Falling Into the Black

by Caitlin Ricci

  Arin lifted his gaze to mine. He was smirking. “Sorry about that. The ship is really fast, though, despite her age. You should be proud.”

  I was, but I couldn’t think about my ship right then. My heart was racing. I’d never so blatantly disobeyed and then dishonored the peacekeeper code before. “Get your things together. As much as I’d like to relax for a while and enjoy the beaches here and maybe even swim for a while, I think it would be best if we got back to Asiq as soon as possible.”

  “A few hours wouldn’t hurt anything. I’m your slave now. Bought and paid for. It’s a good story. No reason you can’t relax with your slave for a while.”

  I looked over at him and hated that he used that word so casually. But that’s what he’d been, and it was what he was now. To me, no less. I shook my head.

  “An hour, then?”

  I sighed and slumped back against the wall. “We can take a few hours. The delay wouldn’t hurt anything at least.”

  Arin smiled at me and started heading out. His shorts had slipped down his hips and the base of his spine, and the scar there, was exposed. He fixed his shorts, and I looked away.

  He hesitated at the doorway. “Is anything going to change now that we have this secret between us?”

  I didn’t know what he would have been getting at. We weren’t really friends, so there was no friendship to lose now that he’d killed someone. “Like what?”

  Arin shrugged and leaned against the wall as he looked back at me. “I don’t know. Maybe you’ll start wanting to blackmail me to get me to have sex with you. I’ve never been in this position before.”

  I sighed. “Now you’re just being ridiculous. I would never do that to you. You’ve known me for over a year. I’m surprised you would even suggest that.”

  Arin raised his eyebrows at me. “Given my history, is it really all that surprising that I think the worst from men who might want to fuck me?”

  I shook my head as I realized how much sense he was actually making. “No. I guess it isn’t. But I’m not like that.”

  “I guess we’ll see, then. Are you coming down to the beach with me?”

  I had to. I couldn’t very well have him running away and possibly getting himself caught again. Once we were on Wish, he could run around as much as he wanted to, as long as he stayed on the planet.

  “Lead the way.”

  Arin gave me a quick smile, then practically ran down the stairs. He went into the waves, and I found a shade structure about fifty feet away from him to sit under while I watched him dive into the water. The beach was crowded, but not nearly enough that I ever lost sight of him as he played in the waves.

  HOURS LATER I’d ordered myself a few drinks and a bowl of fruit before Arin decided to come out of the water to join me. He sat down silently beside me and picked at the fruit I’d decided not to eat.

  He was beautiful as he sat there in the sunset with the light against his back and the water trickling down his pale skin. But there was a darkness in him that I could see now. He hid it well behind his smile and his shining eyes, but I knew it was there. He had a past that would have broken many people. Yet he was still around, still trying to get through his life.

  “We’ll have to talk to Monroe when we get back to Wish and explain how you’re my slave and how I’m allowing you to work there. Whatever I say, it’s just for show.”

  Arin nodded and kept eating. “I understand. Do you want us to share a room when I’m not with clients?”

  I hadn’t actually given that any thought, but I instantly knew my answer. “No. Nothing will change between us. You’ll still work as you’ve always done. I want you to stay on Wish all the time, though, so Monroe can take your room fee from me for the days you would usually be off-world when you aren’t working.”

  “And if I come into your room late at night and climb into your bed?”

  He wasn’t eating anymore, and I was pretty sure he was testing me. “First of all, you wouldn’t be able to get in. My room in Asiq only opens to my handprint. And secondly, if you did manage to get into my room, I would send you back to your own. You aren’t unattractive, but now that I know your history, I do not want to be with you.”

  Arin narrowed his gaze on me. “What, exactly, is that supposed to mean? That I’m some disgusting monster because people did things to me against my will for years?”

  He tried to get up, probably to leave in an angry huff. It would have been well deserved too. But I grabbed his wrist before he could go anywhere. “No. Sit back down.” He did, after I tugged him back onto his seat. “What I meant was that people have been using you for years, so I wouldn’t want to be just another person to give you empty sex. I know that sex can be better than that. And while it’s one thing for your customers to have sex with you and not care about anything other than getting off, I wouldn’t want to do that to you, but since you’re just someone I wronged and want to make safe again, it would be exactly that empty and meaningless in the long run.”

  Arin shook off my hand. “You find sex to be meaningless.”

  “Not always, but generally. It’s a nice way to exercise and burn off some adrenaline when I get back from a mission, but I don’t ever have sex because I care about the person in some way. I’ve been with most of the people in Asiq. They’re fun, and I like them, but they aren’t people I’ve bonded to in any way, shape, or form.”

  Arin grinned at me. “I can’t believe that I get more out of sex than you do.”

  “You should. You’re getting paid for it.”

  He rolled his eyes. “I get more out of it than just credits, though that is pretty awesome to get paid for something I enjoy anyway. Some of them are almost my friends. And I don’t even have sex with everyone I spend time with. Sometimes we play games or they get super drunk and cry all over the place while they rage about their parents who abandoned them or the person who broke their heart ten years ago. And I tell them how sorry I am and how horrible that must have been, and then they cry some more, and when the time is up, they thank me for letting them just get it all out there and listening to them and their stories. And here you only thought that we go around having sex with everyone.”

  I had thought that. Because that’s all I’d ever asked them to do for me. As long as no one was screaming for help, I hadn’t really paid attention to what any of them did once they took their client down the back hallway and to their rooms.

  “You sound like you really enjoy it.”

  “I do. And I most enjoy getting to have the choice of who I have sex with and when. If I’m not feeling it, Monroe will find some cleaning task for me to do. If I’m not comfortable with a client, even after I’ve brought them back to my room, even if I’m already going down on them—if they do something that pisses me off, I can send them packing. I have the freedom to enjoy myself however I want to. I hadn’t ever had that before Monroe found me and asked me if I wanted to come try working for him.”

  I could see how someone in his position would want that much choice and freedom. I reached over to take his hand, and he slowly pulled it away from me.

  “My choice means who I want touching me too.”

  I nodded. Of course it did. “And I’m not going to force that on you. Or anything else. If you don’t want to be touched, that’s it. Nothing has really changed for us.”

  He gave me a sad little smile. “Only, everything has. Because now you know all of my secrets and every humiliating thing I’ve ever been through.”

  He was right. I did know everything. But I wouldn’t hold any of that against him. “Do you want to go back upstairs and get some dinner delivered?”

  Arin glanced up at the hotel, then back at me. “Sure. Dinner would be nice.”

  THAT NIGHT I slept on the floor with a pillow and a blanket, and I gave Arin the bed, though I could tell he didn’t sleep well. Every time Arin twisted around on the bed, I heard him move. At the seventh time, I sat up and looked at him. He was awake, and there were tearstain
s on his cheeks. I hadn’t even heard him crying.

  “You’re awake.”

  I nodded.

  “Did I wake you?”

  While I preferred to tell the truth whenever possible, it would have done neither of us any good in this situation. So I shook my head. “I can’t really sleep either.”

  “Do you want to come up here?”

  I shrugged and lay down on the bed behind him with my back against his. Within minutes he’d turned over and had his arm draped loosely over my waist. “Thank you for coming for me.”

  “You’re welcome. Though I wish you hadn’t complicated things by killing him. It’s a lot harder to protect a murderer than it is a runaway slave.”

  He sighed loudly in the darkness. “I know. But I had to. We’ve been over this.”

  Yes, we had. And I understood his reasons. I might have even agreed with them. But that didn’t change the fact that what he had done now made life more complicated for us both. “Good night. Try to get some sleep.”

  “Sure. You too.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Resan

  THE NEXT morning I had a message from Em. It simply said, Peacekeepers are here. Go to the safe place. And I knew exactly what was happening. I shook Arin awake. Sometime in the middle of the night, he’d managed to drift off to sleep, but that wouldn’t help us now. We had to move, and I had to get him to safety.

  “What’s wrong?” Arin said as he came awake.

  “You need to get ready. Now. People are at Asiq looking for you.”

  Arin’s eyes went wide, and for a moment he just stared up at me. “Asiq was supposed to be safe.”

  We really didn’t have time for him to have a crisis on top of the one we were already having unless he was doing it while he was getting his things together. “I guess that changes when you kill your master and then lock a peacekeeper up with his dead body so he has to call more peacekeepers to come get him out of a basement with a dead body in it.”

  My sarcasm worked to get Arin to move again. First he rolled his eyes, though. I didn’t mind too much because less than five minutes later, he had his few things in his arms and we were practically running toward my shuttle. If they had thought to look for him there, very few places would be safe for him to hide out in. And since I had likely been seen with him—on a paradise planet no less, as if we were on some damned vacation—I would now be linked in with his crimes even more than I had been before.

  “Put your stuff in the storage hold, and then come back up here,” I told him as I strapped myself in and began turning my ship on.

  Arin quickly did as I’d asked, and then he came back and sat in one of the chairs behind me. There was an open chair next to me, but maybe he could tell how absolutely annoyed at him I was at that moment. It was better that he stayed out of my sight for right then.

  I sent a quick message off to the owner of the shipyard, putting the ship I’d been forced to buy on consignment and giving him my information in case it did manage to sell. Right then I didn’t much care what happened to it. The ship had been a cheap way to get me back to my real ship, which Arin should have never taken. He should have never killed his master either, but I knew that was wrong. The man had deserved to die. I only wished that Arin hadn’t been the one to do it, because now his life would essentially be over just as much as if he had died or had let me take him to a prison planet, as my original goal had been.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  I didn’t look back at him. I was much more interested in getting us off world without looking like we were running from something. That meant moving as calmly as I could possibly appear as I lifted the ship up and into the atmosphere and steered her toward the nearest jump gate.

  “Eydris.”

  “I’ve never heard of it. Is it a planet or a city?”

  Not many people had. It was an ice planet in the farthest reaches of the Brosk system. And it hadn’t been my home for more years than I cared to remember. But it was still the best planet I knew of to hide on.

  “It’s a safe place to hide you for a while.”

  “For how long?”

  I didn’t have a good answer for him. There was a chance that my home on Eydris would be his safe spot for the rest of his life. Bowman hadn’t been a particularly important man, but murder still tended to get people’s attention, regardless of who the victim was.

  I glanced behind me and saw Arin sitting with his knees held against his chest. He sighed, and I turned back around. I didn’t think he’d caught me looking at him. I needed to remind myself that if Bowman was a victim, then Arin most certainly was too, and he’d endured far more than anyone ever should have.

  “As soon as I can bring you back to Wish safely and you can have a normal life there again, I will.”

  I didn’t have to look back to know that Arin was glaring at me. I felt that just fine on my own without having to see it for myself.

  “You might want to relax for a while. Take a nap or something. This is going to take a few hours.” At the very least. We were a few gates away from Brosk even, and then it would take hours just to get to Eydris. “Plan on traveling for most of the day and part of the night.”

  “We’re jumping to other systems. You don’t know if it’ll be day or night there.”

  He was right, and it made me smile that after everything he’d been through and everything he’d had to put up with, he still had that much fire in him. “It’s an expression. You know what I meant.”

  I heard him get up as we approached the second gate. The first one had been uneventful. I was hoping the second would be the same way, despite the long line we found ourselves waiting in. He found some blankets and made himself a bit of a nest right by where he’d been sitting. He looked comfortable, and I got up to sit with him. The line would probably take a while to get through anyway, and the people working the gate would move my ship forward automatically, so I really didn’t need to be sitting there doing nothing and pretending to ignore him anymore.

  Arin looked up at me as I sat down next to him. “You said it was going to take a long time to get there. I figured I might as well be comfortable.”

  He really didn’t need to explain that to me at all. “I shouldn’t have demanded answers from you back in Asiq. If I hadn’t, then nothing would have changed for us, and you wouldn’t have had to go back with him.”

  “And I wouldn’t have been raped again,” he quietly added on.

  I nodded. There was that too. I offered him my hand, and he silently laced his fingers with mine. He was stiff as he sat there next to me on the blankets.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  He shook his head. “You still think that it’s okay because I was a slave.”

  I might have once. Before I had actually gotten to know him. But I couldn’t sit there next to Arin now and not want to arrest every person who had ever put their hands on him against his will, slave or not. He’d been raped. Repeatedly. And since he was a child too. That wasn’t okay. I sighed as I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. I was confused, and the peacekeeper part of me was a raging storm that I had no idea how to make sense of. Justice demanded that Arin be dropped off at the nearest prison planet, where he would likely be executed. He was a slave who had killed his master. The punishment for that was death, unless he was put in front of a lenient judge who might just give him life on the prison planet for what he’d done. But he was young and attractive, and the other prisoners would destroy him for sure.

  “I will keep you safe,” I vowed.

  “You’re a peacekeeper. Safe isn’t a word you understand. No slave or prisoner or criminal is ever going to be safe with you around because you’ll always choose what the law says over what you should do.”

  He was right. That’s what being a peacekeeper was all about. And for the longest time, the law had been my standard of conduct. I couldn’t say that about myself anymore. I didn’t even think I had the right to still call myself a p
eacekeeper.

  “I’ll get you safe, and then we’ll see from there.”

  He nodded and let go of my hand to be able to lie down next to me. He was curled up, and he didn’t say he wasn’t comfortable, but I was sure he couldn’t have been. I got up to give him more space, and once he stretched out a little, I covered him with the blankets he’d managed to find. He looked wary as I stood over him. I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking or how afraid of me he must have been.

  I gave him plenty of space as I went back to the cockpit and settled into my chair. We were closer to the jump gate at least. I heard him moving around, and I glanced back to check on him. He was looking at me too from where he’d gotten comfortable on the floor.

  “How is it down there?” I asked him.

  He sighed and laid his chin over his arms. “It’s fine.” He yawned and closed his eyes for a moment. “I know I wasn’t away from Asiq for that long, but it felt like months. Maybe even years. I’m looking forward to being back on Wish as soon as I can possibly be there without being arrested again. I miss the markets and the constant sunshine.”

  “I’ll get you back there as soon as I can,” I promised him.

  Arin nodded and seemed to relax a little more. “It’s the only place where I actually ever felt like I had friends. Like I could belong there and things would be okay.”