Page 12 of Hunted By the Wraiths
The guilt from the manifests... that was already crushing me. This was worse. This was personal. This was my presence causing him constant suffering.
“You should have stayed away.” My voice came out strangled. “You should have let them kill me. It would have been easier. For you.”
“No.”
“Thoryn—”
“No.” Absolute. Final. “I didn’t survive eight years of them trying to burn you out of me just to stay away when I finally found you alive. Don’t care about the pain. Don’t care about the damage. Don’t care—” He stopped. Breathed. Controlled himself. “You’re worth it.”
I stared at him. This massive, scarred, broken warrior who’d endured eight years of torture. And he’d come anyway. Was sitting here now, fevered and bleeding and locked in constant agony, telling me I was worth it.
“I’m sorry.” The words felt pathetic. Insufficient. “I’m so sorry.”
The silence fell again. Heavier than before. Suffocating.
Inventory: One trafficker. One broken bond. Zero solutions. Infinite guilt.
THORYN
Ilay on the cot, staring at the flickering emergency lights on the depot ceiling. Amber. Red. Amber. The pattern repeated. Gave me something to focus on besides the sensation of my shoulder attempting to melt off my body and the deeper, worse agony of the bond trying to complete itself while my altered biology screamed in protest.
New data points. The scientists would have loved this. New data on pain thresholds. Gold star for Dr. Solis, you sadistic bastard.
Maris sat on the opposite cot. Two meters away. Might as well have been two kilometers for how much good the distance did.
My body was fighting itself. A fresh wave of nausea rolled through my gut. Tasted copper. Again. Always copper when the pain spiked past manageable into whatever territory this was.
She was still sitting there. Still wrapped around herself. Still breathing in that pattern I recognized from years ago. Guilt breathing. Self-blame breathing. The breathing pattern of someone cataloging their failures and finding the list unacceptably long.
I’d just told her the worst parts. The experiments. The twisted bond. The fact that proximity to her caused me agony. Expected her to process that logically, accept that I was broken beyond repair, and leave. Smarter move. Cut losses. Abandon the damaged asset.
She hadn’t left.
She sat there wrapped in guilt that wasn’t hers, blaming herself for things done to me. Wrong. Completely backwards. None of this was her fault. All of it was mine for getting captured in the first place, for being weak enough that they could twist me into this.
The silence stretched. Heavy. Uncomfortable. I was terrible at this. Words were not my strength. Fighting, yes. Tactical assessment, adequate. Conversation requiring emotional intelligence and vulnerability? Absolute failure.
“You should sleep,” I managed, my voice grinding past the pain and the copper taste and the exhaustion. “Need to move in a few hours. Get the next cache.”
“Can’t sleep.” She didn’t look at me. Just stared at her own hands. “Every time I close my eyes I see the manifests. The cargo codes. All those runs.”
Right. The trafficking. She’d just learned she’d been the logistics arm of mass kidnapping. That was probably worse than dealing with my broken biology. Definitely worse.
“Not your fault,” I said. Again. Knew it wouldn’t help. She’d already rejected that logic once. But I was a simple creature. When I didn’t know what to say, I repeated the last thing that seemed true.
“So you keep saying.” Her voice was flat. Dead. “Doesn’t change reality.”
“Changes context.” I shifted slightly on the cot. Mistake. The plasma burn sent a spike of fresh agony through my shoulder. Breathed through it. Functional. Still functional. “Consortiumcommitted trafficking. Used you as transport. Without your knowledge. Without your consent. That’s not complicity. That’s being a tool.”
“A tool that facilitated mass kidnapping.”
“A hammer doesn’t choose what it builds.” Was that a good metaphor? Probably not. I was terrible at metaphors. “Or destroys. Just does what the person wielding it directs.”
She finally looked at me. Those steel-gray eyes. Sharp enough to cut. “Are you actually comparing me to a hammer?”
“Bad metaphor. Point stands.” I closed my eyes. Easier than watching her blame herself. “You didn’t know. Can’t be held responsible for information deliberately hidden from you.”
“The dead don’t care about my intentions.”
