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Cadmus sits up, drawing one knee up, on which he rests his elbow and daubs the blood at the corner of his eye with his finger.
“You want to destroy her. That it? Be my fucking guest. You tell her.” Titus strides past me, without bothering to look my way
Cadmus snorts, and shakes his head. “Like I always say, somebody’s gotta be the bad guy.”
“Tell me what?” I ask, trailing after Titus’s steps. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going to search beyond the hill.”
“I’m coming with you.”
He doesn’t even spare me a glance when he says, “You’ll stay with him,” but the annoyance in his voice is clear.
“I’ll search the buildings for some supplies,” I hear Brandon say behind me. “See if I can find some blankets. It’s getting cold sleeping in that cab every night.”
I swing my attention back toward Cadmus, catching Brandon walk off toward the strip of abandoned buildings beyond him. “Tell me what?”
It’s not unusual for Cadmus to look me straight in the eye when telling me things he knows might hurt me. At times, I’ve wondered if he enjoys watching how such news affects me, so the fact that he can’t even bring himself to meet my stare has my pulse racing with anxiety.
“Tell me what?”
He huffs, looking out over the desert, anywhere he can avoid my probing stare, I guess. “There was a time when the mutations were penned together. Men with even the most minor deformities, discarded as failed experiments. Ericsson began to notice something about them. Where the mutations would kill and consume other men, they were particularly sadistic toward the other Alphas. Ones that still appeared human.”
The picture he’s painting in my head of the poor men sent off to be penned in with the mutations leaves a throbbing ache in my chest.
“If you’ve ever watched some animals in the wild, the way they sometimes toy with a kill. Keeping it alive. Gaining some amusement out of it.”
“What are you saying, Cadmus? Just say it.”
“I’m saying that if there’s a chance that Valdys is alive, he is, or has been, hunted for two months inside that hospital. And if they’ve found him, he’s not going to be what he was.”
Tears swell in my eyes, as my mind conjures such images of him being tortured by those creatures in sadistic play.
“At some point, you need to let him go, Cali. We’ve scoured the desert. Searched nearly every hive that still stands, and we’re no closer to finding those rebels than we were when we started.” He pushes to his feet, and when he lurches toward me, I step back, away from him.
“You’ve never believed that he was alive. You never gave a shit about him!”
“I do.” Edging toward me again, he reaches out a hand, his pale green eyes drilling right through my defenses. “But two months is a long fucking time in that place. With God knows how many of those things. And if you did manage to get inside, what makes you think Valdys would stand to see his woman torn apart by them?”
I know that he wouldn’t. I know that Cadmus is speaking some logic, but my heart refuses to relent. It refuses to give in to what my head is telling me. That’s the problem with the heart, it’s too independent for the mind, and hungry for pain.
“If it were me, I’d want you to forget about me.” His brows knit together, as if the thought of such a thing is more than he can stand. “Valdys is like a brother to me. I know he’d want the same.” As he steps toward me, I step back again, and the hot steel of the truck hits my spine where he’s backed me against it. “Your head is stuck in the same loop that mine’s been in for months. Tormenting yourself with nightmares. Seeing things that aren’t there. And don’t tell me you don’t hear his voice from time to time. Calling out to you. I watch you. I see what this is doing to you.” Caging me in with his arms at either side of me, he drags his hand down my temple, pushing back a strand of hair from my face. “Just as you pulled me out of that place inside my head, I’m pulling you out now.”
Tears slip down my cheeks, and he captures one beneath the pad of his thumb, smears it across my lips. “You taste that? It’s reality, Cali, and it’s fucking bitter. But you and I? We can lose ourselves. Escape and never come back.” The flicker of a smile dances across his face. “I’m telling you, it’s the best feeling in the world. Escaping it all.”
“That’s why you want to give up. To end this search. So you can drift off to your fairytale land and never come back.”
“Just give me what I need.” Crazed eyes shift slightly as he stares back at me, the desperation in them bleeding through. “I’m not going to beg.”
“Cadmus, you don’t--”
“Just give me what I fucking need!” Tension drawn tight in his neck pulses with anger, his muscles at either side of my head bunched as I turn my face from his.
“You want to escape, Cadmus?” I reach down into the satchel at my side, where I stored away the last of his peyote, and throw it in his face. “Be my fucking guest! I’m not going down with you!” Anger explodes to the surface, as I push at his chest, but it fails to move him, like ribbons flitting against an unmovable boulder. “I’ll find Valdys myself!”
Slipping from him, I stride toward the back of the truck, my heart on the verge of exploding into a bloody mess inside it’s solitary cage.
A stab of pain strikes my abdomen, so hot it feels cold, sending me straight to my knees. I cry out, clutching my side, and press my palm to the dirt to keep from collapsing.
