I shook my head to clear my thoughts and returned my attention back to the Quantum drive’s search matrix.
Loretta had explained that finding clients like Markus was easy. He was infamous throughout the galaxy. His picture was always plastered on the cover of gossip magazines, detailing all of his bad-boy escapades and dangerous behavior. Everyone knew about the youngest heir to the celebrated Alin bloodline. Everyone also knew how reckless he was, and how much he resented his own family. It had been a piece of cake for Lee to determine him as a potential client, and even easier to locate him in the galaxy. Markus was wherever the wildest, most exclusive party was.
According to what Lee had told me, he simply slipped the Prince a business card and waited. Apparently, he’d had to wait a bit longer than he expected to, but Markus had inevitably given him a call.
There were other ways of finding dark tourists. People like Zik, for example. Criminals released from prison who were having a difficult time adjusting to the real world. Evil, unbalanced people who needed a certain kind of release that they couldn’t achieve in their own timeline without being tossed right back into jail.
And then there were others, like Rosa. People who were well attuned to intergalactic gossip and underground activity. The kind of people who were after something very specific, and were willing to pay whatever price to achieve it. The kind of people who sought out the Rogues, rather than the other way around.
Loretta had mentioned a potential dark tourist in a timeline close to mine. A young girl named Ayla, just seventeen years old. She was kind of a recluse, constantly shoving her nose in a book or lifting her head up into the clouds. Lee described her as a desperate, incurable dreamer. The perfect client. Lee also suspected that she was time lost and that she could even turn from dark tourist into ideal Rogue recruit. I had a feeling she was going to be my first trainee, once I got my feet underneath me.
The problem was locating her. I knew her timeline and we’d been able to pinpoint her general location using the Quantum drive, but the Time Agency’s data was experiencing a lag in Ayla’s timeline. A two-month gap in information; for some reason, they couldn’t get the same up-to-the-minute information they were able to receive for all other timelines. Loretta theorized that it was probably because someone in the timeline was messing with the time and space continuum. Because of that, it likely wouldn’t be long until the Time Agents decided to simply destroy her timeline.
It made Ayla the perfect client. Lee would go down onto her planet, another version of Earth, and convince her to pay for a trip. He’d be able to confirm if she was time lost, and if so, would gain another Rogue recruit. Money and followers, that was what drove Lee.
I switched off the computer screen and rested my head down on the table. I couldn’t help myself letting my mind wander to Markus. My thoughts could hardly move an inch without touching the memory of him yesterday. Fighting with me, kissing me and then sitting with me in perfect, peaceful silence.
I desperately wished he wouldn’t go through with his plan. I wanted so badly for us to land in his ruined timeline and see him refuse to leave the ship, or immediately demand that we turn around and take him back to his family. He wasn’t a killer. He couldn’t be.
But, maybe the potential for evil was inside all of us. After all, my violent urges whenever Lee pissed me off particularly badly were hard to ignore. Maybe, in the right conditions, I could even feel the desire to kill him. Markus had lived twenty-eight years treated like the runt of the litter. Unimportant, forgettable, worthless.
It was no wonder he wanted to wipe the cause of those feelings from existence.
It felt crazy that a small part of me felt like I understood Markus and his motivations.
At that moment, the door to the tiny laboratory opened and Lee wandered in. He jumped at the sight of me, eyes still clouded with sleep. It must have been the early hours of the morning at that point, which meant I’d barely slept in twenty-four hours. I’d had a hard time relaxing on the ship, surrounded by an entire organized crime business and creepy dark tourists. Not to mention, a handsome dragon Prince that I couldn’t seem to shake from my mind. It was no wonder sleep eluded me.
“Rough night?” grumbled Lee. It must have been too early for his trademark smirk, and I was thankful for it.
“Just wanted to get some work done on the Ayla files,” I explained, gesturing to the screens even though they were currently dark.
“Yeah, looks like it,” he snorted, bustling around in the corner at the coffee machine. It almost made me laugh. Even a thousand timelines away, floating in between worlds, caffeine drove humans more than anything else. “I saw you and dragon boy on the security cams.”
I rolled my eyes. It didn’t surprise me that the common room had cameras in them. Dark tourists were, of course, always at risk of causing trouble, even on the Rogues’ ship.
“Are you stalking me or something?” I replied.
Lee simply shrugged. “Gotta keep an eye on my investments.”
Sighing heavily, I dropped my head back down onto the table. So, I lasted a full minute without wanting to seriously injure him.
Lee snorted quietly and sat down at the table next to me. “Well, tell me about Ayla.”
Relieved that we’d already moved on from discussing Markus, I switched on a tablet and slid it over to Lee. “We only know where she was two months ago, thanks to the lag. Problem is that she moves around a lot on her version of Earth. She’s a floater, never in one place for too long.”
“Does she have any patterns at all?”
I shrugged, gesturing to a few hotspots of the Time Agency’s data. “There are a few cities she frequents more than others. One in particular, an entire ocean away from her hometown. We could try there first?”
Lee grinned, scrolling through the information I’d spent the past several hours digging through. He was quiet for a moment.
“Ellen Moore, I think you’ve found your calling,” he said, shooting me a sarcastic wink. Lee could tell I was less than happy to be dipping my toes in this particular line of work and clearly gained a sick sense of pleasure from seeing me succeed at something I was so determined to hate.
I decided not to respond to that, and asked a question of my own that I’d been curious about since the moment Lee had introduced himself to me.
“How did you even get started in this business?” I asked.
Lee’s smirk appeared then, snide and vaguely cruel. “Believe it or not, twenty years ago, I was just as innocent and wide-eyed as you. I joined the Time Agents. I worked with the intergalactic agents who destroyed the ruined timelines. Over time, I saw the opportunity in those timelines. I was making shit money, anyway. Breaking the rules just tends to be a little more lucrative.”
Wow. Lee? A Time Agent? Working for the government? I couldn’t picture it.
Still, I was grateful for the knowledge. Survivors stayed alive because they gained every bit of information available and maintained it for future use. Knowing that Lee was once, evidently, just like me, could be helpful. And maybe, just maybe, we really weren’t that different.
Chapter 12
Morality
Markus
Paul and Patty, who appeared to the rest of us as a sweet old couple, turned out to be just as sick as the rest of Lee’s long list of dark tourist clientele. We landed in their ruined timeline overnight, in a world largely dominated by humans.
And then, with the help of the Rogues, Paul and Patty initiated nuclear warfare. Understandably, none of us could be down on the planet to witness it with our own eyes. The bombs were launched from a second Rogue ship not far from us. Paul and Patty sat in the common room together, holding hands and giggling with delight as they watched an entire world burn beneath them. I didn’t bother looking at the factsheet for this one; I didn’t even want to try to understand.
Rosa had barely been seen since she’d gotten her daughter back, so I knew why she wasn’t bothering to witness what li
ttle elderly Paul and Patty were up to in their ruined timeline.
That left me, standing alone in my room, looking down on a planet engulfed in flames.
Ellen came and stood with me, having finally managed to free herself from her intensive training in the command center with Lee and Loretta.
“They’re psychopaths,” Ellen murmured, pressing her fingertips to the glass as she watched, eyes full of horror, as millions of people burned alive on the planet below the ship. Sure, they were due to be erased from existence soon anyway, but a fiery death was still incredibly unpleasant. Even I found it difficult to watch.
“Are you surprised?” I asked.
Ellen shrugged, shooting me a glance and a sad smile. “I guess not. They’re just so…sweet.”
“Looks can be deceiving,” I replied.
I watched Ellen bite her lip. I knew she was thinking about the way my own looks had changed before her eyes, black eyes turning golden, then bright red. Shoulders itching to set free a set of massive dragon wings. I was shocked that she was so willing to be alone in the same room with me again, but Ellen was also unreasonably brave. And determined.
When she saw the light in someone, she certainly wasn’t going to let it burn out.
“So, how’s the…training?” I asked, sitting down on the edge of my bed and forcing my eyes away from the tragic destruction orchestrated by Paul and Patty.
Ellen snorted and sat down beside me. Her legs were a little too short to reach the floor from the bed and she kicked them back and forth idly like a young girl, still chewing her lip.
“Honestly?” she asked. “It’s kind of interesting.”
“Interesting?”
“I know, I can’t believe I’m interested either,” she sighed. “But Lee’s entire business structure, especially the system for seeking out potential dark tourists… It’s so elegant. Really intelligent. It’s hard to turn my nose up at it, even if it is driven mostly by evil.”
“Did you just compliment Lee?” I asked her incredulously.
Ellen laughed, nudging me with her shoulder. “Hardly. But, he is smart.”
I wanted to kiss her again. Properly, this time, and without the scary antics. But, it didn’t seem right, not at that moment. Not with a burning planet and countless people dying outside the window. Not with Lee breathing down our necks on the security cameras, which I had no doubt were also in the private bedrooms, not just the common room. It was the only way to explain how Lee seemed to know everything that went on inside the ship.
Instead, I reached out and placed my hand on top of hers. As if it were the most natural thing in the world, Ellen instantly flipped her hand over and entwined her fingers with mine. The look in her beautiful green eyes thawed my dark, frozen heart just the slightest. Just enough to let a sharp pang burst through my entire chest.
I wanted her. But, I didn’t deserve her. She was so good, so kind, so perfect. And I wanted to kill my family. I was a killer. She was a survivor. We were too different to ever make sense together, and the truth of that was what caused me so much pain as I held her hand in mine.
“I need to tell you something,” she said after we were quiet for a few minutes. The soft silence that tended to settle between us was a kind of peace that I’d never known in my life.
I ran my thumb along the space between her thumb and index finger. “What is it?”
She cleared her throat quietly, glancing outside the window for a moment and then seeming to immediately regret it. Ellen flinched away from the sight and looked up at me.
“I’ve been spending some time alone with the Quantum drive,” she told me. “It’s how they find ruined timelines scheduled for erasure. It’s also how they locate clientele and even potentially time lost people. It’s actually a really sophisticated piece of technology. Lee stole the codes from the intergalactic government back when he was a Time Agent, and the Rogues have been hacking the software ever since.”
My eyebrows shot up. “Lee was a Time Agent?”
“Crazy, right? Lee, working for the government.”
I exhaled sharply. I definitely hadn’t expected that kind of backstory from a guy like Lee. I’d assumed he was the kid of a couple white collar criminals, or the only heir to a mafia fortune with too much time on his hands.
“Anyway, they use the Quantum’s data to figure out where the Time Agents are at any given time, in order to avoid running into them, handing themselves in to the cops, et cetera,” she continued. “And, I mean, I think it’s pretty obvious I’m not the kind of person who’s about to make a career out of organized crime with a bunch of assholes who call themselves Rogues. So, I’ve been looking for ways to cross paths with the Time Agents somehow.”
I listened, not entirely sure where she was going with this.
Ellen shifted beside me to face me better. “I also think there could be a way to use the Rogues’ version of the Quantum drive to send a message to the Time Agents. Some kind of code that would look suspiciously out of place, similar to the type of data that’s flagged in ruined timelines. I could turn Lee in. I could turn them all in. Put Zik back in prison. Paul and Patty with him…”
I froze, my hand going stiff in hers. “So, you’re planning to go all insurgent on their asses? Do you know how dangerous that is?”
Ellen pursed her lips and it looked like she wanted to roll her eyes at me, too. “Yes, Markus. I’m well aware. I’m not new to danger.”
Turning in the Rogues was, of course, the moral path. I didn’t know why I didn’t realize Ellen’s actions after being kidnapped would lean in that direction. She was good. She wouldn’t only want to escape and get her revenge, but also make sure that no one else ever suffered at the hands of the Rogues and their dark tourists ever again.
And she had a point. Zik needed to be put back in prison. Maybe even hanged. Paul and Patty could also do with some time behind bars, even if they already were on their last few years of life. Who knew how many years they’d been wandering time and space, blowing up planets along the way?
But, it also meant that Rosa would be implicated. Sure, she had a good explanation for her criminal activity as a dark tourist; all she wanted was to be reunited with her daughter. The Time Agents would probably give her a slap on the wrist for something like that; the government were a sappy, optimistic bunch.
And me. I’d be in trouble. I hadn’t done anything yet, not technically. We hadn’t even reached my timeline, and even if Lee told the Time Agents the truth about my purpose for being on this trip, it was the word of a creepy criminal against an incredibly powerful dragon Prince. Still, I’d definitely face a handful of smaller charges for paying for Rogue services in the first place and willingly stepping on their ship. I definitely wouldn’t go to prison, not with the type of influence the Alin bloodline carried across the galaxies, but I would definitely be plastered on a hundred more intergalactic tabloids. Not to mention it’d be another talking point at the dinner table; something else for my uncle and older brothers to sneer about over their stupid champagne.
Familiar anger flared within me at the thought of them and what had happened at dinner the evening I stormed away and decided to give Lee a call. Maybe I was having cold feet about killing my mother, but I definitely would enjoy murdering my father’s stupid, pompous brother.
But then it struck me. My uncle had probably felt the same way that I did my entire life. Maybe not quite as intensely, but to some extent. Always a Duke, never a King. He’d walked in my father’s footsteps his whole life, just like I’d grown up in the shadows of eight older heirs. Perhaps that was why he always seemed to be so fixated on me. He saw himself in me and, because he hated himself, he was determined to hate me, too.
Wow. Was I…therapizing myself?
It had to be Ellen’s influence. I’d never been particularly concerned about understanding the varied layers of my family-related trauma. I’d always just been content to react before thinking, get trashed and disappear for months at a ti
me. I had never thought about the Duke as anything other than my asshole uncle who had a penchant for humiliating his brother’s youngest heir at every possible opportunity. I certainly hadn’t ever tried to empathize with him.
What was even more startling was that I agreed with Ellen. I understood that she wanted to do the right thing, but I could also acknowledge that it was the right thing, and that doing the right thing was the preferable option in a situation like this. In fact, it was the best option in most situations. Even if it meant that I would get in trouble, turning the Rogues in using the Quantum drive was necessary because it was good.
Ellen leaned into me, pulling me out of my reverie.
“You’re deep in thought,” she murmured.
“Yeah,” I breathed, resting my forehead against hers.
“What’s on your mind?” she asked.
“Lee,” I replied.
Ellen raised her eyebrows, tilting her face away from mine in confusion.
I shot her a wink. “Putting an end to him, I mean. I’m with you.”
“Really? Seriously?”
I nodded.
“I didn’t expect that from you,” she admitted. “I was prepared to do this whole thing on my own.”
Chuckling, I pressed a chaste kiss to her temple. “I know you were.”
Ellen smiled and shifted closer to me. Carefully so as not to crush her, because she’d always seemed so fragile to me, I placed an arm around her.
“You’re not going to break me,” she joked. “You didn’t seem all that concerned about being gentle yesterday, after all.”
I snorted. “I thought you forgave me for that.”
Ellen nodded. “Oh, I did. But, what’s with the change of heart? It can’t all just be my nagging that’s making you want to become a hero.”
Shrugging, I pulled her in close to me, letting go of my original timidity.
“I guess you just make me want to be a good person.”
A Wife for the Torturer Page 8