Chapter 170

YENA

An eerie quiet took over the mountainside, as if every creature on the road and in the woods was holding their breath. All eyes were on the tree line. The soldiers were still as statues.

And then something very strange happened. The mountain suddenly trembled.

It was a short, jarring movement, like the quick reverberation from a big impact.

It happened and then was over in an instant. My brain wanted to tell me that it was an earthquake, though I’m quite sure that phenomenon hadn’t ever happened in this part of the world, at least not in my lifetime.

Some glances were exchanged amongst the Gamma warriors, but that was their only reaction.

Another couple minutes passed. My eyes were getting sore and tired from staring out into the spotlight glare.

And then finally the trees stirred to life, like something big was moving through.

And out came the brothers.

They were both covered in blood.

Nolan was, for some reason, shirtless. He was bloody all over but walking tall and looking strong, and he had his older brother in handcuffs and was pushing Adan forward ahead of himself.

Adan was hunched and staggering. And there was something tied around his neck, some sort of fabric pulled tight into a slipknot. Like a scarf made into a noose. It looked wet, red and shiny.

Honestly, the man looked about an inch from death.

In the couple seconds it took me to take in this scene, watching Nolan and Adan’s first few steps out into the street, I felt a mix of a million different emotions.

Pure joy. Elation that Nolan was alright, and that he’d won, he’d gotten Adan and this was about to be over. Incredible relief.

But maybe because this whole troubling situation was finally reaching its conclusion, my mind began to really understand the depths of how truly horrific it all was.

Any person with a shred of decency in their heart could not look at Adan in his condition and cheer. It was a gruesome, shocking sight.

He must have felt my eyes on him, because as I studied Adan’s physical condition, he turned his head slowly and looked right at me through the window of the tank.

His face was black and blue all over. And the shape of it was different, like his jaw had been broken, or his cheekbone. Or both.

And I could see now that the thing around his neck was Nolan’s shirt tied into a makeshift bandage, covering a bleeding neck wound. So that was two mysteries solved.

I knew that Nolan had not wanted to kill Adan. That was never part of his plan.

But looking at Adan’s disfigured face, and then noticing, no small measure of alarm, that a pulsating stream of blood was gushing out from under his chin – I worried that he was going to die. Nolan hadn’t meant to do it, but he had killed him.

Nolan’s Gamma warriors closed in slowly, moving strategically with guns drawn and calling out commands to the prisoner. They took Adan off Nolan’s hands. Adan seemed to be complying. I lost sight of him as the soldiers pinned him to the ground and piled their weight on top of him, preparing to apply restraints.

But apparently, Adan was not done yet.

With a sudden burst of inexplicable energy for a man with mortal injuries, he wrestled free from the heap of Gamma warriors and escaped them.

He erupted out in a flying leap, shoving the armed guards aside like they were nothing. He was lunging for Nolan, who had turned and taken only a couple steps away to make room for his men.

Nolan turned fast on his heel and saw Adan.

And met his forward charge with one of his own.

I must have blinked and missed something, because it was over as fast as it had started. Nolan had Adan pinned to the ground, sitting on his chest with his knees dug hard into Adan’s splayed shoulders.

And then the back half of the storm hit us.

The lightning came first – a shock of white that made the floodlights look pale. Then a crack of thunder followed a second later, like the violent snap of a giant whip. And then the rain – another sudden, violent downpour.

This time the storm was right on top of us. The lightning was close and blinding, strobing in erratic patterns. The booming thunder matched it almost second-for-second.

It was chaos out on the street. Voices shouting and guns pointed and flurries of arms everywhere.

Adan was staring straight up at Nolan and shouting something, his beaten face made even more gruesome by the baring of his big teeth into a vicious snarl. I couldn’t hear what he was saying over the now constant and deafening crashes of thunder.

This time Nolan kept his position, holding his brother to the ground while the Gamma warriors worked on binding Adan’s body with silver shackles.

I saw that the handcuffs Nolan had brought Adan out in were still around his wrists – he’d severed the chain that held them together. Now he was chained into fresh handcuffs as well as leg irons and a belly chain, all of which were locked together with padlocks. I had never seen anything like it. The man was completely immobilized.

Finally Nolan stood up and distanced himself from his brother, but he watched closely as Adan was dragged away downhill.

The Gamma warriors were about to throw him into a waiting high-security prisoner transport truck, but Nolan stopped and redirected them. They loaded Adan into an ambulance instead, where two medics strapped the shackled man into a gurney and another carefully began cutting Nolan’s bloody shirt off his neck with a big pair of scissors.

I reached the door of the tank and pulled it open and found Nolan was pacing back up the road toward me. The rain had washed his body clean, and I had to wonder if any of all that blood had been his own at all – he looked completely uninjured.

One step into the street and I was soaking wet and chilled to the bone. The rain was ice-cold.

Nolan closed the distance between us and swept me up into his arms in an effortless movement. My legs wrapped themselves around his waist like they belonged there.

“You did it,” I said.

Nolan’s face was stony and serious. For a fraction of a second I had the incomplete thought that I should ask if he was okay, but then suddenly he lurched his mouth against mine and kissed me frantically. Hard.

His hands grabbed at my soft flesh with desperate vice grips, and he threw me back up against the tank, pinning me against it with his strong body, which I now felt was thrumming with adrenaline. His heart was hammering wildly.

I was a bit shocked. Here I had been sitting quiet and still for hours and now suddenly I was rain-soaked and airborne with Nolan’s hot hands all over me and his mouth hooked to mine like a hungry magnet.

It was like I’d been transported to another world in an instant. The booming thunder and pouring rain were the only sounds in existence. The freezing rain drops bit at my skin with every icy impact. Nolan’s body heat pulsed out of him and into me everywhere he touched. And the feeling of his lips on mine, his tongue in my mouth – it was overwhelming.

I worried I was about to lose control of my body and shift. Or black out. Or maybe drown.

I grabbed Nolan’s hair and pulled his head back, gasping for air when I finally succeeded at prying him off me. The look on his face was unreadable.

I put one hand to his cheek and stroked the short scruff on his strong jaw. His eyes softened; his pounding heart started to slow down. He planted one light, gentle kiss on my lips and then pulled his face away and loosened his grip on my body.

I slid down the length of him until my toes touched the ground. My hand drifted from his face and came to rest in the center of his chest.

“How did that happen?” I had to ask. “How did he wind up looking like… that… and you were not hurt at all?”

Sober lucidity returned to Nolan’s eyes. He was coming down from the battle high.

“I was hurt very badly,” he said. “But I watched my wounds heal before my eyes. I assume because I still had your blood inside me.”

There was amazement in his still-serious, vibrant green eyes.

I was cold now. Very cold. The chilling rain was still pounding down.

Nolan jerked his head in reaction to a sound I didn’t hear. I followed his eyes and saw that the Gamma warriors were all in motion – most were hastening to their vehicles, but a few were rushing right to us, shouting and pointing to the sky, telling Nolan something urgent about the storm.