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I had no idea what he meant, and I shrank back in spite of knowing I could easily take him in a fight right then. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He pushed up on his elbow and bared his teeth. “What are you?”
“I’m a human,” I spat, “who has spent the last three months being experimented on, and I need someone to fix it before this kills me. So, if you could stop staring at me like you want to rip my throat out…”
He looked startled and quickly backed off, shuffling up along the mattress farther. His hand darted out, feeling around before he settled his upper back against the wall, and after a beat, his breathing calmed.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice rough. “You just… You smell like…” He stopped, then shook his head, and I swore for a second in the glow of the moonlight, he blushed. “It doesn’t matter.”
It did matter, more than I wanted to admit, but I wouldn’t press him on it. Hopefully in the morning, more of his wolf would emerge.
He’d heal. He’d get stronger.
I only hoped that when it happened, our shared trauma would keep him on my side.
“I’m going to head to the front room,” I told him, taking one of the water bottles with me. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to sleep much, so if you need anything, just yell.”
He stiffened, then nodded. “And if anything happens… if anyone approaches the house…”
“You’ll probably know before I do,” I reminded him, knowing even in this state his senses were far stronger. “Just try to get some rest.”
He sank farther down on the mattress and gave a soft grunt to let me know he’d heard me. I watched him another long moment, then turned and headed out.
I shut the door behind me, then made my way across the dusty floor toward the living room. My body ached for a proper bed, and my mind ached for peace. I wanted to rewind back to a year before—two even. Back when I was blissfully ignorant to the horrors that humans were capable of. Back when I was lost in my books and my studies, and the proof of human cruelty was nothing more than notes on a page.
Back when I thought maybe we could be better than this.
But we weren’t. We had never really been. We weren’t the only monsters, but we had no moral high ground in this war.
I sank to the floor and used an old, battered sofa cushion to rest on. The pain was a constant friend now, wrapping around my middle. I began to ache all over like I had a fever, but with no time to be sick, I decided to ignore it. Hopefully, the Wolves would come for him before things got bad, but I also knew that with my luck, that wasn’t going to happen.
Chapter Three
KOR
I woke slowly, a sort of aching climb to consciousness, and I fought it at first because being awake meant feeling the torment even more acutely. It took me too long to remember I was no longer strapped to a bed, in the lab, with poison being pumped into my veins.
I didn’t ache the way I had before. I was healing. I held my eyes shut, but I didn’t need to open them to know I still couldn’t see. When I turned my face into the warm sun, there were no pinpricks of red showing through my closed lids. Just the absence of all light.
I breathed out a sigh, feeling it leech from the bottom of my feet, all the way to the roots of my hair, and then I sat up. For a brief, fleeting moment, I saw flashes. Sparks in the corners of what was once vision, but when they faded, there was nothing. Not even the tiny ring of sight remained in my periphery like there had been the night before.
It’s the healing process, I told myself as my hands felt around the bed. It had to be. I had no way to gauge how my body was going to deal with all of this. I had been injured in war before, but I had never been stripped down to nothing for months on end.
I pressed a hand to my chest and felt the irregular heartbeat. There was damage there too, and in my lungs. I could feel the tug when I filled them with air and fought the urge to cough when I exhaled. My nerves were on edge, but I had to keep a grip on my control. If I had to fight—if the human was wrong and this was a trap, I had to save my strength. I wouldn’t be taken again. I would not go through that. I would die before I let the humans put their hands on me.
I explored my surroundings by touch, and I froze when my knuckles bumped against a pile of something soft. Fabric. Clothes, I realized. Clothes Misha had left out for me. From the feel of them, they wouldn’t do much to keep out the elements, but the pants were fleece, and sleeves on the sweater reached all the way down to my wrists.
I felt a sudden urge of frustration that I couldn’t see what they looked like. Misha could have put me in hot pink, and I wouldn’t know until my eyes started to heal, but I realized after a beat that it didn’t matter. The clothes gave me back a sort of dignity that had been stripped away the moment I had been taken. They covered me in ways I had been denied for too long, and a small part of me wanted to weep at the small, almost thoughtless gesture.
I pushed myself to stand and regretted that I had nothing for my feet, but the clothes were enough of a comfort. The floor under me was warm and rough—like the wood had been unpolished long enough it had begun to splinter. The heat there told me the sun was high, most likely. I wasn’t sure if I was grateful for Misha for letting me sleep or furious because it likely meant he’d fallen asleep on the job.
I supposed, in the end, it didn’t matter. I had survived the night, and off in the distance, I could hear the fast thrum of his heart, which meant he had too.
I fumbled around the room as I tried to find the door, my mortification at being so weak and helpless mollified only by the fact that I knew no one was watching. It was a little absurd that after all the humiliation and degradation I experienced at the hands of the monsters in the lab, I would be worried about Misha seeing me miss the door and hit the wall, but I was desperate to regain some of my dignity. Not that he would have even noticed, I thought as my fingers brushed along the walls.
Misha, the human captive experiment, had been tormented right along with me. He hadn’t been treated the same, as far as I could tell, but part of me wondered if what he endured was somehow worse. After all, I had been unconscious for nearly everything they’d done to me. He had been awake—aware—as they worked on him.
Something about him was altered. I could sense that even in my weakest state. His scent was off, the beat of his heart too rapid, the temperature of his skin too hot. He was also hurting. I could feel pain radiating off him in waves, though he held himself through it enough that I was impressed.
