Chapter 75 75
Aidan
Ezequiel won’t let me get close, but Lois has been in the same state for hours. Her fever is dangerously high, she hasn’t eaten anything in two days, and the marks on her body haven’t faded; they’re burns—something Ezequiel refuses to explain.
“We have to go back!” I shout at him for the fifth time.
I’m tired of doing whatever he says. Tired of waiting, of sitting around hoping we won’t be found. This was never supposed to be my problem. I only wanted to find Lois. This was never supposed to be my problem.
It was about finding Lois. And then what?
Well… I guess my plan was to convince her not to let Emmanuel get inside her head.
Who am I kidding? I came here without a plan, driven by nothing but the raw need to go after Lois.
That’s the same reason I couldn’t leave anymore. It was no longer under my control.
If before I fought the urge to be near her… now I felt like something had me tied to her, anchored to her. I didn’t understand it.
My head was a real problem, crowded with doubts I couldn’t make sense of—too many questions, too many things piling up.
What was this thing I was feeling? It was getting stranger by the minute, and everything revolved around her, around Lois.
“There’s nowhere to go back to,” Ezequiel says.
I do have somewhere to go back to—my father. But I have to go back with Lois. I know he must be worried sick right now, but some things have slipped into the background and—
Only Lois matters.
Lois, Lois, Lois.
Lois.
Her name is all my mind screams, over and over. Sometimes I think it’s going to explode. At least Ezequiel’s thoughts aren’t bleeding into mine anymore, but Lois’s are—every now and then. Something I still haven’t gotten used to.
“We don’t even know what’s wrong with Lois,” I tell him.
“It’s… Emmanuel,” Ezequiel says quietly. “Something is happening to him—and whatever it is, it’s happening to Lois too.”
Ezequiel runs a hand over his forehead and Lois gasps, whimpers. Something hurts her—I don’t know what it is, I don’t know anything.
All I want is to pull her away from that damned, stupid wolf and take her back—either to her pack or to the university. We’re lost in no-man’s-land, wolf territory, but belonging to no pack.
We look like savages in the middle of nowhere.
“I haven’t been able to hunt anything,” I tell him. “If Lois wakes up, she has to eat, she has to regain her strength. It’s getting dark again, Ezequiel. We need to find food.” I try to reason with him.
Ezequiel gets to his feet and circles around Lois, thinking it over.
“Don’t you even know how to hunt?!” he yells at me, as if he sees me as useless.
“I don’t need to eat,” I reply calmly. “And my blood intake is covered,” I tell him.
Ezequiel peers out the door, then looks back at Lois, then returns to her. I know he doesn’t trust me. I know he doesn’t want to leave her with me, and that’s why he hasn’t moved away from her this whole time. He walks toward me and his fist slams into the wood beside my head, splintering it. He leans in close, his blazing eyes fixed on mine.
“If you do anything—if you breathe near her, if you come close, if you touch her… I will end your miserable existence, Aidan,” he says in a cold, calculated tone.
I swallow at the harshness of his words and nod.
He leaves, glancing back once before disappearing into the forest.
Once he’s gone, his words don’t matter to me. Neither do his threats.