Dragon's Revenge (The Dragon Corps Book 4)

by Natalie Grey

  She could. She could do it now. In the few minutes she’d been alone, she had worked her boots off and kicked them across the room. The charge she had left in her implants could fry the floor if she wanted, and take him with it; he did not have rubber in the soles of his shoes.

  Disconcertingly, she found that she did not want to die.

  “I want to know why you did it.” It was true. Her eyes tracked him as he walked in front of her. “What were you going to say when you called me home the first time?”

  He stopped, facing her. “Do you know what Ymir was when I found it?”

  She shook her head.

  “A circle of hovels and a dirt spaceport,” he spat. “On top of one of the richest mines in the galaxy.”

  “So, naturally you had to enslave them. Now it all makes sense.”

  “I would have made them rich if they hadn’t fought. I have always made those who served me rich.”

  “Perhaps they wanted more from life than to serve you.”

  “What they were doing wasn’t living. They said they wanted to be left alone. I came to offer them the world and they told me to go.” He sneered. “They told me I would never get my hands on the mines.”

  “And?” She did not want to know, but she had to.

  “What do you think? You know how the story ends.” He adjusted his cuffs, a gesture for a different place and time, one of the parts of his mask that had become ingrained. His deception was habit. Who was he, really? His eyes gave no clues, and his mouth curved in a smile that was far from warm.

  “I see.”

  Her answer sparked his anger. “You think to judge me? You?”

  “Because I kill people, you mean?” She did not flinch from it—indeed, she felt herself smile. “Yes, I think I can still judge you. Like Talon does. Is that why you hate him so much?”

  “He’s nothing,” Aleksandr spat.

  “He’s a Dragon. That’s not nothing.”

  “Like every one of those sorry fools, he lives in a cage of his own making—and he wants us to join him in it.”

  “I take it you mean morals. And if you hate cages so much, what did you think would happen when you built one on Ymir?”

  “They were living in mansions compared to what they’d had before!”

  “And you kept them imprisoned! You took away the one thing humans can never stand to lose, don’t you see?”

  “I’m the one who was kept in a cage!” His rage spilled out at last. He could not keep himself away any longer. His hands were clenched, his face white. “I was the one kept back my whole life by the petty moralizing of the rest. I was the one who saw the greater good, and I created it. I made Ymir from nothing!”

  “There’s a difference,” Tera observed quietly, “between choosing the greatest good without regret, and pursuing your own ends.”

  He stepped back. A muscle in his jaw was twitching and he straightened his cuffs again, jerkily. His voice, when he spoke, was ugly. “I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

  “So where does that leave us?” She stared him down. “I was too scared before to hear your answer to my question, but since we’re here … what will you do if I never agree? What will you do when you find out I was the one who grounded your ship on Ymir, that I was the one who killed Julian, that I was the one who paid your mercenaries on the planet to stand down—and that I thought my father would be proud of that?”

  His hand clenched, and she knew without asking that he wanted to take the gun at his hip and shoot her through the heart. It was what he should do. They both knew it. There was no avoiding the fact that she was more dangerous to him than anyone else in this world. Instead, to her surprise, he left, the door slamming in his wake.

  She waited there as the seconds crept by. She wondered if he would take the oxygen, or pump poison into the room. It took several long minutes for her to face the truth: he was not going to kill her. Which meant she had an option she had never wanted. She let her head drop back and waited for certainty to come to her.

  And it did, in a rush: it was her, or Talon. As a thud echoed through the ship, a thud that sounded suspiciously like a ship docking, she realized there was no time to make it more complicated than that.

  There was only one thing for it, then. She looked up to where the chain was secured and smiled grimly. She’d tested her first implants fully, measuring herself against other enhanced humans, the best of the best. But she’d had no one to try her second set with. She’d had the courage to upgrade herself, and then she spent the next years running from it, unable to take the final step.

  She was done pretending. She reached up, braced her feet as wide as she could, and hauled with all her might. The casing and the chain came down with a screech of metal and the tearing of machinery, and before she could stop herself with thoughts of the pain, Tera jerked her wrists apart. The chain holding the cuffs snapped and the heavier chain that had held them thudded to the floor with a satisfying thud. Tera looked around herself, chest heaving, blood running from the lacerations on her wrists. She had over-extended herself, the implants sending wild impulses trembling through her muscles, and she did not care. She did not feel the pain she knew was lingering there.

  She felt wonderful.

  She strode to the door that led out into the hallway and hauled it open, stepping barefoot into the setting for her last fight. There was no fear left, even as the seven former Dragons in the hallway turned to look at her.

  “You should leave this ship,” Tera told them simply.

  They laughed at her. She did not smile. She took the gun out of its holster and fired, the first three shots echoing through the ship before a single one of them had time to lift their weapons, and then she was running, sliding under shots that were aimed at the space she had just occupied.

  37

  The airlock opened in a hiss onto the silent ship. The Blad was dimly lit, pale greys and blues and the filtered light that came through windows on the top of the ship. Expensive. Ostentatious. They could just have blown the windows out and vented the damned thing.

  Talon wasn’t ready to admit to himself yet why he hadn’t done that.

  The Dragons came down the gangway cautiously into the exposed hallway. No movement in either direction. It could not have more clearly been a trap if someone had set up a flashing sign. Goddammit. Well, they hadn’t exactly been subtle. He supposed this was what they got. They fanned out in two directions at his signal, moving down the hallway to provide what little cover they could to one another.

  It was just a matter of time, and about halfway down the corridor on either side was when the trap was sprung. Former Dragons appeared out of side corridors, their shots precise, their formations familiar—and deadly. Talon dropped into a crouch as his soldiers launched into action. He did not need to call commands. They knew them, and he watched with grim satisfaction as they brought down their opponents.

  I pay attention to the ones that leave, he remembered telling Cade, sometime in another life. Because I meet them in dark alleyways. And I kill them, because I’m better. Normally they left in ones and twos. These had left in a group, defecting from all over the Dragon Corps, and he had gone out of the way not to learn their names. He needed to shoot without thinking. They weren’t full Dragons, but they were still dangerous as hell.

  He moved mechanically, firing and reloading as the corridors filled with smoke, and when it was over at last, he was surprised to discover the sweat on his skin and the labored sound of his own breath.

  “Report.” Tell me who’s gone. He closed his eyes and prayed to a God he had always hoped existed.

  The silence told him that his prayers were too late. And then Esu spoke from one side of him. “Meph.”

  “Sphinx,” came Tersi’s voice, raw and broken. Talon looked over at the pain and the telling gurgle in his comrade’s voice, and saw the blood running over Tersi hands. He stood with one hand pressed to his side, his face white. Beside him….

  “Get bac
k to the Ariane,” Talon told Tersi.

  Tersi only shook his head, and Talon did not have it in him to argue.

  “Leave them for now,” he said quietly. “We have to move. Nyx, head the second team.”

  “Yes, sir.” They were gone in a moment, moving quietly, and Talon led the first group down the hallway without looking down at the bodies he stepped over. He did not want to know which faces he would see.

  The next group that rushed them was sloppy, hired mercenaries who were clearly terrified to see Dragons coming out of the smoke at them. Talon’s team took what cover they could, but it wasn’t necessary. Their shots were quick and accurate, and the mercenaries crumpled to the ground one by one. They were nearly the best, Talon thought dispassionately. Only not quite. Money couldn’t buy the best.

  For the first time in his life, he was questioning what he was. Who he killed. Every person he killed before had been a known quantity in some way. The weight others felt on their souls, the weight that drove soldiers like Cade to leave the Corps altogether, had never troubled Talon’s sleep. This time, even wading into the lair of a man who had enslaved thousands, Talon could not help but feel a flutter of distress. He swallowed as they went past the next set of bodies. Young, they were all far too young. He swallowed and said another prayer.

  “Boss.” It was Nyx’s voice. “You should come find us. Leave your group to go on.”

  Talon had learned long ago not to question Nyx when she said should. He looked around. “Aegis, take command.”

  “Sir.” Aegis saluted and the group moved away, leaving Talon the unenviable task of going back through two battlegrounds and past the bodies of his teammates.

  The sound of gunfire guided him, though it trailed off quickly enough. He could hear the ship creaking as it drifted, and he saw the bulk of the Ariane docked above, her hull streaked with carbon. Whoever survived this was going to have a hell of a time getting back to civilization. When he rounded the corner to the second group of Dragons, he found them crouched behind cover, weapons up, watching. Waiting. Beyond them…

  Nyx had said Tera was a cyborg, and Talon had not doubted her. The woman was, to his trained eye, fast and strong. Few women could best Talon in sparring, but he had known enough of them that he had not questioned it when she won in the armory those weeks ago. He should have, he realized now. It had not been guile that enabled her to win against him, as it was with Nyx. Tera, talented and quick in her own right, was enhanced in ways he had never seen.

  The rest of Soras’s pet Dragons were ranged around her in a tight circle. They were well trained, but they had nothing on her. In this confrontation, Talon saw echoes of the cargo bay on Akintola Station. Her opponents stumbled, hesitated. They were frightened of the figure who lashed out with preternatural speed and grace, her strikes shattering bones. Tera fought like a woman possessed, her movements too quick for the naked eye to follow.

  There were, however, enough of them. Talon shook, his hands on his weapon as he watched some of the men and women he had trained fall back and raise their guns. They knew arithmetic, and they knew that shooting at their own soldiers was a less risky proposition than letting Tera continue to fight.

  Talon’s gun rose by instinct and nothing more. The first Dragon took a shot to the throat and Talon went sideways to pick off the second. The third hesitated a moment too long, the barrel of her weapon jerking between Talon and Tera. She went down without a sound and Tera turned to crush the throat of her last opponent.

  When Tera looked up, her chest was heaving. Blood ran down over her hands, disconcerting; when she drew the back of one hand over her forehead to get the sweat, it left a smear of bright red, and Talon saw that the blood was her own, dripping from her wrists. She had broken the chain between whatever cuffs Soras had her held in. She took in the dead bodies behind her and Talon’s raised weapon.

  At the sight of her, he thought his heart was going to fracture in his chest. He meant to tell his group to move on. The words that came out of his mouth, however, were:

  “Why did you go?” He thought he had known at the time. Now he saw that he knew nothing. The raw tumble of emotions in her eyes too closely mirrored his own.

  “I thought you were going to kill me,” she told him simply. Her eyes tracked him as he walked closer to her, the Dragons falling back. “Talon…”

  “Yes?” The sound of his name had stirred too much in his chest for him to manage anything more.

  “Were you?”

  “No.” He wanted to take her in his arms, but he could not move. “I believed you. But I would have done the same in your place.”

  “It would have been the logical move to kill me,” she said, and her voice was very small. “I know that. You don’t need to deny it because you think I won’t understand.”

  The sound that came out of him was half laugh, half sob. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not exactly logical when it comes to you.”

  She moved before any of them had time to react, crossing the space in three running steps, and she collided with him with her arms around him and her face buried in his neck, and with that reckless half-laugh he ached to remember, she dragged his head down to hers for a kiss.

  “I thought I was never going to see you again,” she whispered. “And why are you here, Talon? Leave. He wants to see you die. I’ll do this.”

  He reached up to take one of her hands. “I’d say the same thing to you, but I know you wouldn’t listen.”

  And, because he knew this might be the end, he kissed her again.

  38

  His hands were at her face, holding her as he kissed her back. She could feel the release in his body, the fear draining away—that they would never see one another again; that it would be worse if they did.

  It would not. They were here. They were still alive. She gasped at the sweetness of his kiss and the way his hand splayed against her lower back, drawing her close. He felt over the outline of the knife hidden along her back and smiled against her mouth, and she opened her eyes to watch him.

  “I think I can get the handcuffs off, you know.” His voice was husky. He took her arms from around him to examine the cuffs still at her wrists. He paused when she winced.

  She held herself back from wincing again as he used his own knife to break the locks. Metal grated against broken skin and she felt the blood trickling, fresh and hot, over the wounds. But the pain seemed very distant, somewhere beyond the solid reality of his presence.

  “You should go,” she said again, quietly. She knew he was not going to, but she said it anyway.

  “I’m not going anywhere.” He kissed her again, so desperately that she lost her breath, and when he stopped it was only to pull out a first-aid kit. She frowned at him and he gave her a surprisingly no-nonsense look. “I’m not putting up with two soldiers who refuse to get treated for injuries. Now come on.”

  “He’s waiting for you,” she said, but she held her wrists out.

  “Were there more than two parties of Dragons?”

  “I don’t think so. There’s another couple of mercenary groups, though, if I heard the soldiers correctly.” She winced as he smeared ointment on one of the cuts and held herself in place. “I’m used to bandaging myself, you know.”

  “That’s the beauty of working in a team. You don’t have to.” He finished wrapping the bandages and put the gear away, and then he looked away from her.

  She was abruptly conscious of the Dragons watching them. None of them had moved to shoot her, though they had not helped when she was fighting before. They were wary, but following his direction. When she looked over, only Nyx would meet her eyes; the woman nodded seriously. There was blood on one of her hands, and there were too few people standing with them, and Tera found that she was afraid to count, to see who was there and who was not. She swallowed.

  “Tera.” Her name was a whisper on Talon’s lips.

  She looked back to him. He was staring at her wonderingly, eyes traveling over
the ragged gear she wore and the tears on her coat, the blood on her face and hands. He was staring at her like no one ever had before, and she felt her stomach drop out when she remembered what he had seen her do a few moments before.

  “I’m … not natural.” She said it quietly.

  “I have upgrades, too.” He was smiling.

  “You know there’s a difference.”

  He only shook his head.

  “And I was going to kill you.” She felt tears start in her eyes. “I was going to kill everyone on the Ariane.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m an assassin.”

  “I’m an assassin.” His voice held humor, and a wry truth. “None of it matters, Tera. I swear it doesn’t matter to me.” And he was kissing her again, his lips soft and urgent all at once, his tongue thrusting into her mouth, her hands brushing over the unforgiving surface of his armor. He paused, forehead against hers. “Does it matter to you?”

  “No. It’s just….”

  “What?” His thumb traced over her lower lip.

  “It’s terrifying.”

  “I know.” His voice assured her that he did.

  “And it’s not what’s important right now.”

  “It is. It’s why we’re going to take him down instead of the other way around. As long as you’ll have me by your side,” he told her softly, “I will stay.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not leaving again.”

  But it was bravado and they both knew it. He sighed. When their eyes met again, Tera saw acceptance there. Neither of them were green soldiers, new to combat. They knew their enemies were stalking them through the halls of the ship. But as terrifying and sweet and all-consuming as it was to touch one another, see one another in the flesh, it wasn’t why they stayed. The man who lay ahead of them, hemmed in at last with no exit, had been a mentor to them both. Neither of them wanted to end this.

  And neither of them wanted to step away from this moment, because as soon as they did … it all became real. The members of Talon’s crew who were dead. The man they had to bring to justice.