I lift my head and squint at the red numbers on the digital clock, shocked to see it’s the middle of the night. I slept? I blink, unable to believe it. I slept for how many hours? Eight? Ten?
I shift, and he moves too, pulling me tight. My heart pounds. I haven’t slept this long in ages. Since I can remember. Since the hospital collapse. The children. The kitten.
I stiffen, waiting for the fear to close back in. That’s always how it happens—I wake up feeling good, and then the memories tumble back, and fear closes around me, poisoning everything.
I lie there, waiting for the fear. But I feel…okay.
So much of being a journalist is about recognizing the relative weight of details. You want to pull out that one little detail that has significance for people, the detail that helps tell the story in a way that words can’t. Maybe it’s something somebody said, or an image. Somebody’s hands. A broken doll in the street.
The detail that takes everything over.
The kitten became that detail for me in a negative way. It haunted everything, blocked everything. I couldn’t see past it. The kitten, the antiseptic smell.
And suddenly, lying in this strange, savage man’s arms in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night, the kitten has the weight of…a kitten.
And when I breathe in through my nose, the smell is gone. The smell that would cling to me for days on end, even through long weekends off, even when I wasn’t there at the hospital.
And I slept. Did I sleep because the smell wasn’t there? Or did the smell go away because I was able to sleep?
He pulls me tighter, breath steady. And I think that I can’t go anywhere even if I wanted to. And then I think that I don’t want to.
And I let my eyes drift closed again. And I wonder if we’re saving each other.
Chapter Seventeen
Kiro
Ishould hateher. I should walk out of this room and leave her. Lock her up so she can’t follow. Kill her if she takes yet another photo of me. I should kill her for how she’s fooled me.
Instead I breathe in the scent of her hair.
All these long, grueling months, I’ve wanted one thing—home. To be back with my pack, the one place in the world I ever belonged. The only ones who ever wanted me.
Ann acts like she wants me, but she just wants my story. I know that now.
I should kill her for being so kind to me. For making me think she cared.
I should kill her. Except I can’t. And I want her.
My head is still foggy from the drugs, but better than I can remember for a long time. My shoulder burns, but no feeling is quite so powerful as the feeling of her in my arms.
I want her with a fever that burns so brightly I can think of nothing else.
Morning. Birds nearby. Not nearby like at Fancher Institute but right outside the door. The sun is just rising; I can hear it in the bird songs. I need water. Sun. Food. Air. To run.
But my desire for her overpowers all that.
She’s nothing but a reporter, hungry for my story. I heard her on the phone. I heard what that man on the other end said.
She wants my story because I’m different, savage, wrong.
Still I want her. Need her.
I knew she had secrets, with that strange kitten story. I knew she wasn’t like other nurses. I never expected she was one ofthem.
Those reporters.
I still remember the way they went at me when I was so weak, unable to defend myself.