by Kate Rudolph
“She’s my mate,” Brax shot back.
The Detyen froze behind him and Brax used the opportunity to break free, barely feeling as one of the razor sharp claws slashed his skin. But Doryan recovered quickly and he took Brax out with brutal efficiency. “We have one blaster and a child with us. There’s no hope against them.”
There had to be hope. Vita would rather die than be captured, and Brax knew that every second she spent in there alone would be torture. If he didn’t get to her she’d do everything she could to escape. And if that didn’t work, she’d do anything necessary to make sure she wasn’t sold into slavery a second time. “She’s my mate,” he said again.
“And she surely has weapons on her ship,” Doryan reasoned. “We’ll return,” he promised. “With weapons and a plan.”
Brax wanted to run towards her and fight anyway. He couldn’t bear to let her spend a minute in the company of the monsters who operated this place. But even in his desperation he could see Doryan’s point. “We come right back,” he demanded. “She doesn’t spend one more second than necessary with them.”
Doryan nodded. “You have my word.”
And though it killed Brax little by little to watch his mate be secured to the stretcher, she opened her eyes one last time and looked at him. There was no betrayal in her gaze. She understood why he wasn’t coming for her.
I’ll come back for you.
There were legends that some mated pairs shared a telepathic bond. Brax suspected that his brother and Naomi might have had something like that. But he and Vita were too new to know what might flourish in their bond. He didn’t think she could hear him, but he hoped to the bottom of his soul that she understood no power in the universe could make him abandon her. And when he turned away to return to Manda he had to reassure himself that this wasn’t abandonment.
They were coming back. Soon.
Doryan had them in the vehicle in moments and commanded them to strap in. Brax felt useless as the warrior tore out of the lot, driving straight at the guards who had regrouped and come for them, ignoring the shots of their blasters as they came within centimeters of flattening them. At the last moment the guards darted out of the way, but the vehicle ran over something and Brax grabbed onto his door as they took a corner quick enough to slam him up against the side of the car.
They were coming back. He kept repeating it as the building grew smaller behind them and unfamiliar buildings passed them by. Doryan didn’t ask for directions as he weaved down streets and through alleys. It must have been close to an hour before he turned to Brax.
“We haven’t been followed, but there’s probably tracking on the car. We need to abandon it. Where’s your ship?”
Brax took a breath. They could do this.
“I don’t think the dock is far from here.”
They had to get Vita back. Or both he and his mate were dead.
LONG YEARS IN THE SLAVE pits made Vita an excellent sleep faker and the guards seemed to buy the act. They had her trussed up and chained in the same room they’d been holding Doryan and Manda in a matter of minutes. No one checked to see if she was wounded, so either they didn’t care if she survived, or a doctor was coming later.
She hoped they didn’t care. An examination put her one step closer to the sale block and she’d jump on a sword or shoot herself in the eye with a blaster before she let that happen.
But things weren’t that dire yet. She had to believe that.
Brax had to be going crazy. She’d seen him ready to charge out to get her and though it had made her heart soar with joy, she couldn’t let him risk himself like that. She’d known the guards would be coming and as much as she loved the man, he wasn’t a fighter.
Oh.
She loved him.
Fuck.
When had that happened?
She tried to think of the exact moment, but it had been happening little by little since the moment she snatched him from Earth. Or maybe from the second Roski had thrown her out and they’d teamed up.
That changed things. Or it should have. She was still tied up in enemy territory, but now she had to get out of this mess, if only so she could tell her mate how she felt. No sacrifices. Survival.
He was coming, but she had to do her best to get out before it came to that. She hoped Doryan would help, but now that the Detyen was free, he had no obligation to them. And Brax would try his hardest, but she wasn’t sure if he’d ever fired a blaster before.
A sudden flash of light drew her attention to the wall, and she saw that the screen embedded there had lit up. She hadn’t noticed it before, but before this was a makeshift prison it had been a normal office. Roski’s face flashed on the screen and Vita did her best to keep her expression neutral.
She failed.
“I should have clamped you in irons and sold you on when I had the chance,” he said with a scowl. “You may not have been born in the pits, but you were always meant for them. This is how you repay me for your freedom? You’re useless. And it is going to be my pleasure to see you suffer when I touch down on Jaaxis.”
She should have been angry. Or hurt. But she wasn’t even frustrated. In fact, she wanted to roll her eyes at Roski’s wailing. Maybe because she’d already gone through all of the emotions that Roski’s betrayal had raised in her. Or maybe because it was so... overwrought.
“You didn’t sell me because no one would buy a girl who killed her master and his retinue.” It didn’t occur to her until she said it, but it had to be the truth. Maybe Roski had seen a spark in her when they met, but there was also no way he would have been able to profit. Even someone who got off on breaking willful slaves would be reluctant to purchase someone as bloodthirsty as she’d been.
She didn’t expect Roski to acknowledge it, but he shrugged. “We’ll see how they feel about you now. Control chips have come a long way in the last few years. And they’ll have a cuff or collar on you in no time.”
Her blood chilled. She’d always hated the cuff, but she’d never considered how Roski had access to them. How had she been so blind? And a control chip? A piece of metal embedded in her brain that drained her free will? They were disgusting devices that had a bad habit of frying people’s brains or exploding, but if he managed to get one in her Vita hoped it blew up quickly because she couldn’t let herself become something like that.
She had to stop him before he commanded his people to embed the thing. If he had the ability to do it on Jaaxis, she was screwed.
“It’s going to be tough to sell me when all your data is corrupted,” she said. Maybe he hadn’t figured that part out yet. And she would have liked to be far away from this building when he did, but she had no other card to play at the moment. “Can’t contact your buyers. Can’t access your funds. Can’t do anything but wallow in your broken empire.”
Roski’s eyes narrowed and then darted to the side. He reached forward and must have pressed a button on his side of the call. His screen went silent but she could see him talking, barking out orders to someone on his end. His face darkened with rage, and he looked back at her and screamed in silence.
Then the screen cut out.
So now Roski knew.
Now Roski was pissed. And he wasn’t going to let her live. So she had to get out before anything worse happened.
She struggled against the ropes tying her hands and legs together and winced as it chafed against her skin. It would have been nice if she had the claws that Brax had been hiding, but her hands were just as human as always. She could feel the sheath where she normally kept her knife, but it was empty.
Except she couldn’t remember them checking her for weapons.
Her blaster had been laying at her side when they collected her, but no one had patted her down. Normally that would have meant she had the backup blaster and at least one knife, but the blaster was with Doryan and the knife was gone.
Or was it?
This room was the last place she was sure she’d had it. Was it possib
le she’d somehow left it after untying Manda? She couldn’t remember sheathing it after Manda had kicked her, but putting her knife away was second nature and there was no reason to remember it. But the knife wasn’t in its sheath, so it had to be somewhere.
Vita rolled over and started looking. The light in the room was dim, but her eyes had adjusted and she could see well enough. She didn’t have much room to maneuver with the way she was secured, but at least they hadn’t chained her to the wall. She had to be thankful for small favors at the moment.
And when she saw a glint of metal she bit back her yelp of triumph. She didn’t want to accidentally call down the guards and quash her own success.
Scooting across the floor was harder than it looked, and she ended up flopping like a fish to get it done, but finally her hands closed over the hilt and she began to work the blade against the thick ropes that bound her. It took long, way longer than it had taken to cut out Manda or Doryan, but she and Brax had had the advantage of movement. Vita could barely saw and it was only the wicked sharpness of her blade that let her have any success whatsoever. But finally one strand of rope gave and she had room to roll her wrists, even though she couldn’t quite tug them out. A few minutes more had her hands free, and that was followed quickly by her legs.
She jumped up and tried not to wince as her back protested. That blaster shot had hurt.
She had to ignore it. Her hands and legs were free, but she was still locked in a room with only a small knife to defend herself with. If the guards came, she couldn’t fight more than one, and that was assuming they didn’t just shoot her.
This wasn’t over yet.
Chapter Nineteen
BRAX GRIPPED THE BLASTER in his hands and tried to remember everything Doryan had told him. He could point and shoot, but the soldier had given him pointers to make up for his lack of technique. Under some other circumstances, Brax’s masculinity might have been affronted, but he’d take any help he could if it meant getting his mate back sooner.
After dropping off Manda at the ship and grabbing weapons, Brax and Doryan had returned to the car he and Vita had been using that morning. It felt like a lifetime ago. They hadn’t moved towards the building yet, and Brax wanted to urge the Detyen on, but he seemed determined to wait.
“Are you hesitating? Or have we been sitting here for the last ten minutes for a reason?” Brax was at his wits’ end and he needed to move. Or shoot. Anything that would bring him closer to having Vita safe and in his arms.
“Listen,” Doryan said and tilted his head toward the building where Vita was being held.
Brax listened. He heard nothing. “What?”
“Engines.” Doryan leaned forward a bit, and a moment later Brax heard it too. A small shuttle broke through the atmosphere and landed behind the building, disappearing from sight. “It’s too small to contain reinforcements,” Doryan assured him.
“It’s Roski.” Brax had no way of knowing it for sure, but if the man had been anywhere near Jaaxis when he and Vita attacked, if he knew that his guards had Vita in their clutches, he’d be there to punish her himself.
“We don’t know that,” replied Doryan.
“Yeah, we do.” If Doryan truly was soulless, he didn’t have Brax’s instincts. He probably couldn’t remember rage and hate and love and didn’t know what would drive a man like Roski to come back and hurt Vita. He didn’t know what drove Brax to run into danger to save her. Brax turned to fully face Doryan. “I’m not leaving that building without my mate, do you understand that?”
Doryan blinked once. “It may not be possible to retrieve her.” It wasn’t compassion, exactly, but something in his tone softened. He might not have been able to feel, but maybe the memory of emotion still clung to him.
“We come out together, or we don’t come out at all.”
“And do you expect me to sacrifice myself if this becomes a suicide mission?” From another man it would have been a challenge, but not from one of the soulless.
“Do what you have to do. Now how are we getting inside?”
Doryan’s gaze flitted over the block. “They’ll be expecting our return. All doors will be locked and guards posted. We need an alternate entry point. But electronic security will be a problem. Most likely we’ll be isolated the moment it’s possible, trapped.”
“So let’s cut the power.” Brax might not have been a warrior, but he was a problem solver, and that one was obvious.
“How? A place like this is bound to have backup power. Even if we blacked out the city they would be back up in minutes.”
Brax tapped his fingers against the barrel of the blaster. “What about an electromagnetic pulse?”
“An EMP?” Doryan nodded. “It could work. But only if they’ve already engaged the backup power. And we have no access to something big enough, nor the knowhow to improvise one.”
And now it was Brax’s turn to shine. “Roski’s ship. Get me onto it, give me ten minutes, and I can take this whole place down.”
“It means our blasters won’t work.” Doryan wasn’t trying to discourage him, Brax was sure, but he didn’t seem to see the positives.
“Neither will theirs. This will work.” Brax could feel it in his bones. “But I need you to get inside and cut the main power. And cause a distraction. Rerouting the system takes a bit of time.”
“Do you need me to get you into his ship?”
“I can do that.” He was going to mention the ships he and his brother had taken joyriding a time or two. Honora Station security hadn’t caught them. No need to admit to anything now.
“Give me six minutes to get inside and then move for the shuttle. I’ll distract them for as long as I can.” When Brax nodded, Doryan slid out of the vehicle, leaving him alone.
They were the longest six minutes of his life, amazing given he’d just lived the longest two hours of his life. Brax didn’t let anything like doubt creep in. Rewiring machinery was second nature to him. And he’d made EMPs before, though never this quickly. But Vita was counting on him and he had to get her out of there. He could do this.
Once the time was up he shoved the blaster in his pocket and headed around the block to approach the building from behind. He’d changed his clothes and the native Jaaxians were a similar blue to the color of his skin, so he hoped if anyone saw him they wouldn’t realize he didn’t belong. He walked with purpose, and was surprised when he made it past the guard station at the lot without being challenged. No one stood in the guard house and he distantly heard shouting.
Doryan was doing his bit.
Now Brax ran. He pulled his portable toolkit from another pocket and had the hatch to the ship open in seconds. He breathed a sigh of relief when he realized the vehicle was empty. A shuttle that size could hold a handful of people, but they could only go from ground to orbit, and only fly for a few hours. But he didn’t need it to fly, he just needed it to shoot.
And as he suspected, there was a small laser blaster built in to the ship. It wasn’t meant for defense, but instead to blast obstacles like boulders and space junk out of the ship’s path. And the presence of the blaster made Brax’s job a whole lot easier.
He ripped off the panel covering the blasters and ignored a jagged piece of metal digging into his skin. Soon wires piled up around him and he sank into the work. This was harder than installing Ygreen’s device on the data store, and so much more important. If he failed here, his denya was doomed. So he wouldn’t fail.
But it took more than ten minutes. Eleven and a half, to be exact.
He powered up the ship and held all his hopes close, concentrating on what he had to do, and then he hit the button to shoot the EMP.
THE DENYA BOND WAS a living thing. That was the only way Vita could explain why she turned left once she escaped the room that had been holding her. She’d returned the knife to its sheath and started moving. She knew how she’d escaped before, but didn’t know if it was the best way out a second time. And yet, that was where she was h
eading. The bond pulled her that way and she knew deep inside that Brax was there.
But when she heard boots tromping her way she had to duck inside a tiny closet. She barely fit, but it was enough; the footsteps faded and after a minute she was brave enough to keep moving.
Was Brax really outside? Could she get to him armed only with a knife and determination?
Yes. She had to.
When she turned the next corner she almost jumped out of her skin. But it was no enemy. Doryan stood with a blaster in his hand and nodded as if he’d expected her to come down the hallway. “Come on,” he said.
“How did you get in? How did you find me?” It wasn’t the time, but the questions burst out.
“The roof, and you found me. Now hurry, your mate is going to get us out. And Roski will be looking for you soon.” He didn’t look at her as he spoke, instead leading them quickly down the hall.
She followed without question, taking the turns he took and stopping when he stopped. And then her mind caught up. “Wait. Roski? He’s here already?” Seeing him on that screen had been enough, she didn’t need an encounter in the flesh.
“That is what your mate thinks. There’s a small shuttle outside.”
Before she could ask more questions, Doryan opened a door with a warning sign on it. There were switches and wires and it looked like touching it would hurt. “What are you doing?” she asked as Doryan raised his blaster.
“Cutting the power.” And he shot. For a moment nothing happened, but then he fired two more blasts and the lights dimmed and electrical smoke tickled her nose.
“They’ll have backup.” And the lights flickered back a second later.
Doryan nodded, and didn’t quite smile, but something in his expression made her think he would have. What had Brax said? He was soulless, he had no emotions. But there was something there.
“Come on,” he said, not explaining.