Chapter 14
Danton
He hadn't made a request.
There hadn't been time.
Which the commander should have known if he'd bothered to think about it.
The hallways of the school were long and lit by whatever industrial lighting the Vampyren had rigged when they gutted the place.
It hummed, that light, a constant low vibration that set his teeth on edge.
The humans who'd built the school had lit it better.
Everything humans built was better lit and worse defended.
Danton walked fast, his hand on the girl's upper arm, steering her through the corridor.
She was keeping up but barely. His stride was twice hers and he wasn't slowing down.
Couldn't afford to. Every second they were visible was a second somebody could question why a golden warrior was personally escorting a human female away from the questioning rooms and toward the residential quarters.
She hadn't said a word since the commander's office. That surprised him. She'd been mouthy enough in there. Mouthy enough to get herself backhanded, which he'd noticed. The bruise on her cheekbone was already purpling and it made something twist in his gut that he didn't want to examine.
He turned a corner and another soldier passed them, nodded at Danton, barely glanced at the girl. Good. He outranked most of them. A golden warrior escorting a prisoner didn't raise flags.
Unless someone asked where he was taking her.
His quarters were at the end of a dead-end hallway on the third floor, the last door, the one nobody walked past on the way to somewhere else.
It was a reward for service, the commander had said when he assigned it.
Small, private, quiet. What Danton valued most was that no one had reason to come down this hall.
He keyed the door and pushed her inside.
She stumbled, caught herself on the edge of the cot that served as his bed, and whirled on him.
There it was. The defiance he'd seen from the street, from the back of the motorcycle, from every encounter with this impossible girl.
Her jaw was set and her eyes were blazing and the bruise on her face made her look like she'd already been to war and come back angry.
"What is this?"
"My quarters. You'll stay here."
"Like hell."
He almost smiled. Almost. "You'd prefer the breeding pool?"
That shut her down. Just for a second. She looked around the room — the cot, the footlocker, the single chair, the narrow window too high to see out of. Not much bigger than the cells downstairs but it had a door that locked from the inside and no guards on the other side of it.
Danton was willing to risk it on the grounds that the commander wouldn't think about it. He just didn't care that much. Besides, on his own planet, he was a prince. Here he might be part of the military — all royals served, however briefly — but he could still force them to obey if he had to.
Now there was time to put in the request.
To lie about the fact that she was in questioning while he stashed her somewhere safe. His quarters. Tiny and not good if she made noise.
He thought he could convince her not to. Just long enough for him to bravado his way through it.
"Don't open the door for anyone but me," he said, and the look she gave him could have peeled paint.
"And if you don't come back?"
He didn't have an answer for that. He didn't know if he was coming back. If anyone found out what he'd done, if anyone questioned where the girl from the commander's office had gone, if anyone checked the breeding pool and found she wasn't there —
He dragged her by the arm, wondering what in the name of all the planets of hell he was doing.
No. That wasn't right either. He knew exactly what he was doing.
He just didn't know why.