Oblivion is worse than death. I am non-existing for him. It makes everything I worried about, everything that hurt me about what he did, how he might feel, useless, unimportant, wasted energy.
His death was my fuel to go on, the source of my rage that made me so determined, so full of energy and life. And now… it’s gone. Just like that. Poof! That sun burned up and went off in a supernova and now, nothing is left. I feel empty. No, I feel nothing at all. I am a black hole. They finally won and took me over.
I barely even remember what Austin and Daniel talked about and decided. I can’t recall if I said anything, reacted in any way. I don’t know what comes next. All I know, all I remember, is one thing. One warm spot.
This tiny, fragile, and precious life that grows in me. I think I must have listened to its heart beat throughout the whole discussion. I concentrated on the tiny movements, some quick, more like a twitch and others long and languorous, like he or she was stretching. I caught myself wondering if my child was a boy or a girl – there was definitely one heartbeat, not two – and I was helpless facing the fact of me having to choose a name. All I knew was that I wouldn’t and couldn’t call him or her after his or her father.
And that means a lot.
But as I was listening to my child, I realized that I still needed to fight this war. I still had to face the next battle. I still had a reason to continue. An even more important one: I had to make sure that my child was safe. I needed to make sure that we weren’t hunted. I wanted to give my kid a childhood that was as normal as possible in a house with a white picket fence, a sibling, and friends, and family. All that horrendous stuff I hated growing up. But all this… didn’t work without a dad.
“Who else survived?” I asked and my own voice sounded strange to me, but that was just a sign of me not having spoken for a long time.
As the guys didn’t answer, I looked up and the expression they were wearing on their faces did more than just annoy me.
“Again?” I asked calmly, knowingly surprising them as they definitely had expected me to explode; all I did was sigh while I got up on my feet. “I know you want to spare me the pain, but that’s not helping any of us. We are a team. We share information and we decide together. That’s the deal, or no deal and you will have to watch me do this alone.”
Austin stared at me as if I had grown two heads, but I didn’t look at him, I looked at Daniel, whose face screamed worry. He was concerned about my feelings, which was understandable, but it wouldn’t bring us forward.
“I’m not going to read the diary,” I shrugged. “I don’t need to; you have gone through it and know everything we need to know. There: I spared myself the pain for you.”
“Well, I think the most important thing is that Severin didn’t make it,” Austin started, but from his expression I knew that I wouldn’t like what was about to come.
“Doctor Winters is dead,” Daniel chimed in when Austin paused to find words. “Peter was badly injured, and Jay wrote that he might not fully recover or recover at all. Peter blames Jay for her death. Torres survived, too.”
I let out a breath I had held without realizing, but I was truly relieved. After all, she was the closest I had ever had to a best friend.
“The others?” I asked as Daniel didn’t continue, but he shook his head. “They protected the survivors with their bodies. That is why Jay and Nina survived at all. Jay assumed that Peter tried to get Winters into safety through a different hallway. It’s a miracle that he made it.”
Listening to Daniel’s retelling, I knew that Jay had probably written about this being added to his long list of reasons for guilt and self-loathing and that was something I couldn’t read through right now. I needed to be bare from unnecessary emotions.
In a way, I was almost thankful for the possibility that Jay didn’t remember us. The chances that this would cause us trouble were probably higher. It was easier to just add him to the enemies we were about to face than to worry about him. That was, until we would stand eye to eye and I would have to hurt him, or worse.
But that was a problem for a different time.
“So, what’s the plan?” I asked, and I don’t know why I expected those two to have found a solution to our new problem.
The fact was: the board members would not retreat to the fortress, which was a good thing. The downside was that they had beast bodyguards. But, was it really a coincidence that Jay was guarding just the person we wanted to take out next? Did they really have beast guards with all members, or had they known that we would come.
“So, you have no plan,” I assumed.
“There’s a reason, I never was second in command or in command,” Daniel shrugged. “I’m not a planner. I execute.”
Both, he and I looked at Austin.
“I don’t know, I’m not military at all, I’m just a hacker.” He turned his palms up.
“We can’t use our wild card now, or we’ll never break into the fortress,” I explained and started thinking.
Ironically, after questioning Austin and Daniel more about what Jay’s second diary had revealed to them, it was a no-brainer what we would do next. Especially when they told me that there were chemicals involved regarding the brainwashing. The chemicals had to be administered regularly in order to continue to work. All we had to do was catch the beasts one after another and cleanse their bodies. It would take some time and the board would figure out what we were trying to do, but until then, we could double or maybe triple our man power.
Of course, only when it worked.
I was sure that we would be able to catch one or two before the board figured that we were playing a long game. But for our first hunt, our time was running out.
We needed something to knock out a beast and such a tranquilizer wasn’t available at the mall. We had to break into a veterinarian practice or – even better – an animal hospital, or zoo.
And of course we had to pray that they hadn’t been able to track us. That was maybe the thing that worried me most. That, and Daniel’s change of behavior.
The moment we had made our plans for tomorrow and the days after that, he left Austin’s office without deigning to look at me. If I hadn’t learned to know him it would have hurt or annoyed me – probably both – but I knew now that if he had wanted to cause any emotional reaction, negative or not, he would have actively done so and waited for the result. He was a calculating SOB and if he wasn’t, then something was wrong.
After more or less two months of having him round and close to me – more than I probably had Jay in eight – I knew that he was upset, and I found him – just as expected – in our sparring area.
All he had done was tossed his sweater and tee, which left me no choice but to ogle at his bare back, while he was skipping to warm himself up. He hadn’t turned around as he heard me approach, and that was a clear signal for me to leave him alone. Most of the past few weeks, I would have enjoyed his silent treatment, because that meant I would be spared from his – as I know now – playful advances, may it be complimenting me in different, often awkward ways, or being outright blunt while wiggling his eyebrows, giving me that mischievous smirk that I always wanted to smack off his face, just to be tricked by him into getting close.
Now, I missed it. Now, I wanted him to turn around and say something that made me roll my eyes in a poor attempt to prevent myself from blushing. And while I waited, I kept blatantly staring. I didn’t even notice that I mustered the twitching muscles, noting that this body didn’t have one gram of fat too much or too less. It was just enough for him to neither look wiry nor soft.
“Are you finished?” His voice punched me out of my trance and this time I didn’t do anything to stop myself from blushing.
Dan hadn’t turned around. He had just stopped, not even being out of breath, and I had no idea for how long I had been standing there, staring. There was no facial expression needed to know that he was annoyed.
He growled, lowly, rather sounding like a dis
gruntled, old dog than a beast that was about to lash out. However, that noise alone was enough for my body to react. Just not like he or I had seen coming.
That sound made me feel like a tuning fork, perfectly resonating with his sound. Yup, my beast was wide awake and ready, but not for sparring, for a completely different workout and – as much as I’d like to say it wasn’t – it was no surprise for me, although awkward. As much as my body felt the urge to basically jump him, I kept it restrained, yet, Daniel noticed the complete silence on my part. And that made him turn around.
He could see it from the green color of my eyes and by the way I had wrapped my arms round myself tightly. This time, I had no idea what his expression meant, I could only guess, from what I knew.
“I’m trying to be a good guy here, Kitten,” he told me, his voice vibrating barely noticeable, as he was pulling himself together, too. “I have not forgotten what you told me a thousand times over. So, I’m keeping my distance.”
“You’re not keeping your distance because Jay is alive,” I shook my head slightly, trying to analyze him while we spoke. “The chance was there, all along. Hell, you even were willing to fuck me while he and I were together in the compound. Forgot about that?”
“That was something different, that was then,” he argued while his hands were slowly destroying is skipping rope, avoiding my eyes. “I’m trying to be a good guy.”
“No, you might not have left the decision to me there, but here you did,” I stated. “You teased me, but…”
That was when I knew it and I felt like I had just been tossed out of a flying airplane, forgetting for a brief moment that I had a parachute.
“I know that you want to capture him, if possible.” Daniel noticed that he was destroying the only skipping rope we had and tossed it aside; but now, his hands had nothing to do, so he started flexing them. “You will choose him, even if he doesn’t remember you. I am stepping aside, so that you don’t need to worry about telling me that we are through. Simple as that.”
I heard his words, heard the obvious logic behind them, and they did make sense, they just weren’t true. He was in love with me. He was in love with me and tried to avoid the pain of me dropping him. He wasn’t willing to fight, because he didn’t see a chance; and I couldn’t blame him. The way I reacted to Jay still being alive and to the fact that they had withheld the diary from me… it was just too strong, and too emotional. And he was right. Of course, I wanted to catch Jay first and try to make him remember me. I deny that I didn’t hope we could make it work, despite what he and I had done.
“I don’t know what to say,” I almost whispered, and of course he misunderstood me.
I wasn’t agreeing with him, I was trying to wrap my mind around the fact that the beast I had despised most had fallen in love with me, and that it made me all kinds of different and wrong things. I didn’t want to hurt him, but I didn’t want to lose him either.
“Well, yeah,” Dan shrugged. “Mind if I continue?”
It wasn’t a question and he didn’t wait for my answer. As he turned around to start his routine of punches, kicks and evasive maneuvers, I couldn’t move. A part of me wanted to close the distance and kiss him. Not as if I was trying to lure him to bed, but honestly kiss him. But I couldn’t do that. It wouldn’t be fair. I would be using him. It was already too late to avoid hurting him. And that was killing me.
He was right. About almost everything. I wanted Jay to be the one we caught first. I needed to try and get him back, get him to remember me. I just wasn’t sure if I was able to choose him, once it worked. I wasn’t sure if Jay would tell me what I wanted and needed to hear.
But I couldn’t tell Dan that I wanted to give us a try when there was the possibility that I really would choose Jay over him in the end. Especially, if I didn’t know what I actually felt for Daniel, if it was more than just an attraction, if it was more than my beast being needy, and horny for his.
Day 64
I feel as if I was born to do this and to be this: a planner, a leader, and a beast. And I am grateful for the distraction. After explaining to the boys what we had to do, Austin was the one to take care of the details, and while he did that, Daniel went for a long walk, to check if anything had changed regarding our surroundings.
And my job was to eat. Hunger was pretty much the only thing I felt – or allowed myself to feel – and it didn’t seem to stop even when I was full.
I am fine with that. Eating keeps me busy and from thinking too much. I don’t think. I don’t want to go through all the countless possibilities without knowing which one is actually true.
Yes, if I could bribe fate into having us catch Jay first, I would do it. And we will try to make that happen. Capturing him would make things easier, even though the possibility was high that I could severely hurt him, while trying to stick a syringe into his neck. Or he could hurt me.
Even with me being the bait and not the one engaging him that could actually happen, but we have to let the board think that we don’t have the diary, or haven’t read it. They will expect me to try and find Jay, if I were Daniel’s prisoner, or something similar.
After all, “Four” wanted me.
So, that’s what we are going to do. I’m going to go back there and “look” for Jay, be all upset when he doesn’t remember me. And if they have briefed him to act as if he does… well, then I will have to improvise. I have to distract him long enough for Daniel or Austin to take the shot. We’ll steal tranquilizers, a tranq gun and darts to knock him out, get him into our car and drive off. We will have to switch cars at least once, so that they don’t track our car and then the clock will tick.
The questions for me is: do we return for Nina? The thought of leaving her behind is actually tormenting me, even though she won’t remember, but that’s a risk we cannot take. Should we get the opportunity to tranq them both, I would be a happy woman, but the chances are close to zero.
But, who knows? Maybe after all the shit I’ve been through, this time fate might actually be on my side.
Little bean…. I think it should be a bit larger right now, but how would I know? I guess I’ll have to ask Austin to find me a gynecologist to drop me off at, or find one like the one that took care of Daniel, and let the guys do the dirty work.
Maybe, it’s just me, but being the mastermind of a break-in that has Daniel steal tranquilizers, while I sit in a gynecologist’s practice is absolutely hilarious… I feel as if I am in a silly movie. In comparison to what I’ve been through the last months, this is so PG-13.
Daniel and Austin have just returned. They went to pick up stuff Austin had ordered so that we can build two cages to restrain beasts in them, and stuff Daniel requested for the break in. I wanted two cages because I’d rather be prepared for the unexpected than having to leave someone behind we could have saved.
I am watching them from a safe distance, not because I wouldn’t be able to assist them, but because of Daniel. I want to give him space, and apart from that, Austin is a handful, too. I would actually be laughing if that wouldn’t draw Daniel’s attention on me.
I still don’t know what to do. About Daniel, I mean. It’s been a day, but I already miss him pestering me and keeping me on my toes, although it all had turned into a sort of game, since we got… physical. It was fun. I enjoyed myself. It was a distraction.
In the end, I keep myself locked away in my room, with Jay’s diary tempting me. It’s lying on the chair in which Daniel watched over me. I really don’t want to read it; I have all the information I need. How would me reading it change anything about the fact that he doesn’t remember? If there had been any hint towards me, regarding helping him out of that brainwashed mind of his, Austin or Daniel would have found it… wouldn’t they?
X X X
Needless to say that it all worked out just as planned. I don’t want to say that it was because I made the plan, Daniel is pretty good at executing plans, just as he said. But like I said: this is the PG-13
part, the next one is going to be much different.
And while they were out having fun, I was meeting up with a doctor on the other side of town, in his own secret private practice for people I wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley, which was kind of an irony, because I might scare them to death if they met me.
I knew this guy wasn’t a gynecologist, but he was available and trustworthy, as he was a freelancer and his reputation was his most important asset and I could only assume that Austin was paying him handsomely.
What I noticed was that he didn’t ask any personal questions. When he asked anything, it was about how I felt, if I had any discomfort. It was the usual stuff minus the questions that were meant to show that he cared, but which were also invasive regarding privacy. I was instantly reminded why I liked the guy in the first place.
I was doing fine until he told me that everything looked great for me being four months pregnant. That was when I tried to appear unfazed by the information and just nodded with a smile that I didn’t feel. I knew that I was six months pregnant, not four.
Somehow I managed to ask him when I would show and he answered that it was different with every woman. I might not be showing anything until I passed the sixth month, as some women carried inwardly, but that also meant more trouble as the stress on my organs would me higher than if I carried outwardly.
All I could do, was nod. At least I knew that everything seemed to be fine.
The pulse was strong; it was the right size for a four-month pregnancy. I should make sure that I was getting enough minerals, but there was nothing that I should worry about.
Little did he know that I was scared and horrified, as the number four echoed in my head. Perfectly fine for four months. The heck four months. But what did I know? I was the first woman to be pregnant with a beast. And I was the first beast being pregnant, for all I knew. Maybe this was just fine. Maybe beasts were pregnant for a year instead of close to ten months. Who knew? The only person who might have known was dead.
The Beast Is Me (The Beast And Me Book 4) Page 12