Page 23 of Hunted By the Wraiths
This was practically gourmet.
Maris returned to her cot. The pain dropped back to eleven. Then ten.
She stared at the chip in her hand. “How do you do this?”
“Do what?”
“Accept it. What they did to you. What they made you.”
I considered the question. It was a good question. The kind of question I’d asked myself roughly three thousand times during captivity.
“I don’t accept it,” I said. “I just don’t let it be the only thing I am.”
She looked at me. Gray eyes sharp and searching.
“They spent eight years trying to break me,” I said. “They twisted my biology. Conditioned my responses. Turned proximity to my mate into torture. They did everything they could to make me a weapon without weakness.”
“And?”
“They failed. My weakness is still you.”
The words came out simple. True. She was my weakness. She’d always been my weakness. The Consortium had just made it hurt.
Didn’t make it less true.
She stood, but this time she hesitated. She stayed by her own cot, five feet of cold air between us. She remembered what happened in the last safe house. She’d seen my scales flash emerald under her touch, just before the pain nearly tore me apart. She knew proximity was poison.
But I knew something else.
Underneath the ten, underneath the fire and the knives, I felt it.
A thrum.
Faint. Clean. A signal cutting through the interference.
Her bond. The healthy half. Reaching for me, even from across the room.
My conditioning screamed at me to stay away. To protect myself.
The thrum had a different message.
Home.
“Come here,” I said.
Her head snapped up, her eyes wide. “What?”
“Come here, Maris.”
“Thoryn, no. It hurts you. I’m... I make it worse.”
“I know.” I held out my left hand. My good hand. “I don’t care.”
She crossed the space. Sat on the very edge of my cot, as far from me as possible, her entire body tense, ready to flee.
The proximity made my scales ripple. The pain jumped to twelve.
She flinched, seeing the reaction. “See? This is a bad idea.”
