Page 7 of Light the Fire

I needed to cling to something. And this was it.

I also needed to assume that there might be an ambush at the survival pack and the boat in the event Moord did torture Neffers into revealing the plan.

But either way, I didn’t need these three.

They exchanged looks with each other.

The tallest of the three sniffed, and his gaze on me intensified and became almost … predatory. I cleared my throat.

“She’s the source,” he said.

The other two whipped their eyes to his.

“I can smell it,” he said.

They all eyed me hungrily now.

I took a step back. My hand went to the Yakku blade back on my hip. I still had his Filton 390 handgun, too, as well as an arsenal of other weapons on my body.

They stepped forward.

I took another step back and lifted up the gun. “Don’t come a single step closer.”

Sly smiles slid across their mouths like they were one second from laughing at me.

“You’re not a normal Stratera Kappa, are you?” the shorter, stockier one asked. Though he wasn’treallystocky or short. The guy who first found me probably had seven inches on me at least, the tallest guy had probably nine or ten inches on me, and the shortest guy had five or six inches on me. And I was five-foot-seven. So he wasn’tshort.He was just shorter than the other two. But at the moment, it was how I was identifying them. Tall, medium and short. Or, tall, medium and tree trunks for arms, because the stocky guy had very muscular, very large biceps and shoulders and as he crossed them over his chest it just made them look even bigger and caused the veins to pop.

I jerked my chin. “I’m Kappa dominant. But I’m hybrid.”

Intrigue flooded their eyes.

“Hybrid?” the tallest asked.

I swallowed. “Stratera Kappa Sigma Theta. The first of my kind …apparently.”

The tall guy’s brows lifted for a moment. “Makes sense.” He sniffed again, then exhaled like he was sighing.

I backed up again, but good God, I was so distracted that I’d backed myself right up against a tree.

“I will put a bullet between each of your eyes if you touch me,” I said, hating that my voice held a quaver. “I’m not giving up one prison for another.”

Their noses wrinkled, and they stopped prowling toward me, exchanging curious looks with each other. The tall guy who’d been looking at me like I was a piece of meat and him a starving mountain lion seemed to snap out of his trance. He took a step backward and shook his head.

“Prison?” the stockier one asked. “You think we want to kidnap you?”

“I don’t know what you want.”

“The same thing as you,” the first guy said.

I lifted a brow. “Which is?”

“Freedom.”

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