Kane made sure he was ready with the heavy gun, and even though his body was roaring for a fight, he recognized that he had to control himself. He wanted to start shooting already, to bring all the guards to him, to pick them off one by one or in pairs, until the blood flowed on the threadbare and dusty carpeting.
But Nadya was the point of this.
And what was wrong with his thinking that he had to remind himself of that?
On that note, he let Apex lead them into an unremarkable room, one that had peeling ceiling paint, and a broken chair, and a window that looked out over the back parking lot.
“How is this going to help us?” Kane demanded.
“That is a dumbwaiter.” Apex pointed at a square panel that was inset into the wall. “The shaft leads down into one of the drug workrooms. I know the layout, so no, you dematerializing to there isn’t an option. You’ll re-form in the middle of a table and die.”
“I’m not staying here.”
“You want that nurse dead? Fine, fuck around. Go right ahead—what thefuckis wrong with you.”
Kane couldn’t understand what the problem was. Then he glanced down at the space between their bodies. A hand and forearm that he vaguely recognized as his own were holding a gun out, the muzzle pressing into Apex’s abs. The safety was not engaged. There was a bullet ready to go. And his finger was tense on the trigger.
Off to the side, the wolven watched, one hand markedly down at his side. Kane didn’t need to see anything directly to know that there was a gun in that grip, one that was just as big as the Magnum the guy had lent out.
“Who are you?” Apex whispered. “This is not you.”
Kane retracted his weapon. Then he turned it around and offered it to Apex, handle first. After the male took it, he blinked and put his free hand to his head. “I don’t know… who I am anymore.”
“That I believe,” Callum said grimly.
Down in the clinic, the guard who Nadya had triaged last, whose thigh she had stitched up as her last bit of needlework, was feeding from a female who had been brought in from the outside. It was clear they weremated, the pair’s eyes clinging to each other’s as the wrist was offered and accepted. Though they didn’t touch other than the connection of mouth to vein, they didn’t have to.
The love between them was obvious.
As soon as the female had been brought in, Nadya had stepped back into the forest of the shelves, and taken cover in the midst of the dusty left-behinds. Theshellanhad been like the others who had come to service their males, in this case blond, but in any event, fresh from the world beyond the prison, dressed in blue jeans and a dark sweater, her body and hair washed, her throat perfumed, her face made up.
On one level, none of the mates had been remarkable, their attractiveness of no particular note. And yet to Nadya, they were extraordinary, a reminder of something she had not seen or experienced in what felt like a lifetime.
Reaching up, she touched the hooding that covered her face. Then she shied away from thoughts of her own past—and instead focused on the other reason these females were of such fascination.
She was shocked that the guards were mated. That they were capable of warmth and relationship. Of common decency.
Based on their behavior in the camp, she would have assumed them all as cold and cruel as the female who led them. But seeing them look with tear-filled eyes at the females in their lives? It exposed sides to them she didn’t expect, and couldn’t understand: When the firstshellanhad come in, she had been struck by an urgent need to rush forth and save the female in some way, ensure that she was not there under duress, protect her.
Yet it had all been voluntary. More than voluntary.
Feeling like a voyeur, she looked away from the couple because they should be granted privacy, and noted that many of her patients were already recovering and some were even leaving. In the last four hours—going by the watches she’d taken off the guards’ wrists—three of the males had transitioned out of the clinic. Their healing was… incredible. Then again, it had been a long time since she had beenaround healthy vampires, who were properly fed both in terms of good food and blood.
And she supposed the fact that two of what she had classified as the most critically injured patients had been among the first out the door meant that her treatment decisions had been appropriate and successful.
Closing her eyes, she braced a hand against a shelf ladened with laundry soap flakes, the boxes of which had faded and were coated with dust. With a groan, she stretched her back and didn’t get far with it given the way her body was—
“Come with me.”
Jerking to attention, she looked over her shoulder. A guard had marched right up to her, looming with aggression in his black uniform and all his weapons. She didn’t recognize him specifically, but there were so many kitted out in the same clothes, with the same short haircut, and the same sharp stare, that they were interchangeable.
Nadya faced the male. “I can’t leave the clinic. I have patients—”
He took her arm in a hard grip and didn’t make any accommodation for her immobility, shoving her out of the storage room until she lost her footing and fell just past the doorway. Nadya cried out as her legs went loose under her, but he didn’t stop. He just grabbed whatever he could under her robing and kept going, dragging her down the concrete corridor.
Just as had been done with Kane. At the end.
“What did I do?” she demanded. “What have I—”