Page 42 of Reckless Wolf

“No, of course not.”

“Then stop badgering me, Bee.”

She was right, of course. My lectures weren’t going to make her heal any faster.

“It’s not like you have some grandiose plan, anyway,” she went on. “How much money do you have? Where did you get it?”

I looked around again, worry creasing my forehead, and I pushed her along, back toward the house.

“Never mind that,” I muttered, concerned about Jesse’s spy ears. “It’s something to get us out of here.”

“It’s not enough.”

I stopped again and stared at her. “So what? You want to just roll over and play dead?”

Dahlia shrugged. “Maybe. For now,” she admitted, looking away from my dubious expression. “At least until I’m in a better position.”

“Once he marries us, he owns us in more ways than one. What if he impregnates one of us? What then?”

My sister’s face went deathly pale. She hadn’t considered the aftermath of the wedding, the implications of what the ceremony meant. I shook my head at her naiveness.

“He… he wouldn’t,” she sputtered without an ounce of confidence.

I gestured around with my hands.

“Look around you,” I growled. “Look at the two dozen wives he has here.”

“But kids are rare,” Dahlia insisted, stating the obvious. Everyone knew that the chances of having children diminished more with each passing year. Our numbers were dwindling, yet that didn’t ease my mind in any respect. “The chances of pregnancy are slim.”

“Like the chances of twins?” I countered, crossing my arms over my chest.

She paled more, and a spark of guilt shot through me. Maybe I was being too hard on her, but I needed to make her see that she was being ridiculous by not taking this more seriously. Or maybe I was being ridiculous by expecting miracles. She did have completely valid points, after all. How far would we get? What would Jesse do with us if we dared to run, and he caught us? Definitely worse than marriage and whatever he had planned for our wedding night.

My body convulsed with all the thoughts, and Dahlia put a hand on my arm to stop me from having a full-on anxiety attack.

“You need to stop planning,” she murmured. “We can only move as fast as we can move.”

“I know that.”

“No,” she corrected me. “You’re trying to rush things, and that’s not helping either of us.”

I gulped back the stone in my throat and nodded, vowing silently to end the endless pressure I was putting on both of us. It was only going to age us.

“Come on,” Dahlia mumbled, her voice suddenly weak. “I need to lie down again.”

I told myself not to worry, that her fatigue was a good sign. The more she rested, the stronger she’d become.

“Come on,” I agreed, pulling on her arm. “Let’s get you back to bed.”

* * *

And she did get better,slowly and surely, day by day. It wasn’t leaps and bounds, massive bursts of energy or sporadic streaks of atoms, but the sister I’d known before Dad had come storming back into our lives was slowly returning, the color in her face remaining.

“We should never have stopped running,” Dahlia told me one night, almost a week after I’d left Atlas’ house.

Night had fallen again, and the silence was almost as creepy as the sound of the guards laughing around us outside. We curled into one another like we had in the womb, most likely, curled knee-to-knee, foreheads together as we whispered, our voices barely audible.

“Mom wanted us to have stability,” I reminded her, tensing at her mildly accusing tone.

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