All In (The Drift Book 2)

by Susan Hayes

  “What?” Cyn asked.

  “Hmmm?”

  “You’re looking at me like you’ve never seen a naked woman before,” she replied.

  “I’m looking at the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, period.”

  “Please. I’m a sweaty, bed-headed mess at the moment.”

  Toro leaned in and pressed a kiss to her bare shoulder. “That doesn’t mean you’re any less gorgeous. Hell, since we’re the ones who made you look that way, I’d say it ups the hotness factor a few degrees.”

  “Absolutely.”

  Jaeger reached out to stroke her cheek, tracing the raised edge of her scar down to her throat. “You’re absolutely perfect just the way you are.”

  “Scars and all?” she asked, and he knew instinctively she wasn’t talking about just the scar on her face.

  “You wouldn’t be who you are without them. None of us would be. So yes, I think you’re perfect, scars and all.”

  She reached out to stroke her fingertips over a collection of thin scars that marked his flank. “You already know where I got my scars. Tell me about yours.”

  Toro snickered. “Yeah, tell her how you got that one, Jaeg. I know I never get tired of hearing the story.”

  “You’re an asshole, you know that, right?”

  “Maybe, but at least none of my injuries were self-inflicted.”

  Cynder raised a brow. “Oh, now I have to hear this story.” She made a show of snuggling against her pillow, grinning the whole time. “Tell me a story, Jaeger.”

  “All right, all right.” He snuck in a kiss before continuing. “We were defending some miserable hunk of rock our corporate masters had deemed strategically important. One of the other corporations was trying to take it, and we were under orders to hold it at all costs.”

  “That sounds familiar.” Cynder sighed. “Why is it orders always came with fraxxing descriptions like ‘at all costs,’ or ‘to the last man’ like we were living in a vid and not fighting a real war?”

  Toro shrugged. “I don’t think it was real. Not to them. I heard a phrase in an old vid once that stuck with me ever since: armchair generals. That’s what they were. They sat in their safe, luxurious offices on the other side of the galaxy and issued orders without ever once thinking about who they were sending into battle to die for them.”

  “They thought we were mindless things, interchangeable cogs in their war machine. On my sister’s Termination Report, it doesn’t even say she died. It states she ‘ceased to function.’ I hate them for what they did to us.”

  He was startled by the amount of venom in Cynder’s voice. The few times they had talked about their past, she hadn’t shown this kind of anger. Before he could press her further, she tapped her finger to his side.

  “I’m derailing your story, sorry. You were telling me how you got this.”

  “We were with several other units, making a push on an enemy position. They were dug in at the top of a hill. Well, it was more like a heap of volcanic rock and ash than a hill. We were staying low, trying to avoid detection, and I had my head on a swivel, trying to spot potential threats.”

  Toro scoffed. “You still going with that lame excuse?”

  He flipped his middle finger up at Toro. “Shut it. This is my story, I’m telling it my way. Now, where was I? Oh, right. I was looking out for trouble, and I slipped. Volcanic rock is nasty stuff. Some of it’s as sharp as a razor. I fell on a patch of it, and it turned my side into hamburger. The medi-bots did their best, but there was a bunch of crap in the wounds…so it scarred.”

  “You fell off the side of a hill?” She was trying not to laugh, but he could tell it was a losing battle.

  “He did. Slid ten feet down the slope, cursing the whole damned way. I had to pick him up and carry him for a half mile until the medi-bots had him patched up.”

  “Of course, I was cursing; it fraxxing hurt! There are probably still bits of me smeared across the rocks of that miserable little world.”

  “Where did it happen?” Cynder asked absently, still stroking his side.

  “A planetoid in the Dartha system. I don’t think it even had a name.”

  “DS-4,” Toro said.

  “How the fraxx do you remember the name of that—”

  “What corporation did you fight for?” Cynder demanded, cutting him off.

  Veth. That was a loaded question.

  “Does it matter?” Toro asked.

  “That’s where my sister died, so yeah, it matters. We were there to take the planet from Gigan-Corp. That was you, wasn’t it? You’re the bastards who killed my sister!”

  “We were Gigan, yeah, but that doesn’t mean…dammit, Cynder, it was war! We didn’t want to be there any more than you did. You know that.”

  She threw off the sheets and launched herself out of bed. When she turned to face them, her face was ashen, and her expression made his heart ache. Pain, anger, and betrayal, were all written across her features.

  “Get out of here. Both of you.”

  “Cynder, please—“

  “Out. Now. I can’t do this. Just, get out.” She pointed to the door, her hand shaking and her voice cracking as she added a final plea. “Please.”

  He rose from the bed and started dressing, but he didn’t rush. He had things to say before she threw them out, and he had a gut feeling that if he didn’t say them now, she would never give him another chance. “You said your sister was killed by a plasma grenade. It couldn’t have been us, Cyn. There was a snafu with our gear, and we weren’t issued any. We had nothing to do with Dana’s death.”

  “You were there, fighting against us. Enemies. We were enemies, Jaeger! You were trying to kill my friends and me. My family. Maybe I killed someone you cared about, did you think about that?”

  Toro got to his feet, his hands held out to her in supplication. “Cynder, please. Don’t make us leave you.”

  “Out. Just get out,” she repeated the same words over and over.

  It was clear to Jaeger they weren’t getting through to her. She had already shut them out. He could feel her pulling away from them more every second, and he could almost see her rebuilding the walls around her heart, making them thicker and higher than ever before. “This isn’t over, Cyn. I’m not letting us end like this.”

  “There is no us, Jaeger. There never was. The corporations saw to that. They said they freed us, but they didn’t. Not really. We’re still their puppets, dangling from their strings.”

  “That’s only true if you let it be. It doesn’t have to be like that,” he said.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Go. Both of you. Now, or I’m calling security.”

  “Cyn. Please,” Toro begged. It was the first time in his life Jaeger had heard his brother plead with anyone, for anything.

  “Go!”

  Jaeger didn’t bother with his shoes. He grabbed them and headed for the door, catching hold of Toro’s arm on the way by. He sent him a message via their internal channel, hoping to convince his brother to go without argument. “She’s not going to listen to us right now. We need to regroup and come back tomorrow. We won’t let it end this way. T. We’ll figure something out.”

  “We’d better. I’m not letting her go, Jaeg. I can’t.”

  The short walk to the door of her quarters felt like the longest mile he had ever walked. As they reached the door, he looked back, hoping beyond hope she would give him some sign, some reason to stay.

  Nothing. She was so cold, and still, she might have been carved in ice. The only sign of life he could see was the pain in her haunting green eyes. Pain that mirrored his own. They were losing her, and he didn’t have the first idea how to stop it from happening.

  They left in silence. Once they were in the corridor, Toro swore and slammed his fist into the nearest wall, leaving a dent the size of a small crater.

  “We need to fix this, Jaeg.”

  “I know. Come on. We need to prove to her that we had nothing to
do with her sister’s death.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “We’re going to need our service records and anything we can find on the battles on DS-4. It’s going to be a long night.”

  “I don’t care how long a night it is, so long as tomorrow we’ve found a way to make things right again.”

  “We’ll find a way.” At least, he hoped they would, because somewhere in the middle of all this, he had fallen for Cynder. He didn’t want to lose her. Not now, and maybe not ever.

  * * * *

  Cynder tumbled into the dark abyss of her memories, lost in grief and remembered pain. She was losing Dana all over again, lying in the battle-shattered landscape with her sister’s broken body cradled in her arms. She had begged Dana not to leave her alone, giving her so many blood and medi-bot transfusions she had risked her own life to try and save Dana’s. Her healing ability had been badly compromised, resulting in the scar on her face. It was a permanent reminder of that terrible day.

  Losing Dana had torn open her soul. They were cloned twins, two halves of a single whole. Cyn never expected to feel whole again. Then, Toro and Jaeger came along and gave her a glimpse of happiness. It wasn’t fair. One glimpse was all she got, and now she was losing everything all over again. Something snapped inside her, and she screamed aloud, giving voice to years of pain and anger. The faceless soldiers who had killed her sister weren’t faceless anymore. She had met them. Laughed with them. Shared her life and her bed with them. She had betrayed Dana’s memory.

  Still half out of her mind, she tore through her quarters, looking for everything belonging to Jaeger and Toro. She wanted it gone, all of it. A couple of Toro’s shirts. A pair of Jaeger’s ridiculously expensive dress shoes. The pile started to grow. Articles of clothing, pieces of tech. The handful of dice Jaeger had been using to teach her how to play starburst. The vanilla flavored sweetener Toro liked to put in his morning coffee. There was more of it than she expected. How had they infiltrated her life so completely in only a few weeks?

  She started stuffing everything into a bag, belatedly recognizing it as the one they had used to carry the picnic supplies to the atrium on their first date. Fresh pain bloomed in her chest, and by the time she was done, her eyes were watering with tears she refused to allow to fall. She dropped the bag by the door. Tomorrow morning, she would have someone deliver it to Jaeger’s room. Hopefully, he would understand the message. They were done.

  Tired and wrung out, she wandered back to her bedroom only to get another emotional kick to the gut. Her bed was still rumpled, and even from across the room she could detect a trace of Jaeger’s spicy cologne still clinging to the fabric. Everywhere she went there were reminders of the three of them. She had to get away from it.

  She looked at her watch and hoped Phyl would forgive her for the late-night call she was about to make. There weren’t many people who would be willing to take on a last minute charter, no questions asked, but Phylomenia Harrington wasn’t just a good pilot, she was a friend.

  She would arrange things with Phyl and then let her brothers know she was taking a few days off. They weren’t going to like the idea of her leaving so suddenly. They were going to like it even less when she told them she wasn’t telling them where she was going, or why she was leaving, but they would just have to deal with it.

  She had to get away from here. Away from them.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The door chime woke Jaeger from an uneasy doze. He and Toro had spent most of the night talking, researching, and planning their next move. So far, all they had was a stack of documents proving their unit had been on the far side of the planet from Cyn and her sister, and a shaky plan that mainly consisted of talking fast and hoping Cynder was willing to hear them out.

  Not exactly a great plan, but it was all they had.

  Toro rose from the couch and staggered over to the door. “I got it.”

  Jaeger nodded and made his way over to the small food dispenser unit. It was time for more coffee. The mug was only half full when Toro called his name.

  “Jaeg. This just arrived. I think we’re fraxxed.”

  He turned, and his heart sank when he saw the bag Toro held. “Is that our stuff?”

  “It looks like it.” He had never heard Toro sound so defeated. “My clothes, your dice, yeah, she’s sent it all back.”

  “No.”

  “No?” Toro repeated, puzzled. “No, what?”

  “No. This isn’t how this ends. No, I’m not letting this happen. No, she doesn’t get to decide this without talking to us first. Pick one.”

  “How about all of them?”

  “Works for me. Come on, T. We need to talk to Cynder.”

  They were outside her door a few minutes later. They both looked like hell, but Jaeger hoped it would work in their favor. At this point, he’d take any advantage he could get, even if it was based on pity.

  He activated the chime and waited. No one answered. He hit the button again and again, nothing. Over the next five minutes, they knocked, chimed, and even tried her comm device. The door remained closed, and their attempts to contact her comm went unanswered.

  Toro was hammering on the door in frustration when Zura appeared from around the corner. She approached them quickly, her silver eyes full of concern. “She’s not there.”

  “We guessed that much. Where is she?” Toro demanded, his voice loud enough that Zura scowled at him.

  “Don’t take that tone with me. You might intimidate the others, but I’m married to two cyborgs that are bossier than you’ll ever be. I might be able to tell you where Cyn went, but only if you calm down, quit beating on the walls, and tell me why you’re looking for her.”

  Toro hung his head. “Sorry, Zura.”

  She wrapped a strand of her indigo and blue hair around her finger and nodded. “It’s okay. I know you didn’t mean it. Now, what the veth is going on?”

  “We need to find Cynder,” Toro said.

  “Details, Toro. I am going to need more details.”

  Jaeger sighed. “We might have screwed things up with her a little. We want to talk to her so we can try and fix it.”

  “That’s not likely to happen.” Luke rounded the same corner Zura had come round, and Jaeger got the feeling he had been suckered.

  “You set us up?”

  Zura nodded. “I figured you were more likely to talk to me than them. Given that they want to punch you and all.”

  Kit joined them a second later. “I wasn’t going to hit them…much.”

  “Liar,” Luke said then crossed his arms over his chest and glowered at the two of them. “Care to explain why Cynder suddenly felt the urge to take an unscheduled vacation?”

  “She’s gone?” Toro asked.

  “Two hours ago. And no, she didn’t tell us where she was headed. Probably so we wouldn’t be able to tell the two of you. Explain. Now.” Kit took the same stance as his twin brother, arms folded and a scowl on his face.

  “Not out here. Cyn wouldn’t like us discussing her personal life in public.” Jaeger pointed back the way the others had come. “Your quarters?”

  Zura chimed in. “He’s right. This is not the place to be having this conversation. Unless you’re going to fight. Fight in the corridor, talk in our rooms. Anyone throws a punch once we’re back inside, and I’ll be pissed. I don’t want to have to replace any more furniture this month.”

  Luke snickered. “As I recall, we weren’t fighting when we broke the couch…”

  “Doesn’t matter. You broke it.” Zura started walking. “Come on, I want to find out what happened, and you’re making me wait.”

  Toro glanced at Jaeger and grinned. “And I thought she was a quiet, sweet little thing.”

  “Yeah, everyone does…at first.” Kit said, his frown lessening for a moment as he watched his wife walk away. Then he glanced back at Jaeger. “If you hurt Cynder, my brother and I are going to hurt you. If you really hurt her, I’ll let Zura loose on the two o
f you.”

  “I can tell you what happened with Cynder in one sentence. Toro and I fought for Gigan-Corp.”

  Kit winced. “Oh, fraxx.”

  “Yeah.” Jaeger rubbed the back of his neck, trying to ease the tension that had settled there since his life had started imploding. “You going to be okay with that? Or should I assume I’m about to get my ass kicked for being the enemy?”

  “It’s not like any of us had a choice. We weren’t drafted, we were designed, and we fought for whoever paid to have us created. As far as I’m concerned, our lives didn’t start until the day we were freed. It’s what you’ve done since that I care about.”

  “Glad to hear it.” Jaeger was grateful at least one of the Armas siblings was okay with the news they’d fought on opposite sides.

  Kit gave him a baleful stare. “You hurt my sister badly enough she’s left the fraxxing station, Jaeger. What you’ve done since being freed might still have earned you an ass kicking.”

  “Please, if you were going to kick their asses you’d have already done it. Come on in, guys.” Zura opened the door to her quarters and gestured for them to follow her inside.

  The interior wasn’t what he had expected. Zura had struck him as the type to have added homey touches to her living space. Most people, regardless of species did. In fact, the only ones he knew who didn’t have much in the way of personal belongings and decorations were cyborgs and soldiers from the IAF, the Interstellar Armed Forces. It made sense. Military life had a way of making everyone a minimalist.

  The walls had been painted a simple off-white color, and the furnishings were identical to the ones in the club. There were a few photos scattered around, but that was it.

  She caught them looking around and laughed. “I know. Everyone who comes in here says the same thing. It’s practical to use the same furniture as the Nova, and I’m not much a homemaker. Before this, the only home I’d ever known was the Sun Sprite.”

  “Ever?” Toro asked.

  “You think cyborgs are the only ones who have strange lives? Try growing up with a smuggler for a father and the whole galaxy as your playground.” Zura took a seat in the middle of the couch, and her husbands settled in on either side of her. “Enough about me, though. I want to know what happened. Cyn hasn’t been off this station in more than a year, so if she’s gone, something went seriously sideways.”