"That's the first smart move you've made in a long time, Harvard."
Chase said nothing, waiting to breathe until the razor-sharp claws fell away from his throat and the warrior who had recently been his tightest companion left him alone once more in the room.
The long hours of daylight dragged by in excruciating slowness. Corinne felt each minute pass as though every one carved away a small piece of her heart along with it. Nathan was gone.
After the years of hoping for the chance to see him again, after the endless prayers for a miracle that might - somehow - grant her the ability to escape her imprisonment to reunite with her child and be the family she dreamed they could be ... he was gone. Slipped through her fingers, not due to any prophesied end but by his own choice. The fact that he was alive and missing hurt only slightly less than the idea that she might have lost him to the vision Hunter had described. Nathan was gone, and in the wake of that fact, Corinne was bereft.
She sat with Hunter in the back of the box truck, both of them waiting for sundown and another chance for Hunter to search for Nathan. He'd gone after him in the minutes after Nathan had fled, but Hunter's search of the area had been fruitless, dawn driving him back to the truck empty-handed.
In the time since, they had moved several miles from the log cabin homestead that had served as Nathan's cell. Hunter felt the risk of discovery by Dragos's operatives was too great to remain there any longer than they had. Corinne had reluctantly agreed. Now all she could do was wonder where her son had run off to and pray his conditioning as one of Dragos's unquestioning soldiers didn't make him return to the very evil Corinne had wanted to deliver him from. That is, if the sun that blazed outside the truck didn't take him first.
"If you were him," she said to Hunter, "where would you go?"
Hunter reached over and took her hand in a gentle grasp, tracing the pad of his thumb over her Breedmate mark. "He is a survivor, Corinne. That's what his training has taught him to be. He is highly intelligent, and he is, I am sure, extremely familiar with his surroundings. I found a number of caves in the area when I searched for him. By now he could be hiding in any one of them." He considered for a moment, then added, "Without the collar to restrict his movement to the area immediately surrounding the cabin, there's also a chance he could be anywhere.">Nothing but a white-tinged ring where the chemicals had burned him. The skin would heal in a short time. The miracle was, he was free.
"Wh-what have you done to me?" he asked, the first words he'd uttered to them. His voice was deep but carried the rough scrape of fading adolescence.
"You are free," Hunter told him. "No one can control you anymore. Thanks to your mother's love, her determination to find you, you are finally free to live as you choose."
Corinne stepped away from Hunter's side and held her hands out to her son in welcome.
"I want to bring you home with me, Nathan. We can be a family now."
He swung a look on her as she approached him. Guarded, mistrusting, he frowned and gave a faint shake of his shaved head.
Before Hunter could register the change in the boy, from caution to cornered, Nathan was moving. In a flash of Breed motion, he had grabbed one of the broken shards of his collar and held it tight against Corinne's throat. She gasped, totally unprepared for the assault. Hunter growled, his eyes trained on the jagged, makeshift blade that was poised at his Breedmate's carotid. Whether this boy was her flesh and blood or not, he had just declared himself an enemy.
Chapter Thirty-two
And Hunter would not hesitate to kill him if the threat escalated even so much as a fraction.
Even as Nathan backed her with him toward the open doors of the truck, Corinne's eyes pleaded with Hunter for mercy. "Nathan," she said, trying once more to reach her son's humanity. "You don't have to be afraid. Let us be your friends now. Let us be your family. Just give me a chance to be the mother I should have been for you."
He moved closer to the doors, saying nothing. That damnable bit of sharp material still riding near her vein. "Nathan," Corinne said. "Please, just let me love you - "
He shoved her forward, a violent rejection of all she'd said and all she'd done for him. Then he bolted out of the truck, escaping into the woods as the first light of dawn was already beginning to glow on the horizon.
Chase hadn't actually expected to wake up. His last conscious memory had been running in a blind tear through the city, losing too much blood from the gunshot wound in the artery of his right leg and the lesser hit to his shoulder. He'd taken worse injuries in combat before, but that was then. This was now, when his body was shuddering and weak, his nearly indestructible Breed genetics hobbled by the disease that roused him awake on a pained groan. He tried to sit up but didn't get very far. Metal restraints clamped his wrists and ankles to an infirmary bed. Another wide band of steel and leather lashed him around his middle. He cursed through his gritted teeth and gave the manacles a good hard rattle. As his vision slowly came into better focus, he saw a dark head peering in from the hallway at him through the small window in the door.
It took Dante a minute before he finally strode inside. As the door closed shut behind him, he stared at Chase from across the room and shook his head. "You're a fucking idiot, you know that, Harvard?"
Chase scoffed. "Thanks for the concern. I hope you didn't come all the way down here just to tell me that."
"No, I didn't," Dante replied, not rising to his bait at all. "I've been next door, sitting with Tess while she's recovering."
"Tess is in the infirmary?" Recalling the Breedmate's delicate last few weeks of pregnancy, Chase immediately felt like a first-class asshole. "Ah, Christ, man. I didn't know."
"How could you know? You weren't here."
Chase exhaled a short sigh and nodded in acknowledgment. He couldn't say he didn't deserve this cold reception. After all, he'd done just about everything he could lately to make sure he was persona non grata with the Order. Especially where Dante was concerned. "So, how is she doing? Everything all right with her?"
"Yeah. Tess is fine." Dante gave a faint incline of his head. "So is the baby. He's resting next door with her."
Tess gave birth already? The news flash hit Chase with double barrels. He couldn't hold back his surprise, or the regret that slapped him to realize he'd been absent for the event Dante and Tess had been looking forward to for many long months. Hell, he'd been pretty damned eager about the whole thing himself. He'd even wondered on more than one occasion if Dante had been thinking about asking him to be godfather to his son, an honor Chase was hardly worthy of, but one he would have accepted with humbled pride at one time.
A million years ago.
And now a million miles out of his reach.