Page 11 of Hunted By the Wraiths
“Stop.” Firmer this time. Almost a command. “Second-guessing decisions from years ago while running for your life is a waste of time. You didn’t know. The Consortium hid it deliberately. Blaming yourself won’t help them.”
He was right. It didn’t help. But I couldn’t stop seeing that cargo code. ‘Subjects’. I transported subjects for their ‘Synthesis Project.’ All those years... what were they doing to them? What kind of ‘synthesis’ requires shipping people in crates?
My gaze snapped to Thoryn. To the flickering, sick-gray scales. The pain lines etched around his eyes. The way he flinched when I got too close. He was a prisoner for eight years. They didn’t just hold him.
“They... they tested on them, didn’t they?” My voice came out rough. “The subjects I transported. For the project.”
He went completely still, his posture defensive.
“They tested on you.” My voice was flat. A statement, not a question. “That’s what this is. You weren’t just a prisoner. You were a subject.”
I stood up, crossed halfway to his cot, stopping when he tensed. “What did they do to you, Thoryn? What ‘synthesis’ did they try to pull on you?”
Silence. Long enough I thought he wouldn’t answer. Then he spoke, voice rough and low.
“They tried to break the bond. Make me a weapon without weakness.” He stared at his hands. “Standard procedure for captured bonded subjects. They want soldiers who can’t be compromised. Can’t be leveraged.” He stopped. Started again. “They tried to sever the connection between me and you. Completely. Eight years of experiments designed to burn out the bonding mechanism.”
My stomach felt cold. Eight years. He’d been captive for eight years. I’d known that intellectually. Hearing him say it made it real.
“It didn’t work,” he continued. “Tamzari bonds are... stubborn. They couldn’t break it. So they tried to twist it instead. Rewire the pathways. Make proximity to a potential mate triggerpain responses instead of bonding responses.” He finally looked at me. Those too-bright amber eyes. “They partially succeeded.”
Potential mate.
He’d said it. Not partner, not lover. Mate.
The word was clinical, cold, but it landed. He was talking about me. I’d always known what we had was... deep. But I’m human. He’s Tamzari. I’d never let myself think about what that... meant.
That the bond was biological. Real.
Real enough for them to spend eight years trying to break it. And now it was killing him.
My brain skipped right over the implications. I couldn’t process it. I latched onto the only part I could.
“Partially.”
“The bond is still there. Still trying to complete itself. But every time I get close to you, every time my body tries to initiate the bonding process, it triggers the new pathways they installed. The pain pathways. My body wants to bond. My altered biology punishes me for trying.”
I processed that. Forced myself to think through it. “So being near me hurts you. Being far from me leaves the bond incomplete, which also hurts. There’s no distance that doesn’t cause pain.”
“Correct.”
“And you came anyway.”
“Yes.”
“You-...” I had to stop. “You walked into my cantina knowing you’d be in agony for every second you spent near me.”
“Yes.”
“Why?” The word ripped out of me. Too loud in the small space. “Why would you do that to yourself?”
He met my eyes directly. His body was still, but I could see the tension in his shoulders, the effort it took to just sit there.
“They failed,” he said simply. “They tried to break me. Burn out what I felt for you. Turn you into nothing in my mind. Make me not care.” He paused. “They failed. You’re still... my weakness. Always were. Still are. They just made sure loving you hurts.”
The words hit me. A confession of specific, prolonged, calculated torture designed to weaponize connection. To turn love into pain. To make the thing that kept him alive through eight years of hell into the thing that destroyed him now.
He’d survived by holding onto me. And now I was killing him just by existing near him.
