down, I never felt it go hot again. I figured that whatever piece of technology he used to track us must have been trashed along with the rest of the stuff in his lab.”
“Wow.”
“What happened after I passed out?”
Sitting on the edge of the mattress, Dawn pulled up one of her knees and rested her chin on it. He liked watching her get comfortable. “I picked up the knife that dear old Harris dropped while he was running away from me and I cut the tracker out of your hip.”
“Hot.”
“What?” she furrowed her brow.
If he’d been thinking more clearly, he probably wouldn’t have said it aloud. “You being all badass and cutting the tracker out. It’s hot.”
She pursed her lips. “I shifted in order to protect you, too. Does that count as hot?”
Quill smirked at her, but it was to cover up the tremble in his heart.
Because it wasn’t hot that she’d shifted to protect him, it was everything. He couldn’t even think about her standing over him in her wolf form without suddenly feeling things he hadn’t felt since his family was alive. “Finish the story.”
“Right. Well, then I dragged your heavy ass back to the car. Which is why your jeans are all dirty and ripped. Sorry. And then I pulled onto the highway and merged on the next one I could find. I kept switching roads for a while until I was certain that we weren’t being followed. And then I found this B and B. And dragged you in here. You woke up for a minute and I was able to get you on the bed. After that, you were completely passed out. You’ve been in and out for a while.”
“How are we paying for this room?” he asked.
“Actually, the owners are shifters. I scented them when I pulled into the driveway. They said that they’ll let us stay here no charge. I had to talk them out of calling the police, though. Actually, I should go let them know you’re awake. They said that if you didn’t wake up soon, they were going to take you to the hospital.”
“No,” he said, holding out a heavy arm and stopping her from standing. “Let me. I want to meet them.”
She looked at him skeptically and it soon became very apparent why. Because he could barely push his heavy legs out of the bed. She wordlessly dug through his duffel and handed him a clean pair of boxer briefs. Quill wrestled them on. He tried for one tremulous second to stand and then was forced to sit back down, dropping his head into his hand. A pricking sweat had broken out over his forehead. He yanked at his hair, then took a deep breath and tried again. This time he was able to get to the bathroom via leaning on every piece of furniture between here and there. He peed, splashed water on his face and through his hair, and nearly groaned aloud as he brushed his teeth with the complimentary stuff that was laid out next to the sink.
But his momentary foray into independence was stymied as a wave of fatigue rolled over him as he made his way back out to the bedroom. He collapsed again onto the bed. She sat next to him on the mattress. “Jesus. What did he use on me?”
“Sucks, doesn’t it?” she said in a soft voice.
Quill stilled. He pushed up so that he hung his head between his bent knees, his hand carding through his hair. Because he just realized that this was exactly how she’d felt after she’d been tranqed. When she’d come to see him at his apartment, it had been just a little over twenty-four hours since she’d been tranquilized. She must have felt like absolute hell. Yet she’d stood there looking dignified and gorgeous and she’d asked him point-blank to confirm or deny what she’d learned about him.
“I can’t believe I did this to you,” he said in a voice that he couldn’t believe sounded so broken. It barely even sounded like him. His eyes stayed on the floor even though she took his chin in her smooth hand and tipped his face up.
“Quill, you didn’t do that to me. You didn’t tranq me. You didn’t shoot the gun.”
He wasn’t letting himself off that easily and he didn’t want her to either. “Maybe, but I knew it would happen. I was the one who sent you there. I’d spent weeks figuring out how to make it all happen. Isn’t that just as bad?”
She stared at him for a long second and he didn’t breathe while he waited for her verdict.
“You might have done all those things. But you know what else you did? You stood between me and the soldiers in your bear form. You didn’t get to me in time to prevent them from shooting me with the tranquilizer dart, but you came, Quill. All you had to do was sit back and watch as they took me. But you didn’t. You stormed out of the woods and protected me. Shielded me.”
Her eyes didn’t drop. Quill’s heart attempted to bang its way out of his chest.
“Why?” she asked quietly. “We’ve never talked about that. Why did you do it?”
“You don’t know?” he asked in a low voice.
Her dark eyes bounced back and forth between his, her bottom lip between her teeth. “I need to hear you say it.”
And sitting on a bed together, in this quiet room, with the late afternoon sun streaming through the filmy curtains, dust motes spinning lazily in the air, Dawn’s big, brown eyes pretty much destroying his existence, Quill broke. He simply couldn’t do it anymore. He had no desire to lie. Even if it made his life complicated. Even if she met him with disbelief or derision, he didn’t care anymore. He’d been breaking in small increments all along this journey. He’d told her how much he cared about her and he couldn’t take it back, but he wasn’t scared. He finally wasn’t scared of her knowing the truth. Come what may.
“Fuck it,” he said, tugging at his hair again, wishing that he wasn’t lying mostly naked and half-dead on the bed for this conversation. He really would have loved to pace around right now. Instead he was pinned in place by her eyes. “Dawn, I know you know the story. I set the whole thing up with the Director. I was the one who figured out how to trick the other mentors into thinking the study was real. I was the one who locked Diana in her office so that she couldn’t get to you and warn you. I’d spent months agonizing over what it would mean for you. And your family, but mostly you. I know you probably don’t give a shit that it was hard for me. But it’s the truth. I had your life in one hand and my life in the other. If I betrayed the Director, he’d have absolutely no use for me. I knew he’d kill me dead. And yeah. I chose myself over you.”
He locked eyes with her and besides breathing a little more quickly than she had been a moment before, she didn’t betray any signs of distress. He couldn’t stop now. He had to barrel on.
“I walked out of the center, having locked away Diana and Ida, knowing that that meant that my job was done. I got into my car and looked at the time and realized that at that very moment, you were likely getting separated from your brothers. You probably hadn’t figured out what was happening yet, but the whole thing was in motion. All I had to do was get out of the fucking way.” He drew his legs up, balanced his forearms on his knees, and hung his head. His knuckles whitened as his hands drew into fists.
“I turned the car on and drove to my house. I got out of the car. But I didn’t go inside. I stood there for a full minute and all I could see was this image of you—” he cleared his throat. “This image of you passed out and strapped down. I could see the Director looming over you. And I knew if that happened, it would be my fault. That I could have been brave. But instead I’d chosen to be loyal to an evil man. I went into sort of a trance. I got back in the car and raced toward the route I knew they were taking. When I saw that the vehicles they were using had been stopped on the road, I got out of my car and shifted. The rest, well, you were there. You don’t need me to explain what happened.”
Even now, he could hear the Director’s voice in his head, telling him to do the job. Reminding him that he had absolutely no purpose on this earth if he didn’t do what he’d been trained to do. In the camps, his training had been the one thing that had made him valuable. It had been the one thing that kept him alive. Breaking that training had been the single hardest thing he’d ever had to do. He’d never felt more vulnerable than he had in that moment.
“Tell me,” Dawn said, her voice so quiet that he’d barely heard her. “Tell me anyways.”
He let out a deep breath, his head still bowed. “I saw you there, in your wolf form. And I saw the guns they were pointing at you. It was the worst moment of my life. And there have been a lot of bad moments in my life. I didn’t think they would shoot to kill. I knew that the Director wanted you captured alive. But the men were just hired muscle and I also knew that I couldn’t trust them. I had to get there. To be between you and them. And I was. I got there, you were already tranqed. The cops came. I didn’t want to get arrested. I saw that you were safe with your brothers. I left. End of story.”
Silence rang, clear as a bell, between them. He could feel her eyes on his downturned head, but he still couldn’t bring himself to look up at her. End of story, Quill? Really? Don’t be a pussy. Tell her the re
st.
“You’re the most freaking confusing person I’ve ever met!” The bed bounced as she stood up and paced to the window. She faced away from him. As much as it was a relief not to have her eyes boring into him anymore, he also wanted them back. He wanted her attention. He wanted to see into her. As hard as it was to see himself reflected back at himself, he wanted that too.
“Why?” he asked huskily, willing her to turn around.
“Because I can’t figure you out! You’re not a villain and you’re definitely not the hero.” Finally, she turned, her hands on her hips. “I wanted you to be the hero, Quill. Back when I had a huge, embarrassing crush on you.”
His eyes widened and his palms went sweaty. “You had a crush on me?”
“Oh, please. Don’t act like you didn’t know.”
“I didn’t.”
She narrowed her eyes at his sharp, honest tone.
“It’s true,” he insisted. “You treated me so… friendly. I thought you thought of me as your older brother or something.”
“That’s how it started. Then I went and realized how hot you are and I got a crush. But that’s over now.” She decisively sliced her hand through the air and Quill winced.
“I never pretended to be a hero.”
“No. You didn’t. And that’s my mistake for putting that on you.” She faced away from him again. “This all made a lot more sense when I thought you didn’t care about me at all. But now I’m back to not getting it.”
“What don’t you get?”
She whirled around and stalked toward him, fire in her eyes. She stopped when her shins edged against the side of the bed, an accusatory finger half an inch from his nose.
“You say you cared about me enough to break your training at the last second and come to protect me, right? Well then, what the fuck is all this?” She threw her arms out to indicate their room, their car, the entire journey. “I mean, I know I volunteered for this, but why the hell are you letting me turn myself in to the Director? You care about me so much that you stand in between me and a gun, yet here you are, half a week later, ferrying me straight to hell? In what world does that make any sense? That’s what I don’t understand about you.”
