“Sophia?”
I gaped at him, unprepared for such a quick run-in with someone who might have noticed I was missing.
He scooped me into a hug. “General kept saying you were okay, but I thought you’d been captured,” he said, tone full of giddy relief. “Where have you been?”
I told him the planned story—I’d been injured and taken to another safe house until I healed.
He released me, his expression morphing into confusion. “Which one?”
I said nothing, and Adam’s confusion faded to wary understanding.
“Ah. Are you…okay, then?”
“I’m fine.” I backed away. “I have to see Theo.”
“Right.” He swallowed hard. “Let me know if you need anything.”
I needed a miracle, but I doubted he had any of those. With a smile in his direction, I hurried toward Theo’s office.
The curt “Enter!” after I knocked made me hesitate. What would I tell him? Why hadn’t I cooked up a solid story? What would he do with the truth?
I took a deep breath before poking my head in. At his desk, Theo shuffled through some documents, but his gaze lifted as the door opened, and his eyes froze on me.
“Sophia?” He jumped from his seat and grabbed my shoulders for a hug. “You’re okay? Where have you been?”
When he released me, I shut and locked the door. “I was wounded and ended up at the house on Evanston.”
“Evanston? I thought you—” Theo blinked a few times, forehead wrinkled, eyes wide. “You’ve been gone three weeks.”
“I was unconscious for a week.” I tugged my clothes to show him the healing knife wounds. When I lifted my sweatpants and showed him my leg, he hissed.
“Shit. What happened?”
“I nearly bled to death. Lucas—he saved me, Theo.”
A long silence followed my words, and Theo sank into one of the chairs before his desk.
I perched on the one beside him. “I woke up stitched and healing. He was a surgeon, apparently. Before all this. He stayed with me, treated the infection, gave me his blood. He saved my life.”
Theo remained quiet, digesting that information. I let the silence stretch.
After a time, Theo stood and opened a drawer in his desk, extracting a small piece of paper. “I received a note.”
I recognized Lucas’s handwriting. “Uncle Theo, you’re lucky she’s not dead,” I read aloud. “That’s all he said?”
Theo sneered at the note. “The guy is a dick. I don’t know how you stand him. I received this a week after you disappeared.”
Pressing my lips together, I tried not to react. “How did he get that to you?”
“It was found in the pocket of a dead Hunter dropped off in the middle of our territory. Someone brought it to me, asking questions. It’s funny. Multiple Hunters have been found dead in our streets. Most of them traced back to the fight at that lookout.”
Given Lucas’s irrational anger at my injuries, that tracked, but I didn’t know what to say.
Theo sat in the chair behind his desk. “I have questions.”
I swallowed my apprehension and nodded.
“You’ve been with him this whole time?”
