BACK TO URSA
Confused, I sat up in bed and looked around.
The decor of the room was timeless elegance and taste, combined with surprising touches of whimsy that only the boldest and most assured of decorators would have ever dared to try.
The color scheme and furniture were all in the hygge style—whites and grays and creamy beiges, pieces that were simple but classic and well-made—but paired with unusual finishing touches, like the faux-reindeer head sporting bright red lipstick, or the bedside lamp shaped with the voluptuous curves of a woman’s body but the face of a devious fox.
Tears sprang to my eyes, because I knew immediately by my surroundings where I was. “Trini?”
If you’ve ever had the feeling of going on a long and arduous journey, you know what it is to come home. I’d never lived with Trini, but seeing her face, hearing her voice, being enveloped in the safety and calm of her presence, was coming home for me.
I burst into tears, holding out my arms to her like a child woken in the night and desperately in need of comfort. “Trini,” I implored.
“Oh, darling.” Trini crossed the room to me, climbing onto the bed beside me so she could pull me into her arms. “Tell me everything…”
So I did. I told Trini everything, everything, from the very beginning. Even the parts that had happened before going to Earth, which I’d never dared to confide to her before.
I condensed many of the details, of course, because I didn’t have months to expound every single emotional beat as I’d done with the Brethren.
Which was probably for the best, really, since I doubt Trini would have had nearly as much interest in hearing about every single orgasm Ursa gave me, or the patience to listen to all of the heists I went on with the crew of the Trojan Horse.
Nevertheless, Trini was a wonderfully receptive audience, I must say. She gasped in horror when she learned the truth of the experiments Rawley had been conducting, then demanded to know why she’d been kept in the dark: “Why didn’t you tell me? I could have tried to help you…”3
And when she learned about how I’d caught the eye of a muscular, virile wildman: “Mina, you dark horse! I always suspected you had it in you…”
She cheered at first when she learned it was Tobago who came to our rescue and took us from Earth to escape Rawley’s clutches. Though she was far less pleased to discover he had a secret husband he’d neglected to tell her about: “I’ll kill him!”4
And then she was much, much less pleased to learn how Tobago had ultimately turned on us in the end. “I’ll kill him,” she repeated, much more solemnly this time.
The most painful part, though, was relating to her what had happened once I reached Haven 3.
Finding Ursa again. Thinking the worst of it was over—that we’d still have to find a way to escape Rawley, but at least we were together.
Then learning he was no longer mine to protect. He was, is, married to someone else.
It was too painful to relive again. I could barely get out the words, and Trini gripped my hand tightly through the telling of it. “So that’s why you fainted?” she asked me quietly when I was finished.
I blinked at her in astonishment. “I fainted?” That would explain how I’d wound up in Trini’s guest bedroom with no memory of coming to her house.
It didn’t explain, however, how anyone had known to bring me here.
“Darling, I was so worried about you when you disappeared from the Earth expedition,” Trini explained to me.
“And of course I didn’t believe that bullshit explanation Rawley gave me about you losing your mind with Earth sickness and attempting to murder him.
Although, after hearing your story, I wouldn’t mind bludgeoning him with a crowbar. ”
Though I appreciated the thought, I thought it best to clarify a few details. “To be clear, I never actually bludgeoned Rawley with anything.”
Trini waved away my explanation. “Anyway, I used some of my connections to put out an alert on you, so that if you passed through port, I would be immediately notified. Lucky I did. I got to you shortly after you’d passed out—from exhaustion, I assumed at the time—and brought you straight back here to recover.
Not without some protests from your, um, interesting travel companions, but I persuaded them it was in your best interest.”
Of course she did. Only Trinidad Llywelyn-Sorensen could take on members of the Brethren of Blood with no weapons and only sheer determination and convince them to let her have her way.
I can’t imagine that Orion, in particular, would have let me go easily to a stranger, so she must have been quite persuasive.
Although I’d mentioned Trini’s name frequently throughout my tale to the Brethren, so maybe that had done something to smooth the way.
Something else Trini said caught my interest, though.
“You put out an alert on me? What does that mean?” Rawley had put out a wanted bulletin for me, and yet I’d had no trouble passing through port—I suppose since, after months of traveling with space pirates, I looked nothing like the wide-eyed, mousy mycologist in the holo image he’d selected.
“DNA matchers,” Trini explained. “I don’t fully understand the science, but the security team I worked with took some samples from your DNA that would ping their system when and if you came back to Haven 3.
” She looks at me grimly. “It’s an expensive service, but not a particularly difficult one. So I think we have to assume—”
“—that Rawley might have done something similar,” I finished for her grimly.
Well, at least the impending threat of an ex-fiance who wanted to murder me might be a nice distraction from everything that had happened with Ursa.
If I had to choose between worrying about Rawley or reckoning with the knowledge that the man I’d given my entire heart to had broken it, I would gladly put all my focus on the former.
And try my best not to think at all about—
“Alessia Octavio Waterstone. Philip’s wife.”
I shook my head violently to clear the awful memory.
Trini must have misread the gesture for fear about Rawley, because she placed a comforting hand on my arm.
“Don’t worry. We have the best defense team in the Havens, along with a state of the art security system on the house.
There’s no way that Rawley can get you here. ”
Now it was fear that coursed through my system, making me shiver just a little.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that Trini was wrong.
I didn’t want to give Rawley too much credit—he was only a man, after all, not some all-powerful god or bogeyman—but if he knew I was here, he would find a way to get to me. Of that, I was certain.
But I supposed I was in no more danger now than I had been when I’d chosen to come back to the Havens in the first place. Then, I’d felt somewhat secure knowing I had some Brethren as bodyguards, but was that really any safer than being behind a first-class security system in Trini’s mansion?
Then another thought struck me. “Where are the Brethren, anyway?” Surely they weren’t staying here in Trini’s tastefully understated but still wildly luxurious home.
She gave me what could only be described as a guilty look. “Well, they refused to leave the Havens until they knew you’d be all right, and I certainly couldn’t let them stay here. Sven is up for reelection, you know. So…I sent them to your house.”
My house? I’d been away for so long that it honestly took me a moment to remember I still technically owned a home on Haven 3. I’d always thought of it as being my mother’s, naturally, but she was gone now. So I suppose it was my name now on the deed.
Misreading my silence, Trini hurried to add, “I made sure to send your serving girl home, with strict instructions not to return until the morning. Havens only knows what they might do to her otherwise…”
Big Red, Jim, Orion, and Redbeard certainly weren’t the most polished gentlemen in the world, but I doubted they’d harm the serving girl.
Other members of the Brethren, however? Almost certainly.
But I couldn’t help but feel a little defensive of my lost boys.
“They aren’t so—” but before I could finish the thought, something else she’d said distracted me. “Why? What happens in the morning?”
“Don’t be mad,” Trini started, which I think we can all agree is never an auspicious beginning.
“But there was such a ruckus happening when I found you—everyone shouting and nearly coming to blows—that I thought it best to arrange a meeting in the morning. After a good night’s sleep to let everyone cool off, we can all have a civil discussion. ”
“All? Who’s all?”
“Those scruffy pirates you were with. The scary-looking woman.” Meridian, presumably. “The bossy ginger.” Alessia. “And…” Trini met my gaze guiltily. “Ursa.”
I felt sick at the thought. Ursa. I would be seeing Ursa in the morning.
Seeing Ursa with her. His wife. It oughtn’t to have been so unexpected, since there was so much unfinished business left between us, and yet the thought of facing him, facing them, was too much to bear.
How could I sit across from the two of them in my mother’s parlor, watch them hold hands and exchange knowing looks, and not fall to pieces?
How could I keep myself from roaring my outrage, my heartbreak, to anyone who would listen—because he wasn’t hers, he was mine?
With no other outlet for my agony, I jerked to my feet, pacing the length of the room before turning back to face her. “Why will he be there? What does he want?”