Siren. The next group of Siren members I ran into at Transport Station Zenith…
I envisioned rivers of blood. Screams. Fanged fuckers on their knees, begging me not to kill them—
“And then there was Nexus 5.” She shivered. I dismissed thoughts of murder and wrapped my arms more tightly around her.
“Tell me.”
She did, her arousal gone as quickly as it had come. Nexus 5 had been a clinical and efficient tormentor. She glossed over her suffering, but it was there, in her voice. Torture. Experiments. Pain. Despair.
The longer she spoke, the stronger her voice became, the more her tears faded, replaced by rage. Yet she did not protest as I held her. Somewhere along the way, I had begun to stroke the side of her face, alternated with sliding my hand up and down her back as I tried to steal her pain and take it into myself.
“Oberon, I’m sorry. I wasn’t going to tell you any of this.”
“Why would you not?” The thought of this female keeping secrets, hiding her pain from me, made me want to crush things.
“I’ve thought about it a lot. I realized it is difficult to acknowledge someone else’s pain. It’s hard to look at, because if you see their pain, you feel it, too. Like it’s yours. Their pain becomes part of you.” She sighed. “Even at the capital, after we were rescued, we didn’t look each other in the eye.”
“You will always look me in the eye, Willow.”
“Why?”
“I cannot care for you if I do not know what you need.”
“I’ve heard that somewhere before.”
Helion? Again? This time, I did not ask.
“Never mind. I just didn’t want to make you worry about Amalia more than you already are.”
“That is not possible. Either she is trapped inside that Hive base, or she is dead. I cannot imagine anything worse. There is no need for you to protect me.”
That made her smile, I felt the pressure of her bunched cheek where it rested against me. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but if it weren’t for me, you would still be naked, starved and tortured on that asshole’s ship.”
“Perhaps.”
“I’m sorry about that. I was so stupid the first day I saw you. I thought you were a patient, not a prisoner. I didn’t want to see the truth.”
I kissed the top of her head because it was the only place I could. I did not have the right to kiss her anywhere else. “I have suffered far worse on the battlefield. Helion’s interrogation would not break a child.”
“What?” She shoved against my chest and leaned back to look up at me. “He was melting your skin off.”
I shrugged. “Technically, that was Mersan’s doing.”
“The doctor?”
“Yes. But even he grew weary of the tactic. I do not believe either of them truly wished to break me.”
“How can you say that?”
“I am not dead.”
She stared at me. I watched her intelligence at work as her mind fit puzzle pieces together. “Like what? What did he not do?”
I began to explain, in graphic detail—because this female was not one to hide from the truth of things—the various things they could have done to me but did not. Broken bones. Eyes plucked from my skull and regrown. Tongue torn from my mouth and reattached. Severing of spinal nerves—regrown with the ReGen wand, then cut again.
“God, stop.”
I shrugged. “Nearly any injury can be healed, Willow. Melting away some skin is actually quite pathetic, as torture goes.”
