Chapter 1: We Got Out

Chapter 1

We Got Out

For what felt like weeks, I drifted. Hands moved me and rearranged my floppy limbs, voices echoed through my hollow mind. I lay on something soft, a change from before—I thought so, at least.

Sometimes I felt a little warmer or a little cooler. But nothing hurt.

Even in my state of partial consciousness, that seemed odd. Very odd, in fact. Because I knew I’d been hurt. Injured, at least, and that should’ve included the other meaning of hurt, shouldn’t it? I had bandages. I was aware of having them changed: unwrapped, ointment, wrapped again.

But I couldn’t feel anything else beyond the very basic fact of being horizontal, or the sensation of touch versus air on my skin.

They’d hurt me. Again and again, they’d hurt me…until it didn’t hurt anymore. And that had been worse.

But it took me a long time to begin to remember.

The memories came back along with my ability to begin to use my own body again.

I’d been in prison. Not the official kind, with a warden and legal procedures and time spent in the yard lifting weights. I’d had a cell, and a thin pad on the floor, and a sink and a toilet. A high slit of a window cut into one thick concrete wall with no hope of real sunlight coming in through it, let alone an escape attempt going out the other way.

When they’d taken me out of the cell, I’d been dragged to a laboratory.

And they’d hurt me. Until it stopped hurting.

Later, weeks or months of more intermittent torment later, the cell door had broken open, wrenched off its hinges by an enormous creature with glowing eyes and monstrous fangs and claws. He’d been holding an unconscious naked man draped over his shoulder with one arm, with rivulets of fresh blood running down the claws of the other hand and spattered on his face.

And chillingly, he’d had blood on those fangs, too.

Someone else came into the cell once the door clanged against the wall, flung aside with a single motion of the creature’s massive arm like it’d been a piece of balsa wood and not reinforced steel. This one had blood all over him, too, and fangs and claws—though not as impressively terrifying as the creature’s. When he picked me up off the mattress, he carefully held the claws away, not so much as nicking me, wrapping strong arms around me so gently I could’ve cried.

Well, I did cry. But I’d done a lot of that in the time I’d spent in that cell, in that place, in the lab upstairs where they hurt me until they couldn’t anymore.

They’d been delighted with that, which confused the hell out of me. Why would people who’d spent so much effort causing me pain be so pleased when they failed? When they cut into my arm and the blood ran down, and I blinked at it, not understanding why I couldn’t feel it anymore.

That memory hit me hard enough that my eyes finally opened. Searing, blinding light, and I gasped and thrashed and winced away from it, and there were hands on me…

“It’s all right! I promise it’s all right, I won’t hurt you, you’re safe, I promise—”

The voice, deep and a little rough, cut off as I opened my eyes again and stared right into—his eyes.

The one who’d come into my cell. The one who’d lifted me off that mattress, whose shoulder I’d leaned my head on as I passed out from shock and blood loss and whatever else my torturers had done to me.

He had dark brown eyes, almost black.

The rest of his face barely registered. Those eyes…I remembered looking into them for a moment before I lost consciousness.

Those eyes meant I was safe. That he couldn’t possibly be lying to me.

I dropped back against the softness I lay on, panting, gazing up at him.

His hands still rested on my shoulders where he’d been holding me, trying to keep me still as I panicked.

My throat felt like sandpaper. “Okay,” I said—or tried to. It came out a hoarse, incoherent rasp.

“Shit,” he said. “Water. You need water.” He let me go and stood up. Off the bed, I realized. Everything blinked in and out of focus around me like I had a strobe light in my brain.

Bed. A bedroom. Blink, waver. My fingers twitched, which felt momentous after not moving any of my own body for…maybe a long time.

Colors started to pop out at me now that my vision had adjusted to actual light. Pale gray walls with a vibrant landscape hung up, trees and a river and a red and purple sky.

And honest-to-God yellow sunlight flowing over all of it like honey.

Tears pricked the corners of my eyes and my vision blurred, clearing after a moment.

My rescuer’s frowning face appeared in front of me again, and now it looked like an actual face and not a watercolor smear with eyes. Largish nose, firm lips, and strong, masculine bones, all perfectly arranged and topped off with glossy dark brown bedhead. I’d been saved from my cell by a guy who belonged on a magazine cover. It shouldn’t have mattered, but it added to the unreality of everything around me and everything in my head.

“How much pain are you in?” he asked, holding out a glass of water. I tried to sit up and failed. “Fuck, you can’t answer that anyway, your throat’s too dry. Sorry, I’m a moron.”

He slipped his arm behind my shoulders and boosted me up, letting me lean against his side and holding the glass to my lips. The water tasted like nothing I’d ever even imagined, like life itself flowing into my mouth and cooling my throat and esophagus all the way down. I guzzled it like an animal, wetting my chin, drops dribbling onto his hand and running down my neck.

At last I’d emptied the glass, and he carefully settled me back down, putting it aside on the nightstand.

I licked my lips, wincing as my tongue caught on the chapped cracks in them. He could’ve been a model, and I must’ve looked like death warmed over. Only not warmed quite enough. Death lightly microwaved?

“I have pain pills for you if you need them,” he said. “Just tell me what you need. And ask me any questions you want. I know you must have a million, but I promise you, you don’t need to ask if you’re in any danger here. I swear, we got out, we got away, and you’re as safe as you’ve ever been in your life.”

We got out. We got away. My mind spun into frantic overload, my vision going all wonky again and my breath coming faster at the thought of asking all the follow-up questions he obviously expected me to ask—all the questions that should’ve been urgently trying to pour out of me.

I’d been in that cell. In those labs.

And I couldn’t remember how long I’d been there.

I couldn’t remember what had come before that.

I couldn’t fucking remember.

His voice came through like bursts of static, distant, barely audible over the pounding of my heart and the rasping of my breath and a high-pitched keening sound…that was also coming from me.

Blackness descended again. I tried to fight it and failed.

When I swam back to the surface, blinking my eyes open more easily this time around, the sunlight had moved from the windows, leaving only ambient daylight. The panic had been washed away by my impromptu nap, but it’d left me feeling drained and apathetic. So I couldn’t remember. I’d deal with it later. It felt so far away that it didn’t matter.

The magazine guy sat in a chair by my bed, a phone in his hand, frowning down at it with tension in every line of his body. I stared at him, not wanting to speak and attract his attention before I’d looked my fill. Long legs, broad shoulders, lean body. Maybe too lean, and that didn’t surprise me given that I could vaguely recall how poorly I’d been fed in that prison-place. This man’s frame was a lot bigger than mine, and he had to have a few inches of height on me, too. How had he survived on rations that had always left me feeling more than half starved?

His eyes flicked up from the phone and met mine. And held them again. I couldn’t look away, even though the intimacy of it made me want to pull the blankets up over my (probably disgusting) face and hide. His eyes were real. Safe. The first sign of safety I’d had in however many months or years. As long as I could see them, I’d know I’d been rescued and this wasn’t some horrible tease of a dream.

“Hey,” he said softly, his voice a low, soothing rumble. “Back with me?”

I managed to nod.

“Good.” He leaned forward, slipping his phone into his jeans pocket and propping his elbows on his knees. “I’m not even sure I know your name. I’ve been calling you Ash, since I think that’s what you told me when you were half-awake while we escaped. But I don’t know if I got that right, or your last name, or anything else about you. Only that we were in that place together.” A faint hitch in his voice as he said “that place” told me he hadn’t gotten out without some mental scars, too. A better man might’ve hated seeing someone else being traumatized, but it reassured me.

Empathy? Could I mentally reframe that as empathy rather than as the much less noble “misery loves company”? Anyway.

At least he’d indirectly asked one question I could actually answer.

“Ash is right,” I whispered. “Asher. For short. I mean, Ash is for short, not Asher. That’s…for long.”

Or maybe I couldn’t answer it after all, at least not without being a blithering idiot. I wrenched my gaze away and stared down at the blankets, my cheeks feeling weird.

Hot. I must be blushing.

But I couldn’t feel that properly, either.

Couldn’t those bastards have removed my ability to experience total, abject humiliation instead of my ability to feel it when I’d been injured, something that had at least been proven evolutionarily useful even though it sucked?

“I’m Drew,” he said quietly, with no trace of laughter or mockery. “It’s nice to meet you. Even though the circumstances were fucking awful.”

That pulled a helpless, wheezing laugh out of me. Fucking awful? That couldn’t possibly be a bigger understatement.

But that little bit of dark humor broke my tension, and I managed to look back at him again.

Dark eyes met mine as if they’d been waiting for me.

Drew. Kind of a plain, bro-like name for someone so amazing, someone who’d literally carried me out of hell like some kind of legendary hero.

And now that I looked at him again, I could totally see him in a backward baseball cap with a red plastic cup in his hand. Yeah, Drew looked like a bro, and that made me vaguely uncomfortable for reasons I couldn’t begin to understand, let alone articulate.

No, no, nothing about my missing and mysterious past. I’d only panic again.

And then Drew smiled, his wonderful eyes softening.

I smiled back, the necessary muscle movements horrifyingly unfamiliar. How long had it been since I stretched my lips like that? The corners were so dry they separated slowly and stickily, as if they were splitting.

“I guess ‘fucking awful’ doesn’t really cover it,” he went on, echoing my thoughts so perfectly. “But there’s time to think about it and deal with it later. Right now, we’re in my house in Boise, and I have a pack here—a family, people who’ll watch our backs if we need it. I’m a shifter, by the way. Werewolf.” He cleared his throat and his hands twitched slightly. “As if that wasn’t obvious by the claws you saw—there. When I took you out. I hope that doesn’t bother you.”

A pack. A family. A werewolf. Did I know any shifters? I had no idea, but either way the thought didn’t disturb me…as if any thought could disturb me more than I’d already been disturbed. Boise. I didn’t have any associations with Idaho except potatoes, and I was pretty sure my feelings about potatoes were strictly neutral. Hopefully that was mutual. After what I’d been through, I wouldn’t rule out a sudden attack by aggressive tubers.

I kept all that to myself, instead asking, “Why would it?”

Drew shrugged. “Sometimes humans get nervous around us.”

Oh, fuck. I bit my lip hard, feeling wetness where I’d broken through, my skin too thin and dry to be abused like that. Human.

That sounded right, but…I hadn’t consciously known I was human until he mentioned it. How could I not know that as readily as I knew how to breathe? How did I know my name but not my own species?

“How do you know?” I rasped, paranoia rearing its ugly head again, my heart starting to pound. Drew’s eyes. His worried eyes, staring at me now like he didn’t know what to make of me. His eyes meant he wouldn’t hurt me. “I mean, I know I am, I think, but—what—how do you know anything about me?”

“Easy,” he said, lifting his hands in a universal calm-the-fuck-down gesture and leaning back in his chair, maybe trying to make himself less threatening. “You were in really bad shape. I didn’t know what was wrong with you and I was fucking terrified that you’d—” He stopped abruptly.

Die. He’d thought I would die. That didn’t unsettle me as much as it probably should have. Being unsettled required surprise, didn’t it? And being alive, in a real bed in a real house in Boise of all the damn mundane places, surprised me far more than dying would have. That unsettled me.

“I called in a shaman and a human doctor,” Drew went on after an uncomfortable pause. “The regular doctor couldn’t do shit except bandage you and teach me how to do it too, and the shaman couldn’t do much either. He couldn’t heal you with magic. He said a bunch of shit I didn’t understand about your body’s energy flow being, like…he didn’t say ‘fucked-up,’ but it sounded like that’s what he meant, to be honest. But he did say you were for-sure human.”

That all sounded…well, unsettling as hell.

But before I could do more than open my mouth, Drew leaned forward again, frowning.

“Hold on a fucking second, here. You know you’re human, you think?”

The noise as I swallowed hard enough that it should’ve hurt sounded too loud in the ensuing silence.

Would he throw me out on my ass when he learned that I wasn’t only injured, helpless, and weak, not to mention human—because whatever he said about humans being nervous around shifters, shifters were often less than friendly with garden-variety humans, so I’d heard—but also that I had a fucked-up head to go with my fucked-up energy flow?

Only one way to find out.

“I don’t remember anything.” I licked my dry lips, wishing for another giant glass of water. Or for a meteor to hit and make this conversation unnecessary. “I know my name, I guess. My first name. I think my last name is Stern. I heard one of them talking about me in there, he said my name. Being human feels right. And I seem to know the stuff that a normal person would know about the world, like what a werewolf is. Or where Boise is. But I don’t remember anything about my life before…before.” In for a penny, in for a pound, even though my heart started to race like it might explode out of my chest. At least I could feel that? Yay. “Also, I can’t feel much. Pain. You asked me how much pain I was in. The answer’s none. I can’t feel pain anymore. They cut on me and it was like a touch.”

Drew looked at me for a long time, his face going hard and set and his fists clenching where they rested on his legs. Was I imagining the faint golden glow in his eyes? Didn’t only alphas have that? Now that I thought of it, his eyes had been glowing in my cell too, only I’d been so focused on their expression I hadn’t cared. But those eyes meant safety and gentle hands. I liked them the same either way.

He let out a long sigh, seeming to force himself to relax. A prelude to telling me he didn’t have time to deal with my bullshit? After all, he’d already done so much. More than enough. He’d saved my life and cared for me after, brought me home. And he’d been there too, as much a victim of that evil as me. He didn’t need me hanging around his neck like a millstone.

“That’s fucked,” he said at last, low and hard. “But we’ll figure out what they did to you. We’ll fix it. And in the meantime, all you have to do is eat, drink, get your strength back. A real hot shower. Pizza. Coffee. Okay? Ice cream. Anything you want, I’ll get. And I’ll take care of everything else until you’re up to more than that.”

That watery sensation came back to the corners of my eyes. Shit, I didn’t want to start crying. How pathetic could I be? Ice cream. God, I wanted it, and I wanted to let him take care of me. Take care of everything, with those big capable hands and his big capable body that had already saved me. I wanted…but I couldn’t take advantage of him.

“You were there too. Tortured,” I choked out. “You need someone taking care of you, too. And you don’t have any obligation—”

“Fuck that,” he spat, making me jump. He leaned forward again, this time fixing me with a gaze so intense out of those gilded black eyes that it pinned me like an insect. “I was only there for a little while. Like, a couple of months. Nothing at all compared to you or the others we escaped with. I’m fine. And even if I wasn’t fine, you’re a lot less fine. You’ve been unconscious for more than two weeks. You’re nowhere near fine. And no obligation? Fuck. That, Ash. We escaped from there together. We’re sticking together.” As he spoke, a red flush bloomed across his cheekbones. “I want to stick together. You’re—” He stopped abruptly, and his eyes flicked away from mine, from too intense to shifty as hell.

I was what, exactly? Gross and smelly, probably. Dry-skinned and thin. My hair…a wave of relief swamped me as I realized I could actually remember more or less what I looked like. Curly blond hair, light brown eyes. A sharp nose and full lips.

Probably.

So matted curly blond hair, bloodshot light brown eyes, chapped full lips, and no doubt something horrible had also gone wrong with my nose. Swollen and red? Five enormous zits? Both?

And then needy, broken, helpless, and amnesiac on top of the unprepossessing exterior.

“You need to tell me what I am and not leave me hanging.” I fidgeted with a loose thread coming out of the fluffy blue comforter spread over me. Drew’s quilt, that he’d tucked around me so carefully. God, I really didn’t want to start crying again. “Because from where I’m lying down being pathetic, I’m not worth the effort. You don’t even know me.”

“Don’t fish for compliments,” Drew growled, making me glance up in startlement, my mouth dropping open. Fish for compliments? I hadn’t meant to— “Yeah, I know you weren’t really,” he said, with a wry little smile. “But you can’t possibly be insecure, either, so I’m not buying it. What you are?” He took a deep breath. “This is going to sound so fucked to a human. I’m sorry. But you’re mine. I found you, I brought you home, I carried you out of there. That makes you mine. Not in a creepy way! But, like…I can’t explain it any other way.”

Mine. Bone-deep warmth spread through me as I blinked at him in disbelief. Reassuring, maybe. Protective and more welcome than I could admit. But creepy? Hardly. My creepy-o-meter had been reset so far into the red that a werewolf declaring some kind of claim on me didn’t even nudge it.

Besides, the way he’d described it didn’t sound creepy so much as…

“Like a stray cat?” That thought didn’t sting as much as it should’ve. Maybe I’d run out of self-respect, too, along with nerve sensation and memories, but better a stray cat brought home and petted than a starving alley cat left to die.

“No! It’s not pity!” I raised one eyebrow at him, remembering as I did that I knew how. People found that obnoxious and condescending, right? At least I had that going for me, since I didn’t have many other advantages in the world. “Seriously,” he continued, sounding exasperated now, “it’s not. You’re not a pet. You’re just…mine. It’s not something a human can understand.”

Speaking of condescending.

On the other hand, maybe he had a point. I flashed back to the claws, and the fangs, and the blood everywhere, including all over him and his claws. Not his fangs, thank God, like it’d been on the other…individual’s. I didn’t even know who or what he’d been, and he’d scared the shit out of me. But the man sitting next to me in that chair wasn’t human, either.

And I couldn’t judge his instincts or his mental processes by any measure I had available to me.

“Okay,” I said.

Drew frowned, his thick dark brows drawing together. “Just ‘okay’?”

“Yeah. Okay.” I could accept it. Pet or not, whatever. I didn’t have the energy to worry about it. Besides, I still had that cozy, heated sensation inside me, something I couldn’t really define but that diametrically opposed the feeling I’d had alone and cold and lost and starved in my bleak cell, waiting to be tortured again.

The frown smoothed away, and Drew stood up. “Okay, then.” His smile warmed me all over again. “You need more water. Food. A shower? That sounded good, right?”

I nodded enthusiastically, probably all wide-eyed and eager-looking, and he laughed, a low, mellow chuckle that chased the last of my tension away.

“Come on, then,” he said, reaching for my blankets and laying his other hand over one of mine, giving my fingers a squeeze. It didn’t feel like much besides pressure, but the heat of his skin reached me, at least. “Up and at ’em. You’ll be feeling better in no time.”

I kind of doubted that, but I appreciated the sentiment. I managed to smile back at him, and I took his hand and let him help me up.