Karl closed his eyes as he tried to figure out how that could possibly work. They’d given him opioids—he recognized the quality of the fuzziness in his brain. He’d have to stop them dosing him with any more if he was going to be alert enough to plan.
“Why?” he asked, and he wasn’t even sure what part of Leon’s revelations his question related to.
“I thought that claiming status might give them pause if they intended to dispose of us,” Leon said. “It would mean we’d be missed.”
Might? That was a slender hope Leon had hung his safety on. “Did it work?”
Leon’s shrug was graceful and fluid, like everything he did. When awake, anyway.
“They decided against letting you die, so there’s that. As for their current intentions, I don’t know. I figure we need to get you healed as quickly as possible but make them think you’re weaker than you are. If they see us as a threat, it might rush them into adecision. At the moment, they’re relaxed about me because they know I won’t leave you.”
He hesitated, then added, “That’s the other reason why I pretended we were mates.”
It took a moment for the words to penetrate. But when they did, they hit like small stones, hard and stinging.
Of course. It wasn’t real. It neverhadbeen real, that warm safety he’d felt, the way his wolf had stretched out in pure happiness and fulfilment. The way he’d felt like he could finally rest, after so long.
He was finding it hard to breathe, and he didn’t understand why. He couldn’t be mourning something he’d never wanted.
“Karl?” Leon’s voice had changed, become quieter and uncertain as if he’d felt something shift but didn’t know what it meant.
Karl blinked his eyes open, only now realizing they’d closed. “Plan,” he managed, his voice thick and not sounding like his.
Leon leaned forward and swept his hair back from his forehead. “We will,” he promised, the gentleness like salt in Karl’s wound, reminding him of what he’d thought he had. “But for now, sleep and heal.”
And then he was floating, all pain and worry gone, apart from the emptiness inside him where something had swiftly blossomed and just as swiftly died.
Chapter Twenty-two
LEON
Dusk was falling when Ruth returned. Karl had slept the rest of the afternoon, which injected a measure of cold realism into Leon’s planning. They were going nowhere anytime soon.
He tried a smile at Ruth, hoping to elicit some of the softness she gave Karl. No such luck. Her expression remained brisk and cool, eyebrows lifted like she was braced for inanity as she waited for him to speak.
Leon refused to be deterred. This was important. It was so important he was pretty sure it was in the Geneva Convention. “Can I get a comb?”
Her gaze ran over his hair. He’d done the best he could using his fingers, but it was amess.“I’ll see what I can do,” she said. “Anything else?”
He couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic. “I need to stretch my legs,” he said. “Will you stay with him?”
“You can have thirty minutes,” she said, already rolling up her sleeves. “I need to give him a bed bath and change the dressing.”
Thirty minutes should be enough for the poking around he wanted to do, and Karl didn’t need him to lurk while Ruth was doing something so intimate for him.
He pushed up out of the torture device of a chair that was killing him by degrees, and looked at Karl. He was still, but it looked like a normal healing sleep, his breathing even and his skin its usual color where he wasn’t bruised. Leon leaned down and brushed a kiss against his temple, soft and barely there. For Ruth’s benefit, if she was watching. Obviously.
He stripped off the clothes Ruth had quietly given him the previous night, leaving them in a pile outside the cabin before he shifted in the growing gloom. To his surprise, no one followed him as he began to explore. He’d expected some kind of surveillance, but he was alone, as if he’d slipped between the cracks. Perfect.
He ghosted between trees and darkened buildings, checking angles and noticing small, useful things. The netting overhead wasn’t strong enough to bear his weight. Chinks of lamplight seeped out around badly fitted logs, both help and hindrance. The scent of fuel was strong as he passed a silent generator, and a cracked solar panel was tucked awkwardly under a tarp. This was a place rationing resources, hoarding energy, watching its own shadow. Whatever the reason they were hiding here, it shaped every part of their lives. It had to be a cult.
But even as he cataloged the layout, something else was turning over in the back of his mind. Karl, and the way he’d been earlier, his eyes dazed, voice raw but soft. There’d been no bossiness, no infuriating logic. No walls. Just the feeling of someone caught in a moment they didn’t quite understand but didn’t want to let go of either.
Leon had felt it too, that closeness between them. Something in Karl had reached for him, and Leon had reached back without thinking. The nearest thing he could think of was how it had been when they’d been lying under the tarp in the rain, naked and touching. A closeness that went beyond physical, which made little sense but which had been undeniable.
He shook his head, slipping around the corner of another building. It changed nothing. Karl had retreated again the moment he’d had the strength to do so. Maybe exhaustion was the only reason he hadn’t kept Leon at a distance for those few moments.
Or maybe—and this was the option Leon didn’t like—those momentshadmeant something, and Karl had decided against it.
