by Raven Dark
“I’m glad you’ve done away with the whole blind middle man thing. The buyers I work for don’t like it if they don’t know everyone the goods have exchanged hands with. The one I’m headed back to when I leave here is a big fish you’d be missing out on.”
The slightest tension tightened Sheriff’s arms around my waist before he replied. “Yes. About that. Who do you work for, Grizzle?”
His tone suggested this wasn’t the first time he’d asked.
Grizzle let loose a crafty laugh. “I have contacts, but I work for no one, Sheriff. And I cannot discuss those I work with, you know that.”
Sheriff slid his hand slowly between my legs, fingers stroking my sex through my pants. I didn’t have to fake rocking my hips into his touch. “You’ll have to tell me if you want this deal to go ahead.”
Grizzle shook his head and slipped his slave’s top down, cupping her breasts. He sucked on her neck and she put her head to the side, her long, waist-length lavender hair barely moving, like it was set in place with cement. A long, silvery comb held the upper half of it in place in a bun, the clip pocking up behind the top of her head.
Again, her mind pounded against mine so hard I could hardly focus, dark and too sharp, and not at all clouded with the desire she should have been feeling. Her emotions didn’t change even when Grizzle plucked hard on her nipples with his fingers.
Instead of wriggling or arching for him, she lifted her gaze and looked right at Sheriff. Not in the eyes but focusing on him nonetheless.
As if her Master wasn’t even there.
Sheriff ignored her, and warmth spread through my belly as he kept stroking my sex.
“I’m going to ask one more time, Grizzle. I know you didn’t obtain your reputation as one of the high-most merchants in the world all on your own. Someone’s pulling your strings, so cut the bullshit. Who’s your boss?”
Grizzle let out an impatient growl. “Fuck. You really know how to drive a hard bargain. You’re lucky I need this deal.” Grizzle paused, looking defeated. “His name is Banat. Chaz Banat.”
Sheriff’s hands froze, and he looked at him. “Banet. The head of Zone Omicron?”
Grizzle made an affirming sound into Madi’san’s neck.
“That’s interesting.” I didn’t like the cold note that suddenly entered Sheriff’s tone.
His guest jerked his head up.
Sheriff slid his hand out from between my legs and sat back in his seat. “See, not many people know this. Banet used to be richer than a king, but he’s been dirt broke for two years now, ever since the head of another gambling operation started accusing him of hiring people to have his competition killed.”
Grizzle’s throat tightened. “Banet doesn’t have a gambling operation.”
“Yes. He does.” Sheriff’s voice was iron.
“Since when?”
“He has for the last four years.”
Grizzle wet his lips.
“Now, I’m going to have my gorgeous slave pour us another glass of wine, and then you’re going to tell me who you really work for.”
Grizzle sat back, looking nervous.
Sheriff patted my hip, a silent command.
I got up, took both men’s glasses, and walked over to the bar behind Sheriff. I’d poured the wine, and was on my way back to the table, but something made me stop at Sheriff’s shoulder and look at Madi’san.
The focus of her mind…shifted, sharpening. She sat up straight in her master’s lap and slid that comb from her hair. Her hair unfurled.
My muscles tensed, though I wasn’t sure why. Then I saw it. The end of her comb was nearly four inches long, and it stabbed downward, a single, sharp blade.
A blade.
My heart went into my throat.
I didn’t think, I just reacted. Dropping the wine glasses with a smash, I threw myself at Sheriff’s chair just as Madi'san flung out her hand.
He went crashing to the floor with an angry shout, and the blade missed him. Pain blazed through me as if someone had shoved a hot poker into my chest. I slammed into the floor on my side, between Sheriff and his guests, between him and his assassin.
His female assassin.
“What the fuck—” Sheriff started. Then he cut off and I felt him sit up before he turned me onto my back. He cursed. I heard Grizzle snarling at Madi’san, but I didn’t register what he’d said through the pain. Sheriff was kneeling over me the next instant, cradling my head in his hands and then pressing hard on my chest.
Gore!” he roared. “Hawk! Fuck, no. Setora, what did you think you were doing?”
I’d never heard his voice sound so strange. I couldn’t get air into my lungs; every breath felt like someone was jamming that poker into my chest again and again. The room erupted with commotion, guards barging in, gapas snarling. Hawk was suddenly there, kneeling over me, his face in mine.
“What the fuck happened?” he demanded. “Get Doc. Someone get Doc!”
“Take him away,” I heard Sheriff order. “No, her too. It wasn’t him. It was her.”
“Stay with me,” Hawk said roughly, and someone was pressing hard on my chest again. They were burning my chest from the inside out, choking the air from me. “No, don’t close your eyes, Kitten. Don’t even think about it!”
I dimly registered the protectiveness in his voice. Then Sheriff was cradling my face, calling to me. It was so hard to keep my eyes open.
Seconds seemed to stretch to eternity, and then the pain was fading, and all I needed was sleep.
“Sleep. Need…sleep. I’ll…rest and I’ll…be…fine, Masters…”
“No.” Sheriff tapped my cold cheeks. “No, don’t you dare. Stay with me, Setora. Don’t you dare fucking leave me, woman!”
A smile tugged at my lips, and I tried to touch his face, but my arms wouldn’t work. “Master…you said… you said…my… name.” My eyelids fluttered.
Maker, so tired.
“Setora, open your eyes,” Hawk growled. “Stay awake.”
Oh, Hawk. Joy floated up through the haze, wrapping around me.
I floated. The last thought I had was of a puzzle with all the pieces finally in place, and Sheriff saying my name like an oath.
Then, nothing.
Epilogue: Sheriff’s Oath
In what must have been minutes, but felt like fucking hours, Doc had showed up, stabilized her on a litter, and started taking her, with the help of his aid, toward his infirmary. Straps secured her to the litter, and her chest had been bandaged to keep the knife in place while the men clattered down the wooden walkway to the large cavern Doc used. I stalked alongside them.
“Wait, Doc.” I stopped them before they could enter the infirmary. “I want her in my room. Take her to my quarters.”
Everyone looked at me, mouths agape. Doc tried to argue.
“Now!” I snapped.
Doc knew better than to argue with me.
A short time later, our slave was laying on her back across my bed, heavy drugs having knocked her out while Doc and his aid worked. The two men leaned over her motionless form with hardly a word. The air reeked of medicine and blood. Her face looked too pale under the glaring lamplight Doc had directed over the bed, her soft, pale lavender hair splayed out listlessly over my pillow. She looked so still. So fucking still, like the dead.
I stood a few feet from the bed along with the others, Pretty Boy and Steel flanking me. Hawk stood a few inches closer, but all of us kept our distance, giving Doc the space he needed to work.
“How did this happen?” Pretty Boy bit out. He turned to me sharply. “How the fuck did this happen, Sheriff?”
“You mean how did I let this happen?” I growled. Then I dropped my shoulders and paced to the nearest wall. For an instant, I’d wanted to punch him for the accusation I’d heard there. Then my anger switched its focus to her.
“Stupid, stupid woman.” I balled my fist, almost punching it through the wall. I looked over at Doc working on her, then dropped my arm, gri
nding my teeth. “She should have let me take the hit.”
“What hit? What happened?” Steel demanded. I could see his anger wasn’t with me.
I relayed the events of the meeting, telling the men about my questioning Grizzle, then what that fucking bitch of his had done. Pretty Boy and Steel stared at me. Hawk remained where he was, arms crossed, head down, silent. Intensity pounded off him, but I couldn’t put a name to the emotion. He wore calm like a cloak, but something told me that calm hung by a thread that was on the verge of snapping.
“She saved you,” Steel said, his voice barely audible.
I closed my eyes and ran my palms down my face. “I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t even know what was happening until she was lying there, and that bitch’s blade was in her chest.”
I paced the room. I felt like a fucking caged animal, pent up, ready to explode. My fists clenched, and I thirsted for blood.
Vengeance. For a slave.
For Setora.
Maker fuck me, what had she done to me? To my men, to my damn club?
“As soon as I know she’s okay, I’ll have words with Grizzle and his bitch,” Pretty Boy said. “I’ll take Steel with me.”
Steel nodded in agreement.
“No.” Hawk’s voice was a low rumble. Frightening. “I’ll do it. They’ll both be crowing anything we want to know by the time I’m done with them.”
“No way, forget it,” Pretty Boy snapped.
“Pardon?” Hawk rasped.
“You just stay out of this. You haven’t been there for her since she came back, why start now? Do you have any idea how much you’ve hurt her by ignoring her, how much she worried about your fucking ass every day you were up on that stupid mountain?”
“Hey,” Steel started, putting his hand on Pretty Boy’s arm. Pretty Boy shook it off.
“Pretty Boy, knock it off,” I said.
“You want to have a go at me, Pretty Boy?” Hawk stepped up to him. “Come on then.” In that same steady calm.
“Enough, both of you,” I ordered, shoving them apart.
“Hey,” Doc snapped from across the room, tossing the blade that had been in Setora’s chest into a container off to the side. “Do you guys mind? We’re working here. Take it into the hall.”
No one raised his voice, but no one left, either.
“I’ll say who interrogates those two fucks when it’s time,” I told the three of them. No one argued. “The important thing is that we find out why Grizzle’s slave tried to kill me, and who he’s working for. If you ask me, I think they were both sent here by the same person who’s been robbing us.”
“Right,” Steel started. “We—”
Doc’s voice carried across the room with a string of curses. We looked over at him, but he put his head back down and fell silent, hard at work again.
We talked quietly amongst ourselves, and I knew all of us where trying to keep our mind off of her. Off of our woman.
Eventually, Doc finished operating on her. Sometime later, he had her stitched up and covered with warm blankets tucked under her arms, which lay limply at her sides. She still looked pale, her face like fine porcelain, sweat slicking her long hair so that the roots were a dark purple. Doc pulled us all into the main room, outside my bedroom. He had a concerned look on his face.
“What is it?” I demanded when he’d shut the doors to the bedroom. “Is she going to be alright?”
He put up his hand, his voice calm. “First off, we’ve closed the wound and stopped the bleeding. Thing is, were she anyone else, she’d take weeks or months to heal just from the bleeding. That knife just missed her heart.”
My patience was running thin. “Well, good, so what’s the problem?”
“She’s not healing like I thought she would be. Again, her body heals faster than ours. It’s a thing with Violets.” He paused, obviously trying to figure out how to dumb down the medical explanation. “Violets have something in their blood that allows for accelerated healing. No one knows why or how. So for her to not be doing as well as I hoped, well…”
“So what now?” Hawk asked. “Is there someone from the other zones we can send for to help her? Is there medicine or something?”
“Not that I’m aware of, no. The best we can do is wait. Keep her comfortable, sedated, and monitor her closely.”
Everyone in the room fell silent.
“Fellas,” he added, and he looked at each of us earnestly. “I need to tell you a few things. First, when we were stripping her for the operation, we found a stari on her thigh.”
“A what?” Steel said.
“A stari. It’s a symbol, a perfect star shape. I’ve only seen it twice in my lifetime, both times on a true Violet. One of their masters called it a stari, but he didn’t seem to know what it meant. I don’t suppose any of you know what it means?”
“You mean the star,” Pretty Boy said, and Doc nodded. “Yeah, I saw that. I don’t know what it means, though. So, other people, other Violets have them too?”
“The ones I saw did. I thought it was a tattoo at the time, something the masters used, like a brand. But I inspected Setora’s. It’s part of her skin. Like a birthmark. It means something.”
“Was there something else?” I asked, noticing he looked uneasy.
“Yeah. This.” Doc reached into the pocket of his white smock and pulled out a glass vial of blood. He held it up to the light so each of us could see it.
My brows shot up. “Is that hers?”
“Yes.” He let all of us lean in to get a good look. “I’ve never seen blood look like that before. When it went into the vial, it was red, like ours. Then it changed to this.”
We all agreed we hadn’t seen anything like it. For some reason, I thought back to what Setora had told me about Grizzle’s Violet, the unnatural way she could feel her mind.
A strange star mark on her thigh, reading another Violet’s thoughts, and now this? It meant something all right.
I took the vial from Doc, unable to stop looking at it.
The blood in the vial wasn’t red. It was blue, and it was glowing.
What are you, beautiful? What are you?
Once Doc finished with us, Pretty Boy, Steel and I went back into the room, gathering around her bedside. Hawk came in last, but stood by the door, silent. Steel knelt at her shoulder, his fingers running through the front of her soft, pale hair.
What was she? What was this perfect fool of a woman who’d saved my life? Fuck, if we lost her…
“You’re gonna be fine, Petal,” Steel whispered. “I still stumble over the words, you know. I can’t get better at reading without you.”
He didn’t seem to notice that Doc and his medical staff were looking at him with surprise. He was apparently too lost in his woman to care that they’d heard him.
“You can’t go changing everything on us, upending our lives and then leave us, woman. You can’t,” Steel growled soflty.
I put my hand on his shoulder and he cleared his throat awkwardly. He stood up, and Pretty Boy clapped him on his other shoulder. Then Pretty Boy leaned in and kissed Setora on the forehead. His lips lingered there, and he whispered something, but I couldn’t make it out. He smoothed her hair back from her brow, then turned to leave.
Hawk strode toward the bed, stopping when Pretty Boy glared at him.
“When she recovers from this, I’ll kick your Yantu ass if you fuck with her head again, you get me?” Pretty Boy said quietly, his voice dangerous.
“I get you, Brother.” Hawk squeezed his shoulder, his voice never above a whisper. He sounded like he fully believed he deserved whatever Pretty Boy did to him.
Pretty Boy made an angry noise, shrugged off Hawk’s hand, and stalked off.
I gave a nod to Steel, who followed after our resident hothead.
Once they were gone, Hawk knelt at Setora’s shoulder, opposite me, and let out a long sigh. For a long time, he just bent over her, his long fingers tracing her pale cheeks, her closed lids, th
e arch of her brows. His scowl was deep.
“You were right, you know.” He ran his thumb over each of her eyelids. “About all of it,” he added as if she’d spoken. Her lips didn’t move. “You were right. I was afraid. Afraid to get too close. Afraid to let you in. Hiding from the pain that runs in my blood like poison. But I’m not hiding anymore.”
He bent and kissed her cheeks, her eyes, her mouth. “When you wake—and you will fucking wake—I’ll tell you all of it. Everything that’s in here.” He tapped his heart. “And you will take all of it, Setora, because you belong to me. To all of us.” He kissed her forehead, a long press of his lips to her pale skin. “Wake and know you’re ours.”
I stared at him, stunned as he stood. I’d never seen Hawk bleed like that. He saw me looking at him and gave an awkward lift of his shoulders.
“What I should have said a long time ago,” he grunted. Then he left.
I shook my head with a sad smile. Fuck, what was she doing to my men?
“Leave us,” I told the room at large.
Doc herded everyone out of the room. I wanted my time alone with her, and I didn’t want a fucking audience.
When the doors closed, I moved my chair closer to my woman’s bedside. I didn’t say anything, though. Instead, I thought back to our first meeting. She was like a flower that had sprung out of the Grotto, filling every inch this place with beauty and light. No matter what I threw at her, she didn’t fall. And Maker, did I throw it all at her.
I wasn’t a perfect man; I was fucked in the head, more so than any of my closest Brothers—her three masters. For years, I’d wrestled with the demons of control and revenge, tormented by nightmares that haunted me even while awake, and almost all of them revolved around one man. Damien Vale.
And then this woman, this beauty lying in my bed, came into my world. Young. Innocent. A walking dream. I known deep in my soul that she wasn’t a spy. Being the General required one to listen and act on his gut instincts, and my gut said my little spy was innocent, a butterfly caught in the web of two predators.
But then it hit me, that fucking attraction, a hunger for her that hit me right between the eyes. She’d gotten under my men’s skin, rewiring my three closest friends, making them fucking happy. She had them laughing, ready to protect her with everything they had. And she had Steel reading, of all things. She made them want to be better men. That I couldn’t deny, but fuck if I hadn’t tried.