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Chapter 23

Addie

My head pounded in tandem to my heartbeat. It didn’t just beat, itgalloped. Meandering through the fucking forest while the rest of the world fell apart in shambles around me.

Instinctively, my hand moved to touch the skin where the doctor had injected me so many years ago.

What had been in that vial?

The cure?

The parasite?

Something else entirely?

Lucian watched me, but I couldn’t quite read the expression on his face. I would almost describe it as triumphant before he carefully masked his features.

“I see recognition in your eyes,” he said pointedly. His hand moved to gently pat my arm, and it felt like a molten brand on my skin. It took significant willpower not to pull myself away and then feed his balls to alligators. Why my mind immediately went in that direction, I didn’t know. Apparently, I have a morbid fascination with the removal of penises.

And people said I was psycho. Please. If you didn’t have at least one fantasy about castrating a dick, then were you really living?

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied, but even my haughty tone couldn’t stop the terror from ricocheting through my body.

“I think you do.” He stood, running his hands down his pants suit. “Did you know you have O negative blood? Otherwise known as a universal donor.”

His abrupt change in topic had me reeling.

I wordlessly opened my mouth, closed it, before opening it once more. My hands were clammy, and my throat felt like cotton.

“What does that have to do with anything?” I asked with more bravado than I felt.

Pound. Pound. Pound.

My heart was so fucking loud it could’ve had its own soundtrack. It sounded in my ears, my neck, my wrists, almost as if my entire body was made out of diminutive hearts with the same erratic heartbeat.

“Deth.” Lucian nodded his head towards the doctor, and the older man grabbed my elbow and hoisted me up. I didn’t bother struggling despite the revulsion I felt at his touch. Lucian trailed behind, hands clasped behind his back.

He looked so much like Fallon my heart began to ache for an entirely different reason. But while Fallon’s eyes gazed down at me with love and awe and worshipful reverence, this man’s eyes were cold and cruel. Mocking. He seemed more likely to lick away my tears with a malicious cackle than to comfort me. Probably got a boner from female tears.

Heaven only knew Deth did, the evil twat. Evwat - another Adelaide original word.

We moved back into the hallway where men and women armed to the teeth roamed the halls. They nodded respectfully towards Lucian when we passed.

“The men who helped Liz kidnap me...were they soldiers?”

I didn’t know why the question was so important to me only that it was. Fallon...he was a soldier. A man who had done right by his country, serving it the same way he’d done everything else in his life: with his entire being.

But those men…

The cowards who had hidden behind masks and had helped Liz torture Ryder by taking him for her…

They didn’t deserve that title.

My stomach was a clamorous combination of anger and fear when I thought of the man who had smirked at me, dragging memories to the surface I had longed to keep buried. I wanted that man, that stranger, to die. A man whose name I didn’t even know.

What had this world done to me?

“Mercenaries for hire,” Lucian explained. “You’ll be surprised what people would do for a quick buck. And what makes it even better is that we don’t need to give them an explanation. We say jump, and they ask how much.”