Page 9 of Bred By the Minotaur (DreamTogether Breeding Program #3)

Nine

Phoebe

When the nurses come back, Hank quietly sits down again.

“Are you the father?” one asks, and he nods.

I’m wheeled into another room and he tags along.

There, a new doctor performs an ultrasound just to be sure the fetus is all right.

Hank is silent by my side the whole time, watching from the chair next to the bed.

His presence is immeasurably reassuring as the doctor searches.

“It’s stable,” he says at last, and both of us breathe sighs of relief. “Everything looks good.”

Finally, after hours upon hours in the ER, they’ve determined I’m well enough to leave. I should call Sandra, but I don’t have anything, not even my purse. No driver’s license, no money, no phone.

When it hits me, I start to cry all over again, thinking how much work it will be to repair everything I’ve lost. Birth certificate, gone. Social security card, gone. How will I pay my taxes?

“Hey, hey,” Hank says softly, rubbing my shoulder but not sitting too close.

“Everything is gone. The deed to the house. The title for my car.” I sob harder. “My records, my receipts...”

“Fires happen. There are procedures in place.”

As comforting as Hank’s voice is, the emptiness, the hollow spot where my life used to be, is an uncrossable void.

“I need to see my sister,” I say finally, sitting upright. I don’t even know if my car is still there or if it caught fire, too. “Could you... drive me to her place?”

I feel bad asking him for anything after turning away his kiss earlier, but Hank eagerly agrees.

“No problem. The station isn’t far—I can go get my car.”

“Don’t you have to go back to work?” I ask for what feels like the millionth time. Hank firmly shakes his head.

“I’m going to get you where you’re going safely. You’re carrying my calf, for starters. And... I want to make sure you’re all right.”

He’s so fucking sweet, it hurts.

“Don’t make me cry again,” I croak, wiping my face. That pulls a small smile out of him.

“Cry all you need. I’ll go get the car if you stay here.”

I nod, and Hank quickly hurries from the room. When he’s gone, I lie back and stare at the ceiling, already beginning to make a list of everything I’ll have to do to recover my life, beginning with a call to get new documents.

I have to remind the world that I exist, when all that’s ever proven it before is some ink on paper.

Hank

I jog the ten or twelve blocks back to the station, and I don’t even go in to check on the guys before grabbing my keys out of my locker and hopping into the car.

One more chance. I have one more chance to convince Phoebe to give me a shot.

Now I know she’s not married, and she’s probably not dating anyone, because the first person she asked to see was her sister.

But she’s also just lost everything, and I can’t even imagine how that feels.

I need to help her, to do whatever I can to ease the pain of what she’s gone through and what’s to come.

I can’t be thinking about those big blue eyes and that small pink mouth this way.

Then I’m on the road to the hospital, where I park out front so I can bring out Phoebe. She’s dressed in clothes that don’t quite fit her—something the nurses must have provided from the lost and found—and she’s sitting up in the hospital bed when I arrive. She smiles wanly as I enter the room.

“Hey, thanks.” She gets up, and I’m about to offer her my hand when I think twice about it, settling for holding the door open.

When we get out to the car, Phoebe hops easily into the passenger seat, and I breathe a sigh of relief that she’s all right after everything that happened tonight. I won’t say it out loud, of course, but it could have been so, so much worse.

I try not to think about that as she tells me which direction to drive. Her scent fills up the whole car, and I have to work just to keep my eyes on the road.

She starts leading me toward my own neighborhood, and I wonder where her sister lives. We’re some of the few monsters in a mostly human neighborhood, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that we’re close by.

When we turn into my housing development, though, I start to feel nervous. Is she going to think I’m stalking her when I tell her I live right around the corner?

We stop on the street just across the block from my own home, where the houses are smaller.

“This is going to sound nuts,” I say as we stop. “But I live right over there.” I point down the street at my own front door.

Phoebe’s mouth drops open. “Really? Right there?” Her face falls, and I don’t think she’s pleased by this news. “Oh.”

“Sorry,” I say reflexively. “When I got hired at the station, it was easier and closer to live here.”

She gives me a baffled look. “You can’t help where you live. Anyway, thank you for the ride. And for...” She takes in a deep breath and closes her eyes, like she’s steeling herself. “For saving my life.” Her voice cracks, and she buckles forward in the seat.

Phoebe’s not crying, not that I can tell, but it’s like all the pain and hurt in her body is trying to force its way out. She shudders, and without thinking I wrap my arms around her, drawing her across the console.

“I’m sorry,” I say quietly into her hair, stroking the back of her head. Phoebe doesn’t pull away. No, her hands fist in my clothes as she shakes with even more force.

Then she peels herself away, and reluctantly, I let her go. She sits up straight in the seat and gives me a firm nod.

“Thanks again, Hank,” she says, and climbs out of the car.

I’m tempted to walk her to the door, but that would be ridiculous, so I simply watch as she heads up to her sister’s house.

There’s a rather interesting arrangement of lawn gnomes in the well-kept, though tiny, yard.

When the door opens and her sister appears, I drive away.

Around the block.

I can hear them reuniting, and a voice that’s similar to Phoebe’s but much higher and louder cries out. This must be her sister finding out about the fire. I should give them some privacy, so I park the car and head inside.

Finally, I call the station to let them know what happened.

“She’s the mother,” I explain to Ron over the phone. “I had to go with her and make sure she was all right.”

“Wait, what ?” I can almost see his big stone brows squinting. “From DreamTogether?”

“Yeah. She was the one in that house.”

“And she’s okay? The calf?”

“All fine.” I let out a sigh. “But I’m exhausted.”

“Go to bed, Hank,” Ron says. “I’ll wrap things up here with an incident report and get your sig tomorrow.”

With that we hang up, and I stand in the dark kitchen, breathing through my nose.

“Honey?” Mom appears at the door, a mystified look on her face. “You’re home early.”

“Bad fire tonight.” I want to say more, but it’s too much to explain right now. “I need to sleep, but I’ll tell you in the morning.”

She gives me a concerned look, then heads back to the guest room.

When I get into bed, though, sleep is the last thing on my mind. No, what I’m thinking about is Phoebe, only a block and a half away. Phoebe, the most beautiful woman in the world, who’s carrying my calf. Phoebe, who barely escaped a fire with her life.

I replay it over and over again, the moment she recognized me and relief filled her face. Now that I’ve seen her with my own two eyes, I don’t know if I’m capable of letting her go again.

I roll over in bed, thinking of how I almost kissed her tonight, how she almost returned it before pulling away.

I can’t fall in love with you, Hank .

What did she mean?

Phoebe

“I can’t believe it,” Sandra says, hiccuping. “Everything was in there.”

We cried together for a while on the couch when I told her about the house. Before I came over with the news, she was feeling stronger than usual, able to walk around and arrange the lawn gnomes. But now she’s down and out for the count again.

I realized too late that Sandra’s documents were in the house too, in a filing cabinet along with mine. Now we both have to pick up the pieces of our lives.

“At least those letters are gone,” she says, shaking her head. It’s always been a point of contention that I kept them.

After Sandra and I had been taken by the state as kids, we tried to write home to our parents, but all our letters were returned.

Not undelivered. Returned .

I’ve kept them to remind myself what kind of people our parents were, and how I would never become like them.

“Well, you can sleep on the couch,” Sandra says, right as the sun starts coming up. “Let me get the pillows.”

“It’s fine. Go to bed. I’ll handle it.” I know where everything is, anyway. It’s all labeled.

Sandra nods and heads to her bedroom while I make myself comfortable on the sofa. If I had my phone, I could find that photo of Hank. That’s what I wish I had right now—the warm arms he put around me in the car. Maybe then I could sleep.

I wake up a few hours later to bright midday light coming in the windows, and I blink bleary eyes. Once Sandra’s up, too, I’m able to log into my work email from her computer and tell my boss what’s happened.

All my equipment, gone. Horror dawns on me as I realize every piece of art I’ve ever created, every design I’ve ever done, has now vanished along with my machine. All my backup drives were in the same place as my computer—inside the house.

I’m beginning to melt down when Sandra finds me. She’s also exhausted from a lack of sleep.

“You had a cloud backup, right?” she asks tentatively.

“Just essentials. Work stuff was all backed up to the company shared drive, but nothing p-p-personal...” Tears leak from my eyes again, and I wonder if I’ll cry for the rest of my life. “Nothing personal survived. It’s all gone.”

I think of the koi painting, only half finished but one of my best pieces yet, and burst into sobs.

Sandra makes me some cereal for breakfast because that’s the most she can do on her feet, while I use her phone to call the bank and order new credit cards.

It’s all so tedious, so terribly trite, each call I have to make just to pay for food.

I still won’t have a way to pay in the meantime, and I can’t withdraw cash without a driver’s license, so I’ll just have to make do with what Sandra’s got.

“You know everything that’s mine is yours,” my sister says, putting her arms around me. “We’ll get through this, Feebs.”

I try to feel her confidence, but it’s so far out of my reach.

My work gives me a week off to get my life straightened out again, but I don’t think that will be nearly enough time. At least my car was safe from the fire, since my garage is full of crap and I park it on the street.

I fall asleep in the early evening to the sound of Jeopardy, a half-eaten box of Chinese food sitting on the coffee table. My dreams are all filled with fire, swirling upward into the air, taking everything in the world that means anything to me along with it.