Page 12 of Broken Pregnant Mate
“Yes.”
“So, what areyoudoing here?”
“No—it’s my turn to ask a question.” I cross my arms and look her up and down, mind racing with possibilities for how she could have ended up here. My first thought was some sort of witness protection program, but then they wouldn’t keep her locked up, would they?
“Why were you arrested?”
Emaline immediately bites her lip and drops her eyes, looking to the ground. I have to resist the urge to reach out and touch her, comfort her.
“I was…at the border during one of the big conflicts.”
I can’t even hide the shock; keep it off my face. The idea of Emaline at the border, of her engaging in any sort of fighting—it’s foreign to me. She has always been a soft person, preferring to talk things through rather than fight them out.
An image of her comes to mind, shouting at the group home, crying and begging me not to beat the shit out of a new kid who tried to break into her stuff, take her meager savings. She would rather I let him get away with it than any physical harm come to one of us.
That girl—how could that girl have been at the border, fighting?
Besides, everyone knows the fastest way to find a quick death in the Grayhide territory is to go to the border. With the erosion of training, support, and trust, our shifters know less and less about defending themselves, and the Ambersky shifters are a tight-knit group.
Since Emaline and I were kids, we’d heard horror stories about the border. And they only got worse as we grew older.
“Why would you go to the border?” I finally manage, the words coming out of me with breathy, pure disbelief. “Unless…were you trying to get away from something?”
She sniffles, wipes across her face with the back of her hand, then shakes her head, raising her gaze to mine. She’s crying, eyes shimmering with unshed tears, and the sight of it makes me want to fight someone.
Except this time, I know that the person most responsible for those tears is me.
“No,” she chokes, “it’s my turn now. What areyoudoing here, in the Ambersky territory?”
I sigh, rub my hand over the back of my head, and sink down into one of the wooden chairs in her cell. Suddenly, my entire body hurts with the weight of this.
“I…when I left that night, it was because I realized I was being poisoned.”
Emaline sucks in a breath, then her brow wrinkles. “Who…but who would have…?”
She seems to realize the answer before I tell her, and the way her expression shifts makes me wish I had never told her the truth.
Because Emaline was so sweet, so agreeable, and a year younger than me, she managed to find a family. They came to the care home, and I knew the moment I saw them that they were going to take her home with them.
A kind, older couple, who had never been able to have children of their own and didn’t want someone too young. Just before she left, Emaline came to me, held my hand in hers, and said she would send letters for me.
And she did.
The couple owned an aloe farm outside the city, only an hour’s run from the border. Though she had to take from her own funds, she sent me those letters, with maps and details on how to get there.
But I was never going to bother her there, not when she’d found parents to love her.
That is, until I realized I was slowly dying, that the food I received at the care home was laced with something. I stopped eating, and the symptoms got better, but the hunger got much, much worse.
Eventually, I ran.
I ran right to Emaline, not quite able to see or think straight. When I stumbled up to the property, between the rows of the aloe plants, Emaline ran to me, like she could sense that I was there.
She’d wanted me to come inside, begged me to come take a shower and rest in a real bed, but I didn’t trust anyone. I insisted on sleeping in the barn.
And I stayed there for two weeks until I realized the same symptoms were popping up again—dizziness, weakness, a general nausea, and headache that never went away.
Emaline was sneaking me food each night, and I knew there was no way she was poisoning me. So, somehow, her adoptive parents knew that I was in that barn, and they’d received orders to take me out.
