Page 228 of Immune

Don’t make it bigger either.

I can’t handle bigger right now.

So, instead, I say absolutely nothing. I only clutch him harder, staring over his shoulder at the wall like a lost little girl who has finally found the door home and doesn’t have enough trust that it’ll stay open.

Maine holds me, and I let him. For now.

Around us, the room remains too quiet.

Someone eventually moves. A medic, maybe. A guard, possibly. I don’t look.

Maine’s breath catches again, pain finally dragging him back to his broken and bleeding body.

Good.

Bad.

I pull back by half an inch. Only half, just enough to see his face. Enough to prove that he’s still there.

His gray eyes are wet, red-rimmed, and fixed on me like looking away might actually kill him. Then he says, “Kota.”

My name sounds like a prayer in his mouth.

I fucking hate prayers, because they’re literally just hopes wearing that long-forgotten thing called manners.

My fingers drag across the tile next to us until they find the fallen hat. The brim is slightly bent and the fabric is damp, but it’s still his. It’s still mine. It’s still the only thing that survived when everything else didn’t.

I press it against my chest, and his hand covers mine over it. Neither one of us speaks, because there’s just too much. There’s not enough. Because this reunion doesn’t fix the wounds left behind. It only gives them a brand new shape.

And somewhere under my ribs, under all the relief and the impossible warmth of his hand over mine, the first clean spark of anger waits perfectly for the air that will fan it into a raging inferno.

THIRTY-FIVE

DAKOTA

The medics stitch Maine up while I’m sitting on the floor.

No one tells me to move. Smart. Maybe the room has finally developed pattern recognition or something.

The red-haired medic works with the same expression of a woman who had the balls to threaten death today and meant it at least twice. Ellis, I think someone called her. She kneels next to Maine with gauze, clamps, thread, and the kind of calm that probably makes grown men confess things just to fill the silence.

Maine lets her work.

Mostly.

His hands stay locked tightly around mine, but not tight enough to hurt. It’s just tight enough that I know he’s real, and that’s somehow worse.

Ghosts have manners, you know? They haunt from a distance. They don’t bleed all over your fingers or flinch when someone cleans torn skin near their ribs. They don’t squeeze your hand like they’re making sure you haven’t disappeared while they blinked.

Maine is actually fucking awful at being dead.

Honestly, very selfish of him.

His hat sits between us on the tile, damp and bent, the brim now stained with old dirt and fresh blood. My bandana hangs loose around my neck now, rendered completely useless as a secret. My hair is out, my face is bare to all, and my scent has been cracked right open enough that every Alpha in the room has gone unnaturally stiff.

Let ’em.

Let Hale write his little report about it in his little commander brain. I’m done being smaller for other people’s comfort. Well, for the next seventeen seconds, at least. Then I’ll probably remember that walls exist and then panic in very creative and fun ways.