Page 190 of Silver Elite

By the time my name is called, the knot of dread in my stomach is coiled around every inch of intestine.

“Is this really necessary?” I ask Cross in a last-ditch effort. “I’m not injured. Not even a scratch on me.”

“Sutler slammed your head against the floor last night.”

“Sorry about that,” Kaine calls out. He’s standing nearby with Ara and Jones now.

“My head is fine,” I insist.

“I’m not sending you into the field concussed, so just let him do his job, Darlington. Stop being so difficult all the time.”

Xavier snickers again.

Gritting my teeth, I join Ellis at the bed. I’ve gotten used to the complete lack of modesty on this base, so I don’t even hesitate before removing my shirt. My pants, on the other hand…

My fingers tremble as I unsnap the button, and a wave of self-consciousness washes over me when my thighs are revealed to the room. Not everyone has seen my burns.

“Your head, you say?” Ellis prompts when I sit down.

“I don’t have a concussion.”

That doesn’t stop him from cupping the back of my skull and conducting his own investigation. The warmth of his touch seeps into my head, and I didn’t even realize I had a headache until suddenly it’s gone.

Well, shit. I can see why the General keeps Mods like Ellis alive. We can be very useful assets to him, especially in the military.

With my head taken care of, Ellis proceeds to run his hands over my body.

I hear a low noise from Cross’s vicinity. Oh, he doesn’t like Ellis touching me? Too bad. He’s the one who facilitated this.

When the healer’s gaze reaches the ugly puckered scars marring my thigh, I shift in discomfort. I feel more exposed than ever under his probing eyes.

“This is very old burn tissue,” he remarks.

I nod. “From childhood.”

He doesn’t touch the scars. Instead, he tips his head and says, “I can get rid of all this scarring right now if you’d like.”

Chapter 42

Fear explodes inside me.

“It won’t take long at all,” Ellis assures me while my heart careens inside my chest like a runaway horse. Thundering off a cliff of panic. “If you just want to lie back—”

“No!”

I don’t mean to raise my voice. It causes everyone to swivel their heads toward me. No one was paying attention before, but now all eyes are on me, and I curse myself for losing my cool.

I can’t let him heal me.

There is no fucking way I can let him heal me.

I swallow hard, my mind searching for a way to deflect his attention without raising suspicion. I know exactly what lies beneath all this scar tissue. A bloodmark that will expose me as their enemy.

Or at least the markusedto be there. I have no way of knowing whether it was fully burned off, or if it’s lying dormant beneath layers of skin like that famous underwater volcano that, according to the history books, swallowed half of the Lost Continents in less than an hour. I know of one Mod who tried cutting their bloodmark off and it turned out to be so many layers of skin deep that it left a hole in their hand.

Either way, I can’t take the chance that it’s still there. It exposes me not just as a Mod, but also as one of the most powerful Mods in existence. Uncle Jim went to great lengths to erase it.

And now this nosy asshole is about to undo all that hard, painful work in a heartbeat.

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