They’d given me an IV to keep me alive. I only slept with the help of sleeping pills, and those only worked for a few hours at a time. By the end of it, I was nearly insane. It’d taken me months to fully recover from the whole ordeal, and sometimes I still had nightmares about it.

After that, we all agreed it was never an option. Unless I was dying or severely injured, I was never using them again.

But I was severely injured now. I needed to be able to walk, and Audrey said these inhibitors would work.

Less than a minute after she injected me, the familiar burn started.

“I thought you said the inhibitor would keep me from feeling the nanos?” It felt like little fire ants were crawling through my veins, biting me as they moved through me. It wasn’t unbearable, but they hadn’t found my feet yet.

“You can feel them?” The alarm in her voice was almost comical.

The burning buzzing in my veins moved up my arms, down my chest, heading for my feet.

Thirty more seconds. If that. And then…

“Oh God. I can’t do this.”

I closed my eyes and started focusing on my breaths—not caring about counting. In and out. In and out.

“I can’t do this again.” My voice was a whisper, a plea, to what I didn’t know. But I needed help or… “I’ll go crazy.”

Audrey’s hand gripped mine, and I opened my eyes to see her sitting next to me. “Listen to me. I’m going to get you through it. I didn’t give you many. I was very conservative. It’ll be barely enough to heal your feet. They’ll be done by the time the night is over.”

“Did you lie? About the inhibitors?”

“No. The inhibitors work fine on me, but…”

“But?” I croaked out the word. They were almost to my feet. The readout on the machine started beeping, warning that my heart rate was kicking up, but there was nothing I could do. Nothing anyone could do.

“I can’t do the things that a full Aunare is capable of. Is your other half strong?”

“Yes.” The word came out garbled. A wave of pain rose up my legs. I screamed and jerked on the table.

No one would ever dare to call the Aetes line weak.

When I was a year old, my parents took me to Sel’Ani to have my bloodline confirmed. I was much more Aetes than I was human. My mother did her best to tell me what she knew about it, but I knew that my skin could glow, and I was faster and stronger than a human, and tech bothered the hell out of me and—