by Kate Rudolph
“I actually figured that part out myself. I don’t—it’s...” Laurel gave up on figuring out what she was trying to say. “I don’t know.”
“About?” Quinn prompted.
“Anything? I was in a coma for three days!” Laurel threw herself back against her pillows. She was hooked up to several wires, one of which seemed to be feeding fluid into her veins. Her throat was a little scratchy, but otherwise she felt fine. Was that how people normally felt when they woke up from comas? She didn’t think she knew anyone who had ever been in a coma before.
Quinn took pity on her and gave her more information. “There was an infection in your brain from some shoddy work that the Oscavians did to you. They kept you alive, but they clearly had no idea what they were doing to a human.”
That explained the headaches and the fuzziness. “And the Detyens did?”
“I guess?” Quinn shrugged.
It was becoming clearer and clearer that Quinn was relaying all of this information secondhand. “Shouldn’t a doctor be telling me this stuff?”
Quinn smiled. “They thought you might want to see a fri—familiar face first.”
Her stumble confused Laurel. “We’re friends, aren’t we?” She didn’t know how people could go through what they’d gone through on Fenryr 1 and come out as anything other than friends. Not when they were on the same side.
But with that question it was like a veil fell over Quinn’s expression and she closed herself off, the smile disappearing from her face. After a moment she began to nod and smiled again, but this time it looked forced. “I... Yeah, I want to be your friend.”
Laurel’s head was still a little fuzzy, even if she wasn’t in pain. She was probably on the good drugs or something like that, and it was kind of hard to think clearly, but she could tell Quinn was holding something back. She wanted all of the information in the open, she needed to know everything that had happened since Fenryr 1. “Good.” She could use as many friends as she could make. “Where are the other women? I still don’t know exactly what happened back there. How long since we were recovered?” Dru hadn’t known, and she couldn’t trust anything that Varrow had said to her. After all, he had said all the women were dead, and that clearly wasn’t true.
“It’s been almost three months,” Quinn shocked Laurel by saying. “The others are back on Earth, we’re all safe.”
Three months? Laurel knew that she’d been held by the Oscavians for quite some time, but it was hard to believe that nearly a quarter of a year had passed. “How did I end up on an Oscavian ship if everyone else is okay? I don’t really remember all that happened. Varrow said they pulled a control chip out of my head. Do you know?” If anyone had the answers, it was going to be Quinn. Laurel didn’t know why she was on the ship when the rest of the women were back on Earth, but they could get to that later. Right now she wanted to know what had happened, why she’d been taken prisoner when all the others had escaped.
Quinn winced at talk of the control chip. “We were afraid of that, back when you...” She trailed off as if she didn’t want to say the rest of the thought.
But Laurel wasn’t going to let her get away with that. “When I want?”
Quinn was already shaking her head and leaning back in her chair, as if putting more distance between them would mean that she didn’t have to say whatever she knew. “I think you should take some more time to recover before we go over all of this. It’s not pleasant.”
If it weren’t for all of the wires, Laurel would have shot up off the bed and tackled Quinn until she could force her to say everything she knew. But since that wasn’t an option at the moment, Laurel was forced to use her words. “I’m a big girl, Quinn. I need to know what happened.”
Quinn took a deep breath and braced her hands on the armrests of her chair. She met Laurel’s eyes for a moment but then glued her gaze to a spot on the wall beyond her. “You sabotaged our rescue ship and then led the Oscavians to Detyen HQ after we were forced to divert there. While we were trying to escape, some of the girls, I don’t know which ones, made it so that you didn’t make it off the planet with us. I don’t think they hurt you, judging by the medical reports we’ve got, but you didn’t make it out of the battle. Best as we can tell, you and Dru were captured by the Oscavians at roughly the same time.”
Laurel’s brain stuttered and stopped, her thoughts frozen like she’d been caught in an iceberg and abandoned. Quinn’s words triggered something in her mind, a flash of memory that had been out of reach in the weeks, months, since she’d been captured.
The door labeled ‘maintenance.’ A bunch of machines she didn’t understand. Three switches that she knew she had to flip.
Her vision went black for a moment but there was no relief from the memory. When the mental vid started playing again it was in a different place, brighter but still hurt by her treachery.
The girls needed to shut up. Laurel saw the tablet, all she had to do was access the network through there and she could send the signal, just as instructed. A commotion by the door gave her the shot she needed and she reached for it, using hacking skills she’d never learned to break through the pass code and sign on. In a few keystrokes it was done. They were on their way.
The memory changed again. This time they were running down a hallway with the sound of blaster fire echoing around them, the shots firing somewhere in the distance. The women around her sat at the edge of panic, the need to run and hide warring with the knowledge that following the warriors leading them was their best shot at getting off planet.
Dru was there. The frantic energy of the memory calmed for a moment when Laurel spotted him, but he was clutching his chest and his normally rich purple skin had taken on a sick pallor. Was he injured?
The tide of the memory dragged her along and a flash of dark hair blocked her vision. Laurel tripped, going to her hands and knees, and the crack of her bones hitting the hard floor should have been loud enough to echo. But between the marching women, the soldiers, and the battle, her struggle was swallowed up by the other sounds around them.
A boot caught her in the chest and Laurel rolled to the side, trying to stop herself from being trampled. She tried to call out, but it was like a hand wrapped around her throat and choked off any objection. A second boot caught her, this time striking her back, just to the side of her spine. Laurel gasped but that was all she could do, she couldn’t even scream.
“Shh!” the women around her hissed. Heavy hands reached down and at first she thought they were there to help her, but instead they rolled her over, pushing her to the side of the hallway and stuffing her into a large, empty crate.
“No room for traitors,” said a woman’s voice.
“We’ve got to hurry!” urged a second.
Laurel tried to get a look at them, tried to see who was doing this to her, but her eyes wouldn’t cooperate. All she saw was hair and flashes of pale skin. And then the lid of the crate crashed closed and she was left alone in the dark, unable to find the strength to call for help.
The memory released her and Laurel gasped, trying to pull in enough air to breathe. Her lungs were on fire and she had to squeeze her eyes shut before opening them and blinking several more times to make out the room around there. The flash of Quinn’s brown hair wasn’t the same as what she’d seen in the dream, but that barely registered.
“You left me!” It may have been hoarse, but the yell echoed around the room. “How could you do that? I was—”
Quinn lifted a hand, trying to placate her. “We didn’t—”
“Get out!” She couldn’t stand to look at Quinn, couldn’t stand to wallow in the memories of what she’d done. Abandoning her at HQ was a kindness that Laurel hadn’t deserved; they should have shot her in the head and been done with it.
A flash of movement by the door wasn’t enough to distract her. Laurel kept yelling, but even she wasn’t sure what she was saying. Vitriol poured out of her mouth, simultaneously castigating Quinn for abandonin
g her and for not executing her for the terrible things she’d done.
“You need to leave.” The deep voice was a lake of calm in the turbulent sea of Laurel’s emotions. She clung to it, knowing that it represented something, but she couldn’t say what right now. Her mind was too jumbled, too caught up in the memory of what had happened, what she’d done.
She didn’t see Quinn leave, but Dru took her place on the chair for a moment before giving it up and sitting beside her on the bed. He reached for her and Laurel lunged forward into his arms, accepting the comfort he offered as tears rolled down her cheeks. “I betrayed them,” she said against the soft fabric of his top. “How could I do that?” Distantly she remembered that there was some reason she was supposed to be staying away from Dru, but at the moment Laurel didn’t care. He was there, a strong, warm presence that anchored her in the present while the past tried to pull her back, tried to show her all the terrible things the slavers had done to her and made her do. All the things she hadn’t been able to resist.
“You were being controlled.” Dru was gentle with her, smoothing down her hair and tucking it back behind her ear. “You didn’t have a choice. That’s not on you.”
“I got people killed,” Laurel insisted. She was the reason for the attack on Detyen HQ, couldn’t he see that? How could he even sit with her like this when she was responsible for the destruction of his home? “I should have been able to resist it.” That was what happened on the media shows. The heroine always resisted the power of the control chip before she did something unforgivable. Even knowing that media was a bunch of bullshit, Laurel had always held the secret thought deep inside her that she’d be able to do the same if the circumstances ever arose.
So much for that.
Dru carefully cradled her face and tilted it up until their eyes met and that zing of recognition bounced between them. “You survived, that is resistance.” He stared at her for several moments until he was satisfied that she’d gotten the message. Then his hands smoothed down her sides and wrapped around her, rocking her gently back and forth.
This wasn’t fair to him. Laurel needed to push him away, make him see that she didn’t deserve his comfort. But a shadow moved out of the corner of her eye as one of the Detyen medics came in. She patted Laurel’s arm and as Laurel turned to watch her she saw her administer something into her IV. Then the room went fuzzy at the edges and Laurel began to fall down into the world of dreams.
But before she surrendered, she vowed to herself that she would resist Dru. Not because of any fated recognition, that didn’t matter anymore. No, she’d resist him because he deserved someone better, someone who hadn’t almost destroyed his people, someone who wasn’t broken by a control chip.
Someone much better than her.
Chapter Nine
DRU SHOT OUT OF THE room, leaving Laurel in the medic’s care. Almost nothing could have dragged him from her bedside, but he would make sure that she was defended, whether from physical attack or mental. And whatever Quinn had said to her, he wouldn’t stand for it.
The human hadn’t gone far. She might have even been waiting for him, standing at the end of the hallway, arms crossed, and eyebrow raised. He recognized someone ready for a fight and Dru had been on the far edge of his own patience for so long that he was ready to throw down.
“What in all the hells were you thinking of, springing that on Laurel?” he demanded. In the three days of Laurel’s coma and the day before, which had gone by in a blur of frantic action while Detyen HQ was evacuated due to the Oscavian threat, Dru had learned a lot of what had gone on since he had been taken prisoner by Brakley Varrow.
Not one but two soulless warriors had found their mates and somehow miraculously regained their souls, their emotions. The team that had originally been sent to Fenryr 1 to recover information from an old ship had found the first real lead concerning the destruction of Detya. Yormas of Wreet was their suspect, and though more than a hundred years had gone by since the attack, the man was still alive and playing an active role in interstellar politics. He was supposed to be an ambassador on Earth, but Kayde and Quinn had revealed that the alien had disappeared after the Detyen team had begun to investigate him. They feared that Yormas had set his eyes on Earth and now planned to destroy that planet the same way he had destroyed Detya. He was working with the Oscavians. Brakley Varrow and his deceased brother Nyden were both connected to him. Dru’s mind had reeled as Kayde and Quinn recited the information.
And every time Dru came near to Kayde, he couldn’t help but stare. The last time he had seen his fellow warrior, the man had been made of ice, not even a hint or an echo of the emotion he once felt before he sacrificed his soul for the protection of his people. But now he looked at his denya, Quinn, with the heat that made Dru want to look away. The warrior even smiled, and Dru was almost certain that he had heard him laugh. What the rest of the Legion had to say about this development, Dru did not know. A fleet of dozens of ships carried thousands of warriors and survivors, but communication was being kept to a minimum in the hopes of keeping the journey a secret for as long as they could.
The information that Laurel had managed to purloin from Varrow indicated that he knew of the secret rendezvous points that the Detyens planned to use in case an evacuation like this had ever become necessary. Kayde and Quinn had discovered a traitor among the Detyen ranks during the course of their escape, and Detyen leadership was now worried that there was more than one mole.
Tensions were running high, and all of that was true before Dru took into account the danger that his mate had been and the words that Quinn had said to her.
Quinn didn’t seem worried about the heat in his tone. She bedded down with a Detyen warrior every night, she knew what they could do, but perhaps the threat had lost its effectiveness when she knew that Kayde was never far away to give her backup. “If you think anyone back home is going to go easy on her, you’re out of your mind. I actually want to be her friend.”
“You’ve got an interesting way of showing it.” Dru would not let any of Laurel’s friends speak to her that way, nor her enemies. If anyone back home tried to hurt her for the things she had been forced to do, he would stand in their way, protecting his mate in any way he could.
“Until three days ago I was sure she was dead. This whole thing is taking us all by surprise.”
And was that how someone was supposed to talk to a woman who had miraculously survived? Dru took half a step forward. “You—”
Footsteps pounded down the hall and a grin broke out across Quinn’s face as she caught sight of her mate rounding the corner, a feral look on his face. “Don’t speak to my mate that way,” Kayde growled at him. His claws weren’t out, but his eyes flashed red and the promise of violence hung in the air.
Under other circumstances, Dru might have tried to de-escalate the tension, but Quinn wasn’t the only denya in this situation. “Your mate put my mate’s health at risk. Laurel needed more time to recover before she heard about what happened.” He’d been making that argument since Quinn told him the full story of the human survivors’ flight from Detyen HQ. He had insisted that they remain quiet about what had been done to Laurel until the doctor cleared her to get up from her bed. He didn’t consider it a lie. Information like that could hit a person as strong as a knife, and while Dru wanted to take all of Laurel’s pains and keep her from feeling any of them, he knew she would never accept that. But in this one instance he thought he could delay until she was a little stronger. Except apparently Quinn had not agreed and had taken matters into her own hands.
Kayde studied him for a long moment and his gaze flicked to Quinn and then back. “From what I hear, she says she isn’t your mate.”
Dru reminded himself that soulless warriors finding their mates was a miracle, and that he should not wish that Kayde would unlearn his instinct for sarcasm. Emotions were a gift, even if right now Dru felt a bit cursed. “We’re working on that.” Yes, he would have preferred if Lau
rel had not rejected him in front of a good portion of the Detyen Legion. That kind of setback might have stopped another man entirely. But given the infection in her brain, and all of the other excitement of the past few months, Dru could be patient. Laurel needed time to accustom herself to the idea of having a mate. And though he was not happy with Quinn at the moment, he thought that seeing another human woman happily mated to a Detyen warrior might help convince Laurel to accept the future that Dru could offer her.
She’d taken his comfort after he kicked Quinn out of her recovery room. That had to be progress. Until that moment, he hadn’t been sure that she would prefer his company under any circumstances. A part of him had feared that if Brakley Varrow were standing next to him, she would rather sit by his torturer than him. Not that he thought she carried any sort of warm feelings for the so-called scientist, but rather the negativity swirling around her head regarding Dru had seemed so bad, so insurmountable, that she would rather spend time with her captor than him.
Apparently not. He’d call that progress.
“She told me you weren’t her mate,” Quinn felt the need to point out.
If he was going to have this argument with anyone, he would have it with Laurel. Quinn and Kayde could mind their own business. “Why did the two of you dock with the ship when you had your own way back to Earth?” he asked. The two of them had escaped Detyen HQ in the same ship that they had arrived in, a small speeder they’d brought from Earth. They could’ve flown back to Earth separately, but for some reason had chosen to join the fleet and let their own ship be towed along behind them.
Quinn tipped her head back and laughed. “And miss out on the company?” By company, Dru was pretty sure she meant drama.
Dru made a sound of frustration. “Stay away from Laurel until she wants to see you.”