She shook her head. “This is all hypothetical.”Please, please still be hypothetical.
“Is it? Because I’m a hell of a lot more interested now.”
She tore her finger away from his clasp and fisted her hands together, bringing them to her face. “We’d have to survive first. No, no, you’re right. The whole idea is suicide.”
“It doesn’t have to be.”
“You can’t guarantee that!”
“Sure I fucking can.”
The breathwooshedout of her. Possibilities rose like waves in her head. Hope. Fear. Even damned arousal was playing a terrible dance in her mind. Hunger. Fear. Hope. Arousal. Gunner. Elodie wanted to trust him but knew she couldn’t, she would be stupid to try. But here she was, one of the desperate prisoners playing a part of a conversation that had started with two men and a weapon at the other end of the brig.
“I can’t trust you,” she squeaked out. “I should’ve never spoken to you. I don’t even know you.”
He turned to fully face her and she peered at him from behind her hands and through her hair. “I’ve never lied to you.”
“Yes you have!” she hissed, dropping her fists. “Several times. What really happened with Royce? Everything screams that you killed him but that doesn’t make sense. The blood on the panel. I remember. It’s impossible. But I know it’s true. How? I want to know. How do you know there are security feeds in the pipe above us? How can you see through them? How is it you’re not afraid, that you never look hungry? I’ve never seen you eat, and you don’t respond to the cold, to anything. You don’t react normally, at all!” Her voice rose as she spoke and so did his roiling intensity.
She’d gained the curious stares of the other prisoners, and it lessened her rising temper, but she continued anyway in a raging whisper. “Your eyes, I’ve never seen anything like them, and it’s obvious you’ve had enhancements done but you don’t seem fully human. Gunner, who the hell pisses all over the place where they sleep?”
She was cowed and Gunner was laughing—laughing at her.
“I mark my territory otherwise I can’t rest,” he said. “It’s instinctual.”
Elodie narrowed her eyes. “Humans don’t have instincts like that.”
“No, but animals do.”
“You’re not an animal.”
His eyes flashed. “I’m not? I could prove it but it’s not fucking pretty.”
She shook her head.Stop lying to me.“Did you kill Royce?”
“Yes.”
Her heart dropped into her hungry belly. “Truth?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I already told you,” he answered.
“No. I mean...” She rubbed her hands, curling them against her chest. “How is that possible?”
Gunner gripped the bars and rested his head on them, closing the remaining distance between them. His heat seeped into her space to enclose around her. Every joint in her body went stiff, her body on edge. They locked eyes and that harrowing connection that had begun to build strengthened. She could still feel his touch and his breath on her brow from nights past. And she waited for all the pieces to fall into place.
“Look at me.” His whisper came out hoarse, low, and dark, and only for her to hear.
“I am,” she breathed.
“No.Reallylook at me.”
And she did.
Elodie drew back slightly and looked at his eyes, the curvature of his face, and the lack of facial hair. His ears came to an odd point on the top, and his mid-length tousled brown hair fell to his neck where his pulse would be. She wanted to touch it but was too afraid to. Her eyes went to his hands, tense and straining on the metal bars on either side of his cheeks, and how they were large enough to round the entire rod of metal.
