Page 60 of Feral

I turned my head back around and stared straight ahead as I kept walking toward the exit.

“Lillian! Please, Oh god, no, you can’t leave me here! Lillian!”

Somewhere deep inside, in a place the agony from my bond had muted before, I felt a stab of guilt when the door to the lab slid shut behind us, silencing the panicked woman’s screams as if they never existed.

CHAPTER 26

LILLIAN

“We can’t go back to my place,” Jerome said as he drove us down an abandoned country road. I had no idea where it would lead us, but so long as it was away from SilverCorp’s compound, it was good enough for me. “They’ll have some nice images of all our faces from the security cameras—we’re all gonna have to get out of the country and disappear somewhere. But we ain’t gonna make it across the border with him in that state, so hopefully the drugs you stole are gonna kick in sometime soon.”

“Any plans?” I asked as I slid a needle into Zach’s bicep. My mate was still passed out, but a hushed growl escaped his lips as I injected him with the first dose of di-hydroperalimitus. I had no idea how fast it would work, if at all, but I reasoned it’d be much easier to give it to him while he was still unconscious. Hopefully it would be easier to treat him if the drug began to take effect.

Whenit took effect.

“Nothing, I’m afraid. Dishonorably discharged vets don’t exactly get the kind of payout that allows for a nice backup hideout in Colombia. We’ll work something out. Getting across the border’s the first goal. You just take care of Barnes. Leave the rest to us.” Jerome sighed, running a hand over his scalp before changing gears.

“Jerome, I… I haven’t thanked you…”

“You had other things on your mind,” he grunted. “And it wasn’t like we were gonna let our brother rot in some fucking test facility.”

“But you lost Beau. And Larry—will he be all right?” I glanced over my shoulder at the headlights following us. Eric drove the other car, allowing Jarl to care for Larry’s injury in the backseat. “I didn’t consider… the cost of this.” Not that I would have stopped them from saving Zach if I had, but the guilt sparked by the claimed woman’s pleas for help as we left the facility gnawed at my gut.

They’d all lost so much, and now they’d be fugitives as well.

“You need to understand that every single one of us will happily lay down our lives for this man,” Jerome said, steel in his voice. “He did the same for us, once, but he didn’t sign up forthis.There is honor in sacrifice. In a warrior’s death. There is nothing but humiliation in what they did to him, and if we’d known, we would’ve come for him sooner.”

I looked at Zach’s naked form as he lay slumped against the backseat door, unable to take my hand off his arm where I’d injected him. The contact of his skin against mine soothed the place in my chest where the bond now hummed contentedly. Despite the absence of pain, I still felt raw inside and out, and I wasn’t sure that part would ever heal. Maybe the damage our separation had done would be permanent.

He’d been introduced to me as a war criminal, a convict, the lowest of scum, no better than an animal. And yet these men had all put their lives on the line to save him.

“I need you to tell me what happened,” I said quietly, never taking my eyes off Zach’s sleeping face. “I need to know why they charged him with treason.”

“You know I can’t. I swore an oath,” Jerome rumbled. “If he wants you to know, he’ll tell you himself.”

“There is…” I swallowed thickly, forcing down the wave of despair just thinking the thought brought on. “There is no guarantee he will ever speak again, Jerome. There is no guarantee he will ever be anything more than a mindless animal. What they did to him… I don’t know if I can bring him back. I’ll try. I’ll never stop trying. He ensured that when he put his claiming mark on my neck.

“I don’t hate him. I don’t hate him for being so desperate for a companion that he stole my choice and my future from me. I don’t hate him for the things he has done to me because they took away his ability to control himself. But I… I want to know… Ineedto know, if the world had been different, if we had met… somewhere else. Could I have loved him? Would I have chosen him, if he had asked instead of taking?”

Silence filled the car as my voice died down. For the longest time, I thought he was going to keep quiet, and I wiped the tears threatening to spill from my eyes. I had my mate back—hours ago that was all I’d wanted, and more than I’d hoped for. How we had come to be, and how we would continue… it didn’t matter. I had no right to cry anymore.

“Just because you didn’t choose him doesn’t mean you don’t love him.” Jerome’s voice was uncharacteristically quiet. “Why did you try to rescue him that first time?”

“They were hurting him. No one deserves that kind of treatment, no matter what they’ve done. Despite… Despite everything, I would do it again.”

“But whyhim,specifically?” Jerome asked, glancing at me in the rearview mirror. “There were dozens of other alphas in there, locked up and brutalized just like Barnes. Why’d you choose him?”

“I…” I bit my lip, frowning at the question. I thought back to Zach’s bloody back and the pained mistrust in his beautiful eyes. And then, like a whisper, I remembered how I’d thought about him day and night, how his eyes and his body had stayed with me in my dreams. “I thought he was different.”

“You thought he was different, yet you thought him a traitor and a murderer?” Jerome snorted. “It doesn’t get a lot of press, not outside alpha circles… but the rumor is we’re not the only ones who know when we meet the woman who’s meant to be our mate. She will too, even if she doesn’t always understand. Zach isn’t the type of man to claim whatever piece of ass he can get a hold of just because he’s lonely. I don’t care what they’ve done to him, that shit is fused into your bones.

“You say he stole your future from you—girl, he was always your future.Youpickedhimwhen you chose to free him from that fucking cell the first time ‘round. So don’t give me any bullshit about how youmighthave loved him if he’d been the perfect gentleman and bought you flowers before he gave you the knot and bit your neck. Love ain’t like that, not for us. It’s primal and it’s inescapable, and what you feel for him… that’s the kind of love that never, ever dies.”

I gaped at his steely gaze in the rearview mirror, too stunned to respond. But his words sank in deep, penetrating the place in my chest my bond was hooked and making it hum as if it was trying to convince me he spoke nothing but the truth.

“I’ve been in love before,” I whispered. “Many times. It didn’t feel like this—this is… it’s awful. I have thisthinginside of me, like a worm burrowing in my flesh, a parasite manipulating me, hurting me when I’m too far away from him.”

Jerome scoffed.“Beta love. That’s not real, girl. That’s a beta making you feel good to get in your pants. You think yourbondis manipulating you?” He scoffed again. “Fucking betas.”