by Kit Rocha
Chemical imbalances of the brain plagued plenty of people who had nothing to do with experimental gene modification, and in the sectors, such disorders still frequently went untreated. It was conceivable the bodyguard’s mother had suffered from one, possibly exacerbated by whatever had resulted in those dark, helpless memories of sleeping in the streets. The memory was coated with too much resigned recognition for his mother’s grief to have been a sporadic or rare occurrence.
Sara could empathize. Her mother may not have been a conductor, but she’d taken in the pain of the world, collecting it like static that had no way to discharge. Sara had known early in life that Mama had bad days, and Papa would do anything it took to make them right, except that sometimes, he couldn’t.
Her father hadn’t accepted defeat well. Makhai soldiers rarely did.
Sara’s stomach nearly heaved again as she imagined what her father would have said about today’s fiasco. She was only eleven when the Base came for her tiny family, but her parents had spent every second before that day preparing her to live an invisible life. To hide in plain sight, to use her rapid processing skills and uncanny instincts to earn the right amount of money in the right ways--enough to be comfortable, but not so much as to be noticeable.
To never be someone the people in power took seriously or remembered.
Well, she’d fucked that up.
Chapter Ten
As a child, Ivan had learned to sleep lightly.
During his mother’s worst dark periods, he would awaken at the slightest whisper or creak of floorboards. Sometimes, if he left his room and caught her wandering, he could head off a spiral. He’d lead her back to bed, or to the overstuffed chair in the corner of their tiny sitting room. She’d gather him close and bury her face in his hair and tell him to be like his father, to be good, over and over, until sleep dragged her back down.
Maricela’s nightmare started with a whimper.
Ivan’s eyes shot open at the first sound, and he stared at the darkness above him until he heard it again--soft and terrified, a low noise ripped from an unwilling throat.
He tossed his blanket aside and was over the back of the couch before it came again. In the dim moonlight filtering through the window, he saw movement on the bed--Maricela twisting fitfully, tangled up in her ridiculous duvet.
Her face looked stricken, and his heart clenched.
“Maricela.” No response as he crossed to the bed and slid one knee onto it so he could reach her in the middle of its vast expanse. His fingers encountered a bare shoulder, and her skin felt feverish. He shook her gently. “Maricela, wake up.”
“No.” Her fingernails raked over his upper arm as she clawed at him. “No.”
“Maricela.” He dragged the heavy covers away from her and pulled her upright. “It’s Ivan. Look at me.”
“How--” Her voice, thick with emotion, broke. “How could you?”
She still wasn’t seeing him. He cupped her flushed face, his heart thudding painfully as he choked back panic. He smoothed his thumbs over her tear-streaked cheeks and lowered his voice to a soothing murmur. “Come on, Maricela. Come back to me.”
After what seemed like an eternity, her gaze focused on his face, and she mouthed his name.
“Yes, it’s Ivan.” He stilled his thumbs, but he couldn’t pull his hands away. Not when she looked so lost. “Do you know where you are?”
She nodded. “I’m okay. Just a bad dream.”
Reluctantly, he released her and sat back on the edge of the bed. “It sounded really bad.”
After a moment, she sighed. “Yes. But I don’t know how to talk about it.” She drew her knees up under her chin and wrapped her arms around her legs. “What do you know about the day Gideon was almost assassinated?”
Not a comfortable topic for a Rider. Ivan had been in Sector Three that day, tasked with helping to get the new joint hospital operational. “I know that Eden used the family of one of the kitchen workers to pressure the man into trying to kill Gideon. Donny shot Gideon, but Gideon managed to take him down before he collapsed.”
“And I found them and called for help.” Maricela nodded. “It’s a nice story. Plausible, with no holes. It fits the timeline. It could have happened.”
His heart had been racing. Now it felt frozen in his chest. “It didn’t?”
Her throat worked as she swallowed. “I was working in the solarium when I heard the gun go off. Gideon’s study is just down the hall, so I went to ask him if everything was okay. He was--he was bleeding, but conscious. And Donny had the gun.”
She didn’t say anything else, and Ivan had the sick feeling he knew where this was going. But it was hard to look at her like this--so small in the middle of the huge bed, curled in on herself, fragile in spite of all of her strength, because she never, ever gave herself a break. “What happened?”
“I had to stop him from hurting Gideon again.” She licked her lips, and her eyes lost focus, like she was looking at something very far away. “I tried to disarm him, and he hit me. We struggled. He must have dropped the gun somewhere, because he pulled a knife. I took it, and I stabbed him with it. I stabbed him until he stopped moving.”
The mental image of Maricela lunging at a man with a gun was its own special brand of nightmare fodder. He could see it so vividly, too. She was fearless in defense of the people she loved, reckless with her own safety.
He wanted to shake her. He wanted to wrap his arms around her and hold her until the fear at what might have happened that day stopped eating him up inside.
He wanted to make that lost look in her eyes go away. “You shouldn’t have had to do that.”
“I didn’t,” she mumbled. “At least, that’s what everyone thinks. That God struck Donny down, or Gideon killed him, or the guards or one of the Riders. No one suspects the truth because it’s so unfathomable.”
Of course it was. Who could look at her like this, or when she worked in the gardens or handed out sweets to children or walked among her people, granting blessings, and think that she was capable of taking a knife and plunging it into a man until he bled out?
She hunched further in on herself, and he realized that his shocked silence was only proving her point. That if anyone learned her dark, violent secret, they’d never be able to look at her the same way again, because murder was incompatible with Sector One’s princess.
Ivan shifted more fully onto the bed and opened his arms. “Come here.”
“No.” She started unbuttoning the top of her nightgown, then paused. “Can you keep a secret?”
After all the burning tension that had passed between them, watching her bare the tops of her breasts should have been seductive. But her pain seethed in the air, and the moment felt like it was balanced on the edge of something dangerous, as if one wrong move would send her into a fall he couldn’t protect her from. “Of course.”
Wordlessly, she shrugged her arms free of her gown, then clutched the white fabric to her chest and turned away from him.
The smooth skin over her ribs was interrupted by a splash of black ink so unexpected that he simply stared at it, his mind unable to process the meaning.
Clarity hit him like a knife to the heart.
Maricela had a raven.
She took a deep breath. “Del didn’t want to do it. She tried to set a penance for me instead, but I couldn’t take it. You understand why, don’t you?”
“No.” Surely if anyone deserved leniency, it was Maricela. A year of service to wipe the stain from her soul would have been nothing. Her entire life was service. “I don’t understand.”
“Only through contrition of heart and deed may you find absolution,” she recited woodenly. “You can’t repent unless you regret your actions. You have to be sorry for what you’ve done.” Slowly, she turned to him, her dark eyes burning with intensity. “I’m not sorry. I’d do it again if I had to. Every day.”
Now he was the one balanced precariously on the cliff’s edge. There was noth
ing fragile about Maricela now. With the weight of the secret gone from her shoulders, she was fierce--less like her gentle mother and more like her aunt, Santa Adriana, the woman who had fought alongside her bodyguard more often than she’d hidden behind him.
Maricela was glorious. She was a little intimidating.
She was waiting for him to say something. “I’m going to make sure you don’t have to do it again.”
The banked fury in her gaze eased, and she smiled as she reached out. “You know what? I believe you.”
Her fingers brushed his cheek, and Ivan remembered something else about Adriana.
She’d fallen in love with her bodyguard.
Warmth spread out from the tips of Maricela’s fingers. He was so damn attuned to her now that his body stirred from that contact alone. She was only using one hand to hold up her nightgown now, and the fabric dipped low, revealing the outer curve of one breast.
It would be so, so easy to fall into this. In the darkness, in silence. If neither of them spoke, neither could say we can’t. Just hands and mouths and finally, finally getting more than stolen, forbidden touches.
His hand flexed in anticipation of stroking her. But her fingers trembled on his cheek, and he knew he couldn’t. Not with the weight of her revelations between them, or with her vulnerability still so close to the surface.
Ivan could survive a lot of sexual frustration. He couldn’t survive being something Maricela regretted.
Moving slowly, he reached out and caught the edges of her nightgown. He coaxed it back up, guiding her arms back into it before carefully refastening each button.
The bed was so big that three more people could have joined them with room to spare. He shoved two pillows up toward the headboard and scooted up. Then he held out his arms. “Come here,” he repeated.
She curled up against him and rested her head on his shoulder. Sweet. Trusting.
His chest hurt again.
Her hair spilled across his arm. He drew his fingers through the silken strands, coaxing them away from her cheek, and she relaxed with a soft noise of pleasure.
It loosened the band in his chest. It tightened other places. But Ivan smiled and let his fingers sink deeper into her hair, until he could drag his fingernails lightly over her scalp. “Want me to talk?”
“No, just...” Her hand clenched in his shirt. “Don’t leave me.”
That was the one promise he could make to her, for as long as he was alive. “I won’t.”
Chapter Eleven
Nita’s suite was huge, a sprawling collection of rooms that eclipsed Maricela’s in their grandeur. The royal palace, after all, hadn’t been expanded since the days of the Prophet. Gideon thought the mansion was too big as it was, and Maricela couldn’t argue. She had a wing to herself, more than sufficient space, and that was enough.
Estela Reyes, on the other hand, had things to prove. It wasn’t a practical need for space that drove her to build a house grander than the royal palace, but it was practicality all the same. Her majestic home was a statement of prosperity.
And her heir’s massive suite? Well, that was a promise--a promise that anyone lucky enough to marry Nita would share in these riches.
Laurel ducked out of a closet, shaking her head, and narrowly avoided a collision with two servants pushing a rack of gowns. “My entire fucking apartment could fit in your closet.”
“Which one?” Grace asked around the pins clenched between her teeth.
Bewildered, Laurel tilted her head. “Which apartment?”
“No, which closet.”
“She has more than one?” Laurel stalked away, presumably to take full inventory of Nita’s storage space.
Nita rolled her eyes skyward before zipping up the back of Ana’s slinky, glittering dress. The fabric looked like the midnight sky with a dreamy scattering of stars across it--but the slit in the front was high enough to flash the knives strapped to Ana’s thigh. “Wait until she finds the bathroom.”
“You should just give her the grand tour, Nita.” Kora paused in applying Maricela’s mascara to wink at her. “Shouldn’t take more than an hour or two. You’ll barely be late for the ball.”
“Yeah, yeah. My rooms are ridiculous.” She finished with Ana’s dress and jabbed a finger at the Rider. “Don’t go anywhere. Jewelry next.”
Ana turned and held up both hands. “No, no way. I don’t want to spend ten years paying you back if I lose an earring in a fight.”
“Wait until you see it,” Nita countered before raising her voice. “Inga, can you get the set from my debut, please?”
One of the maids who’d been arranging snacks on a wide table nodded and hurried off in the direction Laurel had gone.
Kora slipped the wand back into the mascara pot and rearranged the protective smock covering Maricela’s dress. “You’ve been quiet.”
“Have I?”
“Mm-hmm.”
Maricela sorted through the various blush palettes, taking her time to choose one. She couldn’t tell her sister that she was still reeling from the events of the previous day--or that she’d woken up in Ivan’s arms.
She especially couldn’t say that last part with Ivan and Ashwin standing only a few feet away.
She deflected with a half-truth instead. “I was just thinking about how beautiful you look tonight. Pregnancy agrees with you, and so does that dress.”
Kora smoothed her skirt over her stomach. The ice-blue fabric showed no change in her shape, but her skin glowed with health and happiness. “Thank you. But you’re avoiding something.”
“Miss Nita!” The maid was back, staggering under the weight of a massive jewelry box. Ivan jumped to take it from her, hoisting it onto the table next to the pre-party snacks.
“Thank you, both.” Nita flipped up the lid and unfolded the trays that swiveled out from each side. “Maricela, did you pack your own jewelry? I can have Inga bring out the rest of it.”
“Thank you, but I’m fine. Isabela--” She paused as Grace reached past her for a sewing kit with a murmured apology. “Isabela came fully prepared. She brought our mother’s wedding jewels for me to wear.”
“Oh, that’s subtle.” Nita lifted a velvet tray out of the box and turned it to reveal a necklace and matching earrings made of wrought silver flowers accented with pearls and diamonds. “This will look perfect with that dress, Ana.”
Ana stroked the delicate petal of one silver flower. “Are you sure? If something happens...”
Nita waved a hand. “If a fight breaks out in the middle of my mother’s carefully planned ball, she won’t be fretting over jewelry. Trust me.” As if that settled the matter, Nita set the tray on the table and pointed to a chair. “Now let Maura fix your hair and makeup. And where the hell did Laurel go? She needs to get dressed. Laurel!”
Nita stalked toward the far side of the room, and Ana obediently dropped into the chair next to Maricela with a laugh. “This is more intense than gearing up for a fight. And she might be bossier than Deacon.”
“You have no idea.” Grace glanced up from the dress draped across her lap, though her fingers never stopped flying as she tacked up the seam with a row of stitches. “She spent the last few days subtly offering me gowns from her closet. She was sure I wouldn’t be able to finish mine.”
Maricela had no idea how she had. Grace’s dress was simple, certainly--a wrapped bodice with twisted spaghetti straps that fit her tightly through the waist before draping loosely for the rest of its length. But the wrap created a dramatic, extremely flattering plunge halfway to her navel, and the fitted parts clung to her like a second skin.
“It looks good.” Laurel emerged from another door, a length of black fabric draped over her arm. “Maybe we should trade, or something.” Before Grace could answer, she dropped her dress over the back of a chair and started unbuttoning her vest as she kicked off her shoes.
In moments, she had stripped to the waist, and Ivan cleared his throat and turned his back on them. Ashwin�
�s brow furrowed, but Ivan made a quick gesture, and Ashwin obediently turned.
Laurel laughed like it was the cutest thing ever, then dropped her jeans, swept up the dress, and pulled it over her head. It fell to mid-thigh, the stretchy fabric skimming her curves.
Maricela covered a smile. “I don’t think you need anything tailored, Laurel. Our hearts might not take it.”
“Flatterer.” Laurel pushed her hair back out of her eyes and squinted at Ashwin and Ivan’s backs--or maybe their asses. “Nothing like a well-made tux, though.”
Ivan’s shoulders stiffened, as if he felt her gaze.
Ana laughed. “I thought about wearing one, but I couldn’t resist a slinky dress. Plus, no way was I going to the fittings. Zeke was being so dramatic about having to dress up.”
Ivan couldn’t have been thrilled about it, either, but he hadn’t complained. Maricela folded the smock covering her dress, careful not to smudge the white satin, and set it aside. She rose and circled the table to stand in front of him.
His bow tie was slightly crooked, and she reached out to straighten it. “Laurel’s dressed now.”
“Thank God,” he murmured. He lifted his hand to the tie. “Did I do it wrong?”
“Not at all. You look...” The only words that came to mind were far too revealing. She couldn’t say them to Ivan, much less in the company of so many others, so she bit her tongue. “You look fine.”
He tugged lightly on the bow tie, knocking it askew again. “I feel ridiculous.”
“You’ll be dressed exactly like dozens of other people tonight. Trust me, you’ll blend in.” A lie, but only a tiny one. Gideon had mandated formalwear for the Riders in lieu of their official dress uniforms in hopes that they would do exactly that--blend in with Estela’s guests.
But Ivan could never be mistaken for one of them. It wasn’t just that he was uneasy in the tuxedo. He exhibited a leashed strength that the fine fabric couldn’t hide, and a prowling energy it couldn’t contain. He might look like one of them, but he wasn’t. He was a warrior, and a fancy party didn’t change that one bit.