Now, as Corinne finished setting the kitchen table, she turned to assist at the stove, where Amelie was pulling on oven mitts, about to reach in and retrieve their dinner from the broiler.
"Here," Corinne said. "Let me get that for you."
Amelie gave her a dismissive little cluck of her tongue. "Don't you worry about it, child. I know my way around this old kitchen like the back of my hand."
It seemed unnecessary to point out to Amelie that she didn't have the benefit of sight to guide her. As she had the day before, the gray-haired woman navigated her living space as though she knew every square inch of it by instinct alone. Corinne stood back as Amelie served up two beautifully browned slabs of buttery white fish crusted with a fragrant smattering of peppers and spices. The aroma wafted up from the broiler, making Corinne's stomach growl in anticipation.
Amelie took off her gloves, humming to one of the soft jazz songs that played on the stereo in the adjacent living room. Rounded h*ps swaying in time with the music, she reached for a spatula in the squatty earthenware jug next to the stove.
"I hope you like catfish," she said, pivoting to place the filets onto the pair of plates that waited on the countertop at her right elbow. Still humming and swaying to the high-pitched male voice pleading for someone to tell it like it is, she found her marks on the plates with hardly a falter. "I'll let you serve up some of that dirty rice and steamed vegetables, if you like. You can put the hot corn bread in that basket right over there."
"Of course," Corinne replied. She put some of each onto their plates, then carried both plates and the corn bread to the table and took her seat across from Amelie.
"Did any of those clothes I set out work for your man?" she asked.
Corinne started to correct her about Hunter being her anything, but the words took too long arriving on her tongue. Besides, after everything that had happened between them under Amelie's roof in the past roughly twenty-four hours, it would feel even more awkward for her to attempt to deny that there was something between them. "Yes, they did," she said, simply answering the question. "Thank you for letting Hunter have them."
Amelie nodded as she cut into her fish. "My son's always leaving his things here in his old room when he visits. He's a big boy, rather like your man in there. I'm glad something fit him."
"Well, we appreciate it very much," Corinne said.
She and Hunter had been able to wash out most of the bloodstains from the fatigues he'd worn to Henry Vachon's, but while the clothes were tumbling in Amelie's dryer, Hunter had been forced to borrow a sweatshirt and snap-sided track pants. To say that any of the clothes fit him was a stretch, Corinne thought, smiling to herself when she pictured him in the brightly colored sports-team shirt and shiny nylon slacks.
While she and Amelie enjoyed their dinner and the pleasant music drifting in from the other room, Hunter was in the guest bedroom talking with Gideon and using Amelie's son's computer. He'd gone back to the box truck a short while ago and brought in more of Dragos's laboratory records from the metal safe Vachon had been keeping in storage. Some of those records had been computer files, encrypted data, kept on several finger-size portable devices that Hunter was currently transferring to the Order's headquarters in Boston. Corinne prayed there would be something useful in the records. As incredible as her time alone with Hunter had been, a heaviness lurked in her heart. She'd hoped desperately that her blood would have surrendered even a small clue about her son and where she might find him. But Hunter's talent had given them nothing to go on. Nothing except his awareness of all the degradation and defilement she'd been subjected to at her captor's hands. Although he knew it all now, he didn't coddle her or make her feel somehow less a woman for the way she'd been treated while trapped inside Dragos's prison lab. She'd felt dirty, ashamed of the things they'd done to her. She'd felt herself powerless, a coward for having let them take her child away.
Once she had been freed, she'd felt immense guilt that she'd survived when so many others imprisoned and tortured alongside her had not. They'd had sons stolen from them too. Children they would have loved, if not for Dragos's evil. Right now, among the Breedmates taken in by Andreas and Claire Reichen back in New England, there were mothers who were mourning lost sons, nursing the same festering emotional wounds that she was. As Corinne quietly ate her dinner, she felt a pang of selfishness for the need that spurred her to seek her own child above the rest. Slim as her hope of finding him seemed, even if she failed completely, perhaps her personal quest would also open the chance for other newly freed captives to search for their own stolen sons.
Even as she thought it, Hunter's words of warning came back to her, dark and ominous: We were never boys, none of us...
If your son lives, he will be a Hunter, like me ... fully trained ... experienced in dealing death.
Your son is gone. He was gone the instant Dragos took him out of your arms. No, she told herself. There was still hope.
Hunter himself was proof of that. He had managed to break from the brutal doctrine Dragos imposed on him. He was given a chance to be something more, something better. That's all she wanted for her son. That's all any of the other Breedmates would want for their sons. Perhaps if they could save Nathan, there might be hope for more stolen lives too. Corinne held on to that hope as she finished eating the wonderful meal that Amelie had prepared.
"Everything was very good," she said, her taste buds still tingling from the peppers and spices and fresh, savory flavors. "I've never had catfish or dirty rice before. I've never had corn bread either. It's all delicious."