by Selena Scott
“How old were you when you were taken to the camps?”
“Fifteen or so,” he answered vaguely. “My brother was a year younger than I was. We were separated on the day the government came for us. I never saw him again. Or my parents.”
“They died?” she whispered.
“Yeah,” he said in a gruff voice. “I never knew the details of when or where or how but a few months after I was released, I looked up the public record. They’re all buried up in Washington state.”
Her stomach flipped over. The shifter cemetery in Washington state was basically a mass grave. The bodies that were buried there had gone unmarked for decades until the shifter camps had been shut down and deemed illegal. They were forced to hand over records to the state on who had been buried at the site. Now, she’d read that the dead were memorialized there with a lovely memorial, each shifter’s name carved into various stone monuments.
But she doubted that would be much comfort to anyone who was going there to visit the grave of a loved one. It was all just smoke and mirrors to cover the fact that for a long time, shifters were so repudiated that it had been legal to dump their bodies in a mass grave.
“You were the only one who survived?” she asked in a voice she hoped wasn’t too horrified. He didn’t need her pain to carry.
“Yeah.” He knocked his hand against his knee and glanced at her so fast she almost missed it. He was nervous. “I survived, ah, because of the Director, actually. About a year after I’d been sent to the camp, I was dying, just barely hanging on. I was starving and sick and depressed. But the Director was visiting my particular camp and something about me, I don’t know, he thought I’d be worth saving.”
“Wow.” Dawn had no idea what to think about that.
“He moved me to a different part of the camp, away from where the rest of the shifters were held. He gave me medicine and food and, eventually, training.”
“Training for what?”
Quill shifted uncomfortably. And Dawn’s eyes grew wide with understanding.
“Oh my god,” she muttered. “You mean that he trained you to know how to trap shifters for his program?”
Quill knocked his fist against his knee. “I was—am—a tool for him. When we were in the camps, it was easy for him to convince other shifters to follow him. Pretty much anything was better than just being stuck in the camps for eternity. But the ones that he really wanted, they weren’t the ones that were blindly becoming his disciples. They were the ones with conviction, strong will, independence. I don’t know how much Diana knows, or told you, but the Director uses shifters to create weapons for the government. Sometimes the shifters themselves are the weapons and sometimes he models technology off of what he can learn from a certain shifter. But either way, the meek were not what he was looking for. It became necessary for him to have an emissary.”
“You say emissary, I say mercenary.”
He cleared his throat. “That’s… fair.”
She scowled. Why was it that she wanted him to defend himself? She wanted him to argue with her. She wanted him to reveal some piece of the minutiae about his role that would make the whole thing more palatable.
“After the camps became illegal and all the shifters were set free, that’s when the real test began.” Quill continued his story in the tone of a river that had just been undammed. Dawn didn’t think he could’ve stopped talking right then even if she’d asked him to. “His program fell to shit and so many of the shifters who’d pled loyalty to him just disappeared into the world. And any new recruits were harder to find. We couldn’t figure out who was a shifter anymore. And of course, they’re all suspicious of anything that has to do with the government. So that’s where I came in. Come in, I mean.”
It was the second time he’d accidentally spoken of his role in the past tense. It pricked at Dawn.
“So your job was to recruit shifters for the Director. And if they couldn’t be recruited, to trap them and ship them off.”
He cleared his throat. “I’d never successfully trapped anyone before. Everyone I’d ever recruited had been because they really had no other option. They were homeless or desperately in need of something the Director could provide for them. You were the first shifters I tried to trap."
“Why?” she whispered.
“Because the Director wanted you and I knew you three couldn’t be talked into it. He’d have to take you by force.”
It was both relieving and dismaying to be talking of his betrayal in such a cavalier way. “Quill, you have to see how fucked up that is. How could you do that to your own kind?”
He took a long time to answer and to her dismay, there was no fire in his response, only a grim resolve that chilled her to hear it. “It’s a matter of loyalty, Dawn.”
She was naturally empathetic and she struggled now to understand. “You have more loyalty to the Director than you have to shifterkind?”
“I was dying in the literal dirt, Dawn. I was diseased and about ninety pounds soaking wet. Another week and I would have been hauled up to Washington just like my family. Dumped in the ground and forgotten. He saved my life. He rescued me. You’re asking me to completely disregard that? I watched as all the shifters who were a part of his program left him high and dry. I watched as the government turned their back on him. Cut the funding, labeled him a quack. I watched as he had almost no one left except for me. And then it was his turn to need the help. It was his eleventh hour. What was I supposed to do, Dawn? Turn my back?”
She said nothing and she was grateful that he didn’t turn to see her face. Because her emotions were a confusing tumble. His story was horribly sad. And her heart ached for him. But could it possibly be justification for what he’d tried to do to her? To her brothers? He was the reason that she was driving across the country to turn herself in to the Director. He was the reason that she’d likely never see her brothers again. That she’d never again walk through the mountains she’d grown up in. He was the reason she had no choice but to give up her freedom.
It was painful to uphold both points of view at once, but she didn’t think she had a choice.
“Love… doesn’t exist in my life anymore, Dawn,” he said, almost plaintively. And she knew that as removed as he was trying to be, he still couldn’t help but appeal to her for understanding. Even if he couldn’t admit it out loud, he didn’t want her to think of him as entirely reprehensible. “Love died when my family died. Loyalty is all I have left. And loyalty doesn’t mean anything if you don’t hold true to it. Loyalty doesn’t switch sides. Maybe I wouldn’t choose this path again, if I had my life to redo, but it’s the path that I’m on. And it doesn’t matter… If I didn’t—don’t—stand for something, then I might as well be dead.”
CHAPTER FIVE
That last sentiment sat between them as blindingly as a mini sun. Quill could barely believe that he’d said all that. No, strike that. He could barely believe that he even felt all that. He’d long considered the part of his heart that manufactured feelings like that to be fully dead. It had been killed along with his family.
“I—I didn’t say that to make you pity me, Dawn. Or to, I don’t know, make you less mad at me. I just—” His words cut off in a hiss of breath as her warm, silky hand left the steering wheel and suddenly slid over his. She gave the back of his knuckles a surprisingly firm squeeze.
“I know.” She cleared her throat. “I understand.”
Shockingly, those two simple words made his throat contract painfully. She not only believed his story but she seemed to understand it.
There was a reason that Quill had never told anyone else of his time in the camps. Of how it had felt to lose his family. To descend into hell. There was a reason he’d never attempted to explain why he’d pledged loyalty to the Director.
Because there was no excuse for the way he’d chosen to live his life. He’d always known that he was a screwed-up person. He didn’t need someone else to verify it for him.
Bu
t he could feel Dawn’s liquid eyes on the side of his face, and he played her husky voice saying those two words over and over in his head. I understand. I understand. I understand.
There was something expanding in his chest as quickly as his throat was contracting. There was no way out for a feeling like this. It was going to get bigger and bigger until it choked him from the inside out. A feeling this big might just kill him. If the Director didn’t get to him first.
He didn’t know what to say. He felt like a prey animal frozen in the sightline of a wolf.
How had he once thought Dawn to be gentle and unassuming? He could see now that she was dangerous. The most dangerous person he’d ever met in his life. Even if she didn’t know it, she had her teeth at his neck. One shake of her head would be all it would take.
Good Jesus, he’d lost her faith once and it had nearly killed him. If there was any way that she was considering giving it back to him… well, he was certain that losing it again would actually kill him. There was only so much his weakened heart could take.
Suddenly, even as the car seemed to shrink in on him, Dawn flicked on her blinker and pulled off at an exit.
“What are we doing?” he asked.
“Gas,” she answered. “And there’s a Target at this exit.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You have a sudden hankering for shopping?”
She glowered at him as she followed the signs toward the Target parking lot. “Look here. I didn’t exactly plan on a road trip the other morning. Sasha sent me on my way with a toothbrush and toothpaste. But beyond that, I literally only have the clothes on my back. The way I see it, I’m turning myself in to the Director to save my brothers. But also, that’s most likely gonna save your ass as well. The least you can do is buy me some underwear.”
His chest contracted, but this time, the feeling was welcome. He couldn’t have stopped the laughter that tumbled out of him even if he’d wanted to.
***
Eight hours later, their car was running on fumes again and Quill’s eyes were scratchy. It was time to pull off and find a place to spend the night. Dawn had been dozing in the passenger seat for the last hour, her Target purchases in a bundle at her feet.
As if Quill needed anything to further torture his measly existence, he’d followed Dawn around the store like a stray dog as she’d held shirts and pants up to the light, squinting at them, putting them back on the rack. She’d chosen a few more sets of yoga-ish clothes, similar to what she was already wearing. She also bought a pack of clean socks and she hadn’t been bluffing about the underwear.
The ones she’d chosen had been simple. They came in a six-pack, wrapped in plastic.
Quill shifted his hips in the driver’s seat. Yeah. It was better if he didn’t think about her underwear.
He pulled first into a gas station and then cruised the strip of the small Missouri town. There were two motels side by side; he pulled into the first one. Dawn hadn’t stirred much at the gas station, but registering the second stop, she dragged a hand down her face and came awake.
“What’re we doing?”
“Stopping for the night.”
She didn’t protest, and Quill didn’t think that she would. She’d driven half the day and so had he. They were both bone-tired. They needed sleep.
“You can wait in the car.” He ducked into the front office and was ducking back out a moment later, unable to believe his ears. Instead of getting back in the car, he jogged across the parking lot to the adjacent motel.
Three minutes later, he was back to the car and Dawn was peering at him quizzically with her big, dark eyes.
“You’re not going to believe this,” he told her.
“Let me guess, there’s no rooms in either place?”
“Close. There’s one room in the far motel.”
“Okay. That’s fine.”
His stomach flipped over. “You wouldn’t mind sharing a room with me?”
He couldn’t read the expression on her face. He really, really wished that he could. “That’ll be fine for tonight,” she said at length.
Not the most ringing endorsement a man had ever gotten, but it was better than her telling him that he and his single room predicament could choke on it.
“All right. I’ll go book it.”
He pulled the car into the second parking lot and disappeared into the tiny, dark office where the owner sat, awash in blue light from his ancient television. Quill paid for the room, grabbed the key on its chain, and waved Dawn down to room fourteen.
She grabbed his bag and her new one from Target and met him at the door. His first impression of the room was that it was pleasantly impersonal. Not nearly as ancient as the front office had been. Which was a relief considering he’d been expecting framed doilies and cross-stitched cat pillows. But no. This was just a normal, bland motel room. It even smelled clean.
His second impression was a little bit more earth-shattering.
“One bed,” Dawn whispered behind him.
To his surprise, there was no accusation in her tone.
“Shit,” he growled. “Shit, Dawn, I’m sorry. I’ll go back and see if they have anything else.”
“You already said they didn’t.”
He already knew they didn’t have any other rooms. The double bed sat in the middle of the room in a circle of light from the bedside lamp that Dawn had just clicked on. It had a patterned duvet, four pillows, and utterly mocked him.
His tired body protested in every cell, but still, he couldn’t help but do the decent thing. “I’ll sleep in the car.”
She laughed and rolled her eyes. “Oh, jeez. Don’t go growing a conscience on my account. It’s fine, Quill. You stick to your side, I’ll stick to mine.”
He eyed her dubiously.
“Seriously,” she insisted. “We have a long day of driving in front of us tomorrow and we both need a good night’s sleep.”
If he hadn’t already paid for the room in cash, he might have walked out to find another motel room in another town. But the cash that he had was a finite resource. He was determined that when this all ended, he was going to send Dawn home with enough cash in her pocket to get her back to Portland.
They couldn’t afford another room tonight. Which meant making the best of this room.
He sighed and dropped his bag. “You can take the bathroom first.”
She did not argue with him. She closed the door and he heard the shower kick on. To distract himself from thoughts of Dawn in the shower, Quill flicked on the television and sat on the foot of the bed.
It didn’t work, though. He stared unseeingly at the TV and thought of nothing but Dawn. He thought of how quiet she’d been for so long. How chatty she was now. He thought of how much her anger earlier in the day had summarily cut him in two. He’d hated it.
It had been nothing but proof of what he already knew, that he’d forever lost her, but that didn’t keep it from stinging.
Finally she opened the door to the bathroom and a puff of steamy air rolled out into the room. Not looking at her, he scooted into the bathroom himself, quickly showering and brushing. He hoped she’d be asleep when he came back out.
No good, though. She was lying on her back in that corona of lamplight, a pillow under her head and two pillows shoved along her side, a barrier between where she was sleeping and where he would. He saw, with a softening in his chest, that she’d given him the side of the bed closest to the door. Something about that warmed him. Like if there were an intruder that night, she’d want him there to stand in between her and danger. At least she trusted him that much. Maybe it just meant that she considered him to be a lesser evil, but still, he’d take it.
He crawled into bed, pulled the sheet up, and flicked off the light. The silence stretched out between them, and he couldn’t tell whether or not it would be weird for him to say goodnight.
“Quill?” Her voice was a clear note in the dark. He could almost see light emanating from the sound. There was
nothing more hypnotizing than her voice.
“Yeah?” In contrast, his own voice was a dried-out husk. His soul felt a thousand years old in comparison to hers.
“Why did Sasha bother you so much?”
Of course she’d waited until they were lying side by side in the dark to ask that question. It wasn’t like she wanted to make this easy on him or anything. He restrained a sigh and tried not to give too much leash to the annoyance that had sprouted up at the mention of Sasha’s name.
He might not have answered if he’d detected any sort of fishing in her question. If he’d thought she was leading him somewhere on a string. If there was some answer in particular that she wanted to hear him say.
But there was none of that in her voice. He sensed it was a genuine question. And because of that, god help him, he wanted to give her a genuine answer.
“Because… getting to know you, it was the only thing that kept me going this year, Dawn. And I thought I knew all your secrets. I was surprised there was something so big that I didn’t know.”
Her breaths turned slightly shallow and the bed dipped as she shifted around. There was silence between them, but he sensed that she had more to say, more questions to ask.
“You weren’t, I don’t know, mad that I’m not a virgin?”
He laughed in surprise. If he had been, it had only been for a moment. He was a screwed-up asshole who’d made plenty of mistakes. But he wasn’t that much of an asshole. He didn’t begrudge her her life. Her past. “No. I mean, there’s an innocence, a purity to you, Dawn.” And I feel proprietary of it. “But it doesn’t have to do with virginity.”
“Oh,” she said softly and he could feel her eyes peering at him through the dark. He felt her gaze as if it were the light touch of sunlight. He didn’t turn to her.
“Besides,” he continued, “regardless of how I may or may not feel about something like that, it’s really none of my business.”
“There was a time when it was your business.”
The breath dammed up in his chest. “What do you mean?”