by Keri Lake
Eyes brimming with tears, he lowers his gaze and shakes his head. “I swear she looked like you. And I left her there. I fucking left you.”
The sight of him brings tears to my eyes, and I reach out to touch him, but he flinches away from me.
“Cadmus, I’m right here. You didn’t leave me.”
A tear spills from the corner of his eye as he looks up at me. “I don’t know if I dreamed it all. If it’s all in my head, or real.”
It’s hard to say, when it comes to Calico. So many things I thought were real, like my sister surviving her gunshot wound, turned out to be lies. Nothing but a trick. That’s the nature of the place. They toyed with our minds. They made us crazy.
“You need some water. And food. We made a camp.” The only thing that could exacerbate his delirium is dehydration. I slide off the canteen I strapped across my body and open it up, offering him a drink.
He hesitates at first, but snatches it from my hand, and tips it back to gulp the fluids. The water dribbles down his throat, and in seconds, it’s gone.
“Are you hungry?”
He nods, wiping away the fluids from his face with the back of his hand.
A glance at Valdys, and I nod toward him, pushing to my feet, and all three of us exit the truck. Cadmus hobbles after, with Valdys following close behind, the tension in his muscles poised for an attack. When we reach the camp, darkness has settled over mountains, the waterfall lit only by the flicker of the fire we set earlier. Titus is still nowhere in sight.
I grab a piece of the jerky from the supply pack, offering it to Cadmus, whose skin still carries the dried blood from the battle with the marauders the night before. “Come to the water,” I urge him, and when I reach for his hand, he wrenches it away. “I just want to wash the blood off you, is all.”
He glances back at Valdys, as if he’s silently asking for permission, and I know something has shifted inside of him. The old Cadmus would’ve taken without asking--he made that clear, the night back in his room, when he insisted on having me one time. Scratching at his arm, he limps after me toward the pool, and Valdys stands by the edge, watching us, as I lead him deeper into the water. At chest level, I approach him cautiously, and when I set my hand to his arm, he twitches at the touch, but doesn’t push me away.
I scoop up some of the water and dump it over his skin, running my hand over the blood, the evidence of his carnage, down to his hands. The muscles in his arm contract beneath my palm, and I take note of how massive he is, even at his weakest. If he were so inclined, he could easily break me in half. So many scars mar his body—new ones with poorly healed edges that slip beneath my fingertips. The marks of recent tortures, the likes of which I can’t even fathom. There is no stretch of his skin that doesn’t bear the notches of punishment.
After another minute of scrubbing away the blood, his muscles seem to ease a bit, and maybe he’s even relaxed by my touch.
“I would’ve gone back for you,” he says, as I move around to his back. “I’d have been scared shitless, but I would’ve gone back down there for you.”
I lower my gaze, my heart aching at the thought of that, and I glance to the side, where Valdys watches on. “I wouldn’t have wanted you to,” I whisper.
“My mind is in hell, thinking about it. Imagining the things they’ve done to you.”
“It wasn’t me, Cadmus. I’m right here.”
“I still hear those screams. Every time I close my eyes, I hear them.”
“It could’ve been a trick. A game. They kept you in isolation.”
Chin to his chest, he shakes his head. “It was real. I felt it.”
I come around to his other arm, washing away the blood there, and I study the wound with the needle-like holes, running the pad of my thumb over it. “They’re so cruel and evil. They might’ve forced you to hallucinate. And hurt you while doing it.”
Dousing his shoulder, I run my hands over the long sinewy fibers of muscle, and feel his fingertips reach out beneath the water. Bunching my shirt, he draws me closer, as Valdys stands oblivious to his movements below the surface, and he runs his hand across my stomach. “I wanted to stay with you.”
Even after what he saw? Surely, he must be out of his mind. I can’t fathom the level of horror, watching such a thing.
“If I couldn’t have you here, maybe I could have you there.”
“Cadmus …” My voice is a warning, and I break from his touch, moving to the front of him, where Valdys can see me again.
“I forget what it feels like.” The wobble in his voice draws my gaze to his, and I can see a flicker of vacancy returning to them. Hopelessness, perhaps. “I forget how it feels to be human. To be touched.”
As I draw my palm down his chest, he captures it, forcing my hand into the water, across the ridges of his abdomen, and closes his eyes. As if the touch of my hands alone are enough. “It was sickening to see all those eggs covering her body. All those tiny, faceless things. I don’t know if they came from her belly, or not.” Tipping his head toward me, he opens his eyes, and guides both our hands to my stomach where he touches me possessively. “But it made me think, what if I could put a baby in you. I could watch it grow inside of you. Watch it suckle your breasts and feed from you.”
He’s clearly ill, talking the kind of nonsense that would’ve kept him in isolation until he killed himself, if we were back in Calico. Whatever happened, whatever they did, it severely messed with his head.
Before I can stop him, he leans forward, resting his head in the crook of my neck, and I turn to see Valdys frowning from the shoreline. I wave him over, and when he steps toward us, I push Cadmus away.
Hands reach out beneath the water, yanking me against him. “Please.”
Splashing comes from the right, where Valdys storms through the water toward us. With one hard shove, he knocks Cadmus backward. And just like that, the two of them are splashing around the water, punching and falling, like lions fighting over a kill. However weak Cadmus may have looked before, he’s certainly not lost his physical strength, as he volleys a punch for every hit he takes.
Helpless, I stand on the fringes of their scuffle, searching for a way I can get between the two and put an end to this madness--perhaps as stupid as wishing to step between two rabid dogs.
“Stop this! Both of you!” My screams fall on deaf ears, as Valdys wraps his hands at Cadmus’s throat and shoves him underwater. Bubbles emerge, where the last breaths expel from Cadmus, and in spite of my better judgement, I pull at Valdys’s arm. “Stop this! I don’t want him to die!”
For the first time in the last few minutes, my words have some effect, as Valdys releases Cadmus, pushing him away.
“He’s sick. Whatever they did to him, it’s changed him.” One hand on my hip, I thread the other through my hair and shake my head. “He’s … talking nonsense.”
Cadmus emerges from the water, coughing and sputtering fluids, and I’m caught between wanting to go to Valdys, and wanting to help Cadmus to his feet. Instead, I stand between the two, frustrated when Valdys makes his way back toward the shore. My head scrambles for something to say to him, so that he doesn’t think I’m choosing one over the other, but I won’t risk saying the wrong thing. “Valdys, wait.”
Shaking his head, he doesn’t slow his pace. “You’d have to be blind, or a fool, not to see what he wants.” The words burn past his lips, and I realize what an incredibly complex organ the heart is, that it can draw fire and ice from the same breath.
A slap of dismissal.
“I don’t want to fight you,” Cadmus says, in a voice calmer, more lucid than before. “I know I’ll lose where she’s concerned.”
Valdys halts midstride, but doesn’t bother to turn around.
“You’re like a brother to me.” As Cadmus rises to his feet, the water sinks to his chest level again. “We survived hell together. Do you remember that first night in S Block?” He pauses, and when Valdys doesn’t answer, he keeps on. “The pain? So
much pain, we thought we’d die by morning. You told me, Hang on, Josiah. Hang on because we’re going to make it.” That must be his real name, the birthname that was stripped from him when he arrived to Calico. “We’re going to live, you said. And we did.” Even in the moon’s light, I can see the shine of tears in his eyes. “We lived. And now? I feel like I’m dying again, Valdys. Watching you with her. I know she isn’t mine to take. I wouldn’t take from my brother. I won’t take from you.”
Valdys’s shoulders sag, and I know he’s listening.
“But after what I saw down there … it’s like a constant loop inside my head.” Panic rising to his voice, he rubs his hands back and forth over his skull, clenching his jaw, and his eyes are on me. “I just wanted to touch her. I wanted her to know I was there, too. I’d give anything to feel her and have her look at me as she did down in those tunnels. Like I was the only one who could save her.”
I don’t want Cadmus in the way he’s convinced he wants me. I don’t want to be his. But there is an innate and indescribable yearning to help him, as I suspect I’m the only one of us who can. To do so requires the touch he seems to think will erase whatever images play inside his mind. The kind of touch whose absence has made him violent and unreachable, just as Valdys was in the beginning. It’s the masochist inside of me who thinks she can save him, but the pessimist who doubts the outcome.
“It’s my blood that runs through her, too. Alpha blood,” Cadmus says, unwittingly answering the questions to my thoughts. “It’s why she can’t say no. It’s why she promised herself to me that night. Before they sent me down there.”
When Valdys turns to face me, there’s disappointment and hurt swirling in his eyes, which he wouldn’t dare admit to Cadmus. “Is this true?”
The look on his face churns a sick feeling in my stomach. “I … agreed on the grounds that he would release me. That he would no longer interfere with you and me. No matter what they tried to force on us.”
“Do you want him that way? Is that it?”
“I want you, and only you. That’s the only reason I agreed to it.”
His gaze shifts from me to Cadmus. “And you would’ve conceded. You would’ve been content to give her away afterward. After that one night.”
“Yes.”
Valdys scoffs, and his jaw tightens as he shakes his head. “Then, I know for certain you’ve not had her that way. Because there isn’t a chance in hell you’d give her up so easily, if you had.”
Part of me is relieved that he knows nothing happened between us. A much bigger part of my heart is crushed by his words, though, and once again, I hate myself for putting him in this position.
“She is the breath of air, when you’re drowning. The warmth on your skin, when the world feels colder. The sun that draws the universe into her embrace.” Valdys lowers his gaze and frowns, as if he’s contemplating so many things at once, and when his eyes meet mine again, the conflict in them hasn’t gone away. “I suppose it isn’t fair for me to keep you to myself.” He rubs his thumb over the palm of his hand, perhaps needing the distraction. “Women are few and far between in this world. And women like you are even more scarce. I was greedy for you. I’m still greedy and selfish, when it comes to you, Cali. He’s my brother, and yet, I’d sooner watch him die than put his hands on you.” With a sigh, he casts his gaze away then back to me. “But I know part of you would die, too. It’s not something you can help. It’s something that was forced on you through this binding. And that, I can’t live with.” The lines in his forehead deepen, while he stares somewhere past me, perhaps seeing things he can’t bear to imagine. “Is this what you want? To be with him?”
“No. I just want to help him. That’s all.”
“And yet, in his mind, there’s only one way.” At my frown, he continues. “During our tortures, you were given as a balm. The pleasure to our pain. Reward for suffering. We became primed to your face and your voice. Hallucinations designed to make us want you more than anything else. I knew the sound of your moans before I was ever with you, because I’d heard them inside my head. I’d already imagined your body against mine.” His eyes slide to Cadmus. “That’s what he wants from you. That’s the help he craves, and why he can’t let you go. It’s like a drug. A physical withdrawal.”
“I want you, Valdys.” Tears swell in my eyes, and I blink them away to keep the emotion from touching my words. “In a perfect world, that’s all that would matter to me. You’re everything—warmth, air, water, the sustenance I crave to live. It troubles me to see him suffering, and if the alternative is to end him for it, I can’t accept that. But for him to think that I’m his only comfort is more of a curse than fortune.” The idea that I was reward for their brutal suffering twists my stomach into deep knots of guilt.
As much as I try to push the thoughts away, there’s a nagging reality that he wouldn’t be this way, if it weren’t for me. He wouldn’t have been sent to the tunnels, and he might not be in the state of mind he’s in now.
Cadmus needs help. The kind he isn’t going to find out in the middle of the desert. The kind that requires attention and care that doesn’t come from mere affection from me. But this is the nature of our decimated world. What we need to survive, to thrive here, rests in the hands of those who would sooner watch us kill ourselves for it. All I have to offer him is my touch, and I’m not even certain it will make a difference. Even if, in the absence of it, we become withdrawn, cold and imperceptible, physical contact alone isn’t going to save Cadmus.
I don’t know how to fix him. How to fix what I’ve done to him.
“Just once. I swear to you, I won’t ask again.” Cadmus’s voice from behind carries the desperation of a man whose mind is lost. The old Cadmus would never beg this way, far too bold and unapologetic compared to the man that stands here now. “I want to feel her. I want to feel again.”
He believes I’m his cure. Maybe I am. Or maybe this is another of Calico’s vicious torments that’ll leave us all in tatters afterward.
It seems I was promised to all three, but it’s always been Valdys that I choose. A lesson I’m certain was intentional, to dispel any acts of defiance against the Alpha Project. One that Doctor Ericsson undoubtedly laughs about even now.
“I’m not offering my blessings to watch another man lay his hands on my female. If not for your feelings toward him, and mine toward you, I’d fight to the death to keep that from happening. And I don’t honestly believe one time will be enough to slake this thirst he has for you, but if it’s a deal we strike to ensure he doesn’t touch you again, I won’t stand in the way of it.” Valdys lifts his gaze toward Cadmus, his eyes darkening. “Know that I will uphold those terms. And I swear to you, Cadmus, if you hurt her, I’ll take my pleasure in watching you suffer for it.” He turns away from me, headed back toward the shore, but I grab his arm.
Cadmus has pined for me since the beginning, and it’s clear the Alpha still covets me, even after what’s happened to him. My guess is, he won’t stop, which may prove dangerous. Might even get worse. The alternative is leaving him here alone in the desert, where he’ll undoubtedly perish in his state of mind. There’s a small part of me that wonders if that might be best, that maybe we’re prolonging the inevitable. It’s only my concern for a man who saved my life that refuses to entertain such a thing.
“This isn’t about his thirst. I don’t know what was done to you, or me, or Cadmus, but we are connected, whether we want to believe that, or not. I don’t understand what it means that Alpha blood runs through my veins. All I know is, whatever happened to him back at Calico, to all of you, I’m not blameless for it. Your pain is my own.”
“Enough with that.” He lurches toward me, gripping my chin. “You owe us nothing. You owe him nothing!”
“Valdys.” A quick glimpse of Cadmus shivering and twitching, as he stands in the water, and I lower my voice. “One time with me isn’t going to fix him, I know that. But maybe he needs to find that out himself.”
“I’d venture to say you’re wrong.” The resolution in his eyes is enough to crush my chest, and I have to look away from him. “I’ll stay near to ensure he doesn’t harm you, but I will not stand here and watch him take from you.”
“Wait.” The thought of being alone with Cadmus takes hold, prompting me to cling to Valdys.
“You think the walls of our cells were so thick that I couldn’t hear the way he took his pleasure?”
“I won’t do this, then. You’re right. It’s foolish of me to think I can save him this way, anyway.”
His shoulders sag, and he shakes his head. On a huff, he cups my cheek, his thumb running over my cheekbone. “I know firsthand how capable your touch is of saving a man’s life. It’s his that I fear would change you afterward.”
“Then, show him how to touch me without taking.”
He turns his face from me again, the very thought of such a thing assuredly repulsing him, but then his eyes shift with contemplation.
“I don’t understand what my role is in this binding between us, or why I was forced to be shared by three, but I know without question that you are my Alpha. My Champion. You’ve always been and will be.” I reach for his hand and lead him back to me, back to the water, and as I tug him to my lips, I see his eyes are on Cadmus. Watching the other Alpha. This doesn’t stop him, though, as he lifts me into his arms and carries me deeper, where Cadmus waits, and sets me down, between the two of them.
I feel encased in a wall of muscle and desire. There’s a moment of quiet and stillness, some exchange of stares between the two Alphas, and Valdys gives a sharp nod, as if Cadmus silently asked permission. Rising up on tiptoes, I pull Valdys in for another kiss and feel Cadmus set his hands beneath my shirt, against my waist.