I forced my hand to release the knife, let it slide back into its sheath. My heart hammered against my ribs, adrenaline still flooding my system. The woman was still backing away, putting more distance between us with each step.
Around us, other people had stopped to stare. Watching the newcomer who'd nearly stabbed someone for a friendly touch.Confirming every suspicion they probably had about what the Drakarn had done to me.
If they only knew. The Drakarn hadn't made me violent. I'd been violent long before the crash. Military training and three deployments had taught me to respond to unexpected touch with immediate force.
Scalvaris had just refined those instincts, made them sharper.
I'd changed so much in the last several months. Adapted to Drakarn customs, learned their ways, understood their culture. I'd gone from viewing them as monsters to seeing them as people. Complex, honorable people who were just as varied and complicated as humans.
I'd found a place there. A purpose.
A mate.
I didn't belong here anymore. These were my people by biology, by shared origin. But Scalvaris was my home now. The Drakarn were my people by choice.
And Nyx was mine.
And he was rotting in a cell somewhere.
Not for another minute.
I turned away from the woman I'd nearly stabbed, from the medical tent where Larissa was falling apart, from the curious stares of people who thought they understood what I'd been through.
Larissa was safe. Physically, if not mentally. I could go back to Kira in good conscience and tell her that her sister was alive and healing. If I could get these humans to see reason, I could even bring her here, maybe the others, too, if they wanted to eke out a life in the Broken Plains instead of among the Drakarn.
But that life wasn't for me.
I belonged in Scalvaris. With Nyx. With the mate who'd made me a weapon rather than trying to disarm me. Who'd flownme across hostile territory and offered me everything he had without demanding anything in return.
Who was probably tearing himself apart right now, trapped and alone and thinking I'd abandoned him.
The thought made my chest constrict. Made my hands curl into fists at my sides.
And I was going to find him.
Now.
18
NYX
My throat was shredded.Each breath scraped through tissue I'd worn out screaming her name, screaming for release, screaming at walls that didn't care.
The restraints cut deep enough that I couldn't feel my hands anymore. Blood had dried in sticky patches where metal met scale, crusted over wounds that should have clotted but kept reopening every time I moved.
The pain had become background noise, something my body registered but my mind had learned to ignore.
The heat in this box never changed, never gave me markers to track day from night. My internal clock had fractured, leaving me adrift in an endless present where Lexa was gone and I was trapped and nothing else mattered.
Water would have helped.
My tongue had swollen in my mouth, thick and useless. The membranes of my throat stuck together when I tried to swallow. Drakarn could survive a long time on nothing, our bodies designed for Volcaryth's brutal climate, but even we had limits.
I was approaching mine.
My vision had started doing strange things. The walls rippled when I stared too long, patterns emerging from thesmooth metal that disappeared when I blinked. Twice, I'd seen movement in the corners, shapes that vanished when I turned my head.
Hallucinations. My mind playing tricks on me.
