by Lolita Lopez
Raze shot him sidelong glance. “Not when it comes to my mate and her safety.”
The elevator stopped on the right floor. Swift stepped off first and muttered, “Best to let me handle this.”
Raze grudgingly agreed. He trailed Swift to the main desk where the guard sat with his feet propped up on the counter and his tablet on his chest. Ear buds firmly in place, he laughed at the program playing on his tablet and remained completely unaware of the two officers waiting for him.
Mouth settled into an irritated line, Swift stepped forward and slapped the guard’s boots right off the desk. The guard dropped his tablet and yanked the buds from his ears. Sputtering his apologies, he rose to his feet. “Sir, uh, sirs,” he nodded at both of them. “How, uh, how can I help?”
“Get his mate out of lockup.”
The guard glanced at Raze. He didn’t have to ask which mate he wanted. Raze doubted there was another woman in lockup. Hell, he was pretty sure that other than Naya no other woman had ever been taken into custody aboard the Valiant.
As he waited for the guard to produce Ella, Raze tried not to think about all the gossip circling the ship by now. If Swift’s information was correct and she had started a riot in a public area, she could be charged with serious crimes and punished harshly. Raze had friends in high places, but he had burned the bulk of those favors with his behavior last night. He might be able to spring Ella from lockup, but he wouldn’t be able to make any charges disappear.
“Whatever charges they slapped on her won’t stick,” Swift insisted, obviously interpreting his silence for worry.
“I told her to stay inside.” Raze wasn’t sure why he was repeating himself to Swift. “Vicious told her to stay put. We both warned her about the men on this ship.”
“Seems to me that it might be us men who are the real problem then,” Swift said under his breath.
It was a sentiment Raze shared, but it wouldn’t be popular among their superiors. The old ways were tradition, and their people were nothing if not traditional, clinging to outdated customs and rituals like the Grab and claiming uncollared women on ships and bases.
A set of double doors opened at the end of the hall and Ella emerged between two men from the police force. He was relieved to see her unharmed, but the bratty I-told-you-so smile she turned on the two men escorting her sent his blood pressure sky high. Did she not realize how serious this was? How much danger they were in right now? How easily she could be taken away and given to another man or tossed off the ship by Orion without anyone to protect her from all the enemies she now had?
“I warned you what would happen when Raze found out you were holding me here,” she crowed before turning that dazzling smile on him as she flounced toward him. “Now you’ll see what happens to jerks like you!”
“Not another word,” he snapped. Tired and hungry, his usually inexhaustible patience was at an end. He pointed to the spot next to him, and Ella swallowed before stepping into it. Ignoring her confused and hurt expression, he turned to the guards who had brought her to him. “Why wasn’t I informed that my mate was in central lockup?”
“Our systems don’t update until the end of shift so her chip wasn’t recognized until a short time ago. She was walking around without a collar and without proper escort—”
“That’s not—” Ella butted in loudly but Raze silenced her with a glare. She squeezed her lips together rather defiantly but said no more.
“She was walking around without a collar or proper escort,” the guard repeated himself, “so we had a difficult time identifying her. We were preparing to send a man to inform you when you arrived.”
Raze didn’t believe that, but he kept his suspicions to himself. “What are the charges?”
“There are none.” The lead jailer settled his irritated gaze on her. “This time.”
“There won’t be a second.” Raze frowned down at Ella who still seemed totally oblivious to the trouble she had caused and the dangerous position she had put herself in by disregarding his orders and leaving the safety of his quarters. “Is she free to go?”
The jailer nodded. “Her chip is flagged. You better keep a tighter leash on her.”
Raze stepped forward, but Swift put a steadying hand on his shoulder. “I think we’re done here.”
“Yeah,” Raze growled, “we’re done.” Taking Ella’s hand, Raze led her back to the elevator. Swift scanned his chip when he stepped inside and selected the restricted pilot level. Not a word was said in the elevator, not even when they arrived at Swift’s floor. The skilled pilot exited the elevator with nothing more than a nod.
When the doors closed, Ella yanked her hand free and pushed his arm. She didn’t have enough strength to move him, but the force behind her shove got his attention. “How could you talk to me like that? In public! And to point at the ground next to you? What do you think I am? A dog?”
“I think a dog would be better behaved. What were you thinking, Ella? How do you think it makes me look when my new mate breaks out of my quarters and starts a riot that sends a dozen men to the infirmary?”
“Is that all you care about? How I make you look?”
“I care when your bad behavior puts my career in jeopardy.”
“Oh, you’re one to talk about bad behavior! You punched a man last night and stole me.”
“I was defending you. I was protecting you.”
“So you could make me your mate and treat me like this?”
“Your pouting and dramatic hysterics aren’t going to work on me, Ella.” He was lying, though. The look on her face was tearing him up inside. The rational part of his brain screamed at him to shut up and stop talking, but the emotional side of him wouldn’t let it go. “You went against a direct order—”
“An order? I’m your mate. I’m not a soldier.”
“Right now, you’re not acting like one. You were told to stay put. You were—”
“Okay, you know what?” Ella slid both hands wide in front of her as if done with the entire conversation. “We are not doing this. Not here. Not in this elevator.”
“Then we’ll do it when we get back to my quarters where you will be disciplined.”
“Disciplined? Are you serious?” Her anger was evident by the redness in her neck and ears, and the rising tone of her voice.
“Dead serious,” he ground out with frustration. “If you want to act like a child and break the rules, you’ll be punished.”
“If you think you’re going to punish me—”
“I don’t think. I know. I trusted you, and you broke that trust. You’ve earned your punishment.”
“You haven’t even heard my side of the story yet!”
“I don’t need to hear it, Ella. You left my quarters after you were expressly forbidden from doing so. No matter what argument you make that fact will not change.”
Ella made a disgusted sound before dramatically throwing herself back against the wall of the elevator and crossing her arms. Eyeing him with distaste, she spat, “No wonder your first wife left you!”
It was a low blow.
It was a brutal blow.
And she was right.
He stepped to the far side of the elevator, putting as much space between them as possible. Ella standing there, looking at him in that betrayed and disappointed way, reminded him of her, of Sosie. He had sworn that he would never be that man again. That he would never be unyielding or jump to conclusions. That he would never give orders and expect his mate to follow them like a dutiful soldier.
You’ve fucked it all up, and you haven’t even had her a full day.
The elevator stopped on their floor, but neither moved to get off. The doors opened, and Torment unexpectedly appeared, his worried expression turning to one of relief. “There you are!”
Rushing into the elevator, he grabbed Ella by the shoulders and looked her over. “Did they hurt you? Do you need to see Risk?”
Ella shrugged off his hands. “I’m fine.”
“You were bleeding.” Torment touched her neck and the thin scabbed line there that Raze hadn’t noticed earlier. Silently, he berated himself for missing the small blood stains on her clothing and the wound on her skin.
Shaking his head, Torment demanded, “What the hell were you thinking taking his knife and putting it to your neck?”
“You did what?” Raze exploded, shoving off the wall to get a better look at her neck.
Ella pushed his hands away, her anger and frustration with him still too fresh. “What was I supposed to do? We were surrounded by, like, forty men. Pierce was knocked out cold and bleeding. I had been grabbed and dropped twice. We were both going to be trampled before help reached us so I did something crazy to get those men to leave us alone.”
Raze tried to process all this new information. His stomach churned as he realized what a complete asshole he had been for not giving Ella a chance to explain the whole story. Turning to Torment, he asked, “Forty men?”
“I counted thirty-seven when I viewed the footage,” Torment answered. “It was a fucking disaster. I take full responsibility.”
“You?” Raze asked, surprised.
Glancing around, Torment shook his head. “Not here. Let’s go to your quarters. I just had it swept.”
“You had my quarters swept?” Raze couldn’t believe that Shadow Force had gone into his private space. “Why?”
Torment gestured with his head toward the hallway and left the elevator. Raze turned to Ella and offered his hand, but she rolled her pretty eyes and brushed by him. Apparently, he was going to have to grovel to get her to speak to him again.
When they were safe inside his quarters, Ella walked straight to the bathroom. “I’m going to take a shower while you two talk.”
“She seems pissed off,” Torment remarked after the door closed and the sound of water could be heard. “I suspect rightfully so?”
Raze nodded glumly. “Yes.”
Torment wisely chose not to comment on that. Instead, he said, “I asked Ella to come to the Shadow Force sector for an interrogation. She didn’t want to come. She told me that you had instructed her to stay put, but I pushed until she agreed to come with me.”
“Pushed?” Knowing Torment, pushed could mean a lot of things, some of them not very pleasant.
“I used you as a pressure point. I knew that she would do anything to help you, especially after the way you came to her rescue last night.”
“You know how I feel about manipulation,” Raze growled as he began peeling out of his gear and stowing it in his locker.
“And you know that it works,” Torment countered. “She came down to one of our secure rooms and spent five hours giving us very good intel. We’ll need to pull her in again, but I’ll make sure it’s done in the middle of the night when she won’t be seen. We’ll treat her like we would any asset.”
“I see you have this all perfectly worked out,” Raze replied tightly. “You seem to have forgotten that you need my permission.”
Torment raised his eyebrows at that remark. “I don’t think you’ll get very far with Ella if you keep that attitude. I think she’s done asking men for permission to live her life.”
Torment’s barb struck its mark. Raze glanced away and clenched his jaw. When he released the pressure, he exhaled roughly. “I know you pushed us together last night.”
“Of course, I did.” Torment didn’t even try to deny it. “I made a calculated judgment call. I think you’ll treat her right, and I think that she likes you. I saw the two of you together at Venom’s wedding. Chemistry like that is unusual.”
Raze rubbed the back of his neck and winced. “You know I’m not good at this part.”
“Bullshit,” Torment shot back. “You successfully manage relationships with your friends, colleagues and your teams. If you can handle all those men, you can learn to understand your mate.”
He was right. Torment was always right.
“The mess hall riot wasn’t her fault. Orion and Vicious have seen the footage. They were on their way to break her out of containment but you got there first. They’ve both ordered that her record be cleared and that you—and she—be given apologies from all those assholes who tried to take her.”
“Why was she in the public mess in the first place?”
“Pierce wanted to show her the ship, and she wanted to see it. Mates go to the public mess all the time. If today wasn’t a Grab day, it would have been fine, but you know how the men are on days like these.”
“Hornier?”
“Basically,” Torment agreed. “We really need a dedicated pleasure ship in this sector.”
“We need more wives,” Raze argued. “The math out here doesn’t work. We have too many men on the Valiant with outrageously high numbers of valor points. They all want and deserve families, but Calyx isn’t giving us enough lottery slots.”
“There are other ways we could get them,” Torment suggested in that quiet way of his. “Women, I mean.”
Raze narrowed his eyes. “I hope you’re not thinking of skin traders.”
Torment’s expression turned cold and hard. “No.”
“Then what?”
“Matchmaking agencies like we have back on Prime only they would be based on Calyx and run by our people. We could also implement competitions.”
“Competitions?”
“When it comes to the Grab, we’re just blindly taking women. We aren’t matching the best to the best. Genetically,” he added, as if to cut off Raze’s argument. “Look at Cipher. He’s one of our very best, and he refuses to take a wife through the Grab. He doesn’t have family or connections to make a traditional match from Prime.”
“But?”
“But there are very intelligent women down on Calyx,” Torment insisted. “We know this because we have some of them up here now. We could find the best of the best down there and invite them to come up to the Valiant. Men like Cipher who are against the Grabs on principle would have no issue selecting a wife who volunteered to come here.”
It was an attractive solution to a growing problem. “Have you spoken to Vicious or Orion?”
“Not yet. I’m still working out the specifics.” He eyed the closed bathroom door. “Ella could be very helpful. I was thinking that eventually Ella might join a committee with other mates like Hallie and Naya and Dizzy to guide the project along.”
“You’ve given this a lot of thought.”
“It’s my job to think ten steps ahead of where we are now. This situation with unmated men and the need for brides is untenable. What happened today with Ella is a symptom of a deeper problem. The old traditions are crippling us. The war with the Splinters isn’t the only one threat to our way of life. It’s simple, Raze. If we don’t mate, we don’t breed. If we don’t breed, we lose the strength of our numbers.”
“You’ll have to move forward with your plan and do it quickly,” Raze insisted, “especially if you plan to capitalize on what happened to Ella today.”
“It’s distasteful to use the attack on her and Pierce as a springboard for this project, but I don’t know any other way to get Vicious and Orion to listen.”
“You need to be upfront with Ella before you do it.” He suspected Torment would want her help with other propaganda type endeavors in the future. If he wanted a willing participant in those political games, he had to be open and honest with her from day one.
“Of course,” Torment agreed. His gaze skipped to the bathroom where the sound of water could still be heard and glanced at his watch. “Does she know about the water rationing yet?”
Raze shook his head. He wasn’t about to piss her off even more by knocking on the door and telling her that this sector of the ship was restricted to a weekly amount of water that typically allowed one five-minute shower per day. “I may have to start showering in Cipher or Mayhem’s quarters or down in the SRU locker room.”
“Mayhem will give you whatever you want,” Torment assured him. “He
was losing his shit earlier when he found out Ella had been arrested. He was up in Vicious’s office trying to get permission to bail Ella out, but he wasn’t officially listed as her secondary guardian so Vee’s hands were tied.”
“I’ll speak to him later.” Mayhem tried harder than every other man in SRU, and he would feel amplified guilt over what had happened with Ella. “I’ll make sure he knows it was all your fault.”
Torment laughed, the noise sharp and quick. Slapping Raze on the shoulder, he said, “Fix things with Ella. Don’t make me regret putting you two together.”
“I can’t make any promises, Torment.”
“Try,” Torment urged.
“I will.”
“Good.” Heading to the door, he said, “I’ll swing by central ops and have them adjust the rationing to your unit until you two are moved to mated housing.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
“Oh, and Pierce will be fine,” he added. “It was that pain patch that weakened him today. One good tap to the jaw and he went down.”
“You’re sure he’ll be fine?” Raze tallied up all the injuries that poor bastard had suffered in the last year. “He’s abused the hell out of his body.”
“Risk will probably keep him on light duty for the next year. He was ranting and raving in the infirmary about how the men on this ship are undisciplined hotheads with too much free time. Unfortunately, Orion was there to hear him. I suspect we’re about to see a rollout of new fitness and skill standards. The admiral will find a way to keep those men busy.”
Raze groaned at the thought. Whatever orders Orion issued, Vicious would make sure the ones issued for the Land Corps were at least twenty-five percent harder.
The shower shut off and Torment made a gesture toward the bathroom door as if to remind Raze that he had promised to try to make things work with Ella. He left the apartment quickly, and Raze made sure to fasten the lock behind him. Torment’s remark about having the room swept for bugs only reminded him that there was no place on the ship that was actually private.
The bathroom door opened a sliver, and Ella peeked out to check the room.
“He’s gone,” Raze said before she could ask. “We’re alone.”
