Camellia pressed her fingers to her lips and found she was trembling. She couldn’t look at Jonas anymore. “There were a couple of nurses who stayed with us throughout all the experiments and accompanied us to Whitney’s various bases and laboratories. One of them, Beverly, was with us as long as I can remember. I loved her. We all did. It wasn’t as if she was overly affectionate, but she was always there for us, no matter how much Whitney frowned at her when she picked us up off the floor when we were toddlers or instructed us when we needed to know things about growing up as females. He intimidated every caretaker he ever had for us until they quit, or he fired them because they were too nice to us. In addition to Beverly, the only other long-term nurses were Shirley and Rosa. Rosa mostly cared exclusively for Lily, although she looked after all of us when she could.”
“Why would one nurse be assigned exclusively to one child?” Jonas asked.
“Lily received special treatment. Eventually, Whitney took her away from us, and Rosa went with her. The rest of us had always been put into groups. Each group was assigned a nurse. Beverly was the nurse assigned to my group, and she ended up staying throughout our childhood and teenage years when so many of the others left.”
Camellia could hear herself screaming not to give too much away. Jonas was too connected to her through the enhancements Whitney had given the two of them—and he was intelligent. She had no doubt he observed everything, from body language to every psychic emotional leak she gave off. She suspected that very little ever escaped him, and he was specifically tuned to her.
She desperately needed someone to talk to. To bounce her ideas off of. At the same time, she didn’t want to know the answers. She couldn’t shred that last piece of her heart. She just couldn’t take it. She wanted to turn away from him, but she could feel his gaze on her, compelling her to continue. She needed to talk aloud. To say something to him. To give some explanation.
“Whitney did so many horrible things. I can’t even begin to explain just how bad he could get. He tortured Flame over and over, making her sick, uncaring of whether she lived or died, as long as he could record her reactions.” She was repeating herself. She couldn’t stop and Jonas didn’t interrupt her. He just let her babble on. “We went on countless missions, but if one of us didn’t come back, one of the other girls was punished. Later, as we got older, he infected us with a virus, and we needed the antidote in order to survive, so we had to return. If one of us escaped, he said he would kill one of the remaining girls.”
Her throat closed. Her lungs seized. She couldn’t breathe. It took discipline to force air through her body. It was really difficult not to look at him. She felt his reaction. Middlemist Red absorbed his emotions. Breathing in and out, accumulating his rage and letting it go into the soothing peace of the garden. That was Red, always finding a way to make things right when their world was filled with violence and rage.
She was sweating, little beads on her forehead. “I’m jumping around in my history here. Going back to when I was younger, before all of us banded together to try to get out all at once. I planned my escape. I just couldn’t take it anymore. I knew it couldn’t be while I was on a mission because I couldn’t go with a virus in me. I was so careful. I studied the guards. He changed them often, and if we were on a regular military base, he made sure all the assigned guards were kept away from us. When I decided to make my move, we were on private property in an underground laboratory. He’d held us there for a while. We were brought to the surface to exercise and whenever we were needed to plan for missions. I’m extremely good at holding information in my mind, so I knew my way around the lab’s maze of tunnels.”
She doubted if she was giving him too much information about herself. He most likely had the same gifts she did. Whitney had enhanced him with fungi and Middlemist Red. He knew now about the mycelium, but not Red. Red’s gifts would have allowed him to cope with the terrible amount of aggressive genetic coding Whitney had hardwired into Jonas. Without that, Jonas would probably already be dead or, worse, have gone insane.
“Camellia.”
He said her name softly. Gently. The sound of his voice was like a piece of velvet cloth sliding over her skin in a long caress. Shockingly, when she’d closed her mind to him, when there was no bridge between them from Red or the mycelium, she felt the same brush of velvet in her mind.
“Just telling me this is hurting you. You don’t have to tell me. I don’t like you hurting. It isn’t as necessary as I thought it was.”
There was genuine truth in his voice, and she turned to meet the gold in his eyes. He meant every word. She’d worked to build up her protections, those walls she surrounded her heart and soul with. She didn’t believe in anyone anymore. She couldn’t afford to. She knew Jonas had been asking her to do just that, but now . . . he was aching for her.
Jonas had stumbled into her garden. Essentially, she needed to regard him as an enemy. He was a GhostWalker, another one of Whitney’s creations. He didn’t work for Whitney, she knew he didn’t, but he was still a man who followed orders. Those orders could include acquiring her. She had secrets. She had skills. She could be useful.
Whitney had men in high places protecting him, and they still did deals with him. They wanted his experiments. If he wanted her back, there was no doubt in her mind those men would find a way to trade her.
Even with all that in mind, just looking at Jonas, into his eyes, crumbled her resolve all over again. She had a reason for not going down to the compound and letting the other women know she was there. She had a reason for refusing to be with him, even though she knew he needed her in the way she needed him. Her reason wasn’t a trivial one. He had to understand that. She wasn’t being selfish or emotional or afraid. Her reasons were deep and elemental, and there was no repairing the damage done.
“Thank you for saying that, Jonas,” she acknowledged, “but I want you to know. Beverly found out I was missing from my bed, and she alerted the guards.” Her stomach knotted when she told him, and she pressed her hand tight over it, because what if she was wrong? What if, all this time, she was wrong?
“They caught me just as I was leaving the tunnels. Whitney had all the girls assembled in their pajamas. They were crying and scared. He asked me if I remembered the consequences for trying to escape. He walked up and down the row of girls and told me to choose one of them. I told him to go to hell, but I was so terrified. I shook so bad I could barely stand. I didn’t think he’d really do what he said. But he did. He took Ivy. I tried to attack him, but his soldiers held me back and they took her to another room. We all heard the gunshot. There was blood in the room, lots of it. He made me clean it up. We never saw her again.”
She didn’t realize she was crying again until Red dipped her branches and used the blossoms to gently touch her face.
“Whitney asked me if I really thought Beverly loved me. He said I was stupid if I believed that. That she worked for him for money.” She still remembered the sneer in his voice, the way he mocked her—all of them—for thinking anyone could ever care for them.