49. Lorken
Lorken
Pain came before sight, a dull, throbbing pressure that radiated from my chest outward until it split my skull. I became aware of the cold steel of the deck beneath me, the acrid stench of scorched metal, and a voice calling my name from a distance. A very great distance.
"Raas." Dawz's face swam into focus above me, his brow pinched and his lips thin. "Do not move."
I tried anyway. The moment I attempted to push myself up, a bolt of fire lanced through my chest and stole the breath from my lungs. I fell back with a hiss.
"I told you not to move." My majak pressed a finger to my sternum, holding me down with little effort. "You were struck."
"My chest?”
"Your arm." He nodded toward my left side, and only then did I register the scorched flesh along my bicep, the putrid smell of burned skin mingling with smoke. "The blast caught your arm as you turned to shield her. You struck the transport hard when you fell.”
It came back to me then, all at once. Athena. The hangar bay. The Zagrath with the raised blaster who smiled before he’d shot. A wave of dizziness crashed over me.
You look so much like your mother.
"Athena." I forced myself upright despite the pain tearing through my ribs. "Her father. That man was her father, Dawz. He took her."
"No enemy ship has left the hangar, Raas." Dawz kept one hand on my good shoulder, steadying me as the world tilted. "None have unlatched from our hull. Zarn has been informed and has ordered every bay sealed until we find them.”
I should have found comfort in that. Instead, unease coiled tighter in my gut.
My brother was brilliant in battle and in a crisis, but he had made his opinion of Athena clear enough.
Was he getting some darker satisfaction in seeing my war bride proven exactly the threat he'd suspected her to be.
But if no ship had left, that meant one thing above all else.
"She is still aboard," I said, and something in my chest eased even as the wound in my arm throbbed in protest. "If she has not left the ship, we can find her. We can save her."
"That is what I have been trying to tell you," Dawz said, though there was little patience in his tone. "If you would stop trying to exacerbate your injury, we can go after her.”
It was only then that I became aware of the others crowded around me. Hal stood wringing his hands while Vallia blinked at me with luminous eyes. Lettie knelt at my side, her painted face uncharacteristically grim.
"You need to stop fussing and hold still," she said, in a tone that brooked no argument, "or you're going to lose that arm before we get you somewhere it can be tended."
I opened my mouth to argue, but she was already unwinding the bright, patterned scarf from around her waist. She looped it beneath my forearm and started to tug it snug behind my neck to form a makeshift sling, when her gaze snagged on my bare chest.
"Well, would you look at that," she murmured, her fingers hovering just above my skin without touching it.
Hal rolled his eyes at her. “You’ve seen plenty of bare Vandar chests by now, haven’t you?”
She shot him a look over her shoulder. “Not with marks that are spreading."
I glanced down, expecting to see my usual marks, but the black swirling lines that had always traced my chest in familiar swirls were indeed spreading. They now curled toward my collarbone and across my shoulders in delicate, looping threads.
Dawz leaned in close, and I watched his jaw drop. "You have mating marks, Raas."
I lifted my good hand and touched the burning skin I'd assumed was hot because I’d been shot. For one dizzying moment I forgot the pain in my arm. I even forgot the smoke and chaos of the warbird.
Mating marks. I had mating marks. Which meant, somewhere on this ship, Athena’s skin bore the mirror of them.
She was my true mate. My heart had known it since the moment I'd seen her image, but now my body knew it too, and had marked it into my very flesh. I could never let her go. Not to her father. Not to anyone.
"Raas?" Dawz's voice cut through the roaring of blood in my ears. "Are you—"
“I am fine,” I said, my voice rough. “I need to find Athena.”
Lettie finished knotting the scarf behind my neck, tugging it snug enough to make me grunt, though I barely registered the pain in my arm. Whatever fire had burned in me before to find Athena was nothing compared to what roared through my veins now.
"There." Lettie sat back on her heels, surveying her work with something like satisfaction, though her eyes still darted uncertainly to the marks spreading across my chest. "That'll hold you together for now. You can thank all my years fixing costumes.”
“Thank you,” I said, as I forced myself to my feet.
My legs held, though my head spun and my vision pulsed black at the edges before sharpening again. Nothing mattered but finding Athena. Nothing had ever mattered more.
I lurched toward the mouth of the transport, my majak close at my heels, ready to catch me if my legs betrayed me again. But when I emerged into the hangar bay, there was no sign of her.
Bile rose thick and bitter in my throat. Every instinct screaming through the marks now blooming across my skin drove me forward. I broke into a run, ignoring the fresh shriek of pain from my wounded arm and tearing through the chaos of the hangar bay and storming desperately through the ship.
She was mine to protect, and I would tear the warbird apart plate by plate before I let anyone, even her own father, take her from me.