Drova
The staging room at Safe Harbor smelled of neoprene, gun oil, and the faint brine that clung to everything on the island no matter how many times the floors were scrubbed. There were other, more pleasant smells, like the laundry detergent scent coming off Brody's uniform and his aftershave.
Brody hadn't been part of the original team that had returned with her to Safe Harbor and had arrived later along with the two Odus and Julian because those in charge had decided that a backup team was a good idea.
They also thought that the Odus would make the excavation go much faster and that people might get injured and a doctor would be needed.
Broken bones had to be set right away, or they fused wrong, and that was true for the Kra-ell as well as for the immortals, even though the Kra-ell healed at a much slower rate and it wasn't as urgent to set their broken bones.
They were also built stronger, and there was much less chance of them breaking anything.
She was much more worried about bullet wounds.
Whatever.
The other Guardians were going through their preparation rituals, some in silence and others chatting with their friends.
Anandur was sitting on a crate with a sandwich in one hand and a tablet in the other, either reviewing stuff for the mission or just watching something for entertainment.
The guy was a seasoned Guardian, and not much fazed him anymore, or at least not enough to suppress his appetite.
Drova's own stomach was tight with pre-mission jitters, and she regretted filling up on too much blood even though she knew she would need the fuel to last her a while.
It wasn't just the jitters, though.
Pavel was on the other side of the room, crouched over his own gear, his long dark hair pulled back in the low knot he'd started wearing instead of the ponytail.
He'd worn it like that at the wedding, too.
She'd noticed then, and she was noticing now, and she hated how much of her mental bandwidth he was occupying.
She shouldn't be thinking about how handsome he looked with this new hairstyle, or how sinuously he moved, and how her mind imagined him moving like that in a different situation.
What she should have been thinking about was the basement and the chests and the two prior collapses that meant the ceiling over their heads might come down a third time while they were under it, but it had been difficult to ignore him before the kiss, and impossible after.
It had been five days since they had sat together on that rock on the beach, since he'd put his mouth on hers, and since her stupid heart had tried to float out of her chest, and in those five days Pavel hadn't said a single word about it.
He'd trained with her. He'd passed her in the corridors.
He'd sat across from her at the briefing table yesterday and discussed dive timing and the structural assessment of the basement.
Had she hallucinated the entire thing?
Perhaps she'd dreamt that he'd asked permission to kiss her, waited for her to close the distance, and then put his hand against her jaw with the gentlest of touches like she was some fragile human girl.
Maybe she'd also dreamt about how much she'd liked it.
Drova didn't know what to do with it, and that was the worst part.
She was one of the strongest assets on this mission, an unparalleled compeller, an excellent fighter, and she was allowing her stupid hormones to hijack her mental steering wheel.
This was not how the Kra-ell did things.
The Kra-ell were brutally direct.
There was no pining among her people, no five-day silences full of meaning and looks full of longing.
A Kra-ell female who wanted a male invited him to her bed, and the male, if he had any sense and any manners, accepted.
There were four males for every female, and the invitation was not something any male was stupid enough to squander. To refuse was a grave insult.
That was the tradition.
It was clean, simple, with no room for confusion. The male was supposed to attract the female's attention by demonstrating his worth through displays of strength, skill, and prowess, and then he was supposed to wait for an invitation.
Only Pavel hadn't waited.
Pavel had asked permission to kiss her, which was a human thing, a courting thing, the kind of thing the heroes in her romance novels did.
And then he'd kissed her like a human, slow and careful, and just like a stupid human, he hadn't mentioned it for five full days, pretending as if it had never happened.
He was so confusing. At times he was talking about the importance of preserving traditions, and at other times he was talking about integrating into the immortal society and adopting their traditions, which were heavily influenced by human customs.
Just a short time ago, he'd talked about taking the good parts of both, so maybe this was his version of doing that. He was taking the human kiss and the Kra-ell silence and combining them into something that made no sense and was driving her mad.
"If you keep sharpening that knife, there will be nothing left of the blade."
She had been so preoccupied with thoughts of him that she hadn't noticed him crossing over to her.
Drova looked up.
Pavel was standing in front of her with his gear bag over his shoulder and looking down at her with that maddening half-smile of his.
"You can never over-sharpen a blade," she said, and slid the knife back into its sheath. "But if you thin the edge too far, it does lose its rigidity. It rolls instead of cuts."
"So why keep at it?" he asked.
"Because the alternative is sitting here doing nothing, and I'm restless."
"I hear you." He sat down beside her on the bench.
The bench was long, and the only other person on it was Brody, who was sitting on her other side. There was plenty of room, and there was no reason for Pavel to sit so close that his thigh pressed against hers from hip to knee, the warmth of him bleeding through the fabric of their cargo pants.
He didn't shift to allow some space between them, and neither did she.
She told herself it was because moving over would have been an admission that he had such a profound effect on her, and that her whole awareness had narrowed down to the line where his leg met hers.
She stayed where she was and stared straight ahead at the opposite wall, where Bowen was explaining to another Guardian how the seals on the waterproof casings worked.
"Eight casings for five chests," she said, because she needed to say something that wasn't about Pavel's thigh, or his lips, or the kiss that he pretended had never happened. "Perhaps we should transport the Odus in them."
"They are spares," Pavel said. "In case some of them are defective."
"I know what they're for, but I also know that the Odus are super heavy, and I saw how they struggled underwater. They are not built for diving."
Pavel chuckled. "Neither are we, and here we are. I hate even dipping in a pool."
She laughed. "Yeah. Who would have thought that Kra-ell would volunteer for a mission that involved diving? I'm surprised that Kian is okay with that. I fully expect at least one of us to panic and surface."
He arched a brow. "Are you referring to yourself?"
"Of course not," she bristled. "I'm not terrified of deep water the way some Kra-ell are."
The way most Kra-ell were.
It was an instinct they were all fighting against. Their dense bodies didn't float, which was why they avoided any body of water that was more than hip deep.
But they'd all trained with the scuba equipment and had learned that it wasn't as terrifying when proper gear compensated for natural limitations.
"Of course, you are not."
Was he mocking her? Or was it his attempt at complimenting her?
She turned her head to glare at him, but it was a mistake because his face was less than an inch away from hers and she could see the faint reddish cast over his eyes.
She gave him a questioning look.
It was the only thing she could think of doing. She couldn't ask the question out loud, not here, in a room full of their teammates. But she could look at him and let the question sit in her eyes.
Pavel smiled.
That was all. He smiled, that infuriating one-corner smile, and he did not look away.
She wanted to punch him.
She also wanted to do several other things that she'd only read about and had no practical experience of, and the combination of wanting to punch him and wanting to do the other things was so disorienting that she had to look away first, which felt like a defeat.
"The briefing's starting," she said, to save face.
It was also true.
Yamanu, who had been talking to Julian up until now, stood up, and he was now facing the room and waiting for the conversations to die down.
"Last brief before we kit up and board," he said.
Behind him, a screen showed the cove and the tunnel and the basement in a schematic that Drova had stared at so many times that she could draw it from memory.
The cove was completely hidden, accessible only from the water or through the tunnel that ran up from the waterline into the mansion's basement on one side and the harem on the other.
Navuh had built it as a private escape route, a way off the island that no one else knew about, and now the clan was going to use it to take the one thing that mattered the most to the Clan Mother.
"With a team of Guardians, Kra-ell, and Odus, we should be able to handle whatever they throw at us."
Someone near the back said something about butlers bowing politely before punching the enemy in the face and then sweeping the mansion's basement clean after extracting the chests.
Anandur snorted. "You'll be thankful for their help when we need to move boulders the size of jeeps out of the way. They are our heavy equipment."
Okidu dipped his head in a perfunctory bow. "We prefer to be called the muscle, master."