I bobbed my head. “You’re a doctor, right?”
He shrugged. “Yeah, but…I mean, I’m not…I’m not up on all the research. I’m just a guy who’s good with a scalpel, you know?”
I threaded my fingers through his. “We have all the research. But we cannot make sense of it. And there’s no one else I can trust.”
His shoulders slumped, and he cupped my cheek in his hand. “I’ll help in any way I can, Nattie. Just…get me the information and give me some time to sort through it, and we’ll see what we can do, okay? We’ll do this together.”
He lifted our intertwined hands, offering me a soft grin.
I returned his expression, relief coursing through me. “Thank you.”
We held each other’s gazes for a moment before he said, “So, uh, is there a notebook or something.”
“I will do you one better, doctor,” Nadia said as she stepped forward, having slipped into the room quietly as we spoke. “I’ll take you straight to the laboratory.”
Kyle’s eyebrows shot up, and he nodded. “All right. Perfect. Yeah, let’s see what we’re dealing with firsthand.”
“Excellent. Now, we can’t exactly tell you where he’s being kept, can we?”
Kyle frowned. “Uh… that’s gonna make it a little harder, huh?”
“Not really,” Nadia said, producing a needle, its tip glinting. “Just a little pinch.”
“Wait, wait—hold on,” Kyle said, backing away slightly, his hands raised. “Can’t we just…I don’t know, put a bag over my head or something?”
“And risk you seeing something we don’t want you to? Not a chance,” Nadia replied, her voice calm as she approached.
“Wait, just wait a sec–“
But Nadia waited for no one. She plunged the needle into his neck and depressed the plunger.
Kyle twisted to face me, his features pinched with worry as his eyes slid back into his head, and he slumped into Stefan’s waiting arms.
“I’m sorry, darling,” I said as I caressed his cheek, my heart heavy. “But we cannot take the chance.”
Would Kyle be able to endure this sort of lifestyle, or would this put him over the edge?
CHAPTER 23
KYLE
The strong scent of antiseptic brought me back to my senses with a rude jolt. With my eyes still pinched shut, my brain tried to process what in the world was happening.
A zillion really weird things hit my mind all at once, but then I remembered being knocked out. We were on the beach, someone shot at us.
I must have been knocked out.
My heart skipped a beat.Nattie. What had happened to Nattie?
I snapped my eyes open, my chest constricting as I struggled to breathe. I had to find Nattie and make sure she was okay.
I found myself in a dimly lit room, flat on my back.
“Kyle?”
I blinked a few times, trying to clear my blurry vision until I finally shut my eyes again. The whole room seemed to bespinning. That hit to the head must have been epic. I likely had a concussion.
But I definitely wasn’t in the hospital, that was for sure. No hospital had this dim of a lighting scheme.
