He was the greatest man I ever knew.
Those were the words Joshua repeated whenever she asked him, as an innocent little child, what her dad was like. She stopped asking after the years went by and the answer just confused her more. Hunter knew of people who searched their whole lives for the truth about their parents, but Hunter trusted Joshua’s words. Up until the day in the lab, that is.
As Hunter stood before the glass, her heart so crowded by emotions that it had no room to move in her chest, she remembered the day she visited her parent’s graves after Joshua revealed how they actually died. She understood how different her life would be if she grew up with them, without powers, with a normal family. Joshua would only be a family friend and not the man who raised her. On that day, she accepted her fate and that she would never know her parents.
It had always been about her mother from then on. How she died giving birth to Hunter. How it was because of the combination of the chemical drug Feucotetanus and the volcanic substance called Ravenadium that she had her abilities. How her mother knew the truth about Joshua, about his experiments, about his demons. It was her mother’s voice that calmed the fire in the warehouse so long ago.
He was the greatest man I ever knew.
But the man lying on the bed, a bed he’d been trapped in for nearly twenty years, could not possibly be her father.
Hunter looked up into Dr. Wolfe’s cruel, oyster eyes. “That’s not my father. He’s dead. He died before I was even born.”
His chilling smile finally sent feeling back into her body and her heart lurched. “I’ll prove it to you.”
She was led with shaking hands out of the little black alcove that still smelled of gravy into the room itself. Hunter hesitated, not wanting to enter. The doctor left the door open. Two guards stood beside it, watching her, ready to take her back to imprisonment.
“He will be moved in the coming days to a more equipped station, where my team of scientists will speed up the healing process.”
That should have mattered to Hunter, but it didn’t.
Dr. Wolfe sighed, as if she were a stupid child. “Come in, he won’t bite.”
Hunter swallowed nothing in her dry mouth and stepped inside. The man’s physical appearance was enough to bring up the empty contents of her stomach. Burns covered every inch of his body. The room smelled of salves.
Dr. Wolfe passed her a file. It was hand-written and very old, containing information about the genetic studies performed on the patient before her. Even if it all made sense on paper, it did not make sense in her memory, nor in everything Joshua had told her about the night her father burned in the fire.
She looked down at the man, then back at the data, but could not comprehend it. Hunter watched the rise and fall of his chest under the blankets, at the flutter of his scarred eyelids and realized she’d had enough. This was some new form of torture. The information was made up; this man was not the man who carried her DNA. This was a lie.
She stepped back. “I’d like to go back to my cell please.”
Dr. Wolfe frowned at her. “Wouldn’t you like to hear how he survived?”
She shook her head. She was about to break, and she could not break in front of him. Not again.
“But Hunter-”
“Take. Me. Back.”
The words were full of passion and anger, words of the fire in her core and not her grief. But Dr. Wolfe would not release her, and he left her no choice.
The only way he would send her back to her cell was if she deserved to go back there. Even worse, he would punish her for it. But perhaps pain was better than being shown a lie claiming to be her only hope of family she had left in the world. Empty, physical torture was better than that.
Hunter found some joy in breaking the doctor’s nose. It was a weak punch and it left her swaying into the guard’s arms, weak from lack of nutrients and light. She didn’t fight back and slumped against the men, her vision swirling. She saw red blood on the floor.
Then the man’s heart rate monitor started to accelerate.
Hunter looked up. In that moment, his eyes opened and they met hers, and it was like a cosmic explosion broke out inside her. The guards gasped and let go of her, for her skin had become so hot that she glowed again. For the first time, the power restraint could not hold the fire in. Dr. Wolfe had a look of shock on his face that she’d never seen in him before, but at that moment, she didn’t care.
Hunter stared into his eyes like staring into a mirror; a wonderful, ageless, golden mirror of the past.
Those eyes.
He was her father.