Queen of Quarantine (Brutal Boys of Everlake Prep #4) - Caroline Peckham Page 0,3

syringe in the same movement. He roared in pain, stumbling back and clutching his junk.

I shoved myself up, my head spinning as I tugged the needle out of my arm then I lunged at him with the last of my strength, grabbing his white coat in my fist and knocking his visor aside as I fought to see the face of one of my captors. I coughed heavily and he shoved me to the ground with a panicked yell and my head impacted with the floor, making my skull ring like a gong.

“Stupid bitch,” Jonas spat, slamming his visor back into place while Alan looked between us in alarm, two empty glass vials still clutched in his grip.

“I’ll get the doctor.” Alan ran for the door, but Jonas caught his arm to stop him, his dark eyes swirling.

“No. We have a job to do.” He took a syringe from a tray beside him and stalked forward with murder in his eyes.

I coughed again, scrambling backwards as my strength failed me. My coughing grew heavier and I tasted blood in my mouth, swilling over my tongue like poison. Fear pulled at my heart and whispered deadly promises in my ear. I dabbed my lips with shaking fingers, my death staring back at me more keenly than ever before as they came away wet and red.

“She’s in the final stages,” Alan gasped.

“Then we’d better take what we can get.” Jonas sneered, dropping down and jamming the needle into my thigh. The sedative washed through my veins fast and my eyes locked with Jonas’s as darkness grabbed me and tried to pull me into oblivion.

Spots of blood speckled the mask he wore beneath his visor and I managed to paint on a mocking smile, aware it might be my last. If I was going to die soon, I wouldn’t let these motherfuckers see my spirit break.

“It looks like you’re coming with me to hell, Jonas,” I rasped and terror swirled in his eyes before I fell away into an endless abyss.

F our weeks. Four fucking hellish, unbearable weeks without my baby in my arms and her soul in my keeping.

I crouched behind a parked car a block away from the private research lab we were all focused on, flexing my busted knuckles and relishing the twinge of pain as the scabs cracked open across them. I probably would have broken my hand punching that damn wall if Saint hadn't stopped me, though he was sporting the mother of all bruises on his ribs in thanks for his help. I was enough of an asshole that I hadn't even apologised for that move and he was enough of a man to understand that I was sorry all the same.

I didn't deserve him. Didn't deserve any of them. But they were stuck with me and I'd do whatever I could to make my place amongst them count.

I owed Saint an apology for smacking him, I just didn't have enough good in me right now to give him one. I was blinded by the loss of our girl, just like we all were. Until she was back in our arms, I knew this violence, this tension, this unrelenting anger wouldn't do anything other than fester and spread like rot.

It was hard to feel anything other than fury and fear right now. And I hadn't felt fear in a long damn time. I'd even begun to believe that I wasn't capable of feeling it anymore. But then Tatum Rivers had made me feel a lot of things I'd never thought I could feel.

She was the light to my dark, the hope in a world without any, the reason for my shackled soul to crave freedom. She'd given me dreams of a life with something more. So much fucking more. It was beyond anything I ever could have claimed to deserve but she'd given it to me anyway. Even after all the things we'd put her through when she'd first fallen into our lives.

But I should have known then what I did now. She was never just some girl, never a victim or a means to an end. She was the centre of us. The heart we never believed we had. She'd drawn four lost and hopeless souls into her orbit and claimed each and every one of us as her own, despite the dark and depraved beasts she knew us to be. Without her, we were nothing. I was nothing. Cast adrift without purpose or meaning. But