Free Web NovelChapter 204: Chapter 203: The Hunger Storm
The first thing Eve noticed when she woke up was that she couldn’t move without everything screaming.
Literally every muscle in her body had apparently filed a formal complaint overnight and elected pain as their spokesperson. Her ribs ached in a way that suggested at least two of them had opinions about being used as Katerina’s personal punching surface. Her left wrist throbbed with dull persistence. The cut above her eyebrow had scabbed over, pulling tight and itchy against her skin every time she frowned.
She frowned now, testing the sensation.
Yep. That was unpleasant.
"Don’t do that," Damian said, from approximately three inches away.
Eve turned her head....carefully, because her neck had also submitted a complaint...and found all three of her mates arranged around the bed with the energy of men who had absolutely not slept and were absolutely not going to admit it.
Damian sat in the chair he’d clearly dragged to her bedside, still dressed in yesterday’s clothes, his tie long discarded, shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows. He was watching her with that gray-eyed focus he usually reserved for hostile negotiations and very serious spreadsheets.
Silas was on the bed beside her, close but not touching, his body angled toward her like a satellite dish pointed at its signal. His expression was the carefully neutral version that meant he was feeling approximately ten thousand things and had organized them all into a queue.
Damon was at the foot of the bed, sitting cross-legged, chin in his hand. He looked...wrong, somehow. The energy that usually crackled off him like static electricity was muted. Quieter. Like someone had turned his volume dial down without asking permission.
He was watching her breathe.
The realization settled in Eve’s chest like something warm and aching. He’d been watching her breathe. Probably all night.
"Good morning," she said, and winced at how wrecked her voice sounded. Raw and scraped thin, like she’d been screaming. Which....right. She had been.
"Water," Silas said, and produced a glass from the nightstand with the efficiency of someone who had placed it there specifically for this moment. Which he probably had.
Eve drank. The water was cold and perfect and she wanted to cry about it a little.
"How do you feel?" Damian asked.
"Like I fought a five-hundred-year-old warrior for twenty minutes and then nearly died."
"So accurate self-assessment," Damon said. "Good. Brain’s working."
His voice was doing its normal thing...dry, light, the humor sitting on top like a skim of oil on water. But underneath it, Eve could feel through the bond the echo of last night’s terror, still vibrating at a frequency just below conscious thought. He hadn’t let it go. Just filed it somewhere he thought she couldn’t access.
She could absolutely access it.
"I’m okay," she said, looking directly at him.
"I know," he said. ƒrēewebnovel.com
He didn’t look like he knew.
"Damon."
"Eve." He met her eyes, and for one unguarded second she saw it....the raw, unprocessed fear of someone who had watched the person they loved bleeding and convulsing and almost not coming back. Then the wall came up again, smooth and practiced. "Eat something. Catherine sent up food approximately forty minutes ago and Damian has been physically preventing me from stealing your eggs."
"They’re her eggs," Damian said, without looking away from Eve.
"Everything in this house is technically pack property...."
"Eat," Silas said to Eve, nudging a tray onto the bed with quiet authority.
Eve ate. The eggs were good....Catherine had clearly made them herself rather than delegating, which was its own kind of love language from a woman who expressed affection through aggressive competence and firm instructions. There was also toast, orange juice, and what appeared to be a small pot of honey with a note that read for her throat, not optional....C.
Eve ate the honey too, because arguing with Catherine’s notes felt like a losing battle even when Catherine wasn’t physically present.
The morning passed in the particular quiet of people who had been through something terrible together and hadn’t yet found the words for it. The brothers took turns....one always staying close while the others handled pack business that apparently hadn’t stopped just because their Luna was recovering. Damian fielded calls with his phone pressed close to his ear, his voice low. Silas reviewed reports with the focused patience of someone who processed stress through productivity. Damon disappeared for twenty minutes and came back smelling like coffee and the outdoors, like he’d needed to breathe air that didn’t carry the memory of last night.
Eve rested, which she was deeply bad at.
"I could do some light reading," she suggested, around midday.
"No," said Damian.
"Just emails...."
"Absolutely not," said Silas.
"I’m just going to...."
"If you say training I will physically remove every piece of equipment from this building," Damon said pleasantly, from the doorway.
Eve subsided. Glared at the ceiling. The ceiling was unhelpfully neutral on the subject of her recovery.
It was around the third hour of enforced stillness that she first noticed something was wrong.
Not wrong like pain....she was well acquainted with pain at this point, they’d been formally introduced. Wrong like a warmth that didn’t quite make sense, spreading from her core outward in slow, lazy pulses. Like her body was running slightly hotter than it should. Like the air in the room had developed a texture it hadn’t had before.
She shifted against the pillows.
Silas looked up from his report immediately. "Are you in pain? Where..."
"I’m fine," Eve said. "Just restless."
He watched her for a moment with those careful dark eyes, then went back to his report. But she noticed he didn’t turn the page for a long time.
The warmth built slowly. Subtle enough that Eve kept almost dismissing it, writing it off as the fever that had apparently accompanied her power crash. Raphael had mentioned a fever. This was probably just...residual. Normal recovery things.
Except it didn’t feel like fever exactly. It felt like hunger.
She was hungry. That wasn’t unusual, she’d barely eaten since before the trial. But this wasn’t the kind of hungry that eggs and toast addressed. This was deeper. More specific. The kind of hungry that had a very particular answer and approximately no polite way to mention it while surrounded by three men who had spent the last eighteen hours terrified she was going to die.
Great, Eve thought. Perfect timing, body. Really excellent work.
