Amaryllis rolled her eyes. It was Reese’s voice.
Just her shit house luck to be bunked right next to him. Apparently the gang was all here.
“I’m fine,” she said through gritted teeth.
“What happened?”
She wasn’t about to admit to anything so shameful as having been dragged into fighting over a man. “I had a difference of opinion with Violet—that dainty little flower sitting in the cell across from me.”
He was silent for several moments and she had the uncomfortable feeling that he knew exactly why Violet had attacked her. “We need to talk.”
Instantly visions of the last ‘discussion’ she’d had with Reese filled her mind. She covered her face with her hands, feeling a rush of both embarrassment and desire, but a hysterical urge to giggle swelled in her chest, as well. She’d spent years suffering agonies of envy of all the girls who’d had boyfriends, certain she never would, and now she had three bull headed, absolutely single minded cyborgs chasing after her like she was some sort of sex goddess or something. “I think it’s going to be a little difficult to carry on a ‘discussion’ under present circumstances.”
To her surprise, he immediately grasped the innuendo. From the tone of his voice, he wasn’t particularly happy that she’d brought it up. “I meant talk,” he said tightly.
“I don’t particularly want to talk—to you or anyone else.”
The silence lasted longer that time. “You’ve chosen Cain?”
The question and the inflexion of his voice spurred a riot of emotions, making her heart tighten painfully in her chest and she realized a number of very unpalatable facts all at once.
As appalled as she was to find herself lusting over Reese, Dante, and Cain all at the same time, she had far more to worry about than lust. She wasn’t over her crush on Reese, not by a long shot, and she felt just as distressed over the idea of choosing Reese over Cain, or either one of them over Dante. She didn’t want to do it. She didn’t think she could. No matter which she chose, she would have a lot of regrets to live with, more than she wanted to face.
And she would have to. No matter whether there were hundreds, or thousands of cyborgs awaiting them on the cyborg planet, it would still be a small community and that meant she’d be running into one or the other of them all the time.
“I chose my life already when I decided to become a soldier. I’m not cut out for anything else. I don’t want anything else,” she lied. The truth was, she did. She wanted a life like her parents had had. She wanted to be ‘normal’. It was all she’d ever really wanted and the one thing she could never have.
Maybe fate had dropped her right where she belonged, a misfit in the midst of other misfits, and yet even among them she didn’t quite fit. The hunters differed from the cyborgs but they still shared the bond of being the same as each other. Despite their own varying physical attributes, the cyborgs shared the bond of having been created the same.
She was still different and, beyond her mixed feelings about considering forming a family unit, she was still afraid she would never truly fit in. Both Dante and Reese already knew she was different. How long before everyone else realized it, as well? And, once they had, even supposing they decided to allow her to live among them, they would know she was different and she would be able to feel them staring at her where ever she went and know she was being judged, hated for being different.
“We have a standing army. You needn’t give that up if it’s what you want. You would still be allowed to form a family unit.”
Surprise flickered through Amaryllis briefly, but she wasn’t particularly pleased by the information when she’d expected that to settle the matter. She decided to try a different tact.
“You would be more … content with someone who has more interest in forming a family unit than I.”
“One of my own kind, you mean?” he asked in a harsh whisper.
Touchy. She hadn’t realized he would be so touchy about it. The anger in his voice unsettled her and riled her own anger. “I don’t know why you think you want me anyway. You’ve hardly spoken to me in all the time we’ve worked together. Why the sudden interest?”
He was silent so long she’d decided he couldn’t come up with a convincing lie.
“I was … afraid.”
The comment startled her. It also completely caught her attention. “Why?” she asked, genuinely confused.
He seemed to wrestle with himself for several moments. “Could we discuss this when we have no audience?”
He had a point. They didn’t have any privacy, and yet she could hear the others who’d been confined talking. She couldn’t think they had a great deal of interest in her conversation. Finally, she got up and moved to the front of the cell. “Why?” she demanded, pressing her face to the bars so that she could see him in the next cell.
He scrubbed a hand over his face. “It was forbidden.”
Her lips flattened. “Sex was forbidden. We could’ve been friends.”
“I do not want to be your friend,” he said harshly. “And I could not take a chance that I would be tempted to do something that would make them suspicious of me. It seemed … safer to keep my distance.”
Amaryllis frowned. “You were afraid you’d blow your cover? Or that they’d reprimand you with brig time so that you couldn’t spy for the cyborgs?”
