Stolen By Raze (Grabbed Book 4)

by Lolita Lopez

  After looking it over for a few seconds, he cleared his throat. “I have to start asking you some private questions now. If you’d prefer Raze to leave, that’s your right.”

  Ella had a pretty good idea about the types of questions he wanted to ask her. It was hard to accept that she was never going home again, but she had to be realistic. Raze was offering her a chance at a future that would never have been possible back in The City. He wasn’t after her money or her body or her connections. He didn’t want to use her or hurt her. He was a good man, and he would treat her kindly and with respect.

  “He can stay,” she said without hesitation. Glancing over at Raze—at her new mate—she explained, “You deserve to know everything about me right from the beginning. Just in case you want to change your mind,” she added quietly.

  Raze’s expression turned dark. “I’m not going to throw you away, Ella. I don’t care what you say in the next five minutes. You’re mine. I’m keeping you.”

  She raised an eyebrow at his possessiveness. “I’m allowing you to keep me.”

  Risk seemed terribly amused by the back-and-forth. “Will you allow me to ask you some personal questions, Ella?”

  “Yes.” She hugged the blanket a little tighter to her body. “I’m ready to answer anything.”

  “How old were you when you had your first sexual experience?”

  “Fourteen.”

  Raze visibly stiffened at that piece of information. Risk’s head popped up, his concerned gaze darting from his tablet to her face. Not wanting them to think the worst, she explained, “He was my boyfriend. We were just young, dumb kids. We thought we were in love.”

  “But you weren’t?”

  Ella felt that familiar chill settle in her chest. “I’m not the kind of girl someone can love.”

  Raze placed his hand against her lower back as if to counter that assertion. Risk seemed to understand that she didn’t want to discuss that part of her life anymore. It wasn’t relevant to her medical intake history anyway.

  “When was the last time you had intercourse?”

  “Two years, ten months, nine days,” she answered without hesitation.

  Risk seemed taken aback. “Exactly?”

  She nodded stiffly. “If you knew my last partner, you would understand why I keep that countdown going in my head.”

  Beside her, Raze had gone rigid. He had to have known it was George. Was he imagining all the reasons why she would have that date burned into her mind?

  “And what about other types of sexual interaction? Have you had any contact with other men or women?” He asked the question with the efficiency of a medical person, his tone nonjudgmental.

  Not easily embarrassed, she answered honestly, “I spent the night with a good friend of mine a few months ago. We were intimate but just with our hands. We don’t—we’ve only ever kissed and touched.”

  “Male? Female?”

  “Male.” She hoped Risk wouldn’t ask her the man’s name. She had a bad feeling that Raze wouldn’t be pleased to find out she had spent the night with Danny. It was one thing if the men in her past were anonymous faces and names he didn’t know, but Danny worked with the Harcos warriors a lot these days, especially the SRU. She had seen first-hand the way Raze reacted when he thought Swift was going to take her. She refused to put Danny at risk.

  “I see that you’ve had a high number of partners. I don’t mean to be indelicate,” Risk said carefully, “but I need to know if—”

  “If I was selling my body?” She met his gaze head-on, hers unwavering and unflinching.

  Risk nodded. “Were you?”

  “I wasn’t a full-blown prostitute scraping my knees in a Low Town alley or dropping onto my back in a grimy flophouse.” To most people there wasn’t a difference, but there sure as hell was for Ella. “I didn’t have a pimp. I didn’t walk the corner. I had one client who later became my…benefactor.” She swallowed hard and tried not to shudder with revulsion. “My benefactor liked to share me with other men for favors or money. I received a cut of that…business.”

  Raze’s hand had been rubbing slow, gentle circles on her back, but it faltered upon hearing her tale. It was the reaction she had been expecting. It was one thing to imagine that she had enjoyed lovemaking with other men. It was a different thing altogether for him to learn that she had let other men use her body in exchange for food and shelter and money. She had just been cheapened in his eyes, and she suspected that his feelings for her, so new and raw, would diminish once he had a chance to think about the dozen men who had touched her body before him.

  Risk didn’t make a moral judgement. He simply asked, “Did you ever contract any venereal diseases during your time with your benefactor?”

  “No. He was very careful with me. The other men weren’t allowed to touch me without wearing barriers. He smuggled them in from the colonies.”

  “We’ll run a series of tests on your blood, just to be sure,” Risk explained. “I’ll also need to take swabs from your—”

  She held up her hand. “I don’t need all the details.”

  Risk shrugged and glanced at his tablet again. His brow furrowed with surprised. “You’ve been pregnant?”

  The questions she had been dreading had finally arrived. Ella’s stomach swirled like a pit of broken agony, and her heart raced as she remembered the best and worst nine months of her life. “Yes.”

  “What happened to the baby?”

  Ella clenched the blanket so tightly in her fists that her fingertips went numb. She didn’t want to think about any of this. She didn’t want to remember. Some of it she couldn’t remember. “She died.”

  Her softly spoken words seemed to echo in the exam room. Raze’s hand slid from her back to her arm and down the length of it until he found her hand. He uncurled her fingers from the blanket and gripped her hand as if to give her some of his strength. She glanced at him through the haze of tears threatening to spill down her cheeks.

  “Does she have to talk about this tonight?” Raze asked the question gruffly, his concern for her so obvious. She wanted to lean into him and beg him to shield her from this, too.

  “I need to know some of the details, Raze,” Risk said, almost apologetically. “If I don’t ask today, I’ll have to ask tomorrow or the next day. It’s better to get it all out now.” Risk slid closer on his rolling stool. He put a comforting hand on her knee. Even through the blanket, she could feel the heat of his warm hand. “How old were you when you conceived?”

  “Almost fifteen,” she managed to choke out, her throat impossibly tight. “I didn’t know…. We didn’t think…” Her cheeks felt so hot, and the blood pounded in her ears as she admitted to such ignorance. “But we decided we wanted the baby. Well,” she corrected with a painful laugh, “I wanted the baby. He freaked out and disappeared after…” She wasn’t sure how much to say. “There was a fire at the cotton mill where we worked. He took off after it started, and I never saw him again. But Naya and Danny promised to help me so I wasn’t afraid.” She smiled sadly. “Maybe I should have been.”

  “Did you have any prenatal care?”

  “I saw a midwife when I could scrape together the money or had something I could trade for the care.” Biting her lip, she tried not to cry. “I thought I was doing everything right. I made sure to boil my water first and eat only fresh vegetables and fruit and safe meat that Danny got from a butcher he trusted.” She sniffled as the tears started. “But it wasn’t enough. Everything went wrong when my labor started.”

  “What went wrong, Ella?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said uncertainly. “It started normally. I had contractions for a few hours in the morning. By the afternoon, they were stronger but they weren’t getting any closer together. It was the same thing all night and most of the next morning. The midwife gave me tea to drink, and it started to work. My contractions were stronger and harder—but the pain kept getting worse and worse. The contractions wouldn’t stop. It was lik
e a wave of pain that was trying to snap my back in half. After sunset, the midwife decided to break my water, but it was dirty. She said it was okay, but Naya wasn’t sure.”

  Ella tried to process the flashes of memories. “One of our neighbors told Naya that I needed help, but the midwife told Naya to stop panicking and that women had been giving birth since the beginning of time. She told me the baby would come soon.”

  “But it didn’t,” Risk guessed, his tone deceptively quiet.

  “No, the baby never came. I was in agony by midnight—and then the bleeding started. There was so much blood. The midwife was yelling because I wasn’t pushing, but I couldn’t push. I could barely breathe. And then she left.”

  “She left?” Risk seemed unable to believe that.

  “Naya sent Hopper out in the rain to find Danny. When he arrived at the apartment, he was drenched—and he had the doctor with him. Not a real doctor like you,” she explained, “but a back-alley type. The type that can’t get a license to work in The City.” Ella gulped. “Danny picked me up off the bed. Naya threw everything off the kitchen table and put down a tablecloth. The doctor washed his hands in the sink and gave Hopper a wet sponge to hold over my mouth and nose. It smelled so strange and made me feel dizzy and lightheaded. The doctor had Naya and Danny tie me down. I felt the first cut and screamed. It was like fire cutting through my stomach. The second cut was even worse. Danny put his hands on my neck—and then I blacked out. When I woke up, the sun was shining—and my baby was dead. The doctor was gone, and Danny said I would never be able to have another baby.”

  “A wet sponge? Cutting you while you were awake?” Risk sat back, aghast. “Where did they cut you?”

  Ella touched her stomach. “I can show you.”

  “I need to see.” He stood and pushed his stool out of the way. Motioning for her lift her legs onto the table, he said, “Keep the blanket. I’ll work around it.”

  Raze guided her back to the table and covered her with the blanket. He remained at the head of the exam table, his huge hands on her shoulders. She stared up at him and locked onto his steady, reassuring gaze.

  Risk maneuvered the blanket down to her legs and lifted the gown to bare her abdomen from the very top of the thatch of hair between her legs to just below her breasts. He traced the long, ugly vertical scar there. “Did you have post-surgical complications? Fever? Infection?”

  “Yes. Naya had to steal medication for me.” She cringed and hoped Risk and Raze would keep quiet about that. From what Danny had told her, Naya had gotten into enough trouble up here for her past lawbreaking.

  “We can revise these scars,” Risk said and then began palpating her stomach. He smashed down on each side of her body and then in the center, right over her womb. “How are your cycles?”

  “Irregular,” she said, avoiding his gaze. “When I do have one, it’s very painful. I usually end up in bed for a few days.”

  “And the bleeding? Is it heavy?”

  Her face flamed with embarrassment as she discussed her period with him. “Very,” she said. “Sometimes I get lightheaded and cold.”

  “I suspect you’ll need some corrective surgery for this botched surgical birth. I can feel some obvious issues. Scar tissue,” he said, palpating her belly some more. “A scan will give me a better idea of what revisions you’ll need.”

  “No.” She shuddered on the table. “I can’t go through that again.”

  “I’ll kill the first medic who tries to cut you while you’re awake,” Raze swore. His thumbs moved over her shoulders as he tried to console and comfort her. “We have the best medicine here. You won’t feel a thing during the procedure, and when you wake up, I’ll make sure they keep you comfortable. I’ll use my vacation time to help you recover.”

  And, just like that, Ella knew that being stolen by Raze had been the best thing that had ever happened to her. He was dead serious. He would gut the first man who tried to hurt her. He was going to take care of her, even if she did have a dark and scandalous past.

  Please keep me. It was a sudden, unbidden thought. The desire and yearning to be wanted and loved was so strong inside her. Please don’t throw me away.

  As if reading her mind, Raze leaned down and kissed her forehead. It was a tender, chaste kiss, his lips lingering on her skin. She sensed that he understood what she was feeling right now. Perhaps his Discard—his divorce from his first mate—had left him just as raw and wounded as her.

  “There’s no rush to decide about the procedure.” Risk reached toward a shelf for a pair of gloves. “We’ll schedule a scan in the next few days. I’ll work up your case, and you two can decide what you’d like to do.”

  Opening a drawer in the exam table, he retrieved more medical supplies. “I need to get some swabs. When I’m done with that, we’ll give you the prophylactic dose of meds we give all new brides. It’s to protect you from any strange viruses or bacteria you may encounter up here. After that, Raze is free to take you home.”

  Ella didn’t much care for the invasive exam that followed or the injection that burned like hellfire when it was jabbed into her arm.

  After tossing away his gloves and the syringe, Risk cleaned his hands with a strange smelling gel dispensed by a device mounted on the wall. He picked up his tablet and announced, “I’m declaring you physically fit and approving your status as a bride. I suspect that you can regain full fertility after we revise that botched surgery you were forced to endure.”

  Shocked, Ella blinked a few times. It didn’t seem possible. She had been told that she would never have children and almost ten years of sexual activity had seemed to have proven that true. “What?”

  “That doctor saved your life, but he didn’t have the necessary skill to complete the procedure. It could be something as simple as adhesions impacting your fertility. Or,” he said with a shrug, “the doctor may have inadvertently or purposely clipped your fallopian tubes while he had access to them. I won’t know until we get a complete scan.” Smiling encouragingly, he patted her leg. “We’ll get you fixed right up, Ella.”

  She wasn’t sure how to react. She was torn between crying and laughing. The stress of this seemingly unending night won. She burst into tears that stunned both Raze and Risk. Neither man seemed to know how to react. Risk beat a hasty retreat, but Raze placed both hands on her shoulders and drew her tearful gaze. “Honey, you need some rest. It’s been a long night, and I think you’ve had just about enough.”

  Still sobbing, she nodded. “I’m so tired. I can’t do this anymore tonight.”

  There was a knock at the door, and a moment later, General Vicious stepped into the exam room. He held a white box with folded women’s clothing on top. Setting the box on the exam table, he explained, “These are the bride kits Hallie’s group hands out the night before a Grab. They hold toiletries and other necessities.”

  “Thank you,” Raze said.

  “When you get back from Grab duty, go to the Housing Authority and make your request for quarters in the mated officer section. Until then, keep her confined to your quarters unless you’re with her,” Vicious demanded. “You know what the men in the bachelor section are like.”

  Ella didn’t like the sound of that. Dizzy had explained that the ship’s housing areas were separated into mated and unmated areas that were then sectioned into officer and enlisted areas. She had never been to the bachelor sections of the ship. Venom had expressly forbidden it during her visit, and Dizzy didn’t have access to those areas anyway.

  Turning his attention to her, Vicious regarded her carefully. “Your first night on this ship hasn’t been easy, but it will get better. If you give it chance, you’ll see that life here on the Valiant and as the mate of one of my men is worth the sacrifices you’ve made.”

  Ella wasn’t so sure about that yet. She had left behind more than most women who were Grabbed. She had a thriving career, a small but growing charity and friendships and connections that she didn’t want to sever or lose. Ye
t the possibility of a future with Raze tempted her greatly. He was offering her a life she had never imagined for herself. He was offering a life she had always secretly wanted—to be a wife and a mother.

  After Vicious left, she slipped into the simple clothing provided with the kit. There were also small bottles of toiletries, two pairs of undergarments and a pair of slip-on shoes that had thin soles and elastic sides. They weren’t fashionable, and she wrinkled her nose with distaste at the plain gray fabric of the dress. Tomorrow, she would have to search the ship for better clothing options. She was certain Naya’s shop sold Dizzy’s creations. Surely there would be something in her size there.

  “Are you ready?” Raze held out his hand. He had the half-empty box clamped under his other arm.

  She grasped his hand and let him lead her out of the medical bay. Sagging with exhaustion, she welcomed the strong arm that slid around her waist and supported her during the elevator ride. When they stepped off the elevator, he put a finger to his mouth and shook his head. She didn’t have to ask why. The sound of a woman’s voice in the all-male section of the ship would draw too much attention, especially at this time of night.

  Lifting her hand to the scanner at his door, he seemed to be checking that her newly implanted chip had been properly setup. The lock disengaged, and he led her into his quarters. The lights turned on automatically, but they were dimmed and not too bright.

  She glanced around his apartment and was surprised by the size of it. It was one open room with a single door along the right corner that she assumed led to the bathroom. The kitchen wasn’t really a kitchen. It was two upper and lower cabinets, the tiniest sink she had ever seen, a small cold box and a warming unit. Two square chairs that seemed somewhat comfy sat in front of a nice-sized entertainment system.

  As if reading her mind, Raze explained, “Dizzy and Venom are in mated housing. Those spaces are larger and allotted based on seniority, valor points and family size.” With a shrug, Raze tossed the box onto the counter that doubled as a dining space. “You should see the bachelor housing units that the enlisted men have to share. They’re stacked two and four to a room. This is a palace compared to that place.”