Total pages in book: 165
Estimated words: 159487 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 797(@200wpm)___ 638(@250wpm)___ 532(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 159487 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 797(@200wpm)___ 638(@250wpm)___ 532(@300wpm)
Yet here she was, bossing both of them around as though she had been born to handle impossible situations.
Maybe she had, he thought, watching her with reluctant admiration as she got started treating Ravik’s injuries.
She opened the kit and appeared to find several things she could use.
“Okay, big guy,” she said turning to Ravik. “Can you sit down so I can get to you? You’re too tall to treat standing up.”
Ravik seemed willing to comply with his “mate” and he sat on the chair, though he still kept his hand cupped around his shaft. The metal chair creaked ominously under his weight but held.
Severin wondered uneasily how badly he had injured himself there. That was a sensitive area and it might be difficult to treat if his friend wouldn’t cooperate.
Gods, I wish he could understand me again! I miss the old Ravik, he thought and felt an ache in his chest.
The old Ravik would have been complaining by now. Not whining—never that—but growling that a few minor burns were nothing and ordering Severin to treat his own damn hand before it blistered worse. The old Ravik would have made some dry comment about fikka beetles being a poor choice for First Meal or accused Severin of burning thessa mash often enough that he had no right to judge anyone else’s cooking.
This Ravik only sat where Cassandra told him to sit, his cloudy eyes fixed on her face, breathing her in like a drowning male inhaling air.
The sight hurt Severin’s heart. It had almost seemed like the Beast Kindred was getting back to normal last night. He’d been speaking in whole sentences and was no longer talking about himself in the third person. He had remembered humor. He had remembered desire. He had even remembered enough restraint to obey Cassandra’s rules when the three of them were lying in the huge, heated Visskous mating bed together.
Severin’s mouth went dry as a memory flashed through him—Cassandra spread beneath them, her soft curves bared to their eyes, her thighs open as Ravik pleasured her with his fingers. He could still taste the flavor of her honey mixed with the salt of Ravik’s skin on his tongue…could still smell the sound of her moaning both of their names.
He shoved the memory away with brutal force.
No—not now.
This was not the time to think about Cassandra’s ripe breasts or the way she had trembled between them. It was not the time to think about how much he had wanted to crawl between her thighs and taste the honey Ravik had been so desperate for. And it was definitely not the time to remember how right it had felt when Ravik touched her and she invited Severin to touch her too—as though there might somehow be room for both of them in her desire.
Ravik had regressed—that mattered more than the memory of last night.
Just a few minutes away from Cassandra’s scent and he had slid almost all the way back to his former non-verbal state. Perhaps not all the way—he was still speaking, still responding somewhat to simple commands—but the change was dramatic and deeply concerning.
Her scent and her honey can reverse the virus—but only as long as he’s being continuously subjected to them—to her, Severin thought. It made him believe that Cassandra’s body chemistry wasn’t exactly a cure. Or not a permanent one, anyway. Maybe it was more of a suppressive agent. A temporary neurological antagonist to the viral bonding override.
The Hunger Virus was unlike anything he had ever studied. It did not merely replicate in tissue—it rewrote instinct. In the Visskous, it first colonized the mucosal lining around the mouth and nasal slits, hence the red “blood sign” that appeared before the full hunger phase. From there, it invaded the olfactory bulb and limbic structures, hijacking appetite, aggression, and mate-recognition pathways until the infected no longer perceived others as people.
They only saw meat.
In Kindred blood, the virus behaved differently. It was slower—more cunning. Which wasn’t a very scientific assessment, but that was how it felt to Severin.
Ravik’s immune system had fought the virus fiercely at first, producing a flood of inflammatory proteins and cellular scavengers that had kept the viral load low for weeks. But the virus had adapted. It had bypassed the worst of his systemic defenses and gone for the neural tissue instead, creeping through the pathways that controlled speech, recognition, and higher reasoning.
Which was why the old anti-viral serums had slowed the progression in his blood samples but done nothing to restore his mind.
But somehow Cassandra restored his mind—or rather, something about Cassandra did.
Her scent was clearly a factor, Severin thought. So was her taste—if last night was any indication. Ravik had improved dramatically after tasting her honey, and his eyes had cleared completely by the time she came between them. But the improvement hadn’t lasted once he left her proximity.