In the harsh fluorescent light of the bathroom, I get my first good look at myself in hours, and what I see makes me freeze, one hand still clutching the counter for balance.
The claiming marks on my neck are angry, inflamed. All four of them. They’re all a deep, angry red, the skin around them swollen and hot to the touch.
This isn’t normal. This isn’t a cold or the flu or stress. This is something else entirely. Something to do with the claiming, with the bond that I tried to break by walking away.
I stumble back to bed, my legs barely holding me up now. The fever is getting worse by the minute, the heat radiating from the marks spreading through my entire body. My vision blurs, the edges of the room fuzzy and indistinct.
I need help. I need...
My hand fumbles for my phone, knocking it to the floor. I have to hang half off the bed to reach it, my fingers scrabbling against the floorboards. When I finally grasp it, the screen is too bright, the icons swimming before my eyes.
I should call Leah. Or 911. This is clearly a medical emergency.
But my fingers move of their own accord, scrolling through my contacts until they land on a name. A name I swore I wouldn’t call. A name that makes the marks on my neck pulse in recognition.
I stare at it, my thumb hovering over the screen. If I call him, if I reach out now, it will undo everything. All my brave talk about not being their medicine, about needing more than they could give. All of it will crumble the moment I hear his voice.
But the fever is climbing, the room spinning around me, and I’m starting to feel genuinely scared. This isn’t normal. This isn’t something I can handle alone.
With the last of my strength, I press the call button.
It rings once before a deep, familiar, and intensely worried voice answers.
“Zoe?” It’s Rett. He sounds terrible, his voice rough and strained, as if he’s been shouting for hours. “Zoe, are you there?”
“Rett,” I manage, my own voice a weak, broken thing. “Something’s wrong. The marks... they’re...”
“We’re coming,” he cuts me off, his voice shifting instantly from worry to command. “Stay on the line. We’re already on our way.”
I want to ask why they’re already on their way, how they knew, but darkness is creeping in at the edges of my vision, and all I can do is make a small, pained sound of acknowledgment before the phone slips from my grasp.
The last thing I hear before unconsciousness takes me is Rett’s voice. “Zoe! Stay with me! We’re coming!”
Then nothing.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Rett
“Faster,” I growl, my knuckles white on the dashboard as Dane navigates the empty city streets at a speed that would normally have me telling him to slow down.
“Going as fast as I can,” he replies, his voice tense but controlled. “Five more minutes.”
Five minutes feels like an eternity. Every second that passes is another second she’s alone, in pain, possibly dying. The thought sends a fresh wave of agony through my skull, the static shrieking like a wounded animal.
It’s been like this since she left. Three days of unrelenting torture. None of us has slept. None of us has eaten more than the bare minimum. We’ve been existing in a haze of pain and regret, going through the motions of our lives while falling apart inside.
And then, tonight, a new kind of hell began.
I was in the living room, staring at a spreadsheet on my tablet that might as well be written in Greek. Tristan was on the other end of the couch, endlessly scrolling through his phone, the blue light illuminating the deep, exhausted lines around his eyes.Diego was in the kitchen, the soft, rhythmic thump of a knife on a cutting board the only sound he’d made for the last hour.
That’s when it hit me.
A silent, psychic scream of pure, unadulterated agony that ripped through the center of my being.
The tablet slipped from my numb fingers, clattering onto the floor. A sharp, burning pain erupted behind my sternum, so intense it stole the air from my lungs.
Across the room, Tristan choked, dropping his own phone as he clutched his chest. From the kitchen, there was the sharp, metallic clang of a knife hitting the floor, followed by Diego’s raw, wounded cry.
