Dominus
Page 35
“Your end will come sooner than you think,” I said, staring up at Carter.
I released my destruction.
Chapter 39
I was compressed into Jax by the shockwave of the explosion as it flung us outward, away from the blast. Hot wind blasted across my face, suffocating in its speed. The heat scorched to my lungs, but it soon turned to an icy-cold chill, freezing me inside.
Flashes of kaleidoscopic color flittered through my vision. It hurt to look, so I closed my eyes and clung on to Jax, my only solid connection, while we were buffeted and tossed in free fall to our deaths or somewhere else? Had Jax been strong enough to get us out?
After the wild lashings of the wind, the roar of it rushing past my ears, the impossibility of breathing, the sudden quiet slammed into us. Tranquility and silence, coupled with the sudden cessation of movement and the cold, cold creep of a smooth, hard surface underneath and I opened my eyes.
A white floor, white walls, sparsely furnished room. I hitched to one elbow. Jax lay on his back, a fast-spreading pool of his blood turning the high-polish stone floor a bloody mess.
“Jax.” I scrambled toward him, my hand touching his first, feeling the warmth still on his skin. Thank god. “Jax.” I was over him now, peering down into his shut eye, then to his chest, searching for the rise and fall of life, but his chest was too much of a bloody mess to see. This close, there was only the metallic smell of blood. One hand at his cheek, I called his name again. “Jax.”
“Give me a minute.” Words slurred and faint.
“What can I do to help? Can I get someone?”
His hand touched my side.
“Do they have ambulances here? Is there a number I can call for help?”
“Bed.”
It was only meters away, but without his help, I wouldn’t stand a chance.
“We need to stop the bleeding.”
“Bed,” he whispered again.
“It’s going to hurt.”
He rolled, grimacing, but kept the groans in. Watching him ease himself upright onto one hand and his agony was my own, his moves slow, with a lot of effort. I slid under his shoulder, inching him up to standing. It took eternity, a lot of blood on me and the floor, before I could help lower him down onto his black sheets, where he sat, head bowed, hands hanging limp on the bed.
“I need to stop the bleeding,” I said as I moved to the bottom of the bed and gathered the top sheet into a ball.
It made a terrible bandage around his middle, and he had no strength to press it in place. I had to remove his shirt and take a proper look. Through the shredded strips, I saw vicious torn flesh and gaping wounds.
“I don’t know what to do, Jax. I know nothing about this world.”
“Bathroom, there’s a cabinet.”
A clumsy wave of his hand pointed me to the adjacent wall. At first I thought the pain of his wounds and subsequent blood loss confused him, leaving him without strength to give me proper directions, but I tried it all the same, walking toward the wall. I was within feet when the edges of the door appeared. It sunk inward, then slid aside with a soft vacuum-sealing sound. Inside, the walls shimmered an aqua blue like the sun’s rays on the ocean. If I stared hard enough for long enough, I swore I’d see some fish moving not far below the surface. I stared down through the basin to the white floor below. Captured inside the glass—perhaps—were weird three-dimensional geometric shapes like fossils embedded in rock, preserved for eternity.
Bottles, creams, anything that looked like it belonged in a first-aid bag, I swiped from the cabinet shelves, gathering them in the cradle I formed using the hem of my shirt. On the way out, I grabbed a towel slung over the handrail.
Jax remained where I’d put him, although his head had sunk lower. I inverted the cradle I’d made of my shirt, dumping my gathered supplies next to him and placing the towel beside them.
“You’ll have to help me here. Nothing looks familiar.”
Jax turned his head, peering down at the assortment of supplies. “The bottles.”
I sifted through everything else, pulling each bottle out and holding the labels faceup for him to see.
“The red label.”
I dropped the others and unscrewed the lid on the one he’d selected to find small white pills inside.
“Do you need water? They look small enough to swallow dry, but I’ll go find a glass if you want.”
A slow shake of his head, so I tapped a few out onto my palm, my dirty palm, but there was no time to worry about racing back to the bathroom to wash my hands.
“Two,” he said, which I took to mean feed them to me.
I slipped them on his tongue, and he grimaced as they went down. The stream of blood down his throat rippled as he swallowed.
“I need to lie down.”
“I should clean and bandage your wounds first.”
He shook his head. “I’d rather lie down.”
“Jax, I need to take a proper look at your wounds. They could be deep. You’ll get a bad infection if you don’t bleed dry first.”
“It’s okay.” His voice grew softer. “I need to rest.”
Rest and never wake up. “I’m afraid if you close your eyes, you’ll never open them again.”
He lowered himself down, which spurred me forward to help him. Damn him. He was so stubborn, and I was not about to fight with a badly wounded guy. I surrendered and eased him down onto his pillow. The bottles and other supplies clanged together as we moved about on the bed.
“The pills were coagulants.” He inhaled before he spoke again. “Fast-acting. Give me the white-labelled bottle.”
I sat back and rummaged through the remaining brown bottles. “There’s two.” I brought them up close to read the label. “I think they’re the same thing.”
“Give me one.”
The pills were large oval tablets like something you’d give livestock, not humans, large enough to stick halfway in your throat without half a glass of water to flush them down. Jax didn’t appear to care, opening his mouth like a baby waiting for the spoon.
I slipped it onto his tongue and he crunched it up before swallowing. “Painkillers.” The parts of his face not swollen, bruised, or torn reflected the horrible taste. “It will take effect soon.”
“Is that all? I feel I should do something else. Maybe clean your wounds, stitch something.”
He slowly shook his head. “No, give me some time to rest.”
The sight of him made it hard for me to resist falling into action. I slid onto the bed, moving up to rest back against the wall, giving Jax the silence he needed. The fight, Carter’s triumphant sneer, and the explosion reeled through my mind when I closed my eyes. Mum and Ajay were safe. That was all that mattered. Dad I’d free in time, once I managed to contact Holden, once Jax had recovered.
I rested my forehead on my arms and accepted the firestorm of memories and images so real I could be experiencing them over and over again. I’d felt as desperate and panicked as I’d done in Dominus. The whole scene we’d just played out felt like nothing more than a level in the game. The game had poisoned me. Carter had poisoned me. Dad had poisoned me; he’d been a part of Dominus too.
The feel of Jax’s hand touching my side drew me out of my macabre thoughts. On his back, he looked up at me through his one good eye.
“Oh my god,” I said as I turned to my side and peered down on his face. “The wound over your eye looks much better. It’s not bleeding anymore.”
“That’s the pills at work.”
I looked down his body. It was half-concealed by the sheet I’d bunched at his waist in a useless attempt to stem the bleeding.
“I’ll be fine,” he said, catching where my gaze fell. “You should know Carter will still be alive.”
I blew out a breath and looked away. “I thought as much.”
“He would’ve shifted the moment we did.”
Maybe it was a good thing. I didn’t want to build my kill quota.
Jax closed his one good eye.
“Sorry, I’m asking too many questions.”
“I don’t know where Holden would go. Persal HQ is not a good choice to take your mum and Ajay, unless he plans on uncovering Carter’s plan. Unlike Dominus, the place will be full of people. Real-life people, not bots. There’s no way he will be able to hide them. Without tattoos, they are easily spotted as foreign. It’s also likely he’s taken them to his place, which is in the Persal quarter of Califax.”
“How will we know?”
“Factions only communicate through work portals. Carter and Nixon devised a means of communicating personally beyond the normal channels. If Holden’s listening in, I could contact him that way. We may have to move around the streets of Califax. We’ll get you some tattoos. You’ll need those if you don’t want to draw attention to yourself.”
“Then tattoo me with one of these.” I touched the tattoo behind his ear, now covered in blood.
“Why would you want that?”
“I don’t want to be forced to separate from you in a world I don’t understand.”
“Using the tattoo of another faction is a death sentence.”
“How am I supposed to act like a Persal? I don’t know your rules.”
“Once we find Holden, he’ll keep you safe within Persal. We’ll find your family, Sable. I promise, but I need rest first. The pills are fast-working, but not that fast.”
My muscles ached to get going, but as I looked at Jax, the urged petered out. Even though he talked clearer, his voice stronger, he still looked like he’d been mauled by a savage dog.
“I’ll take a shower and change my clothes once I’ve slept. Do you think you’ll get some sleep if you lie down?”
“God no. Not until I see Mum and Ajay.”
“Fair enough.”
Jax rolled slightly to his side, reaching behind. He pulled out his cell and dumped it on the bed between us before settling onto his back again. I stared down at the screen, illuminated from the movement. A message had come through at some point while we were in my world. With confronting Carter, fighting one of his loyalists, and the explosion, Jax had missed the notification.
I scooped the phone up. The message displayed only the first few words.
“There’s a message,” I said as I typed in the number password Jax had given me, then opened the message screen. “It’s from Holden.”
My eyes skimmed across the words, then again, then one more time as I tried to make sense of what Holden had said. I couldn’t believe it. No matter how many rereads, they still said the same thing, still held the same meaning.
The cell fell from my hands, landing on the bed between my knees.
“What is it?”
“He’s gone.”
“Who, Holden?”
“He’s taken the grafter.”
Beside me, Jax rolled over to his side, then rose up to his elbow. “Taken it where?”
“He doesn’t say. He had no intention of freeing Dad.” The words felt distant, not from my mouth. “Oh my god,” I moaned, rocking forward. I curled down until my face hit my palms, my palms my knees. “He deceived us. This is what he wanted when we made the plan. He made his own plan. I don’t believe this.”
I felt Jax move beside me, sliding up to sit with his back against the wall. He shouldn’t do this. He needed to lie down, but there was not enough emotional strength in me to voice what I thought.
“What about your mum and Ajay?”
“He promised me they’re safe.”
“He’s decent enough for that to be the truth.”
“A decent person doesn’t betray you.” I surfaced from my palms. “Where would he take them?”
“I don’t know. Here, someplace on your world, it’s hard to say.”
“He had a day to plan this.”
“Sable, they could be anywhere. If we want to find them, we have to find Holden.”
“What about Dad? And Carter?” I slid forward and dragged myself off the bed. “I don’t believe this,” I fisted my hair. “How could he do this? He was so full of factional loyalty.” My pacing ignited the turbulent heat pooling in my belly. “He was so insistent on factional loyalty over blood loyalty, over everything. And here I am with an Aris while a Persal has cheated me.” If my words were a tangible thing, they would’ve cut my mouth on the way out.
“We’re here, Sable. We got out. Your mum and Ajay are safe. Holden doesn’t matter. Forget him. I’ll free your father for you. I’ll make sure nothing happens to him. And we’ll find a way to release him of his graft. This is not the end. Carter has not won. As long as you hold that in your heart, Carter won’t win.” Softly spoken, a soothing elixir to blunt the edges of my thoughts.
It worked. The anger fueling my mad pacing evaporated from my limbs. I sunk onto the edge of the bed.
“You would do that?” I looked over my shoulder to Jax’s ruined face, one side a bloody, swollen mess, the other marginally better. He’d come to the Amex to warn me, to help me, while Holden waited below to deceive me. This was the man who’d dragged me into Dominus to see me fail, who then fought alongside me to stop Carter. “You’re choosing to side with the opposing faction. You’re choosing to save the man who killed your family.”
“I won’t pretend I don’t hate your father. I always will. But at the moment, I hate Carter more. I’ve lost everything. I don’t want that to happen to you.”
I turned toward him, sliding a knee up onto the bed. If only I could see his features better, but the swelling and coloring distorted his face, disguising any subtlety in his expression. “I’ve never heard anything so selfless.” I held his eyes.
If only I could release my emotions and allow them to flow across the space between us like I could destruction. Words were inadequate, a shadow of what I truly felt.
I crawled up the bed, sliding down alongside him, and took his hand, placing it over my heart. The Aris bot in Dominus had pierced my chest with his hand to remove my heart. I wanted Jax to do the same, pierce my flesh so that his hand might reach my heart, so he might cradle it within his palm. And then he would know. There would be no barriers between us, not even flesh. And he would know what this meant to me, the sacrifice, the loyalty.
Jax dropped his gaze to his hand, covering my heart. “For so long, I’ve been driven by my revenge. I feel empty without it. I don’t know what I want anymore. All I know is your fight gives me direction. Your passion gives me purpose. You give me purpose.”
“Thank you.” Two words inadequate for the emotion I felt.
It seemed so natural to slide my head down until it rested on his shoulder.
Surrounded by blood, over him as well as me, my clothes, my pants, my hand, staining the sheets, smearing across the floor, footprints of it following us to the bed, we remained silent, together amongst a macabre picture of death. But we’d survived because we’d stayed together, fought together, trusted each other.
Dad was right, betrayal was inevitable. But he was also wrong. The one person who had every reason to betray me, a guy from an opposing faction, had turned into my greatest ally, had turned into the one person I could trust.
Thanks to Jax, this was not the end. Carter would not win.
CALIFAX
In a world built on lies, fear and deceit I must learn what it means to be destruction.
In Jax’s world, right and wrong blur and the only important lesson is survival…
In store now
I have a treat for you.
Do you wonder what went through Jax’s head the day they met? Do you think he struggled to make his decision to take her into Dominus? Was he too soaked in his revenge to care about the possible outcome?
To all my newsletter readers, I give you Jax’s side of the story in this short read.
This LINK will lead you to my newsletter sign up and Jax’s story
Author’s Note
Of all the millions of titles on Amazon it’s great you found mine.
The idea for Dominus was triggered by the memory of a movie I had watched a long time ago called The Last Starfighter, which featured one of those old fashioned arcade games (remember PacMan) and a young boy living in a trailer park who aced the game and was promptly abducted by a bunch of friendly aliens to save their race from the bad aliens (it was a long time ago, so I’ve probably missed the nuances of the movie, so I apologize).
My computer file tells me I started Dominus back in 2016. Four years later it was published. In the mean time, I wrote the skeleton of it, put it aside, pulled it out some time later, expanded it, shoved it away again, forgot about it, found it again, added more, then sent the final perfect manuscript to a developmental editor who promptly shredded the whole story and my confidence as well. The manuscript was then buried for about 18 months before I finally dragged it out, rewrote it, and here it is.
Dominus was a journey that turned into a passion and taught me a lot about writing, publishing and pulling my big girl pants up.
Sometimes the hardest part of publishing a book is the reviews. They can be like my developmental editor, shredding. But despite how tattered I felt after I saw all the red marks and her encyclopedia length critique on everything that was wrong with it, I saw the immense worth (18 months later once I pulled my big girl pants up) in what she gave me. It really was a gift.
Reviews are in this camp. In many ways they are even more valuable because now the people we write for, the readers, get a chance to let the author know what they thought. It doesn’t matter how many times you rewrite, reedit and perfect your work, if you’re not writing what the readers want to read then you’re not doing your job. And the only way a writer can know this is through reader reviews.
And so my dear reader I would greatly appreciate it if you would kindly leave me an honest review. I say honest because I want to know what you really thought. If you loved it, please be verbose in your critique. If you didn’t, I welcome you to be as verbose, but please be honest and respectful. I can improve my craft only if I know there is something wrong with it (and an author is the last person that can tell, we love all our babies).