by Regine Abel
“Leave, now,” Lorik said, to Hagan in a tone that brooked no argument.
“But…”
“I fucking said LEAVE NOW!” Lorik yelled, pointing his blaster at Hagan again. “You’ve overstayed your welcome. I only tolerate your presence because a Guldan always honors his word. You’ve already got him half-dead. Either finish him or leave.”
Hagan’s broad nose twitched, a telltale sign that he felt offended or humiliated. Resentment burned in his eyes as he tossed the whip at my head. I turned just in time for it to strike my cheek before falling to the floor.
“See you at ten in the morning, Magnar,” Hagan said with malice. “Rest your eyes well, for tomorrow, we’re going to give you quite the show.”
Pretending to be holding on to a pair of hips, he thrust his hips forward a few times. I knew all too well what it implied. With a final glare towards Lorik, he headed for the door.
“His guards are crawling all over the top floor,” Lorik said. “See that you take the secret exit. Enter the same way in the morning. I will not delay the hour of my departure, so be on time.”
Dismissing him, Lorik returned his focus to Mercy’s wounds. With a hiss, Hagan turned around and left. As soon as he was gone, the Guldan went to the counter and rummaged through one of the cupboards above it from whence he retrieved a small bottle. It resembled the solvent Mercy used to loosen and remove her prosthetics. Our captor used it on her arms, nape, and legs, the disguise all but falling off on its own.
Dull at first, thanks to the mental numbness I’d been in, the lancing pain from my lacerated back gradually came to the forefront as I watched Lorik tend my woman.
“Full of secrets aren’t you,” Lorik whispered to a still unconscious Mercy. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have given you that shot. As the first ever Guldan-Braxian-Veredian hybrid, that baby would have been worth a fortune.”
Daggers stabbed at my heart at the thought of our child. My only consolation was that Mercy didn’t know of its existence and hopefully wouldn’t realize what was happening because of her other injuries.
“He will betray you,” I said, my voice as dead as I felt inside. “After they’ve defiled her in the morning, he will kill both you and me. And then, Hagan will return to the Council with your remains, claiming he stopped a would-be invader, unfortunately too late to save me, or her.”
Lorik snorted. “Oh yes, he will try. But I will be ready for him. This changes everything,” he said. His fingers caressing Mercy’s Veredian markings made me want to break them off for touching my woman. “She’s too valuable now to let those savages have at her.”
Hope soared in my heart. If he absconded with her, at least she would survive. Whether or not I made it out alive, my close council, Anton, and the Tuureans would see to setting her free.
Mercy stirred with a pained moan as Lorik applied the last of the healing salve on her back and legs. He released the strap that had maintained her head facing me, then walked out of the room. Mercy’s eyelids fluttered, her face grimacing with pain. Her bloodshot eyes settled on me. Despite the agony she was in, my woman’s eyes filled with sorrow for me as she took in the damage Hagan had inflicted. Even though she couldn’t see my back, the welts and torn skin on my arms, and the blood pooling at my feet, revealed everything.
She deserved so much better than me. I’d failed to protect her and sat here, helpless, while that twice damned son of a krillik beat her bloody. And still, she placed my pain above her own.
“It’s okay, my love. I’m okay,” I said, trying to hide the pain and shame from my voice. “Stay strong. They may currently have the upper hand, but we are not defeated yet. The battle is far from over.”
Empty words in our current situation, but I meant every single one. A shaky smile stretched her lips, and she gave her assent with a subtle nod.
Lorik walking back in kept me from speaking further. He carried what I wrongly assumed to be a long white box until he walked past me and I recognized it as a compacted inflatable mattress. He entered the cage next to the one at my back, and I winced while turning my head to look at him over my shoulder. He activated the inflate button and then dropped the foam-like box onto the floor. In seconds, it began to swell and expand, taking the shape of a thick and comfortable mattress. Warriors often used them on campaigns as they were as easy to unpack as they were to repack, took little storage space, and required little maintenance.
As Lorik strolled back towards my woman, I felt a begrudging sense of gratitude towards him that he would at least grant her that little comfort, and not put her in the Jenuvian Cage at the back of the room. Built too narrow to allow the victim to stand or lie down, causing excruciating pain during long periods of incarceration, punished females used to spend many hours in them following a whipping like the one Mercy had received. I suspected her being Veredian played a large role in this sudden clemency.
Looming over Mercy, Lorik gently took her chin and forced her to look at him.
“What powers do you have?” he asked.
Mercy blinked at him, her eyes glazing over.
“I asked you a question, female,” Lorik said, his tone hardening. “What psi ability do you have?”
“N… None,” she whispered. “Kor… Korlethean fathers give psi powers. My fa… father was Guldan.”
My heart skipped a beat at her lie. It was clever. As the only Guldan-Veredian hybrid—as far as anyone knew—she could claim whatever she wanted without anyone being able to contradict her. However, that could backfire. Without psionic powers, although still worth a fortune, she wasn’t anywhere near as valuable.
Lorik narrowed his eyes at her, torn between suspicion, disappointment and, oddly, relief.
“How do I know you’re not lying?” he asked.
Mercy’s sad laughter turned into a wince of pain. “W… Would I still be sha… shackled if I could free my… myself?”
“Fair point,” he said. “I’m still not convinced you don’t have any powers, but as long as you can’t free yourself, we can get you gloves later. And if what you say is true, we’ll just have to find you a Korlethean. For now, I’m not taking chances.” He pulled a hypospray from his pocket. “Consider it a blessing. You get to sleep through the pain.”
Lorik injected Mercy in the neck and freed her from the shackles only once she lost consciousness. Using great care not to reopen the wounds he’d just tended to, he carried her to the cell and laid her face-down on the mattress. He then proceeded to bind her wrists with shackles similar to mine, linked to a thick, long chain which he attached to the wall. The extra length of chain pooled loosely on the floor by the mattress. He didn’t bother shackling her feet, and exited the cell, before locking it.
Our captor stopped in front of me. Examining my injuries, he whistled through his teeth.
“That Braxian sure had it in for you. I’ve got to give it to you, Magnar. A lesser man would have bled out by now, or would be writhing in agony. Too bad you proved so uncooperative.” He glanced at the bloodied bench where Mercy had been tortured before looking back at me. “For your sake, I hope you die before morning. Your friends have terrible plans for you. If you still live come morning, maybe I’ll be merciful and put you out of your misery before they arrive. Who knows?”
With a sadistic grin, he cast one last look at Mercy, thankfully lost in the oblivion of sleep, and then turned the lights off as he walked out of the room. Bound and kneeling in the darkness, guilt, pain, fear, and Mercy’s shallow breathing my only company, I prayed to the Ancestors to guide me through this time of trial.
And then I started pulling on my restraints to try to rip them out of their moorings. Despite the slim odds, few men were as strong and as determined as I.
CHAPTER 17
Mercy
I emerged from a haunted dream only to reenter a nightmare. The softness of the mattress beneath me felt obscene compared to the lancing agony of my back and legs. My stomach still quivered from the aftershock of the terrib
le cramps that had woken me minutes or hours ago, I couldn’t tell. With no windows, and the room drowned in darkness, who knew whether it was morning or still night.
The metallic stench of blood filled my nose. From the strength of the smell, it must have been spilled recently. Clenching my teeth through the pain, I shifted to the side to try and sit up. Alerted by the sticky wetness between my thighs, my head jerked towards them. Despite the darkness, my Veredian perfect night vision allowed me to see the mess of blood between my legs.
For a second, I thought I’d been violated while I’d been drugged and unconscious, but quickly dismissed that possibility. First, I didn’t feel the kind of soreness linked to intercourse, and second, even if that had been the case, Guldan females didn’t tear or bleed from that. As a Veredian, we also didn’t have menstrual cycles. Only one thing could ever cause me to have vaginal bleeding.
Nooo!
A pain greater than the one raking my back clawed at my chest, and tears welled in my eyes. My child. My first child whose existence I’d not even been aware of. A keening sound rose from my throat. Heedless of my wounds, I curled up in a ball and wept.
“Mercy. Mercy. Do not cry, my love,” Ravik’s deep voice said in a gentle whisper. “We will get out of here and make them pay. We’ll make them all pay a thousand fold. Do not cry, my mate. In time, we shall have another, you and I, and as many more as you wish.”
His voice seeped through the sea of sorrow I was drowning in.
He knows. He knows what we’ve lost.
Had his sensitive Braxian sense of smell told him? Had he already known I’d been pregnant?
But even as these questions fired in my head, my anguish and loss slowly shifted to anger and hatred for Lorik and the Fifteen. They had taken too much from my mate and me.
“Ravik,” I whispered between two sniffles.
“I’m here, my love. I’m right here,” he said, looking at me over his shoulder. He still kneeled on the restraining bench, hands and feet shackled, blood trickling from wounds that should have closed by now. “You must be strong for a little while longer. I need you. We can only make it out together.”
He needed me like I needed him. And they needed to die. I embraced the rage and hatred filling my heart.
“They will pay,” I said.
Ravik smiled, a savage glint in his eyes.
“They will pay,” he repeated.
Muscles bunching and teeth clenching, Ravik pulled on his restraints again. I realized then that he’d managed to tear the shackles free from the bench they’d been bolted into, for both his wrists and ankles. My lips parted in shock, awed by the incredible strength it must have required. Blood seeped from his wounds. No wonder they hadn’t closed. From this angle, it looked like he could get up from the bench but needed to rip out the rivet that secured his chains to the floor, limiting the range of his movements. From the fissuring around the rivet on the right, he’d been working on it a while and would tear it out soon.
A pair of shackles bound my own wrists—different from the ones on the spanking bench I’d been tortured on. Heart pounding, I pressed my right palm over the metal ring on my left wrist and pushed my psionic power into it, seeking within any type of nanites that could be reprogrammed. I nearly wept when the white noise of their presence manifested itself in both the shackle and the chain. My initial impulse was to command them to unravel the metal, making it crumble but I chose a more discreet approach instead, setting the shackles’ locks to open instead.
Slipping my wrist free, I clambered to my feet with a hiss of pain. What didn’t hurt felt stiff, or numb. My stomach roiled, and more blood ran down my thighs. I shut it out, refusing to allow myself to sink into anguish. There would be a time to mourn. But first, we needed to survive.
“I can release us,” I said.
With stiff steps, each movement pulling on wounds and bruises, I approached the cell’s door, my eyes flicking this way and that in search of potential surveillance cameras. To my relief, I didn’t see any. That didn’t mean there were none, but at this point, we’d take our chances. Sadly, a quick look at the locking mechanism of the cell’s door made my heart sink.
“Can you unlock it?” Ravik asked, his voice filled with hope.
I shook my head then realized he couldn’t see me in the darkness.
“Not exactly,” I said. “Technically I can, but not without triggering an alarm. It would probably only take me seconds to disable the alarm but the damage will be done by then.” I looked at his restraints, an idea popping in my head. “Can you get your chain close enough for me to touch it?”
“Not yet,” he said, shaking his head. “But I should be close to getting this one loose.”
“Yes, you are. I can see the cracks all around it.”
The look of relief on his face told me how worn out he was. I couldn’t even begin to understand how he hadn’t collapsed yet judging by the severe whipping he’d endured, the blood loss, and the amount of effort he had exerted so far to get free.
“I’ll make this quick,” he said, resuming his efforts. Grimacing from the strain, he stifled his grunts to avoid being heard outside the room.
“Let me see if I can make us some weapons,” I said, returning to the chains lying near my bed.
I pushed my power into four of the big chain links, ordering the nanites to straighten. That done, I placed the metal sticks they had turned into end-to-end then ordered them to merge. Together, the four pieces had the length of a small dagger. Starting at one of the tips, I issued a command for the nanites to flatten the metal as much as possible. The number of nanites present in the chain being fairly low significantly slowed the process. I might as well have been watching grass grow. Putting it aside, I repeated the process with four more chain links.
Once again, I envied my sister Aleina’s kinetic ability. She wouldn’t have needed all these steps or suffered from such delays, simply visualizing the object she wanted to create and, in seconds, have her power reshape any inert material accordingly.
However, the ability to change the nature of the material—up to a certain extent—constituted a major upside of my power compared to hers. Once the ‘blades’ would be ready, we wouldn’t be able to hold them for combat without hurting ourselves. The first one having sufficiently flattened, I pushed a ‘stop’ command so that the nanites wouldn’t make it too flimsy. Handling it with care, I carved out a handle from the mattress, inserted the blade into it, and then ordered the nanites inside the handle to harden the material. Just as I finished pushing the ‘stop’ command into the second blade, a clang, followed by the rattling sound of chains, startled me.
“You did it!” I breathed out, watching Ravik painfully get up on his feet.
Legs numb from so many hours in that position, weakened by his wounds and blood loss, Ravik put up a good front as he edged towards my cell dragging his chain. He advanced slowly, mostly blind in the darkness.
“Mercy,” he whispered. “My beautiful mate.”
The reverence and love in his voice brought tears to my eyes. His shackled hand slipped through the bars to caress my cheek. I leaned in to his touch. My hand covering his, I pressed his palm even more against my face and closed my eyes, savoring a brief moment of tenderness. I kissed his palm and then pressed mine over the locking mechanism of his shackles. It quickly unlocked. My breath hitched, and my chest constricted, seeing the metal had chafed his skin raw no doubt during his effort to pull the shackles free.
“It’s okay, my love. I’m fine,” Ravik said.
But he wasn’t fine. He had too many bleeding wounds that could be developing infections. If it came to that, he wouldn’t be able to fight properly in this condition. I made quick work of unlocking his collar and the shackles around his other wrist and ankles.
“Check the counter to see if Lorik didn’t leave the healing cream he used on me,” I said, holding his hand, my thumb caressing his knuckles. “Look for painkillers, too.”
Ravik nodded. He made as if to leave, hesitated, then drew my face to his for a brief kiss. Awkward though it was through the bars, it comforted me nonetheless. He rummaged for a few moments before finding a work light on the counter, and then returned to me with his hands full.
“There’s the cream, but I’m not sure what those hyposprays are” Ravik said, showing them to me. “I can’t read them.”
Labeled in Guldanese, I had no problem reading them. “This one,” I said, picking it up from his hand. “It’s a good one, too, and has five shots left.”
Raising it to his neck, I injected him with a dose. Ravik closed his eyes, a soft moan rumbling through his chest at the instant relief it gave him. Taking the hypospray from me, he shot a dose in my neck. I made no effort to stifle my own moan of pleasure as the excruciating pain that had been my constant companion immediately started fading.
I took the cream from him and asked him to turn around.
“Based on the clock on the counter, we should have approximately two hours before Lorik returns,” Ravik said, complying with my request. “The Fifteen will be here at ten, but finding out you’re a Veredian hybrid has convinced Lorik to double-cross them. He’ll come to take you away before then. I suspect it will be around nine, but we should be ready for him as of eight.”
“Sounds good,” I said, applying some of the cream on him.
He hissed, but remained still. We quickly discussed our plan, deciding against him going out of the room to try to get the drop on Lorik. We didn’t know if they had cameras outside, and we needed to recuperate as much as possible before the fight. When I finished with his back and arms, he applied a bit more cream on me, then returned everything to its place on the counter.
While I completed our weapons, he explored the room in search of anything else that could be of use. He found a hose, which was probably used to wash the animals formerly incarcerated here. I considered cleaning off the blood covering me but that would give us away when Lorik returned. With one last kiss, I gave Ravik one of the two weapons and we returned to our respective spots, putting back on the unlocked shackles, and rested while waiting for our prey.