Page 41 of Red Marked

“You need to take me with you,” she blurts out.

“What?” My frown deepens.

It’s the last thing I expected to hear.

“You need to take me with you when you leave with the Draig females,” she tells me, her eyes on me.

“I’m listening.” I fold my arms. I have a feeling this is going to be interesting.

“Firstly, I want to make sure you are who you say you are and that the Draig females get to safety.”

“And then?”

“I need to get to Mistveil. Smuggle me out of the jungle and leave me there. I’ll be out of your hair. I’ll find a way to save the females living here.”

“Why can’t you all just leave?”

“We can’t!”

“Why?” I ask.

She shakes her head.

“It doesn’t matter. Those are my terms. If you take them, you take me too, and you get me to Mistveil.”

“Not a fuck!” I growl. Is she kidding?

“Then you can leave now.” She folds her arms tightly across her breasts, looking me head-on.

“I’m leaving with those females, and that’s final,” I tell her.

“No, you’re not!”

“I don’t even know why you’re here. For all I know, you could have committed heinous crimes.”

She laughs and then rolls her eyes. “Do you really believe that?”

No, but I could be wrong. She’s very beautiful but also capable. I can’t let the fact that she’s sexy as fuck fool me.

I narrow my eyes at her. “I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know you.”

“I trusted you enough not to kill you.”

“Gee, thanks,” I tell her. “So now I get to smuggle out a potential criminal and set her loose on society.”

“I’m not a criminal. None of us are.” Her cheeks are pink, and her eyes are blazing.

“What are you, then?”

“We’re dead.”

My mouth falls open, and I take a step back. “You’re going to have to explain that. You need to make it quick, because we still have to brief the females so that I can leave with them.”

“Don’t you mean we?”

I laugh softly. “Who are you, Star? Why are you dead?”

“It was all part of a cover-up that happened just over five years ago. Long story short, a medical document was sent to me by accident, outing what the vaccinations were really for. My boss read it and sent it to someone else in our building. Another doctor. He tried to dial out, but the lines were dead. The Wi-Fi too. The next thing we knew, we were being raided and loaded into trucks. The vaccination center was blown up. It was all made to look like a terrible accident.”