Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 83946 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 420(@200wpm)___ 336(@250wpm)___ 280(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83946 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 420(@200wpm)___ 336(@250wpm)___ 280(@300wpm)
“Please, don’t kill him, please!”
“Move, or I put a bullet in your head right now,” snarls the man at my left.
I don’t even think before throwing a punch that lands against the side of his head, knocking him a little sideways. The action earns me a severe twist of my wrist behind my back by the other soldier, the pain shooting violently up my arm in a way that lingers.
They have to drag me out of the room in the end. I don’t see Bothaki as I go, and that more than anything slices at my heart worse than everything else my father has done so far. My last image of him can’t be the sight of him bleeding and strapped down to a table, searching for the eyes of his mate that didn’t find his own.
That can’t be it for us.
I can’t believe that the universe, or fate, or whatever brought us together meant for us to meet just so that he could die mere feet away from me.
“Stop it, let me go!” I hiss at the rough handling of the two men forcing me down the hall to the next room.
“Bitch,” one snarls back when I scratch his face.
I pay for that one.
Big time.
He’s the prick that kicks me onto the gleaming floor of the laboratory’s observation room. My knees protest when they crack against the tiles, but I barely even feel it as I try to scramble right back to my feet.
Before I even turn around, they close the door on me. Locking me behind a panel of unbreakable glass that looks into the hallway and only part of the library.
I can’t see Bothaki or even my father. Just the edges of boots and legs that move back and forth in front of the doorway. No matter how hard I scream or bang on the glass, no one comes. It’s not like they can’t hear me. I hear them perfectly fine, even though I wish I didn’t.
“Yes,” my father praises, “make the straps nice and tight.”
My stomach threatens to revolt again, but there’s nothing left, so I just dry heave as I turn my back to the door, sink to the floor, and sob.
Stop this, please.
Don’t hurt him.
Please, please, please …
I repeat the words out loud while they scream inside my mind. Even as I cover my ears and curl my upper half tightly against my knees to force away the sounds around me, I rock back and forth, and repeat the same things.
“Stop.”
I sob around every word.
“Please don’t hurt him, please.”
No one seems to hear a thing.
In fact, no one in the laboratory acts as if I exist while they continue to move up and down the hallway to fulfill my father’s most recent request. They still need to clean up my vomit, and he’s told Charles to grab another beaker for a blood sample collection. It’s all hands on deck, some have even set aside their guns to make quick work of what my father calls the filth in the corner.
My vomit, he means.
It might contaminate his work.
As if it all isn’t already so awful.
My heart beats impossibly harder in my chest, daring to climb my throat, as I’m helpless to watch what I can from my own prison.
“Father, please!” I scream again.
Anything.
At this point, I would do anything.
My father, however, doesn’t care.
“I’m taking his eye next,” the general says.
The words make their way down to my spot. I try to deny them, even will them out of my mind like I can pretend he didn’t say it in the first place, but the rattle of metal and heavy grunts freezes me in horror.
He won’t, I tell myself.
He won’t do it.
No one would be so cruel and—
The scream that echoes throughout the laboratory is primal and full of pain. I can taste the agony the same way the salt from my tears is on my every breath.
“Stop it, stop it, stop it!” I shout again and again, banging on the door.
Even the men carrying towels down the hallway for the mess pause a moment. Not to stare at me, but at Bothaki’s scream. But then they keep moving like it didn’t happen at all, and that’s when everything goes a little numb around me. Even the edges of my vision get fuzzy.
My father wants me to think I can’t do anything, but that scream from my mate changes something inside me. Instantly. A part of me breaks for Bothaki, and I know it will never be the same again.
I won’t be the same.
I see those forgotten guns against the hallway wall just outside the library once more, and that broken part of me shifts. Sharp and unforgiving, my mind tells me this is it. If I can get out—and I can—if I could get a gun, and I might, then what?