chapter 5: hate them to my core

Kael's POV

The knife came at me faster than most would expect from someone who'd just pulled themselves from a river. Sage moved with the kind of precision that comes from years of training, years of survival. Her body was still soaked, still shaking, but her intent was absolute.

I sidestepped the blade without thinking, my Alpha instincts taking over. I could have disarmed her. I could have overpowered her. Instead, I caught her wrist mid-swing and held it, not hard enough to break, but firm enough that she couldn't pull away.

"Sage," I said, keeping my voice level. "You're not thinking clearly."

She twisted against my grip, her eyes blazing with a fury I don't recognize.

I held steady. 

"Let her go," Vex said behind me, his voice cold. He wasn't defending me. He was simply stating a fact—we needed her cooperation more than we needed my pride.

I released her wrist. Sage stumbled backward, still gripping the knife, her breath coming in sharp gasps. Milo had moved to her side, and I watched Sage's entire body language shift as her daughter touched her arm.

"Aunty, do you know these uncles?" Milo asked, her small voice cutting through the tension.

I saw the moment realization flickered across Sage's face—not the realization of who we were, but the realization that Milo might make that connection on her own if given time.

"They were familiar a long time ago," Sage said, her voice stripped of all emotion. "But it wasn't in good terms."

She dropped the knife onto the damp ground between us, the blade landing with a dull thud that seemed heavier than it should have been, and grabbed Milo’s hand with a grip that spoke more of fear than authority. "Pack your things immediately. Now."

"Is this the thank you we get for saving you?" Vex asked, his tone sharp enough to draw blood, his posture shifting into something defensive and coiled.

Sage turned to him with a cold look that could have frozen the river we saved her from. Her eyes held no gratitude, no softness—only the hard-earned wariness of someone who had learned long ago that kindness always carried a price tag. "You didn’t save me out of kindness. You saved me for whatever use you think I have. And I’m leaving with your hair."

"You can’t just leave," Cass said, stepping forward and planting himself between Sage and the path leading out of the clearing. His arms remained loose at his sides, but there was an anchor in his stance, a refusal to let this unravel without understanding why. "There’s a reason you were in that river unconscious in the first place. People don’t end up half-drowned in freezing water by accident."

"That’s none of your business," Sage replied flatly, her fingers tightening around Milo’s wrist as though bracing to run.

I moved between them, commanding my voice to cut through the tension before it snapped completely. The air felt thick with the weight of their fear, our curiosity, the unspoken debts that neither side wanted to acknowledge. "You should keep your grudges for us aside. We didn’t just save you for nothing. If we wanted to trade you for something, we would have done it while you were unconscious and unable to argue."

"I didn’t ask to be saved," Sage shot back, the words landing like a slap. Her chin lifted, defiance masking whatever fear lurked beneath. "So you have no right to stop me from leaving. Whatever you think you’re owed, you can collect it from someone else."

Cass suddenly raised his hand, his expression shifting from argumentative to something far more urgent. The change was immediate as his eyes going distant for half a second before snapping back to the present with sharp clarity. "We all have to leave now, or we’re going to get company." His voice had dropped low. "I just got an instinct to use my power, and soon we’re going to be surrounded by some machineries. They’re moving fast, and they’re not trying to be quiet about it."

Milo turned to Sage, her small face pale beneath the smudges of dirt across her cheeks. "They’re going to catch up to us."  The girl spoke with the grim certainty of someone who had watched this particular pattern repeat before.

"Are you in pursuit?" Vex asked.

"Everything will be fine," Sage said, crouching slightly to meet Milo’s eyes, her voice softening for the first time since she’d woken. She cupped the girl’s face briefly. 

"I asked are you being pursued?" Vex pressed again, stepping closer, his attention locked on Sage with the intensity of someone who needed to know what they were walking into before they took another step.

 I found myself wondering why anyone would pursue Sage and a child hard enough to drive her into a river rather than capture them directly. The question came out before I could stop it. "What did you do to get such enemies?"

Sage’s silence was answer enough. Her gaze flicked toward the treeline, toward the sound that was beginning to build beyond it.

The sound of machinery grew louder through the forest. Metal grinding against uneven ground. Engines pushing through branches too thin to stop them. I could hear it closing in on us from some directions, spreading out like a net being drawn tight.

We began to suit up.

I wrenched the straps of my tactical vest tight, the familiar tension across my chest grounding me as the mechanical growl grew closer through the trees. Around me, Vex and Cass moved with practiced efficiency—Cass securing his sidearm, Vex shrugging into his reinforced jacket with the quiet ease of men who had done this a hundred times before. But this wasn't like those other times. Those other times, we knew what we were running toward.

"Let's move," I commanded, my voice leaving no room for hesitation. "Now."

Sage didn't argue this time. She grabbed Milo's hand and fell in behind Cass, her earlier defiance swallowed by the immediate threat pressing in from the tree line. he terrain sloped upward, roots and loose stone threatening to twist ankles, but I kept my pace brutal. 

We made it perhaps two hundred meters before the first vehicle broke through the tree line behind us.

They had us bracketed from three sides, just as Cass had warned. I pushed us harder, my lungs burning, but the ground ahead suddenly lit up with headlights cutting through the mist like surgical blades.

I raised my hand, fist closed. We stopped.

Three armored transports had emerged, their floodlights blinding us a bit. They idled in a staggered formation that blocked our path completely. My hand drifted toward my weapon, but I didn't draw. Not until I knew what we were dealing with.

The central transport's door opened with a hydraulic hiss, and a man stepped out. He was tall, lean, dressed in the kind of tactical gear of custom-fitted plates, integrated comms, the subtle insignia of an organization I didn't recognize but immediately distrusted. 

Behind him, I saw movement. More personnel, six at least, flanking the vehicles with weapons lowered but ready. Not pointed at us yet.

Sage had positioned herself in front of Milo, her body a wall between the girl and the lights. That wasn't the posture of someone protecting a niece out of familial obligation. That was the posture of someone protecting something far more significant, something she had been told to guard with her life.

But as I watched, something else nagged at me. Milo. The girl's face, half-hidden behind Sage's shoulder, caught the glare of the headlights at an angle that stirred something in my memory. She felt familiar. Not in any context I could immediately place. But the recognition was there. Why did she look familiar?

The leader stepped forward, hands raised slightly in that universal gesture of non-threat that always preceded a threat. "We don't want trouble," he said, his voice carrying easily across the space between us. "What we want is the child over there."

I felt Vex shift beside me, his weight transferring to the balls of his feet. 

"Why?" Vex demanded.

The leader's expression didn't change. If anything, the apology in his features deepened, as though he regretted what he was about to say but had no intention of not saying it. "We don't want trouble," he repeated. "But we can't leave without her. That child holds the cure to the virus."

The words landed like a physical blow.

I felt my chest constrict, my thoughts grinding to a halt as they tried to process what I had just heard. The cure. The virus that had gutted the population, that had turned cities into graveyards and survivors into refugees. The virus we had accepted this mission to find a cure for—the mission that was supposed to give us leverage, purpose, the one thing we could trade for the solutions to our own private catastrophes.

And the cure was a child.

I stared at Milo. She couldn't have been more than seven, eight at most. Her face was still half-hidden, but her eyes were visible now—wide, dark, watching the armed men with a stillness that was wrong for a child her age. She wasn't crying or shaking. 

My mind refused to accept it. The cure wasn't supposed to be a person. It was supposed to be a compound, a serum, something we could extract and deliver and be done with. Something that didn't have a face or a name or a small hand clutching her aunt's sleeve with white-knuckled desperation.

But the look on Sage's face told me everything I needed to know.

 She didn't denied it. Her face had gone very still, the way people do when they've been cornered and they know it. The truth was there in the set of her mouth, the rigid line of her spine, the way her fingers had tightened around Milo's hand.

She knew. And she had been running with that knowledge, trying to keep a child ahead of people who would do anything to get the cure.