"I need to feed," he murmured low under his breath. "The gunshot wound in my thigh isn't going to heal very fast if I don't get some fresh red cells in my body. I need to be free to hunt, Dante."
The warrior's gaze bore into his own like a probing searchlight, leaving no shadows for Chase's deception to hide in. "You said it yourself; your leg is in bad shape. You're in no condition to hunt, even if Lucan didn't feel it would be a mistake to turn you loose topside right now."
The thirst that had been clawing at him began to rake its talons even deeper, shredding him from the inside out. He was sweating, an icy sheen that made him shudder as his stomach twisted into a tighter knot. "Can you risk leaving me in here?" he said, his voice rough as gravel, almost unearthly. "I might end up hunting inside the compound, seeing how there's a human living here now."
Dante's face blanched a bit before his eyes fired up with sparks of bright amber. "Because you're hurting, I'm gonna pretend you didn't say that. And I'm going to do you the one-time favor of not telling Brock either, because I promise you, that male would kill you with his bare hands if you so much as breathed on Jenna, human or not. Hell, keep pushing and I might save him the effort."
The coil of agony in his gut made Chase sneer up at Dante in response. "If I wanted to break out of these restraints, I could. You know that."
"Yeah, I know." Dante edged in closer, moving so quickly Chase's sluggish senses couldn't track him. He was startled to feel the cold kiss of sharp metal pressed up hard against his throat. Dante's curved twin blades bit into his flesh, one on each side of his neck, a hairbreadth from breaking the skin. "You could try to break out of the restraints, Harvard, but now you've got two good reasons why you won't."
Chapter Thirty-three
Chase bristled at the threat, one he knew from experience that he'd better respect. "That's some tough love, especially coming from a friend."
"My friend is gone. He's been gone for longer than I want to admit," Dante said, his voice tight and controlled. Lethal, when it lacked the warrior's usual bravado. "Right now, I'm talking to the blood addict glaring up at me with bared fangs and amber-soaked eyes. He's the one who'll be eating these titanium blades if he thinks I'm wrong about him walking the thin line toward Bloodlust."
He didn't ease off with the nasty curved daggers, not even when Chase slowly retreated, letting his spine settle back onto the mattress of the infirmary bed. The sharp edges followed him down, dangerously close, testing Chase's nerve.
He didn't dare escalate the situation.
Although he wasn't yet Rogue, Dante was right. Chase could feel Bloodlust nipping at his heels. And he couldn't be sure that the titanium wouldn't act like poison to his blood. He glowered up at Dante but made no move to try him.
"That's the first smart move you've made in a long time, Harvard."
Chase said nothing, waiting to breathe until the razor-sharp claws fell away from his throat and the warrior who had recently been his tightest companion left him alone once more in the room.
The long hours of daylight dragged by in excruciating slowness. Corinne felt each minute pass as though every one carved away a small piece of her heart along with it. Nathan was gone.
After the years of hoping for the chance to see him again, after the endless prayers for a miracle that might - somehow - grant her the ability to escape her imprisonment to reunite with her child and be the family she dreamed they could be ... he was gone. Slipped through her fingers, not due to any prophesied end but by his own choice. The fact that he was alive and missing hurt only slightly less than the idea that she might have lost him to the vision Hunter had described. Nathan was gone, and in the wake of that fact, Corinne was bereft.
She sat with Hunter in the back of the box truck, both of them waiting for sundown and another chance for Hunter to search for Nathan. He'd gone after him in the minutes after Nathan had fled, but Hunter's search of the area had been fruitless, dawn driving him back to the truck empty-handed.
In the time since, they had moved several miles from the log cabin homestead that had served as Nathan's cell. Hunter felt the risk of discovery by Dragos's operatives was too great to remain there any longer than they had. Corinne had reluctantly agreed. Now all she could do was wonder where her son had run off to and pray his conditioning as one of Dragos's unquestioning soldiers didn't make him return to the very evil Corinne had wanted to deliver him from. That is, if the sun that blazed outside the truck didn't take him first.
"If you were him," she said to Hunter, "where would you go?"
Hunter reached over and took her hand in a gentle grasp, tracing the pad of his thumb over her Breedmate mark. "He is a survivor, Corinne. That's what his training has taught him to be. He is highly intelligent, and he is, I am sure, extremely familiar with his surroundings. I found a number of caves in the area when I searched for him. By now he could be hiding in any one of them." He considered for a moment, then added, "Without the collar to restrict his movement to the area immediately surrounding the cabin, there's also a chance he could be anywhere."
She nodded, appreciating that Hunter didn't feel the need to cushion her from the truth. There would be no more secrets between them anymore, no matter how small. It was something they'd promised each other as they'd made the journey to the isolated cabin in the Georgia woodlands last night, after Hunter's disclosure of Mira's vision had nearly rent them apart. Corinne exhaled a shaky sigh. "At least we were able to change the outcome of the vision. If nothing else, at least we know now that not everything Mira sees must come true."