Origin

by Dani Worth

  What I didn’t love was him not asking me to stay with them. I didn’t love that at all.

  I lay there a long time, looking at the stars above Clay’s bed as the men slept. Neither of them let go of me and I wondered if this was going to be at all hard for them.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Yo, Captain Asshole!” A strange woman’s voice woke me from sleep. I blinked up at the vidscreen, surprised to see a Gwinarian woman with shoulder-length dark red hair smirking at me. “Hey, you, come closer so I don’t have to yell and wake them. Wow.”

  I sat up and looked down to find Anders sprawled flat on his stomach with his arms and legs out, and Clay draped over half of him. Both men were stark naked. I could only stare.

  “They looked fucked to within an inch of their lives. Good work.” She winked at me. “Seriously, come closer to the camera. Are you Siri? Vala told me all about you. You’re a gorgeous thing, aren’t you?”

  “Who’s gorgeous?” A long and lean body showed up on screen before the man leaned down. Long ropes of black hair framed a dark-skinned face. Milky eyes blinked a couple of times before strange-shaped black pupils and purple irises blinked at me. He had a black symbol tattooed around one eye and it didn’t detract from his gruff looks at all. “Oh, hello, Freckles.”

  “Think Erik would like her?” the Gwinarian woman asked.

  “Most definitely.” He made a wagging motion with his finger. “Freckles, could you move a little to your right because I’m kind of enjoying the whole picture here. But lose the rest of that blanket first.”

  I squeaked in surprise when a hand yanked me back between two hard male bodies before covers went over us all. “Perverts,” Clay muttered at the screen, then frowned. “Jarana, I should have known. How the hell did you bypass my security and get the screen open on your end?”

  She snorted and tucked her straight hair behind her ear. “Like you don’t know. By the way, I tweaked your software a bit. You might have to name it Fourth Degree instead of Third now.” She smirked again. “I made it better.”

  “She’s fucking with our software, Captain,” Anders murmured as he pulled the covers over his head and mine. “Mmmm,” he moaned into my neck as his hands started stroking everywhere. “Warm, sleepy woman.”

  I didn’t mind the hands, but I wanted to know what this Gwinarian wanted, so I pulled the covers down enough to peek over them. Anders didn’t stop running his palms over my body.

  “Jarana.” Clay scrubbed his hands over his face. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re breaking into my private channel?”

  “I tried hailing you on the bridge several times but that hulking brute of a man named after an Earth bush said you were busy having an orgy and eating up all the good food.”

  Anders chuckled under the covers before sucking one of my nipples into his mouth.

  I lifted the covers. “Stop,” I hissed.

  “Anyway,” Jarana said on a long sigh. “I can smuggle the three of you and Crichton onto Kithra. You’ll have to get your crew to drop you off on the planet Calina and ride in with the crates to the supply station. I told my people to poke holes in them so you can breathe.” She laughed and I frowned at the faintly evil tone.

  Lifting the covers again, I whispered, “Did you and Claybourne do something to this Gwinarian?”

  “Yeah, tranqued her, kidnapped her friends then made her lose time with her new baby while tracking us down. She hates us.”

  “Oh.” I dropped the covers.

  “She says oh,” came his muffled response. “Tells me to stop then breathes the sexiest word in the galaxies.”

  Clay was grinning down at us. I rolled my eyes, but then her words sank into my sex-exhausted brain and every muscle in my body froze. I knew my terror leaked into my eyes because Clay suddenly frowned and pulled me closer to him.

  “Hey,” Anders yelled from under the blanket. “Give her back.”

  I ignored the words, could only stare at Clay as my world narrowed again—like it had on Burga One when I’d seen Lashin.

  Ride into Kithra in a crate.

  No.

  I shook my head.

  “What is it, Siri?”

  “I can’t,” I whispered. “Can’t get into a box. Can never ever get into another box.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Another box?”

  “Please, Claybourne.” I grabbed his arms, digging my fingernails into his skin. “Don’t put me into a box.”

  “Hey now, shh.” He wrapped his arms around me.

  Anders sat up and he reached out to tilt my chin. “Nobody is putting you into a box.”

  “If you three could listen for a moment,” Jarana tried to break in.

  I barely heard her because I had gone back to my childhood. To dark, small spaces and breathing holes. I began to rock in Clay’s lap, uncaring that the woman on the screen saw me.

  “Shit,” she said. “Tell the woman she doesn’t have to ride in the crates. There isn’t a warrant out for her. As far as anyone will know, she’ll just be another Gwinarian going home for Kithra’s rebuild.”

  “Did you hear her?” Clay asked. “Fuck, please listen.”

  It took all my willpower to slow the tide of terror, to push it back, but humiliation came in its wake. I pushed away from Clay and scrambled off the bed, accidentally kicking him in my hurry.

  “Oomph,” he gasped, but reached for me anyway.

  I jumped out of the way of his hands and searched the floor for my clothes.

  “Well,” Jarana barked the word hard. “I can see you have enough to deal with. Looks like you should be able to arrive on Calina by tonight. It’ll be a two-day trip in the crates, but they’re big.” She leaned toward the screen. “Before I go, let me see Crichton.”

  Heedless of his nudity, Clay got out of the bed and walked to the screen. He kept glancing at me as he pulled out a keyboard and patched in the camera they had on Crichton. The captain had given the man a pallet, antibiotics, and set him up on a feeding tube system, but he still looked awful. Dirty hair fanned around a thin face covered mostly in more dirty blond hair. His beard reached his chest and I shuddered, remembering how emaciated he’d looked when we’d put him in clothes that didn’t smell like the waste receptacle.

  I stopped my frantic clothes search when I caught Jarana’s expression. She stared at the sleeping man for a long time, her lips thin, her eyes flashing the kind of pain I knew well and my heart started to ache for her. She’d seemed hard, cold, but I could see now that she had suffered. I could also see that she was glad Crichton suffered as well.

  “Make sure there are plenty of holes in his crate,” she finally said when Clay switched the feed back to him. “I don’t want him to die before I can question him,” she continued.

  Jarana clicked off and Clay sat on the end of the bed and stared at me silently.

  I stared back, not saying a word, while inside I raged and screamed because I had so many emotions tearing into me, I needed to be alone. “I’m sorry.” My voice broke as I shoved one of their shirts over my head. “I have to…I need to…” I stopped, took a deep breath. “I have to be alone for a little while.”

  “Okay,” was all he said.

  I didn’t even look at Anders as I scurried from the room.

  Jarana’s simple plan backfired. Really backfired.

  Footage of me blowing half of Lashin’s head off leaked everywhere. Images of my wild, terrified eyes, pale face and freckles blazed out through the intergalactic media like wildfire. We arrived on Calina to find not only a warrant out for my arrest, but a crate laid open just for me. It had a hidden, lower level just like the others. They were obviously smuggler’s crates, which made me wonder even more about the scary Jarana. The upper halves could be filled with things like fruit and vegetables. The lower section had cleverly hidden breathing tubes as well as tubes for other things like food and stuff I didn’t want to think about.

  Guess she’d been joking about them poking holes in the crate
s.

  I stared at the box like it was my coffin.

  Anders’s nostrils flared as he kicked one of the boxes. “We’re not fucking putting her into one of these.”

  Clay grabbed his arm, curled his lip. “Stop yelling. I’m not disagreeing with you. We’ll find another way in.”

  “There is no other way in.” The man who’d walked us to the crates reminded me of the nice handler who’d been killed. He had the same gruff exterior but his brown eyes were kind. “There are now enforcers parked on the supply station and they’re carrying around the vids of the three of you. You’re like modern-day gangster lovers and the media is going crazy over the story. The Gwinarian”—he nodded toward me—“is becoming some kind of hero and it’s pissing off the authorities because they want answers.”

  “Are there any enforcers on Kithra yet?” Clay asked.

  “There will be soon. Jarana is trying to work out a deal.”

  Anders frowned. “What kind of deal?”

  The man shrugged. “I have no idea. Just know not to underestimate that Gwinarian. She’s got years of contacts and some in places even I won’t go.”

  I could only stare at the crates as it occurred to me that I hadn’t had a nightmare in weeks about the box years and not a nightmare of any kind since I’d been sharing a bed with Anders and Clay. Looking at the fuming blond man and the concerned captain, I realized something. I’d grown stronger in the last weeks, stronger than even I’d hoped.

  “Could you give us a few minutes?” I asked the man.

  He nodded and strode out of the warehouse.

  “I can do this,” I said to Anders and Clay. Anders started shaking his head and I held up my hand. “No, I really think I can. At first, I was thinking you’d have to drug me.”

  “We’re not drugging you for two days.”

  I grinned at him. “Juniper told me you drugged Vala and Bastian longer than that.”

  “That’s different,” he muttered frowning. “And Juniper? Really?”

  “Yeah.” I smiled. “He also told me how he got that name.”

  Anders stopped pacing, his mouth falling open.

  “My crew likes you.” Clay walked closer, wrapped his fingers around my arms. “I’m not going to drug you and risk you waking up confused in that box. I don’t even have to know what happened—‘another box’ was all I needed to hear to understand that this is one of your worst fears. I’m right about that, aren’t I?”

  I nodded. “The woman who had me before Lashin liked to put me in small boxes. Sometimes I didn’t fit until I was forced.” I pulled up my sleeve and pointed to my elbow and its obvious badly healed break. “You guys never asked why my arm looks like this.”

  “Gods,” Clay whispered before pulling me into his arms. “I knew something bad had happened to your arm, but I honestly didn’t need to know. It doesn’t make you any less beautiful. But now I want you to tell us her name so Anders and I can hunt her down after all this.”

  I pulled back, shaking my head. “No, I don’t need you to. Really. You see, you’ve taught me something pretty damned important. I have choices now. I never got into one of those boxes by choice, but I can do it with one of these. I want to see Kithra. Want Crichton there so we can force him to get well and tell us the whole truth of what happened. I want to know what that explosive is and who was working with Saturna. All these things have become important to me.”

  Anders had gone still and when I looked at him, he turned away from me. My heart clenched.

  “I can do this. It’s my choice. I need, desperately need to understand where I came from, to try and figure out who my family was.”

  Clay framed my face with his hands. I stared into those crystal-blue eyes, watching him read my expression, indecision still on his. “Everyone needs to understand their origin,” he said, voice low.

  “Such a brave girl,” Anders said as he came up behind me. He wrapped his arms around my waist and hugged me against him, tugging Clay into the hug with a fist in his shirt.

  I reached up to touch Anders’s face and mis-quoted, “‘Don’t feel sorry for her. She was one of those who likes to grow up.’”

  Anders started to laugh and Clay groaned, burying his face in my neck. “Not another Peter Pan fan.”

  “Let’s do this thing,” Anders said. “Get it over with so we can get back to the important stuff.”

  “And what’s that?” Clay stretched up to kiss Anders over my shoulder.

  “Fucking, of course.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “I believe it’s time for a bigger box.”

  “Nonsense. She likes this one. She told me so.”

  “Did she say that recently?”

  “A year or so ago.” My owner knocked on the box. “Little Siri, would you like to come out today?”

  Their words sort of spun around in my brain, not making sense. Swirls of sound that I couldn’t catch and didn’t want to. I’d finally reached a point of inner sedation, as I liked to call it. A place where nothing could touch me and my pain was merely a hungry wraith lurking in the background. If I let their words come together, that apparition would eat me alive.

  “Let me see her. I’ve heard she is Gwinarian.”

  “Partially. There’s some other kind of blood in her because she has the ugliest spots all over her face and shoulders.” Her laughter sounded twisted and cruel as it always did. “She is not your type. She has tits.”

  “She’s Gwinarian. That’s my type.”

  “What is your morbid fascination with the species?”

  “Let me buy her.”

  “Sight unseen?”

  “You forget. I know you, Luana. You only take the best and if you’ve had this one six years, she’s the best.”

  “I saw her as a child and knew she would blossom into something extraordinary.”

  “And were you wrong?”

  Her tone turned throaty, low. “I’m never wrong. So, how much would you offer without ever seeing the creature?”

  “You think the term will scare me off? I can offer you kithronite. As much as you can carry.”

  “For that, I’ll sell you this entire ship. It’s off the grid—the perfect hiding place for you, Mr. Lashin.”

  Noise, real noise, pulled me from the nightmare, or in this case, the memory. Boots sounded close to the crate and I held my hand over my mouth, trying hard not to let the cries loose. I thought I could handle being smuggled into Kithra’s supply station, but the dreams were coming with every close of my eyes. I should have let them gas me.

  There were voices, lots of voices around us at different times and the smell of vegetables above me sometimes made me gag. I had a breathing tube, a water tube and even one that held a protein and vitamin paste I was overly familiar with. If I’d known I’d be eating what I grew up surviving on, I probably wouldn’t have made the choice to lie down in this small space. If I’d known about the waste tube…

  At one point, the voices stopped and from the echoes I heard after being jostled about, I guessed we were finally in someone’s cargo hold. I wanted to call out to see if Anders and Clay were nearby, but I couldn’t risk it. All it would take was one enforcer standing silently in the room and we’d be caught. I’d heard them inspecting the boxes, had felt the one I was in shake as the top was opened. I did spend the time I wasn’t hallucinating with flashbacks wondering why Anders and Clay had come. They’d done what they promised. Delivered me and Crichton. There was really no need for them to go all the way to Kithra. They could have left me on that moon and taken off in their pirate ship to do whatever it was they planned now that they wouldn’t be wreaking havoc on Saturna mining sites and ships. Neither had talked about what was next for them.

  I wanted to be a part of whatever that was so badly. Right before I’d crawled into this box, they’d taken turns kissing me until my toes curled. They kissed like men who didn’t plan to let me go.

  They just never said it.

  The last few h
ours of the trip turned out to be the hardest. At one point, I didn’t think I could hold in the screams that built up in my chest and clawed up my throat. It was too quiet outside my crate so I was afraid to even move. It was Anders’s Peter Pan stories that kept me going. The things the boy had said about dreams coming true and sacrificing everything for them.

  My dream had always been to go home and that was coming true. I had a new dream now—to keep Anders and Clay—and during those long, quiet hours in the dark, I held on to both dreams.

  When my crate was opened, I think Anders and Clay both expected to find me in a worse state than I actually was. The anxiety on Anders’s beautiful face cleared up instantly when I gave him that smile he loved.

  “Thank the gods,” Clay breathed as Anders hauled me out of the crate and into his arms, tugging Clay in with us as always.

  I wrinkled my nose when it was squished between their chests. “We need a shower.”

  “I agree,” Jarana said as she came up to us. “I’m so sorry about all this, but it worked. We’re on my ship and I’ll be taking over from the copilot in training before we get to the debris fields.” Her casual clothes of loose lounge pants and thick shirt threw me off at first. She’d been wearing some sort of leather outfit on the vidscreen before. “It’s good to see another one of us returned home. You’re going to cause quite a stir. I saw the footage of what you did. Was seriously hot.” She winked. “You’ll be free to do as you please while on Kithra until the new enforcers get there. Nobody there would dream of turning you in—not for what you did.”

  Two men walked up behind her. The Replicant I’d seen with her on the vidscreen and a blond human who carried a baby girl. She had his silky hair and Jarana’s amber eyes.

  “It’s Freckles.” The Replicant smiled at me and I wondered why he’d put a tattoo on his face. It looked kind of like a swirl of flames with a dagger underneath his eye. It didn’t detract from his appearance, but it seemed a strange place for one. “We have a decent-sized shower in our cabin. You three are welcome to use it. As Jarana said, you should be safe on Kithra until Lux goes out to pick up the next group of Gwinarians. There’s supposed to be an enforcer coming with them.”