“Alright,” Thalia sighed. “Rundown of the crew: the original crew was Hyde, Dom, Rick, Leo, and Custer. All of them are bear shifters. They picked up Annie through a series of happenings of soap opera proportions, which sort of set off their trend of picking up women in various parts of the galaxy, myself included. Leo and Annie are together. They’re both reasonable, but don’t fuck around with either of them. Zosha’s with Rick—that’s the brown-haired dude—and has been since she accidentally got the crew into the U4 game. Zosha’s sweet, but she’s smart and she’s spent her whole life in an uphill battle for survival, not to mention she’s seriously connected. Rick’s the first mate, and if someone says that Dad said to go do something they’re talking about him. Delphine was sent to kill the crew and got captured instead, leading to her and Custer falling in love, which will make sense after you meet Custer, who defies description so I’m not wasting my time. My name, again, is Thalia. I’m a journalist, and I’m with Hyde, the technician. The last member is Dom, who you’re about to meet. Quiet, sweet, reserved. Oh, look, here we are.”
The room Thalia lead her to had obviously been recently repurposed, boxes pushed against the wall to make room for some medical equipment and a table in the center of the room with the man Aurie assumed was Dom sitting shirtless on it.
If this was another day manning the walk-in clinic, the man on the table would have been the highlight of her week. Even sitting she could tell he was short, but he more than made up for that with the almost delicate structure of his face that should have contrasted sharply with the hardness of his body but somehow didn’t. He had the same golden eyes as the other men on the ship and close-cropped dark hair.
He looked up. “This her?”
“This is her,” Thalia confirmed. “Dominic, meet Aurelia; Aurelia meet Dom.”
“The very least you could do in this God-forsaken situation is call me Aurie,” Aurie muttered.
Thalia quirked an eyebrow at her but said nothing.
Aurie turned her attention back to the man on the table.
“So, what seems to be the problem?” she asked.
He gestured behind himself to what, on further observation, was a more rudimentary version of the X-ray machine she used back at Grand View. “There’s something in my neck. It needs to come out.”
Aurie walked around him and inspected the medical equipment, deciding she didn’t really want to know where it came from. It was easy enough to boot up and select the “localized scan” option, waiting for the attached wand to light up blue. Picking it up, she turned back to Dominic.
“Alright, let’s get this over with,” she told him. “Face forward and lean over.”
He complied. She was about to ask where, exactly, she should start looking when she saw it: a thin, pale line in his tan skin approximately an inch and a half across.
“This will tingle a little, but you shouldn’t feel any pain,” she said, placing the wand against his neck and waiting for it to do its job. It only took a few seconds for the image on the screen to clear and for Aurie, heart sinking, to see a very specific problem with her kidnappers’ request.
“So, um,” she started with no little amount of apprehension, “there may be a slight… complication.”
“Complication?” Thalia asked in a terrifyingly mild voice.
“Yeah, um, you see this?” Aurie asked, pointing at a small white square on the screen. “This is a chip—I’m assuming that’s what you wanted me to look for?—that’s imbedded in Dominic here’s neck. It doesn’t look like it’s hurting anything, it’s pretty small, but from this X-ray it looks like it was put in before he finished growing. That means it’s pretty deeply imbedded in his neck and what’s more, I’m a bit wary of how close it is to his spine. Honestly, I don’t have the skill to get this out and even if I did, I couldn’t recommend going through with it. He’s much safer leaving it in.”
“No, he’s not,” Thalia sighed, “and neither are we.” She opened up a comm channel on her multi-tool. “Hey, guys, I really hope you’re still in the kitchen, because we’re about to need to have a little family meeting. Me, Dom, and Aurie will be up in five.” She clicked the link out.
Aurie stared at her. “I don’t think you understand. He’s not in mortal danger from this. It’s…annoying, maybe, but not fatal.”
“He has Rogerson disorder,” Thalia told her.
Aurie blinked and leaned slightly away from Dominic. “Oh.”
“The chip generates some kind of high-pitched noise, or something that his brain reads as a high-pitched noise, that causes him to shift unexpectedly,” Thalia continued.
Aurie had, in her many years working in various hospitals in various areas of the city, learned the very important lesson of not blaming people for their medical conditions. It was poor medical practice. With that said, the knowledge that she was standing next to a man who might, spontaneously and without warning, turn into a feral bear at any second was…alarming.
“Oh,” she said again in a slightly higher voice. “That’s… oh.”
Dominic snorted. “Don’t worry, Princess. They’re keeping me under a mild sedation until we figure this out.”
“And that’s working?” Aurie asked.
“Well, they wouldn’t keep wasting the medication if it weren’t,” he replied with far less sarcasm than she probably deserved.
“That’s just fantastic,” Aurie said woodenly. “So, we need to get back to the kitchen?”
“We do,” Thalia said. “Come on.”
Aurie walked stiffly behind her as they returned to the rest of the crew.
“Breathe,” Dominic muttered behind her.
“What?” she asked.
“I said breathe,” he said. “They’re not going to blame you. You’re going to be fine.”
Aurie swallowed. “Thank you.” Then, “you have excellent bedside manner, do you know that?”
Dom chuckled softly. “Thank you. I assume you do as well, when you haven’t been recently kidnapped.”
“Oh, no, I’m about this bad all the time,” Aurie replied.
In front of them, Thalia snorted.
“If you want Custer to ever stop making fun of you, you might want to stop flirting before we get in earshot.”
Aurie felt her cheeks heat. She needed to lay off the rom vids—there was a very, very low chance that her kidnappers were going to secretly all have hearts of gold, and that she and Dominic would fall madly in love and she’d go off gallivanting in the stars with them forever. That just wasn’t the way her life was laid out.
Dominic sighed. “Don’t be like that, Tali, I’d hate to have to ask you to pull another double shift.”
“Ooooh, you asshole,” Thalia hissed at him, though Aurie could see that she was smiling. She looked like she was about to say something else, but they reached the kitchen first.
Despite Dom’s assurance that she would be fine, she instinctively curled in on herself as they entered the room. The crew of the Breakwater, other than Zosha, had never seemed particularly cheerful, but with the anticipation of receiving bad news they seemed sinister.
“So what seems to be the problem, Aurelia?” the captain asked.
Aurie swallowed. “The chip? That you wanted me to remove? He’s grown around it. If I tried to take it out, especially without the right equipment, I’d paralyze him. If you want it out, you need to take him to a specialist.”
“Think she’s lying?” Hyde asked, eyes narrow.
“Well, I don’t exactly have a wealth of medical training,” Thalia replied, dry as a desert, “but I’d say she realizes she’d be more expendable if she couldn’t do it, so no, I don’t think she’s lying.”
“So where can we get this done?” Annie asked, eyes like needles.
Aurie hesitated. She wasn’t one to play hero, but at the same time, she knew she’d never forgive herself if she handed someone else to them.
“Look,” a blond man she hadn’t met yet drawled, “it’s lik
e this. If you don’t tell us where we can get someone to do the operation, we have to do this all over again and, for obvious reasons, we can’t let you go until we’re done. Now, maybe this next person is good for the operation. But maybe not. Maybe we have to do this a whole bunch of times. Or, you can give us a name, and it all ends with no one getting hurt and no one disturbed that doesn’t need to be.”
“Custer’s right,” Annie said, not unkindly. “We don’t want to hurt anyone we don’t have to, but this has to happen.”
Aurie chewed it over for a moment. “I… my advisor. Former advisor. She’s the best bet. If I call and ask her to set up a time to operate on a friend who can’t answer any questions, she’ll do it. She used to work in a clinic that catered specifically to people who couldn’t go to a hospital until it got shut down and since she’s an otorhinolaryngologist she’s the best choice.”
The entire crew stared at her.
“A what now?” Thalia asked.
“An otorhinolaryngologist. It’s a medical professional specializing in the head and neck region,” Aurie explained.
“You’re fucking with us,” Zosha said accusatorily.
“They’re also called ENT surgeons, if that’s easier to remember,” Delphine said quietly. Aurie nodded.
“Huh.” The captain leaned back in his chair. “You learn something new every day. And this Ottoman-whatever friend of yours, she can get the chip?”
“If anyone can, she can,” Aurie told him. “Otorhinolaryngologists are sort of the most trained for this, and she’s the best I’ve ever met.”
“Why is that even a specialty you need?” Rick asked.
“Grand View is the hospital of choice for about fifteen different full-contact sports teams,” Aurie answered wearily.
“We’re off track,” Annie said. “Aurelia, you contact your ENT friend. Set it up. Other than that, I’m putting you in charge of giving Dom the sedatives he needs to keep stable. That’s a daily thing for now, so I hope you two get along. Thalia, Zosha, one of you needs to be monitoring her when you’re not on shift. If neither of you can do it, find Delphine. Everyone, get where you need to be.”
“I guess we’re sticking together for a little longer,” Thalia said to Aurie as the others took their leave. “Believe it or not, you won’t hate it here.”
It took three days, but Aurie found she was right.
It was strange that her life on a smuggler’s ship she was being held on against her will was better than the one she’d had before. She felt guilty thinking it, but it was true. True to Dom’s word, no one so much as looked vaguely threatening in Aurie’s direction and with the fear for her safety gone she could see that these flawed people had created a family for themselves. It didn’t help that after a few days of talking with Dom, Aurie could understand all too well the urge to do whatever it took to protect him. It had been a gradual thing—at first, she’d been resentful and still a bit afraid and he had been respectful of her boundaries. But soon the emotional exhaustion wore down on Aurie and she tentatively opened up a little to Dom, only for him to do the same. On the tenth day, she finally got the nerve up to ask him about the chip.
“It’s because I have Rogerson’s, see,” he explained. “Bunch of rich assholes wanted a guard bear. They implanted it so they could control when I shifted. It didn’t end well for them.”
“Well, it sounds like they got what they deserved,” Aurie had replied, thinking about how young he must have been.
“You sound surprisingly okay with that.”
Aurie had smiled. “I’m a foster child. I’ve got a list of people I wish had gotten what they deserve.”
The encounter had broken down whatever arbitrary wall Aurie had constructed, and as the days counted down until the date Dr. Lee had sent them in response to Aurie’s comm, Aurie grew more and more certain that she’d miss the Breakwater when she was returned to her normal, everyday life.
Then one day Annie cornered her after she had finished with Dom.
“Hello,” she said. “I need to talk with you for a moment.”
“What about?” Aurie asked. She was still a bit frightened of Annie, but she’d come to respect the other woman nonetheless.
“Dom,” Annie answered. “And you. Dr. Lee changed her price for the surgery. The embargo set around Do’n means that the hospital isn’t getting the usual brand of anesthetics. She wants us to go around it. I need you to explain to her that we can’t?”
“May I ask why?” Aurie asked.
“Our main employer has certain personal stakes in the embargo being respected. He’s not someone we want to anger,” said Annie. “Just let her know that it’s a no go. Other than that, I wanted to know how you’re doing.”
“I…” Aurie trailed off, collecting her words. “Am better than expected, honestly.”
“You look it,” Annie said. “Thalia says you’re a lot more colorful now.”
“I appreciate you asking after me,” Aurie said with a smile.
“Oh, it’s not a selfless endeavor,” Annie replied. “You like Dom. You like Zosha, and Thalia, and Delphine. And you can stand the rest of us, even Custer. It seems like a lot more than I could say about you and you old coworkers.”
“I don’t understand,” Aurie admitted.
“I’m saying, once Dom’s chip-free, we’ll drop you off anywhere in the universe you want to go. But if you want to stick around, there’s room for you here.” With that, Annie strode off. Aurie, in a daze, just sent Dr. Lee the comm Annie had asked her to, leading to several days where despite Aurie’s best wheedling, Dr. Lee refused to budge, which in turn did its part to gradually ratchet up the tension on the ship.
Aurie was on her way to her and Dom’s daily checkup when she ran into Hyde walking the opposite way.
“You may want to give it a minute,” he told her as he passed her. “He’s pretty upset. This isn’t easy on him.”
Warily, Annie continued toward the room. She could hear muffled swearing and movement and the scrape of something being dragged across the floor. She had almost reached the doorway when she heard a loud thud, followed by a moan of pain. Alarmed, she looked into the room only to see the chair overturned and Dom grimacing and clutching his bleeding hand, blood smudged on the wall where he’d punched it.
Aurie gave him a look she generally reserved for her trouble patients.
“And what did that accomplish?” she asked patiently.
Dom deflated. “Nothing. It… it’s all nothing.”
Aurie studied him for a moment. “Hop on the table.”
“What?” Dom asked.
“I said, hop on the table,” she repeated. “I need to put something on your knuckles.”
Dom stared at her for a moment, then obeyed.
“I don’t know why you bother,” he told her, a quiet confession. “Even if you could do the surgery, it wouldn’t do anything, not really. I still wouldn’t have any control over my shifts.”
Aurie hummed as she looked for antiseptic and something to cover the wound with. “Do you know how long it takes to become a qualified doctor? Classes, exams shadowing, residency? The technical answer is a really fucking long time.”
“That’s nice,” Dom said, clearly a little confused.
“But you know why we do it?” Aurie asked. “Because if we do, someday we get to be the big fancy doctors. Because if we succeed in the end, then we succeed now. I think it’s similar with you. Even if it all seems impossible because there aren’t any clear victories around you at the moment, the war’s not lost yet, you know? It’s about the finish line. And you’ll get there. You’re strong, and you’ve got a lot of help.” She made a noise of victory in the back of her throat as she dug up a bottle of antiseptic spray.
KIKO (MC Bear Mates Book 3) Page 102