Chloe POV:
It felt like dragging a mountain. Every muscle in my body screamed in protest. By the time I heaved his torso onto a patch of damp grass, my vision was spotting with black. I collapsed beside him, my chest heaving, the 1% of life I had left feeling like it was about to flicker out.
For a long moment, I just lay there, listening to the rush of the stream and the frantic beat of my own weak heart.
Slowly, I pushed myself into a sitting position. The memories were still swirling, but they were beginning to settle, to organize themselves. The pain, the fear, the humiliation of the old Chloe was a raw, open wound inside me.
And at the center of it all was Cassidy's smiling face.
"Drink up, my dear cousin. This tea will make you thoroughly 'quiet'—just like your mother, so you'll never be an eyesore to anyone again."
Ice flowed through my veins, a cold fury that burned away the physical weakness. The hurt of the girl I used to be was no longer a passive sorrow. It was fuel. It was a promise.
I looked at my own trembling hands, at the ugly blotches the poison had left behind.
"Cassidy Hayes," I whispered to the empty forest, my voice a raw rasp. "You owe her. I'm going to make you pay for it. A thousand times over."
The vow settled in my soul, a solid piece of iron in the churning sea of my new reality. It gave me focus. It gave me a reason to fight.
My gaze fell upon the man lying beside me. I quiet down now, replaced by the cool, analytical thinking of a surgeon. I need to assess the situation.
I leaned over him and began to unbutton his soaked shirt. The fabric was fine linen, ridiculously impractical for the woods. Underneath, his chest was a landscape of hard muscle, but it was marred by something else. A network of black, vein-like markings spread across his skin, pulsing with a faint, dark energy. They looked like a curse made manifest.
My fingers, guided by a clinical curiosity, reached out and brushed against one of the black lines.A sharp, burning heat zapped my fingertips, and I flinched back. It was a familiar energy, a wilder, more ancient cousin to the poison that was slowly killing me.My System, the fragments of knowledge from The Surgeon, identified the source. Wolfsbane. But his was different. Not a poison ingested, but something woven into his very being. A curse.
His breathing was shallow, his lips tinged with blue. Hypothermia. The curse was probably fighting it, but the cold was winning. If I didn't do something, he would die.
I scanned the woods. No shelter. No tools. Nothing.
I tried to draw on my own energy, to stand, but my body refused. The weakness was absolute.
I looked back at the dying man. An idea, insane and desperate, began to form. He was burning with the curse's fever, while I was freezing to death.
With tremendous effort, I crawled closer to him. I tore a strip from the dry underside of his shirt and used it to wipe some of the water from his chest. It was a pathetic gesture, but it was all I could do.
Then, I lay down beside him.
I pressed my freezing body against his. His skin was scorching hot, a stark contrast to my own icy flesh. I wrapped my arms around his torso, pulling myself as close as I could get. My teeth chattered, my body shaking uncontrollably. I was trying to leech his heat, a human parasite trying to steal a few more moments of life.
The moment my skin made full contact with his, something shifted.
A tiny, almost imperceptible thread of warmth trickled from his body into mine. It wasn't just heat. It was energy. It flowed into my veins, a minuscule current in a dried-up riverbed, pushing back against the encroaching cold. The shivering eased slightly.
My eyes widened in surprise.
The system's voice returned, its tone still flat and mechanical.
I stared at the man's unconscious face. His features, even slack and pale, were aristocratic and severe. He looked like a king. A very dangerous, cursed king who was now, apparently, my personal life support machine.
"Stabilizer?" I muttered, a dry, humorless laugh escaping my chapped lips. "Hammer, my ass. You feel more like a ticking time bomb."
