Chapter 16
She was gone.
Raaevik's eyes snapped open. The room was dim, and for a moment, he couldn't place where he was. Not the barracks. Not the guardroom. The sheets were too soft, too white, and they smelled like—
Emily's quarters.
Memory caught up. He'd fallen asleep holding her… His hand moved across the empty bed. The sheets were cool. Perhaps she was in the shower?
He sat up, pushing his hair back from his face.
"Emily?"
His voice came out rough and sleep-thick. It fell into the silence of the suite and died… Worse, there was no answer.
The bathroom was dark, the archway to the living area showing nothing but stillness beyond it.
“No, no, no, draanthing hell!”
This couldn’t be happening. He was on his feet before the panic fully registered, standing in the middle of the room as he tried to make his brain work through the panic.
"Emily!"
Nothing.
He scanned the room. The crimson dress she'd worn last night was a pool of red silk near the dresser, a stain against the carpet. His gaze hit the nightstand, zeroed in on a single object there. Cream stationery. Folded once.
He stopped breathing.
His fingers closed on the note. They were shaking, and he couldn't make them stop. Eighty-seven years old, a veteran of more combat drops than he could count, with hands steady enough to strip and reassemble a weapon in pitch darkness, and he couldn't hold a piece of paper without trembling.
I'm sorry.
Two words. She'd written them in the careful, neat hand of a woman who'd had time to think about it, who'd lain in his arms and planned her exit while he slept.
The sound that came out of him wasn't a word. It was low and guttural and animal, and it built into a roar that rattled the dresser mirror. The quiet that had held him all night, peaceful for the first time in years while she'd slept in his arms, shattered.
Snatching the weapon's belt off the floor, he buckled it as he moved. Leaving his jacket, there was no time, he hit the corridor running.
The two guards posted at the junction startled. One opened his mouth.
"Sub-commander, is there..."
"Sound the alarm," he snarled, already past them. “The emperor’s match has been taken.”
He didn't wait for confirmation. Didn't care if they followed. He was sprinting at full speed, boots slamming against the deck, the station blurring into streaks of grey and white on either side as he followed her trail by instinct.
He didn't know where she'd gone. But her scent was fading through the corridor, faint, hours old, and pulling him left. He followed it.
The lift was too slow when he called it. Snarling, he turned and hit the stairwell, taking the steps four at a time. He dropped through the levels, the metal ringing under his weight.
Deck Nine. Deck Ten. Too slow…
The lighting changed as he descended into the dormant sectors. Brighter overheads gave way to emergency strips, then to bare service lighting that threw long shadows across abandoned corridors.
His blood howled in his ears, matching the pounding of his heart.
‘Safe in your hands.’ Daaynal's words from the day of the assignment filled his mind. The Emperor had looked at him and said those words, and Raaevik had sworn an oath, and now—
Now.
He smelled it before he reached the bay. Fuel discharge. Engine wash. The unmistakable signature of a ship that had launched recently.
He hit the cargo bay doors at a dead run, slamming the manual release, and the blast doors ground open.
The bay was cavernous. Cold. Industrial lighting cast everything in flat white. Dust lay thick on the storage crates lining the walls, the deck scarred from old loading operations.
He snarled as he whirled around, looking to the end of the bay. The doors were still cycling closed, the atmospheric shield shimmering in front of the blackness of space.
And through the gap, the running lights of a shuttle… Getting smaller.
And… gone.
His scream of pain and fury was ripped from his very soul, bouncing off the walls to ring in his ears.
He'd failed. And the knowing of it dropped through him like a dead weight.
There was movement in the corner of his eye, and he snapped around.
Three, no, four figures stepped out from behind the storage crates to his left, weapons up.
His eyes narrowed. These draanthic had stayed behind.
A blocking force meant to slow pursuit while the shuttle cleared the station's traffic control range.
His grin stretched wide. Obscenely wide.
They were already dead. They just didn't know it yet.
The first one fired and an energy bolt screamed past his ear, close enough to singe the hair at his temple. He didn't flinch. He was already moving, closing the distance faster than any of them expected because they'd planned for a standard warrior, not a male with absolutely nothing left to lose.
Hitting the nearest one at full speed, he drove the male backward into a storage crate hard enough to dent the metal.
The crack of his spine was audible over the clatter of his dropped weapon.
Raaevik took the second in the throat with the combat blade before the male could get his weapon around, and hot blood sprayed across his forearm.
The third fired, the bolt catching him in the ribs.
An explosion of pain flared over his ribs and chest, making him jerk like a child’s toy.
A bolt at that range should have dropped him, put him out of the fight, but he was already moving.
The bolt hadn't killed him, and that was the only fact that mattered.
He jerked upright, massive hand wrapping around the muzzle of the weapon shoved in his face. The owner grunted in surprise just before Raaevik yanked. Hard. The warrior stumbled forward just in time for Raaevik to slam his forehead into the male's face. Bone crunched, and he went down.
The fourth was backing toward the far wall, shaking his head, weapon held in trembling hands. His eyes were wide, terrified.
“Who… what are you?”
Raaevik stalked him, blood dripping from his blade. The burn on his side throbbed, but he didn't care. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but finding her.
"Where did they take her?"
The warrior fired wildly. The bolt hit a crate three meters to Raaevik's left.
Stalking forward, the snarl built in the back of his throat as he closed the distance. It wasn't like any sound he'd ever made before, something deeper and more primal than anything he recognised as his own.
"Where?"
"I don't— I was just told to hold the bay..."
Raaevik grabbed the rifle barrel, wrenched it from the male's grip, and slammed the stock up under his chin. The male’s head snapped back, and he crumpled.
Not dead. Raaevik grunted. Good, he would be alive to talk later.
He stood in the center of the bay, his chest heaving. The shuttle was gone. Emily was gone. He was breathing air that still smelled like the exhaust of the ship that had stolen her.
The hum of the atmospheric shield and the slow drip of blood from his fingertips onto the deck were the only sounds left.
"Report."
The voice was calm. Deep. Absolute.
Raaevik turned.
Emperor Daaynal stood inside the blast doors in full combat leathers.
The crown was gone, his hair pulled back to reveal the link band for the four huge drakeen behind him.
Thyaar was at his left shoulder, and behind all of that, a squad of the Emperor's personal guard fanned across the entrance.
Daaynal's eyes swept the bay. The bodies.
The blood. The burn mark on Raaevik's side.
Raaevik's knees hit the deck. Not a choice. His body just stopped holding him up.
He knelt in the blood of the males he'd killed, head bowed, and the weight of his failure pressed him into the floor like a physical force.
"Majesty." His voice was barely a rasp.
Daaynal walked forward. His boots were quiet on the deck. He stopped close enough that Raaevik could see the scuffed toes of his combat boots.
Safe in your hands.
"They took her," Raaevik said. The words were ground glass in his throat, his voice deeper than it was before. "A stealth transport launched from this bay. I was..." He swallowed. "I was not at my post. I failed to protect her."
It wasn’t the whole truth. Not the confession of her warmth against him in the dark, and the quiet that had settled over him because she was there.
He owed Daaynal that truth, but he couldn't give it.
Not now. Not when every second he spent on his knees in front of the emperor was a second she didn't have.
"They have a ship," he forced his voice to hold despite the rasp. "They were gone before I could reach the bay. The shuttle's transponder will be scrubbed, but I can track the engine signature if I move now."
He looked up and met the Emperor's gaze.
Daaynal was studying him. His expression was still and composed…
unreadable. But then a flicker of calculation moved behind those green eyes.
The warrior-emperor who'd killed his first assassin as a child looked at Raaevik the way he looked at a battlefield, assessing what was left that could still fight.
"You failed," Daaynal said, the words soft.
Raaevik flinched. It wasn’t a condemnation. It was worse. It was a fact.
Daaynal reached for his belt, drew out a dataflex, and unfurled it. "So fix it."
He tossed the dataflex. It dropped against the deck in front of Raaevik's knee.
"The W'Raaith," Daaynal said. "Stealth interceptor. Bay One. Fast enough to catch a transport if you leave within the hour."
Raaevik looked at the dataflex, then back up at his Emperor.
"Bring her back, Raaevik." Daaynal's voice was quiet. "Bring her back, or don't come back at all."
He grabbed the dataflex. Rose to his feet. The burn on his ribs screamed, but he didn't feel it. The exhaustion that had been pulling at him since he woke fell away, replaced by something cold and clean and singular.
He didn't look at Thyaar, though he felt the other warrior's gaze on his back.
He didn't look at the Emperor again.