by Kit Rocha
“Weaker.”
“Dammit, I need more time.” She’d clamped everything she could clamp, and he was still oozing blood faster than she could replace it.
“Kora.” Gideon clasped her shoulder. “Zeke needs you.”
“No. I can do this.” To hell with the risk. She’d never stabilize Jaden with his liver so damaged. So she turned, replaced her soiled, bloody gloves with new ones, and opened her regeneration kit. “This is his only—”
“It’s over,” Deacon said quietly. He was standing at the corner of the table closest to Jaden’s head, his hand resting on the side of the man’s face. Less than an inch from his fingers, Jaden’s eyes stared blankly up at the brick-lined vaulted ceiling.
Gabe closed his eyes and whispered a prayer. Next to him, Ivan turned and slammed a fist into the wall, splintering cracks through the plaster.
Gideon laid a hand on Jaden’s forehead. “We’ll take care of him, Kora. See to Zeke.”
She couldn’t move. She stood there for what seemed like a hellish eternity, locked in place by shock and shame. She’d failed. All her training, all her years of experience, and she’d come up lacking. Inadequate.
People had called her brilliant all her life, but what did that matter if she couldn’t save someone when it counted?
In a fog, she took over Zeke’s care, ignoring Ashwin when he fell into position to assist her. She worked in a daze, her hands moving automatically but her mind still focused on Jaden’s half-open, staring eyes.
It only made her more ashamed of herself. Zeke deserved one hundred percent of her attention, and she just didn’t have it to give. Even when his pulse steadied and his blood pressure normalized, she felt...empty. She started his regeneration therapy, focusing on repairing one thing at a time, like putting one foot in front of the other.
And then there was nothing left to repair, and Ashwin’s hand was on her wrist, guiding her fingers away before she could reassure herself by checking the pulse pounding in the hollow of Zeke’s throat. “He’s okay, Kora. You did well.”
The words pierced through the comforting numbness, and something lurched in her chest, painful and tight. “I need to go.”
“Get some rest.” The gentle timbre of Gideon’s voice couldn’t hide his pain, and the sensation in her chest swelled until it threatened to choke her. “I’ll arrange for someone to watch over Zeke and let you know if you’re needed.”
She turned and stumbled into the blessedly dark back hall. Tucked away beyond the kitchens, where she could still smell the cinnamon and vanilla from breakfast, was a narrow staircase leading up to the east wing. Kora made it up three steps before her knees locked, so she leaned her forehead against the cool wall and willed herself—willed herself—not to throw up.
“Dr. Bellamy.” She hadn’t heard his footsteps, but Ashwin’s voice came from right next to her ear. His large hand settled between her shoulders, a touch as tentative as the word that came next. “Kora.”
“I’m okay.” The words scraped out of her throat, strangled and so far from true that she almost wanted to laugh. “No, I’m not.”
“No, you’re not.” He leaned against the wall, so close she could feel him all along her body, but the only point of contact was the gentle touch at her back. “He was gone before he got to you. No one could have saved him.”
“I know that.” But she’d done plenty of things that no one should have been able to do. She’d been trained for that, to step in when other doctors had given up hope. “I know.”
“But you still grieve.” He stroked her spine. “It’s why you’re so good. But I wish it didn’t hurt you like this.”
“Good.” The laugh did bubble up then, flat and derisive. “What good is good if this still happens?”
He turned her slowly, until her back was against the wall and there was no place to look but him. He filled the staircase, a tall shadow clad in black leather and denim. He looked more like a Rider than he did a soldier, especially when he tilted her chin up and forced her to meet his eyes.
No blankness there. His eyes seethed. “Zeke was almost gone, too. No one else could have put him back together. Death beats you so rarely, it’s all you can see when it happens. But most of the time, you win. You won with Zeke.”
She tried to close her eyes, to block out the emotion surging in him before it could make her feel things, too. Things she couldn’t even think about in a dark stairwell with a dead man’s blood on her clothes.
But she couldn’t look away.
“Say it, Kora.” His thumb smoothed along her jaw, coaxing. “I saved Zeke.”
“Ashwin—”
“Just say it.”
The pressure in her chest eased, just a little, with her whisper. “I saved Zeke.”
“Yes.” His thumb trailed down, blazing hot against her skin as he stroked over the pulse fluttering in her throat. “Say it one more time. Believe it.”
Her knees weren’t locked now. They were weak, and she pressed both hands flat against the wall to steady herself. “I saved him.”
“You saved him.” Ashwin squeezed her shoulder lightly. “Do you need help getting upstairs?”
“No.” Suddenly, she was sure she could make it. That she could do anything. “I’m okay. I mean it this time.”
He took a step down the stairs, bringing them almost to the same height. “If you need anything, I’ll be in the barracks.”
She nodded, turned up the stairs, then stopped. “Thank you, Ashwin.”
It took forever for him to answer, as if he wasn’t used to being thanked. “You’re welcome.”
Chapter Seven
Throughout his life, even in his moments of most profound psychological fracture, Ashwin had always taken pride in one thing. He might sometimes behave irrationally, but he never lied to himself about it.
Tonight, there was nothing left for him to be proud of.
As he used a microdriver to open the casing on the surveillance drone, he tried to trace back to the start of his mission and identify the first lie he’d told himself.
Was it the night he danced with her, when he’d convinced himself that close contact was necessary for him to adequately assess the risk she posed to his emotional stability? Or was it earlier, when he’d sworn to be careful around her?
Had the lie started the moment he climbed into Deacon’s truck, confident that he could alter his plans to accommodate her presence? Or when she’d flown into his arms, and he’d told himself he’d forgotten what wanting felt like?
Wanting ached. It was less and more and worse than physical desire. Physical desire was chemical, simple. Cause and effect. Visual and tactical stimulus resulting in pleasure, and he understood how it worked within his body.
How it would work in hers.
And there was this wanting. This odd, unprovoked tightening of muscle. The low thrum of arousal. He’d fucked women before. Domestic handlers were easiest to deal with when their loyalties were subverted, and since Ashwin wasn’t the type to inspire affection, he’d mostly used pleasure as his weapon. But he’d never felt this...craving before. A desire for someone who wasn’t already in front of him, who couldn’t easily be replaced.
Lie.
Was this how easily delusion snuck in for humans? He’d always imagined they lied to themselves desperately, knowingly, battering themselves against the truth until they buried it under their preferred version of reality.
But here he was, lying to himself about when he’d last lied to himself.
He knew this craving. It had built over weeks and months, hollowing him out from the inside, until not having Kora within reach had become physically intolerable. He’d been half-mad with it by the time the war started. Consumed by it.
And then he’d found her during the final battle. Touched her. Tried to take her away, even though a man was bleeding out under her hands. She’d fought him. Of course she’d fought him. And he’d been so frantic that he’d curled his fingers around her arms so
tightly she must have had bruises for days.
The bruises weren’t the worst part. The fear in her eyes was.
She had always been the one person who never looked at him with terror. The only person who didn’t see him as a monster. And he’d hurt her.
In that moment, he’d known. He’d known. He had to go back to the Base and let them wipe her from his mind, his DNA. His soul. Because if he tried to drag her away, to keep her safe…
She’d break under the fear, and he’d break with her.
Another truth he didn’t want to acknowledge hovered as he pulled out the drone’s circuit board and started untangling the wires that connected it to its power source. He’d never avoided unpalatable truths before. Doing so now, with the proof of it under his fingers, was evidence of his increasingly irrational emotional state.
If the Base ever discovered that he’d brought a drone into Gideon Rios’s grasp, the punishment would be severe. If they found out what he planned to do with it…
Even Makhai soldiers could be court-martialed and executed for treason.
A quiet knock sounded on his door, and he answered without looking up. “Come in.”
Kora opened the door and peered inside. “Hi.”
Wanting exploded through him. He could still feel her skin beneath his fingertips, the racing beat of her pulse under his thumb. Even the pain of looking at her had grown sweeter somehow, a teasing, delicious sting.
For a soldier meant to be free of emotion, he was drowning in impossible feeling.
She hovered uncertainly in the doorway, and the rationalizations came fast and hard. He should invite her in. Seduce her. Purge all this wanting and bind her to him so tightly that Gideon Rios would have his miracle. Ashwin’s place would be secure.
Lie. Lie, lie, lie.
Did it make him more or less rational to acknowledge the lies before he gave into them? “Come in.”
She slipped into the room, clad in simple cotton pants and a tank top. Clothes meant for sleeping, insufficient protection against the cool night air.
“I didn’t come empty-handed.” She held up a half-finished bottle of O’Kane whiskey as she closed the door behind her. “I mean, I stole this from Gideon’s study.”
The label marked it as one of the higher quality liquors produced by the leader of Sector Four. Expensive to come by, but even if Gideon hadn’t been rich, his cousin was one of Dallas O’Kane’s loyal lieutenants.
Ashwin had never developed a taste for liquor, but he understood the appeal it held for most people—numbness. He couldn’t imagine how much alcohol it would take to numb Kora’s emotions. Enough to harm her, undoubtedly. “Do you like whiskey?”
“The smooth stuff? The good stuff? Yes.” The bottle sloshed as she dropped to the foot of Ashwin’s bunk. “But I can’t bring myself to drink it. Feels like cheating, you know—like covering the bar codes. Forgetting, when what I deserve is to remember.”
The self-flagellation was as much a part of Kora as her brilliance and her compassion. It was baked into her DNA as surely as violence and indifference was coded into his.
The only difference was that he knew it.
He pushed his chair away from the desk and extended a hand. “Come here.”
“I’m not feeling sorry for myself,” she insisted. “It’s just that I can’t sleep, and I thought this might help. But then I—I couldn’t actually open the bottle and just drink it.”
“Kora.” He put steel in her name, the edge of command that had left Eden’s military police scrambling to fall in line during his brief tenure leading them. “Come here.”
She obeyed this time, crossing the room with slow steps before stopping just out of reach to stare down at him with her disheveled hair falling into her face. “You’re the only person here who knows me better than you knew Jaden.” Judging from the way she clutched her chest, the confession caused her physical pain. “You’re the only one who might understand why a man is dead, but I can’t stop making it all about me.”
He understood better than she did. Better than she ever could. He knew the truth that had been erased from the Base’s main files and lingered only in secret archives. That Project Makhai had been one-half of a dual-pronged plan to produce perfect soldiers and perfect healers—and that Project Panacea had been terminated when it became clear that perfect healers were unwilling to respect the chain of command above all else.
Or embrace the idea of acceptable losses.
Kora shouldn’t exist. The stress of internalizing so much suffering had driven the first generation of healers mad. The infants of Kora’s generation had vanished. Since the Base wasn’t above murdering babies who would take up resources and provide nothing in exchange, Ashwin had always assumed they’d all been terminated.
And then he met Kora.
Her eyes were wild. Feverish. Even pressed to her chest, her hands trembled. The pain of failure and loss had seeped into her like poison. He grasped her hips and pulled her to sit across his lap, tucking her close to him with her head beneath his chin.
Then he wrapped both arms around her and held her. “Tell me.”
“I don’t know how to stop.” Her voice hitched. “I can’t get it all straight in my head. I should be mourning Jaden—I want to, I need to—but I can’t. It isn’t that I don’t care, I just…” She drifted into silence until a shudder wracked her. “I hit a wall. This place where if I push past it, if I feel anything else, then I’ll explode.”
Ashwin took his time sliding his hand up her back and under the wild tumble of her hair. Brushing her skin with his fingertips sent warning shocks of pain skittering up his spine. Once, during the war, he’d forced a fellow Makhai soldier to inject the torturous drugs meant for aversion therapy into his veins. It had been a last-ditch effort, a desperate attempt to dislodge her from his brain.
It hadn’t worked. Oh, he associated Kora with pain. He associated pain with Kora. But the line between pain and pleasure was dangerously thin. As he curled his fingers around the back of her neck, the heat crawling up his spine melted across that line. Obliterated it.
“Close your eyes,” he ordered softly.
Her hand clenched in his shirt.
He couldn’t tell her it would be okay, and he wouldn’t urge her to trust him. There was only one thing he had to offer her. “You need something right now, Kora, and I know how to provide it. But I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do. It’s your choice.”
She sat up straight, her brows drawn into a confused frown. But slowly, slowly, she closed her eyes.
He’d never had the luxury of simply studying her face before. He traced his gaze over the arch of her brows, down the thin bridge of her nose to the place where the tip turned up just a few millimeters. Down farther, to the full curve of her slightly parted lips, and beneath that to the delicate point of her chin.
He’d never noticed her freckles before. There were just a few scattered across her cheeks. He touched one, and she inhaled, sharp and shaky. Then she sank her teeth into her lower lip and tilted her face to his touch.
Such naked need. All the signs of arousal were there—flushed skin, tight nipples. Shortened breath. The openness of it was a soothing change from the way people hid their emotions behind false smiles and frowns.
All he had to do was touch her, and her body spilled her secrets. When he stroked her, she trembled against him. When his knuckle grazed the spot where her throat met her jaw, goose bumps rose on her arms. He took note of her reaction, factoring it in to his overall strategy.
The first time he bit her, it would be there.
Her flimsy top left her shoulders bare. He touched her there next, dragging his fingers down her smooth, unmarked skin. He noted the ticklish spot inside her elbow, and the way her breathing hitched when he brushed a thumb over the inside of her wrist.
There. That was where he’d start.
Without taking his gaze from her face, he lifted her hand and parted his lips. He knew, ration
ally, that her skin couldn’t taste sweet. It had to be his pleasure at the way her eyes flew open, then half-closed with heavy desire when he licked her.
He kissed her palm. The tips of her fingers. Slow, careful. Precise. Her inner arm. Her shoulder. The delicate line of her collarbone. The hollow at her throat.
He lulled her with soft touches until she was clutching at his shoulders, her breath quickening as she pulled him closer. Her hip rubbed against his cock when she squirmed, briefly diverting his attention to his own state of physical arousal.
It would be effortless to indulge himself. She’d go to his bed willingly. Eagerly. With an exhilarating lack of nerves and fear, because she wouldn’t be like his domestic handlers—bedding him at first out of duty, and then out of eagerness for the way he could make her body react.
Kora would want him.
He could take her to bed and give Gideon Rios the miracle he wanted. A Makhai soldier, infatuated. It would appeal to the man’s religious pretensions, his conceit that love was all-powerful. He’d welcome Ashwin with open arms, and there would be no obligation to choose between Kora and his mission.
The bed was right there, but he couldn’t do it. She had come to him hurting and wounded, recklessly and foolishly trusting him to make it better. It didn’t matter that he’d never asked for her trust, or that he was already violating it in too many ways. By not telling her why he was here. By not telling her who and what she was.
He couldn’t do it with this, not with pleasure. It was the only thing he could offer her that would be untainted by lies, by their pasts and their uncertain futures, by the impossibility of who they were and the world they lived in.
He would give her this. Release. And as long as he didn’t speak, he wouldn’t have to lie.
When she squirmed against him again, he tilted her chin up, found that sensitive spot on the edge of her jaw, and closed his teeth on it. Kora sighed, a sound full of sensual anticipation, and grasped his hand. Her eyes locked with his as she tugged his hand from her hip, up under the hem of her thin tank top, to the bare skin of her rib cage.