Page 9 of Betrayed Pregnant Mate

I feel, acutely, every one of the little things Veronica has stuck to me, and I start to rip them off, which just makes the machine beep louder, and longer.

“Percy!” she says, when I rip the IV out. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

I can see the fear in her eyes, knowing she was here when they brought me in. Maisie saw me at my worst, when the serum had a firm hold on my behavior. Over the months that I’ve been here, I’ve thought about asking to see the video footage of the episodes the serum caused in me, but actually seeing it felt like it would be too much.

Pedaling backward, away from Maisie, I feel my back hit the wall, and I drop my head into my hands, struggling to breathe. I have to get out of here, have to get away—

Something lands on my shoulder, and distantly, I can hear Maisie saying something, to get back, maybe, but when I look up, I see Veronica standing over me, her mouth moving.

My heart starts to slow.

Veronica crouches down, getting eye level with me, and as her mouth moves, the waves crashing over my ears recede, and I’m able to hear what she’s saying.

“—breathe. Look at me. Percy, breathe with me. Watch my chest.”

I do what she says and drop my gaze to her chest, timing my breathing with hers until the confusion and anger flooding through my chest have subsided.

“You—you—” Maisie says, her eyes wide and her mouth opening and closing. “Veronica, you—”

“I had the weirdest dream,” Veronica says, getting to her feet and looking between Maisie and me. “That someone was biting me? I think? What am I doing down here, in the clinic?”

Veronica is turning and looking around the room as though she’s trying to gather information that might help her better understand what she’s doing in the compound. I wonder what she remembers—if she knows she already ran away from here once, only to be rescued by the team when the vampires I alerted went after her.

Guilt flushes through my body, pooling in my stomach, and I swallow, hard, reaching up and trying to put a hand on her. It’s not good for me to be around her, and when I heard Linnea saying Veronica would be leaving soon, I knew it was a good thing.

But here, now, all I want is to touch her one more time.

My hand finds hers, and she glances down at me, squeezing my fingers between hers. Her cheeks are flushed, her eyes bright, her skin warm to the touch. So, she hasn’t turned.

Suddenly, it dawns on me—why Maisie is reacting this way to Veronica being on her feet, talking to me, generally functioning.

“Veronica,” Maisie says, swallowing hard. “You should be dead.”

Chapter 5 - Veronica

“Should be dead?” I say, laughing at first, then registering the absolutely horrified look on Maisie’s face, which sobers me. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Her gaze flits between Percy and me. Percy is still sitting on the ground. When I glance down at him, I really see, for the first time, that he’s in immense pain. Despite everything, it makes a pang of empathy zing through my chest. I don’t want him to hurt.

There are beads of sweat along his brow, and as I look at him, he bends at the waist, tucking his head between his knees.

The emotions whirring inside me are hard to pick out and impossible to hold onto. Seeing him here, like this, is such a stark contrast to the man I knew back in New York City. The man who would pick me up on a whim, spinning me over his shoulder and laughing as I screamed with laughter to be put down. The man who took me on the wildest adventures—to indoor skydiving, sunrise kayaking, and a beer tasting that included a brew made from squid’s ink.

That Percy was all fun, all sunshine, a constant ray of hope and positivity. This Percy has been through something—the apparent psychological break he was suffering from when he kidnapped me.

A shiver runs over my skin, pricking up goosebumps, and I look away from him.

I can’t help it—despite how much I’ve worked with the therapist, the memories are like intrusive thoughts, coming flooding back no matter how many times I try to stop them or keep them from completely zoning everything out.

A path in the middle of the woods, just outside of Rosecreek, is beautiful in the daylight but terrifying at night. That’s where I was when Percy appeared, and seeing him again was like having cold water dumped over my body. Not only was I still pissed at him for leaving me, but I was also, apparently, still very much in love with him.

I’d known it the second he stepped out of the trees, his clothes hanging in tatters from his body, his expression full of pain and confusion.

“Percy?” I had said, stepping toward him, and the violence with which he turned his head, snapping his gaze to me, made me flinch. He didn’t look like himself—for one, he had a long beard where his face was usually clean-shaven. But it was more than that—something unrecognizable behind his eyes. Something dark. Something I had never seen there in him before.

“Veronica,” he’d breathed, that dark cloud clearing from his eyes for a moment. It was too difficult to read all the emotions crossing and muddling up on his face. And then, in one breath, a word that will always chill me to the bone for the rest of my life, his mouth had twisted, his eyes shining with a kind of anticipatory grief.

“Run.”

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