One. Two. Three. The blood in my head hammers against swollen veins. At first I count each thud. Four. Five. Six. Then, the distracting inhalation of a breath. Pain, oh god, everywhere. Seven. Six. No, eight. Eight. I should count the irregular breaths that interfere with the heartbeats instead, but breathing hurts too much to quantify.
“He’s waking up. What do you want to do about pain management?” I don’t recognize the stiff voice.
“Not right now. Maybe later.”
Silence because it’s cruel even for her.
“He won’t be able to converse intelligently in this state.”
“He doesn’t have to. Give us a minute.”
Moving door, scraping chair. I brace for a private conference in our disturbing partnership.
I try for a defiant look once we’re alone, but my eyes barely allow for light. She gets compliance instead. Me, her valiant rival, retreating into his head for nine. Ten. Eleven.
“You know this isn’t personal.”
It is. So personal. Just not the kind of personal that will help me shrug off this agony as justice. I am DNA. I am bloodline. I am punishment for someone else’s sin.
I want to bark back my defense, but I know from experience the words will come out as a croak. She doesn’t get that satisfaction. I can understand her without rewarding her.
I settle on twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen.
“I know you’re awake, Kaleb.” Stern but not harsh. I don’t take pleasure in tearing you apart. Some days I believe her. Not today.
“Kaleb, look at me.”
I try. I try hard because I want to believe that maybe this is the time I find that one shred of compassion. This is the time I will convince her that my suffering can’t return her son to her. My eyelids finally start to move. Fifteen. Sixteen. Violent breath. Seventeen.
She sighs. I hear the chair creak as she leans back, her eyes probably scanning my broken body strapped to the hospital bed like they do on the days I can still see when I wake up. Primal beatings are not helpful for any of us, but I unleashed a string of my frustrations again last night. They never like that.
“You really are a beautiful boy. Were, maybe. We’ll see, right?”
Eighteen.
Nineteen.
Twenty.
It’s my wrist this time. They broke it because they could. Because they needed another movie for my father to ignore, and the dramatic snap of a limb is a captivating script.
“In case you were curious, we haven’t heard anything from them yet.” She quiets, analyzing my bandaged wrist, her art. “Kaleb…” Her voice is closer now, so soft. “What must it be like to lie there knowing your father had six years to come for you and never has? That he can watch us tear you apart and not so much as send a response. To know he didn’t choose you. I’m really sorry no one chose you.”
Twenty-one… My eyes are burning now with a new kind of pain. The kind that comes from salt in an open wound. Hot, wet, and this pain spreads as a searing trail down the sides of my face.
“You are awake,” she whispers, fingers brushing my cheek. Her stroke intensifies, moving to my lips, my jaw. “I just… I don’t understand. How can he not come for you? I would have done anything for my Liam. I would have braved ten armies.”
I attempt to swallow the tears shifting from my eyes to my chest, refusing to sob. I’m not Liam. I’m not a four-year-old little boy, alone and scared in a collapsing building. I’m a soldier. A fucking soldier—alone and scared in a collapsing universe.
“He’s not going to come,” I rasp, mostly to distract myself from any risk of further tears she can own, use against me tomorrow.
She pulls back with a long exhalation, and I hear the crack of the chair again.
“You know, I’m really starting to believe that. I thought for sure this time, but you might be right.”
Light begins to seep into my brain. My eyelids are finally trying to cooperate.
“There is no ‘easier’ for you, is there,” she muses, and this time I’m able to open just enough to focus on her. It wasn’t a question. It’s not even a warning. Just a recitation of the reality we’ve both come to accept in our awkward alliance. She will torture me, and I will let her because I have no choice. Because she has a gaping wound that’s become a sanctioned mission. Because this war is about good people turned bad from pain no one understands.
Nineteen. Twenty-nine. Thirty-three. Who knows anymore?
“Are you hungry?”
I shake my head. My stomach cramps in hunger, but I’d never be able to get food down, and she’s not allowed to know that. Hell, she probably already does. Our dance.
“It’s been at least thirty-six hours since your last meal. You need something.”
She sends the command into her com. “Soft foods” is the description. Soft foods for my three broken ribs, swollen jaw, probably my throat too if that’s possible. Everything is shattered after ten days of filming.
“Well, I’ll let you rest. Try to eat something, okay?”
It’s absurd her concern. Confusing at first, but now I get it. Ten days later, I’m on board.
“Emery,” I call as she moves toward the door. She stops and faces me, sad resignation floating across the room to rest on my shackled body. “Can I just have something? Please…” Oh shit, the fucking tears again. Further humiliation as the metal on my wrist crashes against the bed frame when instinct tries to remove them.
Her expression softens as she studies me. Her muse. Her masterpiece. Her last hope.
“If you eat, we’ll talk analgesics.”
My eyes close again in defeat. Soft foods will somehow have to make their way into my stomach, because counting isn’t nearly as effective as their drugs. They will win again.
I stare at the tray for a long time. Pudding, applesauce, some lukewarm orange liquid that requires a spoon. I was nauseous before I had to make sense of my meal. Still, I can’t breathe from the pain. Think. I just need something, and if relief costs me a few bites of bitter orange mush, I’ll fight on.
They’ve released my left arm so I can follow Emery’s orders, only highlighting the ridiculous nature of the restraints. I’m a threat? I can barely grasp a plastic spoon, let alone fight my way through the guard lounging on a guest chair five feet away. Forget the other two stationed outside the door. I don’t have enough functional joints left to fight back.
My eyes clench shut as the pudding slides down my throat, coating its path with a thick reminder that I’m giving in. That I’m going to keep surviving if I keep eating, but I’m tired of counting. I’m just so damn tired. Not surviving has become too hard.
“Need help?” the guard asks, solidifying my regret. I burn at his sincerity because no one is ever going to help me eat fucking pudding.
“I got it,” I mutter.
“That orange shit is nasty. They made us eat it for lunch today too. I don’t know what it is. Some kind of carrot squash thing.”
I study the orange pool and notice the small black specks in it for the first time. “It looks bad.”
“Tastes worse. Stick with the pudding. It going down all right?”
He’s just making conversation. Isaac, I think his name is. Nice guy, talks a lot, doesn’t seem to understand that we have a ton of bruises separating us. Still, I prefer him to Stacy, who overcompensates for the fact that he hates his name.
The pudding still feels like cement, lodging in my throat as I fight a gag, and I glare at the tray. I’m losing to pudding. I desperately hope one bite will satisfy my end of the bargain, but I’m not optimistic. Isaac evaluates my slow progress with an expression that tells me the pudding will win.
“She said at least one of those containers has to be empty before I can call her back. Just one, man.”
Just one might as well be a month of rations. I shove the tray away and settle against the pillow. Yes, they gave me a pillow for my throbbing head. Today’s gifts. Metal restraints, a shattered wrist, and a pillow.
“Wanna play cards or something?” Isaac asks, and I don’t bother opening my eyes to answer. “Oh shit, sorry. After they give you something, I mean.”
“My arm,” I manage, reminding him of the latest of many reasons I have to decline.
“Oh… fuck. Yeah.”
He studies me in the silence.
“I heard about today.”
I don’t want more of his thoughts, but I’m too weak to stop them.
“Sorry, man. I mean, I get that you’re a traitor and all, but shit. What they’re doing to you…”
A traitor. The official reason I’m a pile of mangled flesh. Unofficially, no one has a clue except Emery and her inner circle. The guards are okay playing cards with an official traitor who’s an unofficial ghost.
“Tell you what.” He quiets, and I force my eyes open when I sense his approach. Alarm sets in as he leans close. I hate how my instinct is to flinch now, but the strike never comes. Instead he assaults the applesauce with a few aggressive slurps.
The burn of tears climbs my chest again at this shock of mercy, so out of touch with my fate. He delivers a half-smile and returns the empty container to the tray. Our conspiracy goes live when he passes along the news that I finished my food.
“Emery is coming,” he reports back, and I’d breathe a sigh of relief if I could. Maybe I will in a few minutes.
They not only reward me for my cooperation, they downright spoil me with a gentle slide into oblivion. The searing pain becomes grass fields and clouds. Cotton candy from the time of innocent childhood and laughter. But my narcotic dream doesn’t linger on the past. It finds its way to new memories, poisonous fantasies of the woman who brought me back to life, even as I was dying.
Andie studies the contents of the top drawer of the filing cabinet, her face scrunched in an adorable strain of concentration. Since our kiss, I’ve found it difficult to maintain that same focus when we’re together in this office. My body ignites with the memory as I watch her, addicted to how good it felt to feel good. I suddenly have to help her, inspect her progress, anything to get close to the dangerous connection again.
She tenses as I approach, her deliberate movements stalling to an absent flutter of papers beneath her fingers. I feel the heat of her, breathe in her scent as I hover, waiting for her to make the decision I’m not allowed to make. I know I’m trespassing, fueling a fire with a girl who’s already admitted she’s consumed by it. I’m terrified and relieved when I catch the rapid inhalation of her breath.
“Kaleb …”
She turns now, the force of my advance shoving the drawer back in place. Her hands push up my chest, claiming, exploring.
My blood is hot, searing with unfed hunger, longing for a woman, for any brush of pleasure in my world of constant pain. The fact that it’s this woman, these curious, compassionate, intelligent eyes searching mine, makes the ache unbearable. I need her against me, just a brief moment of letting her beauty chase away the dark void that owns me. The briefest, I swear.
I don’t know who moves first. She wants me as much as I need her, a terrible combination for our hopeless reality. But in this moment I’m forgetful, undisciplined, careless as I let go of my constant filter and release the flood that will drown her. It’s not fair. It makes me terrible. But I’ve been deprived of light for too long.
Her lips are soft and reckless. I know right then her nights are filled with the same burning imagination, her days the same brutal denial.
She pulls away too quickly, her hair tickling my chin as she settles against my chest. My body is still reacting to the kiss, her closeness, but I’m grateful for her sacrifice. Grateful she is stronger than I am.
“You said we can’t,” she whispers. “It’s so hard to stop.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t want apologies. I want you. I want this so much. It’s all I think about.”
The tears in her voice crush me.
“Don’t you feel it, Kaleb? How do you deny it?”
“I do feel it. I’m in physical pain,” I confess into her hair.
She makes it so much worse when her arms tighten around me in protest. Her fingers press up my back, trailing heat and tension along my spine. She must feel my need as we melt into one statue, but she’s as helpless to feed it as I am to satisfy hers.
“What are we going to do?” she moans, pulling my hips into hers. I suck in my breath at the direct invitation.
I have to… I...
My mouth finds hers again, killing her strength. We’re hands ripping at clothing and soothing hard-fought aches with hot skin.
“If we start this, don’t stop it. Please, Kaleb. Please,” she pleads, arching, gasping as I take what isn’t mine.
It’s a heartbreaking plea, soul-crushing as it floods through me. She doesn’t know falling for me is going to kill her. I’m a monster.
Her breaths are desperate like mine. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I just…” I don’t even know who I’m talking to as my hands rake through my hair.
“You think you’re a monster,” she whispers, “but you’re not. You’re beautiful, Kaleb. One day I’ll make you understand how beautiful you are.”
She’s not reading my mind. Her hope is for the freak with scars and deformed fingers. She can’t begin to imagine the true extent of the monstrosity that’s slaying her heart.
You need to transfer her. You can’t handle this, Kaleb.
Dennel’s warning has run in a constant loop since the kiss. He’s been right all along: I’m not strong enough to resist her. I thought I could walk the line. Instead I’ve paraded her straight into my nightmare. I will be the destruction of the one woman, the one person, I might love. I’m going to snuff out my only light.