Chapter 19
"Raaevik."
He loomed over her, huge and bloody and wrong. But as she watched, the dark patches across his chest and arm softened, colour bleeding back in as the hardened skin loosened and smoothed out. He shrank, the bulk dropping away until he was just... him.
Mostly. Except for the claws. Those stayed out, long and dark and dripping, and the thick blackened scar across his ribs didn't look like it was going anywhere either. But his eyes. The red bled out last, slow, until the violet she knew looked back at her.
Just him. The man she knew.
He’d come for her.
She'd left him a note. She escaped to save his life, and the stupid, stubborn, impossible bastard had come for her anyway.
The relief nearly made her sick. Right behind it came the urge to punch him in his stupid face for not staying where it was safe.
She wanted to grab him, and she wanted to kill him herself for being this fucking reckless.
Then she looked past his shoulders, and her eyes widened.
Holy shit.
The room looked like a bomb had hit a butcher shop. Thick, dark blood slicked the floor, pooling around torn metal and the ruined remains of the—
She snatched her gaze away quickly, not wanting to make sense of those bloody shapes. But even though she wasn’t looking at them now, her brain didn’t let go of the image. The brutality.
Raaevik had done that... For her.
He’d torn them apart with his bare hands. Her gaze dropped. His hands shook as he reached for the restraints holding her down, but he didn't close the distance. He just hovered, his expression pained like he couldn't bring himself to touch her.
Those hands had cracked bone and peeled metal and painted this room red, and now they hovered over her face, shaking like he was the one strapped to a table.
The claws made it worse. Claws as long as kitchen knives, like nothing she’d ever seen before.
.. They dripped blood, and he stared at them like he didn’t trust himself not to hurt her.
"Raaevik. Step back. Now." Thyaar's voice cut through the ringing in her ears, low and ruthlessly calm. Too calm.
She turned her head. Thyaar stood in the destroyed doorway, his weapon lowered but his knuckles white, with a dozen Imperial warriors behind him.
They were scared. All of them.
A male edged past Thyaar, hands raised in surrender. "Sub-commander. I’m a medic. Let me assess her."
Raaevik whipped his head around at the movement, a feral snarl ripping from his chest, as he bared his fangs. The medic froze.
"I just want to help her," the medic said, keeping his voice low and careful. "I need to make sure she’s okay."
“Raaevik,” she murmured. “It’s okay. Just let him do his job, okay? I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere, even if I could.”
A muscle jumped in Raaevik's jaw as he slid a sideways glance at her, angling his body so he didn’t let the medic out of his field of vision either. Then, slowly, rigidly, he nodded. He stepped back just enough to give the medic space.
The medic stepped up to the table. He nodded to her as he reached out to check her pulse.
“Hey there, Emily. I’m—”
He didn’t get any further. His words cut off as his eyes rolled into the back of his head. His body seized. A violent, full-body convulsion racked his frame, snapping his neck and back into a sickening arc. His eyes filled with red, and he dropped.
He was dead before his skull smacked the bloody deck.
The room erupted into an absolute fucking madhouse.
Warriors scrambled backward, shoving each other to get clear of the table.
Someone yelled orders she couldn't make out, and the bio-scanners kicked in with a shriek that bored straight through her skull.
Two soldiers grabbed the medic by his ankles and dragged him back away from her into the corridor.
She just lay there. Stunned, she looked down at the floor where the medic had dropped.
She could still feel the trail of his fingers across her skin as he went down. One second, he’d been checking her pulse; the next, he was on the deck, and his eyes were white, and he wasn't breathing. She didn't even know his name.
Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod.
She was the weapon. Korrait had done exactly what he promised.
Thyaar moved first. He barked something, and six warriors hit Raaevik all at once, grabbing his arms and hauling him away from the table. Raaevik bellowed, a raw, animal sound that split the air, and she saw claws slash across someone's stomach before they got him pinned down.
"Raaevik! Raaevik, stop!" She craned her neck to see him past the wall of bodies. "I'm okay! Don't hurt them, I'm right here!"
He fought them anyway. Three more warriors piled on, and even then, he nearly threw them off, his chest heaving, snarling through bared fangs at anything that moved between him and her.
The medical team didn't waste the opening.
Rough, gloved hands grabbed the restraints and popped them free.
Nobody was gentle. They hauled her off the table and half-dragged, half-carried her toward a bio-containment pod someone was wheeling in through the ruins of the door.
It was a transparent tube, blue light humming along the seams.
"It's okay!" she called back over her shoulder, her voice cracking as they shoved her toward the pod. She could hear him snarling. "Raaevik, I'm okay! Just let them— stop fighting, please!"
She didn't fight them. How could she? She'd killed a man just by existing near him.
Through the glass, she could see Raaevik, still pinned by half a dozen warriors who looked like they'd rather be literally anywhere else. His eyes were locked on her, and the snarl hadn't stopped, a constant low vibration she could feel through the floor of the pod.
"Hey." She pressed her palm flat against the glass facing him. "Look at me. I'm fine. I'm right here, okay? Nobody's hurting me." Her voice wobbled, and she hated it. "Just... don't kill anyone. Please. For me."
Something in his face shifted, and the snarl dropped to a rumble. He stopped fighting, though every muscle in his body looked like it was screaming at him not to.
Thyaar gave a curt nod, and the warriors eased off, stepping back fast. Raaevik stayed where he was, his chest heaving as he half-crawled, half-scrambled to get to the pod, his eyes never leaving hers.
Behind him, Thyaar tilted his head, as though listening to something no one else could hear. A comms unit for a guess. She watched his face change. Colour drained out of him like someone had pulled a plug.
"Say that again," Thyaar said, his voice flat. There was a pause, and his eyes cut to her, then away. "How distant?" Another pause. "No, run it again. Now."
"What?" Raaevik was on his feet, crossing to Thyaar in two strides. "What is it?"
Thyaar lowered his hand from the earpiece. He looked at Raaevik the way you look at someone when you're about to ruin their day. "The medic. He had K'Saan blood. Fourth-generation, collateral line. Nobody flagged it because—"
"Because nobody thought it mattered," she finished from inside the pod. Her throat felt raw. "Until he touched me. Korrait... he did something to me. Made me deadly to K'Saan warriors."
Raaevik went still. Completely, unnaturally still. Then he moved. No warning, no word, just gone — through the smashed doorway and into the corridor so fast the warriors guarding it barely had time to flinch out of his path.
"Raaevik!"
The corridor swallowed him. She pressed both hands against the glass, her breath fogging the surface. He didn't look back.
Gone. Just like that. And she was alone in a glass box with a dead man's blood drying on the floor outside and a room full of warriors who'd just been discussing the most efficient way to kill her.
What if they didn't let him back in? What if Thyaar stopped him at the door? What if whatever she was was already working and he'd collapsed somewhere in that corridor and nobody was going to tell her because she was what had killed him—
A scuffle broke out in the corridor. Raaevik hauled Thraevan through the blast doors by the throat, slamming the priest to his knees right in front of the containment pod.
"Explain it," Raaevik snarled, his claws dimpling the skin of the priest's throat until a perfect bead of red welled up. "Now."
Thraevan didn't look scared. He met her gaze through the transparent wall of the pod, and for half a second something flickered behind those orange eyes. Then his jaw tightened, and it was gone.
"The pathogen adapts," Thraevan rasped. "K'Saan blood. It targets K'Saan blood by proximity."
"She is a weapon," Thraevan said. "The Emperor's bloodline ends with her. The gods will it."
He said it like a prayer. But his voice cracked on "gods."
A warrior pulled Thyaar aside. They weren't as quiet as they thought, or maybe the pod's external mic was more sensitive than they realised, because she caught every word.
"—can't keep her here. When the Emperor arrives—"
"I'm aware."
"She's a proximity weapon, sub-Commander. There is no containment protocol for this. The only clean solution—"
She slid down the wall until her ass hit the floor. She didn't need him to finish. Putting an energy-bolt through her brain was the easiest way to save the Emperor. It was the only logical tactical choice. She'd have said the same thing herself if it were someone else in the box.
Funny how that didn't make it feel any better when it was her.
Raaevik caught the conversation too. Spinning around, he stepped directly between the clustered warriors and her pod. A roar tore out of him, deep enough she felt it vibrate through the pod. His claws descended, long and lethal, snapping out to their maximum length.
"No one touches her!" he bellowed. "Try it, and none of you leave this rock alive."
"No one is killing Emily!"