All In (The Drift Book 2)

by Susan Hayes

  He chuckled to himself as he fell in behind Jaeger. Any other woman would have chosen one of the upscale hotels in the more expensive sectors, but not Cynder. She had the means to spend a week in luxury if she wanted, but instead, she was smack in the middle of the rowdiest part of the platform. He loved that about her…even if he was still angry with her for bolting this morning.

  Finding out she was gone had torn a hole in his heart.

  He got that she was hurting, but veth, she should have given them a chance to talk to her, to explain. Walking away from them the way she had made him question if the three of them had a future after all. Why had she run? It wasn’t in her nature to back down or turn tail, so why this time? He hated feeling like this. He didn’t have any answers, and the only one who could give him any had gone to the far side of the Drift to get away from him.

  He wanted to understand. He also wanted a drink and a couple hours in a gym to work off his frustration. I’ll settle for two out of three so long as one of them involves talking to Cyn.

  Jaeger slowed down until they were side by side again. “You okay?”

  “Not really. I don’t think I’m going to be until we make this right. If we can, I mean.”

  “Her family and friends seem to think we’ve got a shot at this. I’m taking that as a good sign. Besides, this is us. We don’t fail, T. Not when it matters.”

  “I think this one matters more than all the others put together,” he said, every word sinking down into his chest to add their weight to his already aching heart.

  Jaeger nodded and rubbed the heel of his hand to the center of his chest. “I know.”

  It didn’t take them long to find the place where Cynder was staying. It took a little longer to convince the fresh-faced desk clerk to give up her room number, but Jaeger eventually managed it.

  “I can’t believe you managed to convince that kid there’s a secret cyborg branch of Corp-Sec, and we belong to it. If this ever comes back to bite you in the ass, I’m denying all part of it.” Toro said as they stepped into the elevator.

  “It worked, didn’t it? Besides, I’ve heard whispers about the ‘secret cyborg police’ more than once. People love their conspiracy theories.”

  “True.” He had actually managed to put aside the feeling of being an outsider. After a month at the Nova Club, he had finally gotten used to belonging somewhere again. They had friends there. It was fast becoming their home, and now even that was at risk. If Cynder wouldn’t talk to them, they’d have to move on. Maybe not right away, but there was no way he could stay and watch her live her life without them.

  The closer they got to her door, the tighter the knots in his chest got. He hadn’t felt like this since his days in combat. The battles where everyone knew the odds were ugly, and it was a given that not all of them would be alive when it was over. Back then, he fell back on his training and abilities as a soldier. This time, he was going in unarmed and with no idea how to proceed.

  “All things considered, I think I’d rather be heading into combat than her hotel room,” he said.

  Jaeger chuckled. “Yeah, T. Me, too. This isn’t anything we ever trained for.”

  Toro reached the door half a stride ahead of Jaeger. He squared his shoulders and rapped directly on the door, ignoring the courtesy chime on the panel.

  No one answered. Not again. She has to be here.

  He raised his hand and started to knock again, only to have the door slide open while his hand was mid-knock.

  “I knew it was you. Everyone else uses the chime; you just dent the door until someone opens it.”

  He lowered his hand. “Hi, Cyn.”

  “Hi. I’d ask how you found me, but that’s pretty obvious. Phyl told Zura, and Zura told you, which means Little Blue and my brothers must be on your side.” She looked tired, which wasn’t surprising. Sleeplessness seemed to be making the rounds these days. She was dressed in black from head to toe, from her scuffed combat boots to the black leather bodice she wore over a pair of form-fitting jeans.

  She looked incredible and the slightest bit vulnerable. It gave him hope.

  “There don’t have to be sides at all. I don’t want there to be,” he told her.

  She looked at him, then Jaeger and nodded. It was almost imperceptible, but it was there.

  “We don’t always get what we want, T,” she murmured.

  “Sometimes, we do. Can we come in?” Jaeger asked. “Please?”

  Again, the tiny nod. “Okay.”

  He was through the door the second she stepped back. He wasn’t going to give her any time to change her mind. He wasn’t leaving until they’d talked. All of them. About everything. When he walked through the door again, he wanted it to be with Cynder by his side.

  Cynder wasn’t really surprised to see them at her door. She hadn’t expected them to arrive so soon, though. Phyl must have tipped them off to her location before her ship had even left Astek. She thought she’d have more time to think about things. Apparently, her time was up.

  “You shouldn’t have left like that,” Toro said. He didn’t take a seat. Instead, he set his bag down on the floor, leaned his big body up against the doorway, and then folded his arms over his chest. She suspected nothing short of a hull breach would make him move until he was ready.

  “You’re right. I’m sorry I left the way I did.” She sat down in a slightly battered chair, leaving the couch for Jaeger. She still needed to keep her distance. Seeing them again, both of them looking so tired, wary, and bruised, made her want to curl up in their arms and skip talking altogether. They might have been the ones who hurt her, but she hurt them, too. She could see it. She wanted to go to them. Touch them. Hold them and let them comfort her while she did the same for them. But first, they had things to talk about. More than either of them knew.

  Fraxx. What a mess.

  Jaeger took a seat on the couch and started rummaging through his bag. “We spent all night working on something for you. We wanted to prove to you we weren’t anywhere near you or your unit.”

  “You did?”

  “Of course we did. You accused us of being involved in your sister’s death. No matter what comes of us, you have to know that isn’t what happened.” He handed her a data tablet. “We were on the other side of the starsforsaken planet, Cyn. It wasn’t us.”

  She took the tablet but didn’t read it. There was a lot she wasn’t sure how to say, but this was one thing she had already decided. Even if they had been there. Even if they had thrown the plasma grenade themselves, it didn’t matter. It was war, and none of them had any choice. “I regret saying what I did. It wasn’t fair of me. None of us chose to be there. We didn’t sign up to fight. We didn’t get to pick a side. For all I know I could be the one who killed someone you cared for. I was a sniper. I ended a lot of lives in the ten years I fought. We all did.”

  “I hated it. What they made me do. What they made us do.” Toro pointed to the tablet in her hand. “Read it, please. So you never have doubts about it. As far as we can tell, your unit and ours never crossed paths. Not once.”

  She scanned the information on the screen. Dates. Locations. Coordinates. There were gaps, of course. Even now that the wars were over, the corporations guarded their secrets with care. Still, it was obvious from what information they had found that they were right. They had never faced each other in battle. All three of them had blood on their hands, but this proved that none of it belonged to someone they had loved.

  “You see?” Toro asked.

  “Yes.” She set the tablet aside, and with it went a heavy weight she hadn’t even known she carried. “You were right. I needed to see it. I don’t know how you managed to pull all of that together so quickly.”

  Jaeger's mouth curved up into a ghost of a smile. “We were very motivated.”

  “And then we got interrupted by one of your employees delivering our stuff back to us,” Toro said.

  She didn’t have to look at him to know he was scowlin
g at her. “I’m sorry about that, too.”

  “We shouldn’t have left you alone. You were hurt and angry, and we should have stayed with you. I’m sorry we left, Cyn, but we were coming back. Why didn’t you wait and talk to us? Why are we here, on the far side of the Drift?”

  “I made you leave. I screamed at you and called you killers. You two didn’t do anything wrong. This is on me. I didn’t—There’s stuff—I didn’t even get what I was really doing until I was halfway here. I thought I was doing the right thing, but then Phyl did some sort of maternal mind-trickery thing and made me see I wasn’t. She said I was running away…and she was right.”

  Jaeger leaned forward bracing his arms on his thighs. “What are you running from, Cyn? Us? The war? I thought things were going well, and then all this happened, and you were gone. Why?”

  “Because the corporations aren’t done destroying my life yet. I’m more broken than even I knew, and I knew I was pretty fraxxed up. I thought you deserved better, and I didn’t want them derail your lives, too,” she said. The entire statement came out in a single, hurried breath that even she barely understood.

  It took Jaeger and Toro a few seconds to catch up, but once they did, their response made her regret ever trying to push them away.

  “What’s destroyed? What have they done? Why didn’t you tell us?” Jaeger demanded.

  Toro straightened, a stormy look in his dark eyes. “No one is going to ruin your life. I won’t let that happen.”

  The explanation came out in a hurried tangle. “Dr. Jefferies. The test she did. I got back the results a few days ago. No kids. Not for me, not for the others she’s tested. There’s something in our blood. Something she thinks the corporate lab rats put there. The bastards broke me even more than I knew. I thought I was free of them, but I’m not. I can’t ever be, because they didn’t just make me a killer, they made sure I could never be anything else. I can’t create life, I can only take it.”

  The room fell silent in the wake of her inelegant confession.

  “You left because you found out you can’t have kids? That’s why we had to chase you across the fraxxing Drift?” Toro demanded.

  “I’m going to spank your ass for that at some point. You should have told us. That’s not the kind of thing you brood on, alone. You got it? No more brooding. No more running. It’s not good for my ego to have to chase the woman I love around cosmos.”

  “You love me?” she barely recognized the voice asking the question as her own, and even as she said it, part of her was wincing at the way it sounded. When had her life become a scene from a vid…and a cheesy one at that?

  “You’re not seriously going to ask us that, are you?” Toro asked, moving away from the door at last. “We’re here, aren’t we? And for the record, I don’t care if you can have kids or not. You’re not broken, Cynder. You’re perfect. Don’t ever forget that. To me, you’re always going to be perfect.”

  They moved at the same time. Jaeger rose from the couch as Toro strode across the room to stand at his brother’s side. They both dropped to their knees in front of her, identical looks of frustration, longing, and love on their faces.

  “I told you if you left, I’d come after you. I will always come after you because I love you,” Toro said.

  Jaeger turned and grinned at Toro. “What he said. I can’t improve on that, so I’m just going to agree. We love you, and we’re not going back to the Nova without you.”

  “I thought we weren’t doing this? One day at a time, remember?” she asked, trying to ignore the rapid tripping of her heart and the lump in her throat.

  Toro took her hand, gripping it tight. “That was what you wanted. I was never in this for a day at a time. I’m greedy. I wanted forever from the first second I saw you fight. I just never thought there was a chance I could have that. Not with someone like you.”

  “Why would you think you couldn’t have that?” she asked him. This wasn’t only about her anymore. Something bigger was happening. Something important. She wasn’t the only one hurting and full of doubts.

  He thumped his free hand to his chest. “Because of what I am. I was created to fight. That’s it. No other skills. You think you’re broken, but I know what I am: incomplete. They only gave me what they thought a killing machine would need and left the rest out. What kind of woman would want to spend her life with someone like that?”

  “You’re not incomplete. You might have been in the beginning. I can’t say for sure because I didn’t know you back then. All I know is the man you are now, and there’s nothing missing from him. He’s strong, and brave, and kind, and gentle. They didn’t teach you any of that. You taught yourself. You made yourself whole.”

  “You can see it in him, but not in yourself.” Jaeger took her other hand, but his touch was gentle, almost tentative. “You need to stop judging yourself by who you were and start seeing who you are now.”

  Toro snorted. “Good advice. Too bad you refuse to see it applies to you, too.”

  She knew what Toro was talking about. Jaeger didn’t simply think of himself as broken. He believed he was unworthy of the life he had. He hadn’t forgiven himself the lives he took while they were soldiers. Veth, she had even called him a killer and accused him of murdering her sister. Icy tendrils of horror and shame coiled tightly around her heart. Her accusations had added to the guilt and pain he already carried.

  Jaeger shook his head. “It’s different for me. You two were doing what you had to because there wasn’t any other choice. Me? I was good at it. Hell, I enjoyed it. The technical details, the precision. I was always pushing myself to improve. Do you understand? Every time I improved, it meant more people died. There’s no redemption for that.”

  “It was part of your programming, wasn’t it?” she asked softly.

  Jaeger stared into her eyes, his fingers tightening on hers as if he expected her to pull away. “That’s no excuse.”

  “It has to be. If it isn’t, then I’m never going to be able to live with the things I’ve done. I was a sniper. I killed from a distance. An unseen threat in the shadows, watching and waiting until I knew my targets’ faces better than any lover’s. It was what they made me for.”

  The words she needed to say stuck in her throat, but she forced them out anyway. If they were going to be honest, then she couldn’t hold anything back. Not even the things she barely acknowledged to herself.

  “I don’t know what it was like for the female cyborgs you knew, but I was programmed to consent to every request for sex that came from someone on our side. Soldiers. Lab techs. Corporate suits. Anyone. Everyone. I enjoyed it, because that was part of my programming, too. So, don’t you dare tell me our behavior programming isn’t an excuse. It has to be. I need it to be.”

  Jaeger’s eyes widened, and both of them gripped her hands tighter. “That’s not the same thing!”

  She shook her head, determined to drive her point home. “You don’t get to pick and choose. Either we were compelled by our programming, or we weren’t. If you can forgive me, you have to forgive yourself.”

  “There’s nothing to forgive,” Toro declared before leaning in to brush a tender kiss to her mouth. “You said I’ve become more than they made me to be. If that’s true, then the same goes for you. Both of you.”

  “You’re not playing fair, you know,” Jaeger said.

  “Nothing’s fair in love or war. Isn’t that the expression?” she replied.

  “So, which is it? Love, or war?” Toro asked.

  She beamed at them. “It’s love. I love you both so much. I don’t know what happens next, or how we’re going to make this work, but whatever we have, I’m in until the end.”

  Jaeger grinned. “What happens next is easy. We’re taking you to bed. If this place has room service, then we’re not leaving for days. If not, then we’ll let you up…eventually.”

  “That’s not what I—hey!” she yelped in protest as Toro tugged her into his arms and then rose to his feet, ta
king her with him. He draped her over one shoulder and clamped a hand down on her ass, holding her in place. It was only a few steps to the bed, and when they got there, he tossed her gently onto the center of the mattress.

  “Stay,” he said, pointing at her with a stern expression that belied the laughter in his dark eyes.

  “Careful, T. I love you, but that doesn’t mean I won’t kick your ass if you try and tell me what to do.”

  “The last time I let you out of my sight, you vanished. I’m not letting that happen again.” Toro started to strip his shirt off, stopping just before the fabric passed over his head. “You better still be on that bed when this comes off.”

  “Or what?” she challenged him. Not that she had any intention of going anywhere without them. Not now, and quite possibly not ever again. Having them back in her orbit put everything into perspective. When she had left them behind, nothing had felt right. She still missed her batch brothers and even the non-stop insanity that was the Nova, but the hole in her heart had started to heal when she had opened the door and found Jaeger and Toro standing there.

  “Or we track you down again. Then maybe we tie you to the damned bed to make sure you stay put,” Toro said as he tossed his shirt aside.

  “That’s not much of a threat. You’ve already tied me up once, remember?”

  “I’ll never forget that night.”

  “Me, either.” Jaeger kicked off his pants and joined her on the bed, wrapping her in his arms and snuggling her against his naked body. “Everything about that evening was unforgettable.”

  It felt good to have him holding her again.

  “It was,” she said, resting her head on his bare chest.

  “Maybe while we’re here, we can make some new memories,” Toro said as he stripped off the last of his clothes.

  The sight of his hard, sculpted body and the love shining in his eyes made her wonder how she ever thought she could walk away from him. From either of them. Toro joined them on the bed, his touch tender as he cupped her cheek in his hand and kissed her. This was what she wanted the rest of her life to be like. The three of them together, supporting and loving each other. It didn’t matter if she couldn’t have children. Even if it was only the three of them, they could still be a family.