431: Hunter

Hunter

~ ZEV ~2

Zev trembled, looking for the courage. Would she look at him differently if she knew? He'd avoided even asking himself that. Didn't want to doubt her. But now… she already suspected. He needed to be honest with her.

Sasha looked up at him, took both his hands, squeezing them. "Zev, what is it? What haven't you told me?"

His heart hammered in his chest. "I, uh, haven't told you about the training they gave me," he muttered. "About the operational stuff. The reason I didn't have to stay at the compound. The stuff Nick trained me to do."

Sasha waited, watching him.

Zev swallowed hard. "The thing you need to know, Sash, is that I still believed them for a long time. I kind of had to. Even when doubts crossed my mind, to believe those doubts meant accepting that I'd been wrong. Like, really wrong. I had to admit to myself that I was a fool. And… it took me a long time to do that. Then, even when I did, it took some time to get out from under them."

Sasha stepped closer, still holding his hands. "I love you, Zev. Just tell me. Get it out. It's eating you up—and I… I don't want to see you that way again. You can't heal if you don't bring it out into the light.

Zev sighed heavily. He looked down at the ground, his shoulders rolling forward. He suddenly felt fifteen again, and ashamed. Sasha continued to murmur her encouragement, with words and in his head. He was worrying her. But she needed to understand what they were dealing with, he realized.

"I told you that I believed for a long time that they were trying to help people, right? They'd convinced me that I was special. That I had a purpose, and… and I don't know. They made me feel important."

Sasha nodded, but she was blinking a lot. "Is this to do with the mating stuff?"

Zev huffed a cold laugh. "No. No, I've told you everything about that. This is… this is why I had a life that most of the others don't. Didn't."

"Okay, so tell me. I'll still love you, Zev." She sounded relieved.

Would she still feel that way?

He cleared his throat. "When I left you, they brought me to Thana while I kind of… grew into myself," he said gruffly. "There's a transition our bodies go through around twenty. I hit peak strength three years ago. And that's when they tricked me with that whole sickness thing. Brought me back to the human world. The breeding started then too—probably for the same reason. But I wasn't in the breeding arena all the time. For the first few months, I did a ton of training that they called tests… they told me it was designed to find out what my limits were. And I was into it. It made me feel like a badass—especially when I started being able to beat the trainers and Nick… After that, most of the time I wasn't even in the compound. They'd just take me there for certain meetings and… stuff. Most of the time we were in the city. That's how I could keep tabs on you."

Sasha watched him, wary, but concerned. Empathetic.

"Just say it," she whispered.

Then Zev cleared his throat again and told her the thing he'd never told another living soul.

"We'd been doing missions in the city—tracking and surveilling. They were using my wolf senses to see how I could navigate the urban environment. See if I could follow people in human form without being seen, that kind of thing.

"And one week it was this guy. He was kind of fat. But he had a lot of money, and I guess he was important. A big business owner and… they told me he was a liar. They said that he was trying to bring our entire project down. That he'd found out about it because he'd been approached as an investor, and now he was jealous and trying to start up his own—but he knew they were ahead of him, so he was trying to take the Board down.

"He was a threat. And an evil one, they told me. They said he was going to kill all the Chimera except a couple—and Adam and Eve thing—if he could get us taken down. But that he wasn't going to use what he learned to help people, he was going to use it for profits.

"He sounded like an evil bastard. And the next thing I knew, my surveillance operation was becoming a… an assassination."

He'd never said those words out loud. He couldn't look at her when he said them. He swallowed hard, again and again, staring at where their hands were linked and her knuckles were turning white, gripping him.

Sasha swallowed too. "Did you kill him, Zev?" she asked quietly.

Zev nodded. "I killed five different people before I figured out what was going on, Sash." His voice trembled and broke. He swallowed again, heart pounding. He couldn't look at her. "They convinced me these people deserved it, that I was keeping my people safe. But they fooled me. I know that now. I saw… A couple of months before I grabbed you, they relaxed with me. They thought I was deep enough in that I wasn't turning back. And they were almost right. But when they took me into one of the labs I hadn't seen before and I saw the Chimera hooked up to machines… and they started talking about a new mission. Another hit. And I just… it all clicked. I looked around at the men that surrounded me and I realized, we weren't the good guys… we were the villains. And I'd… I'd been helping them.

"That's when I knew I had to get you out, and I knew I had to get out. But I didn't know how. They had made on such a leash. Every time I'd take a step towards cutting it, it seemed like my mind just… shut down. It took months, Sasha. Months for me to break loose—and even then, I didn't know I was going to do it that night. If you hadn't turned around and seen me. If they hadn't come for you… I don't know where we'd be right now."

Then he finally met her eyes—wide and shining and filled with sad horror.

"I'm a murderer, Sasha. That's why I keep telling you, I'm condemned."

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