from the tension in his shoulders, his hurried steps, the way his fingers gripped the bottle. I couldn’t imagine what was going through his head, what he was feeling.
Was he kicking himself for the way he’d treated me? Or was he mad at me for torturing him like this?
I was mad at me.
I folded my hands on the cool stone and dropped my head onto my forearms. Why couldn’t I just say it? I felt it. I knew he felt it. He’d said it to me. So why couldn’t I say it to him? Why wasn’t I rushing out after him to tell him this instant?
Alec and I had come very far, but I was still worried he’d hurt me. No one had ever been quite as good at tearing my heart out of my chest and stomping on it to make himself feel better. If I went after him now and tried to tell him I loved him, would he throw it back in my face, reject me yet again? That was how Alec reacted when hurt; he pushed people away, hurt them more than they were hurting him. I just couldn’t bear the cold look in his eyes, couldn’t stand the thought of hearing his hard, detached voice.
Soothing hands rubbed my shoulders as tears pricked my eyes.
“Just tell him, baby,” Josh whispered next to my ear.
My silent tears spilled over. If only it were that simple.
Eighteen
I took the bottle of water from Karen gratefully, downing half of it in one go. When I’d first arrived for my session, I regretted wearing a summer dress and sandals. It was a hot day, but the AC inside the building was pumping. It hadn’t taken me long to wish for a cardigan.
But once the session got underway, I was hot and sweaty in no time. They hadn’t requested any of the guys for this one. Tyler was in his office some thirty floors up, and Alec was somewhere in the building too, so they were on standby if we needed them, but the research team wanted to test my ability to transfer Light to Variants outside my Bond.
“You OK?” Karen took a seat on the couch next to me. We were finished for the day, and it had become a bit of a routine for the two of us to sit down and debrief after each session. We mostly used the area they’d set up as a living room—the couches were comfortable.
I stretched. “I’ll be fine. It’s just a lot more effort outside the Bond.”
“It’s to be expected. But if at any point you feel like it’s too much, you just say so, sweetie.” Karen had gone from barking cold, impersonal commands into the speakers to having semi-casual chats with me and calling me sweetie. I must have grown on her.
The session had been grueling. I could transfer Light to other Variants without a problem. Yes, it required more concentration, but I’d done it enough that it wasn’t that difficult. But none of that was new; all Vitals could do that. What they wanted was for me to use my glowing Light to transfer to Variants outside my Bond remotely.
I’d done it at the Melior Group event about a month earlier, so it was possible, but I’d been acting on pure adrenaline and survival instinct, not to mention the feral need to protect my Variants. I tried not to think too hard about that night. Doing so made vivid, disturbing images invade my mind—the blood, Alec falling to the floor . . .
I couldn’t stand the thought of losing any of them.
Naturally, Melior Group had footage of the whole thing, so Karen and the team had studied it. I’d tried to watch it myself, but as soon as the armed men appeared on the screen, I panicked. The thought of seeing Alec get shot from a whole new angle made bile rise in my throat, and I raced out of the room.
Karen didn’t make me watch the rest of the video, but she did push me to try to replicate the transfer.
I was grateful for the push. My own mind was curious about this development, but I was scared to try it again. Left to my own devices, I might have avoided the issue indefinitely.
By the end, I’d managed to draw the Light, get the glow up, and remotely transfer some to a researcher with super hearing on the other side of the room. He smiled wide and pushed his glasses