It was a female, and she was staring at him with a detachment characteristic of people who killed often and not always with provocation.
“I was aiming for your heart,” she said levelly as she looped her rifle over her arm. “My goddamn sight needs to be calibrated.”
After Kane had heard gunshots and left that red hut, he hadn’t been aware of vacating his body—or being tossed out of it, was more the case.
But he was back now, and as he felt his bones accept his weight, he licked his lips and tasted blood. Then he looked down in confusion. A guard in a prison camp uniform was dead at his feet. And there were a couple of others in the same condition close by.
“Kane.”
He turned around. Apex was standing next to him, the male streaked with blood, a set of handcuffs hanging off of one wrist. And that was when the scent of injury registered. Somebody, one of theirs, was badly wounded—
Lucan was laid out on the pine needles, Rio arched over him, her cuffed hands pushed into his groin.
“He’s bad,” she said. “We need to get a doctor.”
Kane looked over his shoulder for the hut, just to make sure Nadya was okay—
What the fuck.
Where was the hut?
“Hold on,” he said as he started to bolt back to where it should have been.
Well aware there could be more guards on the mountain, he all but jumped over the fire pit, except when he got to the hut’s location… nothing.
And that wasn’t all. The riverbed was dry and there were short-stack bushes rooted in earth that was undisturbed: No rushing water, no campfire, no shelter. It was as if nothing had ever been there.
What the hell?
He’d been making love to Nadya, treating her body as it deserved, reveling in the fact that she had not been doing some duty, but rather enjoying him as well… when he’d heard the gunfire. The sounds of bullets being exchanged had been far off, but very real, and the idea that his fellow prisoners or the wolven who had taken them in were in trouble had clawed into his consciousness.
That was when he’d seen the flap door. From out of the red fog that surrounded him and Nadya, the exit presented itself as if his change in awareness had created the portal. He had said something to Nadya, something like he’d be right back, and she knew what he was doing.
She had heard the gunshots, too.
And then he was out of the shelter, naked as the day he was born, the sense that he had been away for over a year making him look around to re-catalog the surroundings. But nothing had changed because it had been mere moments—
“Kane!”
Rio was coming out of the woods in a scramble, tripping over her feet, her face pale. “Where’s Nadya? She’s a nurse—”
“I don’t know—”
Except as he turned back to the dry riverbed and the thatch of vegetation, a leg appeared from what seemed to be a split in the landscape. And then, sure as if she were stepping through a set of drapes, his female appeared, the towel she had been wrapped in once again around her body, her eyes wide like she didn’t understand what was happening.
For a split second, Kane froze. Something was different about her…
“We need your help,” he mumbled.
But she was already looking at the human woman who was running toward them. “Who is injured?”
Andjustlikethat, his female went rushing by him, ready to do what she could. As she passed, she gave his hand a squeeze, and it felt like he was following his destiny as he ran in her wake. When they came up to Rio, he listened with half an ear as she explained what had happened and gestured wildly to where Lucan was lying.
It wasn’t that he didn’t care that his fellow prisoner was injured.
He couldn’t stop staring at Nadya.
She was moving differently. More than that, though, her hair… seemed thicker on her head—and when she glanced back at him, the scars on her cheek appeared to have faded, the uneven ridges less pronounced.