he walked away, he thought he noticed tears sliding down her cheek. Corinne all but vaulted out of the vehicle as soon as Hunter had gone into the house. The prolonged drive in the confining space would have been enough to spike her anxiety, all the more so considering what she'd witnessed at the airport tonight. But it was something far worse that sent her fleeing the car for the dank, predawn outdoors.
Fear and horror gripped her, threatening to turn her stomach inside out as she stumbled toward a concrete slab in the derelict yard next door. She sank down onto the damp foundation and buried her face in her hands.
In all of her many nightmares over what might have become of her son, never had she imagined the brutal fate Hunter had just described to her.
Hunter.
Good lord, it wasn't even a true name. Just a label for an object, no different from one that might be used to refer to a blade or a pistol, or any other tool manufactured for the sole purpose of destruction.
Insignificant.
Expendable.
Inhuman.
She wiped at the tears that had begun falling even before Hunter had left the vehicle. Her heart ached for his past suffering, but it tore apart in her breast at the realization that her baby boy - the beautiful, innocent child she'd loved instantly on sight - was still trapped inside the ugly world of Dragos's making.
A sob rose in her throat as she remembered the sweet face of the squalling infant she'd delivered some thirteen years ago. She could still picture his tiny fists flailing as the Minion nurse carried him across the labor room to wash him and wrap him in a plain white blanket. She could still see his eyes - almond shaped and bluish green, like her own, his dermaglyph- covered scalp crowned with a smattering of silky black hair, the same color as hers. Her son would have her sonokinetic ability too, inherited genetically from her the same way he would inherit his Gen One strength and power from the creature who'd sired him. The talent Corinne gave her son was something Dragos could never take away from him. That ability would forever stamp him as hers, no matter what Dragos had done to him in the years he'd had to bend him to his twisted missions and ideals.
Her son had a name as well. Corinne had whispered it to him in that first moment their eyes had met and locked in the delivery room. He'd heard her, even at a scant few minutes out of her womb, she was sure of it. And he'd heard her cry for him as the Minion nurse carried him away an instant later, never to be seen again.
God, how many days and weeks and months - how many years - had she mourned his absence from her life? And now, to think what he'd been born into. It made her sick with anguish to imagine what he might have become in the thirteen years Dragos had controlled him. Hope churned desperately within her. Maybe he wasn't living that awful existence, after all. Maybe he'd been taken away from her for some other purpose, not shackled to Dragos's whims by a deadly ultraviolet collar. Not forced to exist as a killing machine without knowing who he truly was, without anyone to hold him or nurture him or love him. And if he was one of the many Gen One boys Dragos bred as assassins in his labs? Maybe he'd somehow escaped his horrific enslavement as Hunter had. Maybe her son wasn't living at all anymore. For one shameful second, she wished him dead, if only to spare him the bleak existence Hunter had described.
But he was alive. She knew it the same way every parent must know, regardless of how much time or distance separates them from their child. Deep in her marrow, she was certain her little boy was still breathing.
Somewhere ...
The hopelessness of finding him when she didn't even know where to begin looking pressed down on her as she sat alone on the concrete slab, staring out at the vast, empty wasteland of what had probably once been a pleasant neighborhood on the outskirts of New Orleans. Now there was next to nothing left of it. Displaced families, homes in neglect and ruin, countless lives rent apart by a force they had been powerless to stop. She had weathered her own storm in the decades Dragos had imprisoned her.