Leah rolled her head stiffly on her shoulders, briefly offended by the correction, as if Rae was trying to point out how awful Leah was for making a reference to her former boyfriend in the past tense. This was hardly a time for hostility, and with Leah being completely honest with herself right then, she didn’t want to argue about this. The loss was too recent to dispute present or past tense. “Right. Love. Sorry.”
Someone different. The question made her drop her gaze. “Like me.” Why tiptoe around what they were both thinking? “You’re worried you’ll become like I was. Is that it? Alone. Angry. Bitter. Some days not even caring if you come back to the safehouse alive?” Blue eyes met hazel in the dim corridor. “I don’t think that’ll happen to you, Rae. You still have your son. He hasn’t been taken from you.” She tilted her head to the side, resting a hand on her hip. “Besides that, I don’t think you have it in you to be a bitch.”
A lot of people seemed surprised by Leah’s altruistic actions these past few days. It was odd, seeing herself as a helper instead of a woman who merely stood on the sidelines and observed everything that was going on. Rae’s surprise was not unwarranted, nor would Leah have been offended if the other woman told her she would’ve preferred that a friend had been here to support her instead of someone who’d hated her for so long. “Figured you could use…” Comfort. Support. Something. She didn’t know the right word. “Someone who understood.”
Leah didn’t expect Rae to talk, or maybe she did — it was chatty Rae, after all — and hoped that it wouldn’t be a string of more questions she didn’t know the answer to. She wouldn’t have even protested if all the other woman wanted to do was scream and cry. It was a therapeutic method, at least for Leah it was. “You don’t have to say anything.” Leah didn’t rub Rae’s back in any soothing manner, just held on, a solid grip meant to lend some of her inner strength.
’I wouldn’t wish this kind of pain on my worst enemy.’ Something she’d said to Evan a long time ago. It applied to Rae now, although the woman had hardly been an enemy. If Leah had been able to prevent this in some way, she’d have tried. Lilah had told her they’d been experimenting on undead flesh, but what they’d been experimenting on had been frozen, or so she’d been told. That was the only reason Leah hadn’t argued the senselessness of a group of non-bitten science types working with infected flesh. If she’d known ahead of time that they’d graduated to live subjects…
“Do you want me to walk you back to your room?” Leah hated to disrupt Rae’s grief, but Elliot’s body needed to be prepared for disposal… or whatever it was they did with the bodies that turned. Rae didn’t need to be around when that happened.