Chapter 1 #2
“Sorry.” He looks at me over his shoulder, and I shove his thoughts away. I don’t need to hear his self-recriminations too.
“How long have you known?” I look at Shock only long enough to be sure he knows he’s the one I’m asking.
“It solidified last night.” It started three months ago.
That explains how he knew to order fuel.
“You should have told me. We might have been able to prevent the crash.”
Shock isn’t the one who speaks.
“We couldn’t. And besides, we didn’t want to save the crew.” Risk looks at me with a clarity I’m too familiar with. She didn’t get on that ship by choice.
We don’t have to wait for her to wake up for her to confirm it. Risk is never wrong.
Burbling from the screen distracts me, but not enough to make me look away from her.
Risk’s face rarely betrays him, but I see him scowl in my periphery as he grabs the skin patch for her forehead.
“That explains why she didn’t strap herself in before they pushed her out. She’s been drugged. But otherwise, there’s nothing to worry about. She’ll probably have bruises from the landing and be groggy as hell when she wakes.”
I look at Shock. He said she’ll wake up, and I believe him.
“Four hours.” Give or take.
Nodding, Risk closes the panel and pulls out a thermal blanket, draping it over her.
I know I shouldn’t say it, but… “That means we have four hours to figure out how we’re going to keep Drift and her sisters from trying to take her away from us.”
“We don’t tell them she’s here,” Shock says. They’ve already had this conversation. I hear pieces of it in their remembered thoughts.
I look back and forth between them. “They won’t like that.”
Risk shrugs and checks the machine again as Shock says, “You always play the bad guy.” We’re happy to join that farce this time around.
“Her sisters might try to kill us.”
Shock snorts. Jess will want to kill you, but she won’t actually do it.
My brother’s bondmate—the one who hates me, and rightfully so—has wanted to kill me before. I’m okay with letting her repeat the exercise.
Neither object to risking Jessica or Laurel’s wrath. “Alright.”
Risk nods. “We keep her a secret until we know what, exactly, is going on.”
But that’s not enough, so I meet both of their eyes before I add, “And then we let her decide what she wants to do.”
They both nod, and I look at Shock, but I don’t ask him the question on the tip of my tongue. I don’t even want to hear him think what I already know.
There’s no way we can keep her.
RISK
The woman on the table is… soft, despite the glaring colors of her clothing and the dark lines and patterns tattooed on her skin.
We live in a world of hard, sharp, jagged things, and my first instinct is to get her out of here. To send her far away where she won’t be hurt any more than she already has been.
But that’s not possible.
Arc watches her like she’s the last thing tethering him to this planet. Shock has already made too many plans to go back and… once she wakes up, she’s not going to let us send her out of harm’s way.
Chrystal Ardem is an immovable force.
Sometimes knowing things is a curse.
Sometimes knowing things makes wanting them easier.
The desire to keep her is strong… stronger than the desire to protect her from this life we lead and this outpost that was never made to be a home.
Arc isn’t ready for Shock or I to touch her. He doesn’t have to say it for Shock to know too.
Casting a sidelong glance at me, Arc grits his teeth and moves to the side.
“I don’t know why,” he says, answering a question I hadn’t intended to ask.
“You don’t have to.”
“Do you?” Arc asks and for once…
“No. I can guess, but I don’t know.”
He doesn’t like that answer, but his attention turns back to Chrys almost immediately. He smooths a piece of hair away from her face, the diagnostic lights glinting off the hoop in the center of her lower lip. Two others on either side of it… Snake bites, they call them on Earth.
She is soft… but Arc can be softer when he wants to.
I’ve never met another man so large and yet so gentle. He cradles her head like an infant as he lifts her from the diagnostic table. “I don’t want her to wake up in this horror show, especially if something happens and one of us can’t be there.”
He means, if we have to head out into the snow to deal with one of the cavrinskh… a monster that would have killed her in an instant if it had found her before Arc.
She was lucky.
I can’t help but wonder if we were luckier.
“We’ve already set up one of the rooms.”
Arc’s brows twist and I know he heard the truth in Shock’s thoughts.
We got his room ready for Chrys while he was out doing laps of the caldera.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Shock says.
Because all three of us know that Arc wouldn’t have accepted anything else.
“There’s a mountain of blankets, the fire is going in there, and I put a makeshift curtain over the door. It should be warm enough in there for her already.”
Arc doesn’t look convinced. He looks at me. “What temperature should it be in there?”
“To be comfortable for her? Somewhere around seventy degrees.”
Shock holds up his hands. “I promise it’s nearly there. Her body heat and the blankets will do the rest of the job.”
I nod, because he’s right.
“Okay.” Arc carries her back through the house, and Shock and I fix the blankets, helping him tuck her in, but as soon as I’m not needed anymore, I take a step back.
I lean against the wall, watching the two of them negotiate over what will keep her warm but not too warm, and whether or not anything will pinch in this position.
When he’s satisfied, Arc stands back, looking down at her and concern flashes in his eyes.
“You can sleep with me tonight,” I tell him before he can panic.
For the first time in years, he isn’t going to spend the night patrolling the caldera.
She’ll keep him here instead of letting him run away from whatever it is that has made him avoid us even more these last few months.
We stand around her in silence for a moment, and I’m glad that she isn’t going to wake up for a while yet. I can’t imagine what she would think if she opened her eyes to see us watching her sleep.
Arc isn’t going to leave her side, and I don’t plan to make him.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“Why do you ask questions when you already know the answer?”
“Because you deserve to answer for yourself… and otherwise I might not ever speak again.”
He snorts. “Some might think that was a better option?”
“Do you?”
His smile fades. “There you go again.”
“Then I won’t stop.”
We all still again when she moves… just the tiniest amount, snuggling her cheek against one of the blankets with a soft little sigh.
“We should probably call Cindy,” Arc says, but he doesn’t move.
“No.” I voice what he doesn’t feel confident enough to. “We keep her here, we keep her a secret, and we wait until she wakes up to make any more decisions.”
Shock agrees, and Arc sinks to the floor beside the bed, watching her.
I watch him. “I’ll go meet with Breaker and Drift. See what I can find at the crash site.”
Shock nods. “And swing by the escape pod on your way back. There’s a compartment near the base with a bag in it. She’ll want her things.”
“Can you grab my helmet too?”
“Of course.” Leaving them to look after her, I step into my room and pull on the suit.
The others wear it to protect against the cold and the monsters’ claws and teeth. We only need it for the latter.
I pause at the doorway to Arc’s room before I head downstairs, but I don’t pull the curtain aside. I can hear them well enough to know that nothing’s changed in the few minutes I’ve been gone.
Our outpost is several levels carved into the rocky face of the caldera. The bottom isn’t a garage. But we blew out the wall shortly after moving in and put doors and a rolling hatch in it to make it serve the same purpose.
I fly out of the long icy tunnel and into the Zone without looking back, and when I’m finally far enough away, I let myself think something I managed not to let free where he might hear it.
We’ve been losing Arc for a while. I hate myself for hoping she’s what we need to bring him back.
I don’t have to ask my helmet to navigate a course to the wreckage. I don’t know how anyone could miss the billowing plume of black smoke carving its way into the sky.
The wreckage is worse than I thought it would be. Mangled metal stabbed into the ice. If I didn’t know it had been a ship, I might have been hard-pressed to guess.
Drift and Breaker are already here.
Breaker nods a greeting, but keeps his distance.
He doesn’t carry any weapons; his hands are weapons enough, and the electric pulse that courses through them won’t let him operate anything with a longer range.
One touch and a cavrinskh is out.
“Glad to see one of you finally showed up.” Drift doesn’t look at me and I wonder if he even knows which one I am.
Most of the brotherhood have lumped Shock and I together for so long… I don’t think they actually know which of us is which anymore… Arc is saved from that by being enough of an asshole that they can’t help but know him.
Distinction by infamy.
I manage not to laugh as I think about how much he might like that. I’ll get him a shirt that has that written across the chest.
“Looks like a bomb went off while they were in the lower atmosphere,” Drift says.
“Arc said it looked like the nose had been pulled inward while it was still in the air.”
“Where is Arc?” Breaker asks, looking behind me like he expects the other Sian to pop up out of nowhere.
“Not here.”
That gets me a smile. Breaker is one of the few other brothers who likes Arc… sometimes.
“CSS is going to want to elbow in on this,” I say, pretending like it’s a guess. “You may want to get a hold of Riann to jump past the other irritations in that department.”
“Thank you for telling me what I already know.” Drift always sounds annoyed unless Kimba is around to temper him.