Every other day(87)

Unlike the rest, it didn’t have a window. I couldn’t peek in to see what it was hiding, but I knew. I tested the handle, then swiped the identification card. The lock gave, and a second later, I was standing in another hallway.

This place was a nightmare. An endless nightmare, with door after door after door, and I was never going to find him, never going to get out.

“Kali.”

It took me a moment to realize that the voice wasn’t in my head.

“Zev?” I rushed toward the end of this hallway. Toward the last door. I pressed my hands flat against the metal. My eyes were level with the viewing slit.

On the other side of the slit, there were eyes.

Dark eyes, light skin, lashes that belonged on a softer, more delicate face. They framed his eyes in a thick, ink-black fringe.

“Zev,” I said, his name catching in my throat.

On the other side of the door, I could feel him placing his hands against the metal. I could almost feel his touch against mine, his breath against my skin.

I tried my card on this door, and the second I heard the lock give, the barrier holding back my emotions threatened to do the same.

I was so close now. So, so close.

Disbelief coloring his features, Zev pressed the door open, slowly, and stepped out into the hallway. He was taller than I’d thought he’d be, thinner than he’d looked in my dreams. He brought his hands to either side of my face, and I had one moment of utter peace, of feeling that this was how it was supposed to be.

He tilted his head to the side and looked at me like I was something precious. He ran his thumb over the skin of my cheek, and then he whispered, “I told you not to come here.” His voice was tender, and then it broke. “You should have listened.”

One second, his hands were on my cheeks. The next, they’d encircled my neck.

No.

My palms pressed back against his shoulders, but he didn’t move.

I was fast. Strong. Inhuman. He was faster, stronger, older.

No matter how hard I fought, his hands stayed around my neck, like a metal collar. He squeezed, squeezed hard enough that a normal girl’s head would have popped right off.

I can’t breathe, I realized. His hands are on my neck, and I can’t breathe.

This couldn’t be happening. After everything, after Skylar—

Behind us, the animal screams of the other test subjects built to a crescendo, and I struggled against Zev’s hold.

People like me didn’t get scared, I reminded myself. We couldn’t feel pain. But we could feel betrayal.

We needed to breathe.

“I told you not to come,” Zev said, his voice wrapping its way around my body, steady and warm. “I tried.”

The last thing I was conscious of before darkness claimed me—other than an incredible tightness in my lungs—was the sound of yet another door opening and closing. Footsteps crossing the hallway. And then, a pinch in my arm and a woman’s voice.

“Hello, Kali. Welcome home.”





I woke up inside a cell made of concrete—four feet by four feet, only about a head taller than me. My body was slumped against the wall. I checked my watch.

Four hours and fifteen minutes.

This was not good.

I fought back the haze that had descended over my body and belatedly remembered the pinching feeling of a needle being inserted into my flesh.

They’d drugged me.

They’d drugged me, and I was lying in a concrete prison, and Zev knew. He’d helped them hurt me.

I thought of Skylar, poor, stupid Skylar, who’d followed me here and died for her effort. She’d been so sure that she was supposed to, sure that whatever the cost, coming with me would be worth it, because if she didn’t come, then I was going to die.

You made the wrong choice, I told her silently. You should have let them kill me when you had the chance.

But she hadn’t. Skylar had chosen me, and now she was dead, and I was boxed in, the way Zev had been for years.

Zev. He was the one who’d done this to me. After everything—

I struggled to my feet, still dizzy from whatever they’d dosed me with.

“It was supposed to keep you out until sunrise,” a female voice said. “I’m afraid we didn’t anticipate your feeding on the guards upstairs. We would have altered the dose if we’d known you were taking human blood.”

If the guards hadn’t killed Skylar, I wouldn’t have. Trying to rid my mind of that thought, I walked over to the thick metal door and stared out the slit, all too aware that this time, I was the one locked in. The eyes that stared back at me were a deep and mossy green. The eyelashes were light brown, the woman’s skin the color of cream.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I’ve had many names,” the woman said. She smiled—even though I couldn’t see her mouth, I could see it in her eyes. “You could say I’ve been around for a while.”