by Loren Rhoads
Eilif watched her husband study the video as it looped again on the screen. She knew he’d always loved the other woman and that he’d only married Eilif as a poor substitute. She knew him well enough to see the longing vibrate through his body. Soon he’d have his true love back in his grasp.
Eilif shied from following the thought to its logical conclusion. She’d always known her days at Jonan’s side were numbered. Still, she had nowhere else to go. So she would welcome her replacement with a smile, then find somewhere quiet to hide until they forgot all about her.
One of the boys shifted at the edge of her vision. Eilif looked from Jonan to her oldest son. For the person who’d discovered the evidence his father sought so single-mindedly, Jamian didn’t look proud of himself. In fact, his mouth had tightened to a grim line as he turned to the other boys. His question repeated several times, whispered from one boy to the next, before Eilif could make it out: Where had the video come from?
* * *
Sloane watched Raena walking ahead of them, a silhouette against the deepening burgundy of the sunset. Ariel understood something of the pain he was feeling to have found Raena after so long and know he couldn’t hold her. Nothing could stand between Raena and her fate.
This was the moment to change the subject, Ariel decided. “I missed you,” she said.
Sloane’s head jerked toward her. “You did?”
She thought his surprise was genuine. She smiled a little sadly. “Didn’t you know I was crazy about you?”
“You could’ve said so.”
“I did say so,” she reminded.
“Not lately.”
Tired of the tone of complaint in his voice, Ariel’s temper flared. “Gavin, you shot me. Or don’t you remember? You hijacked my cargo. You killed Ximena and Harat. I knew it was the Dart. I knew it was my fault you were on it. But I couldn’t forgive that kind of betrayal in a friend, let alone from the man I loved.”
His stride faltered. “I hear that right?”
Ariel kept moving. It was easier than meeting his eyes. “What’d you think you heard, old man?”
“Something about love.” Sloane matched her stride again.
Ariel found she couldn’t answer. To speak was to have her heart broken. Again. How could she tell him that she’d never loved anyone as much as she loved him? So much time had passed. They were no longer young. Anyone could see he preferred Raena.
But Sloane wasn’t a man to let it go, now or in the past. “If you loved me, why did you leave me alone my whole life?”
“You weren’t alone. How many times were you married, Gavin? You’ve got kids somewhere, your corporation, and your Dart connections. Looked to me that you had no room in your life for an arms dealer with a heart of gold. And anyway, you shot me. How could I ever turn my back on you again?”
“But here you are,” he pointed out.
Too quickly, she said, “Because of Raena.”
Sloane caught Ariel’s arm and drew her toward him. Their lips met, then their bodies. She fought her desperation, kept her arms from clinging to him. When Sloane finally stepped away, he left her breathless and aroused.
“That wasn’t for Raena,” he said.
“No,” she agreed, “that was for you.”
The last of the light drained from the sky. From this angle, the palisade of cliffs hid the lights of the casinos. The beach was very dark suddenly. The sea sounded very close.
Sloane pulled a hand lamp from his pocket and shone it around them. Faint light reflected up into his face. The worry there was painful for Ariel to see.
She spared him from calling out by doing it herself. “Raena?”
“Here,” her sister answered.
Sloane flashed the torch beam in that direction. Raena was closer than she had been before darkness fell. She perched on a large rock, knees drawn up to her chest. Ariel wondered if she’d been listening to them, or if she’d been staring off into the future.
Sloane hurried over to the rock and began to climb it. He’d thought Raena was gone, Ariel realized, vanished with the light. And the panic he felt was only a fraction of what he’d feel when Raena really disappeared.
Despite the steamy breath of the night on her skin, Ariel shivered. As Sloane left her standing in the darkness to take the light to Raena—who probably could see better in the dark without it—Ariel had another realization.
Raena wouldn’t say goodbye to either of them. She’d just vanish, gone to confront Thallian. She intended to leave Ariel behind to console Sloane. Raena knew everything Thallian had done in Ariel’s cell. She knew Ariel could barely face the memory, let alone the man himself. Ariel was meant to prevent Sloane from rushing after Raena and plunging headlong to torture and death.
Ariel watched Sloane scramble up the rock face. He slammed his knee against an outcropping, but paused only momentarily. He had to reach Raena, had to touch her to reassure himself.
There wasn’t anything Ariel could do to stop Gavin from confronting Thallian. She could only go along to watch Sloane’s back.
She imagined how badly the gun would shake in her hand.
“Come up,” Sloane invited, gesturing with the lamp.
Ariel shook her head. “I think I’ll go back to the room. I’m a little chilled, all of a sudden.”
Raena said, “Let me warm you.”
Ariel tossed her head back as she laughed. “Wake me when you come in.”
“Promise,” Sloane answered.
Ariel turned away before the first tear spilled down her cheek.
CHAPTER 10
Sloane waited until Ariel passed beyond the edge of his light. He saw the orange flare of her igniter as she lit another spliff. “Is she okay?” he asked.
“No.” Raena hugged her knees tighter to her chest. “You’re breaking her heart.”
“I can’t help if I love you,” Sloane said defensively.
“Ariel can’t help loving you,” Raena answered softly. “Life is cruel.”
“Do you want to go after her?”
“It wouldn’t help,” Raena said. “She’s deciding whether she will die for you if she needs to.”
Sloane stared at the motionless girl beside him. Raena seemed faintly luminous in the diffuse light of his lamp. She gazed inscrutably back at him. Exasperated, Sloane asked, “What are you talking about?”
“Ariel is deciding if she’ll come with you when you go to your death at Thallian’s hands.”
Rather than ask if that was something she foresaw for sure, Sloane demanded, “Will she die?”
“If that matters to you,” Raena answered, “you ought to consider waiting for me here.”
“Have you seen her die?” Sloane insisted.
“No,” she admitted. Before Sloane could relax, Raena continued, “She will wish she was dead. She barely survived him the last time.”
“Then don’t you go.” Sloane grabbed Raena’s wrist and yanked her off-balance against him, so he’d know he had her full attention. “If you don’t leave me, I won’t have to come after you. And Thallian won’t hurt Ariel. It’s all up to you.”
That bittersweet half-smile slipped onto Raena’s face as she deftly twisted her wrist free from his grasp. The motion was so quick he wasn’t sure how she’d done it. Then she laid her cheek against his shoulder. “Thallian is already looking for me. I’d rather go meet him on my own terms.”
She moved her fingers over Sloane’s lips. “Don’t tell me to run,” she said. “I’ve wasted enough of my life running from that man. If you’d let me die on Brunzell, I might have averted some of what will happen. The longer I wait to go, the more dangerous Thallian will be.”
“If we’re all going to die,” Sloane snarled, “what difference does it make?”
“No one said we’re all going to die,” Raena corrected. “And we’re alive tonight. Why not enjoy it?” She hugged him abruptly, then went slithering over the edge of the rock, somehow finding handholds in the darkness.
“Where are you
going?” Sloane asked, shining the light around until he found her down on the sand, peeling her shirt up over her head.
“Swimming!”
“Is it safe?”
“Is anything?” She unwound the skirt from around her legs and dropped it on the sand. Sloane saw she was wearing a knife sheath on her thigh and nothing else. Raena gazed up at him, black eyes shining and fists on her bare hips. “Come on,” she said. “I bet the sea is warm.”
He clipped the hand lamp back onto his belt and crept down the rock after her. Finding toeholds in the darkness was a matter of faith, of putting his foot down and hoping to touch something that would support his weight. Sweat slicked his body, clammy under his shirt, when he felt the sand under his boots again.
When he turned to look for her, Raena swarmed up over him, pushing him back against the rock face as she climbed his body. She caught his lower lip between her teeth. Sloane ran his hands down her back, marveling again over the ridges of her scars.
“You can swim, can’t you?” she breathed into his ear.
“Yes.”
“Good.” She unwrapped her legs from around his waist and slid down the length of his body until her feet found the ground. Her fingers raced his to the closures on his shirt. She gave up, letting him undress himself as she covered his chest with small nips, never enough to be painful but enough to remind him she had teeth. As if he could ever forget that.
She helped him slide his trousers down and knelt at his feet to pull off his boots. She placed them precisely one beside the other on a rock ledge, then sat back on her heels, hands caught together behind her so that her back arched and her breasts pushed forward. Tipping her head up to meet his eyes, she grinned and asked, “What is your bidding?”
“Don’t play with me,” he growled, teasing her back.
“Can’t help it. Everyone is so serious these days.”
A gentle swell of water materialized around her as the tide came in. The foam clung to her legs and hips, bubbling in the scattered light from the hand torch. She broke the pose to do a walkover backward into the froth. “Come on, Gavin. I can’t remember the last time I swam in an ocean.”
He waded out after her, wondering what lived in Kai’s ocean. Was it nocturnal? Was it hungry? Ahead of him, Raena was waist-deep and moving away. She leaned forward into the water and pulled hard with her arms. The torchlight caught a glint of something in her hand. Sloane fought to stand still against the nudge of the surf, waiting to see it again. There it was: she’d drawn her knife and was carrying it in her hand.
He could go back to the hotel room, he realized. Ariel would be grateful if he did. Even as he thought it, he bent into the water and kicked off. This was undoubtedly another test. If he wouldn’t follow Raena here, she’d know he wouldn’t follow her to meet Thallian. Swimming in an unfamiliar pitch-black ocean was probably the safer of the two options. He just wished she’d brought him a knife, too.
He kept his eyes on her small black head, which bobbed a surprisingly far distance out, and stroked through the water toward her. On his lips, the water had a metallic tang like iced steel. Around him the temperature was pleasant, maybe even a little too warm for comfort.
Something large and white appeared on the water ahead of him. Sloane thought it was a reflection of the moon, but when he paused to tread water and look up, nothing glowed in the sky. A second glow rose up from below, followed by another, and another. They floated up from a frighteningly long way down.
Raena startled him when she suddenly burst up out of the water at his side. Sloane lost his rhythm, then panicked as he started to sink. The glowing creatures were all around them now, undulating menacingly. If Raena hadn’t sunk her fingertips into his biceps and held him at the water’s surface, he might have given in to fear. Even now, he wanted to clutch her.
She rotated him back toward shore. The still-burning torch stared unblinking in the darkness.
“What are we going to do?” Sloane didn’t like the shiver in his voice.
“Once they come to the surface, they seem to stay,” Raena observed. “They must be feeding on something. If we swim down, we can slip past underneath them.”
“Down?” Sloane echoed.
“Well, seeing as I can’t fly without a building to leap from, our only other choice is to stay here and wait to see if they develop a taste for humans.”
“How did I let you talk me into this?” he groaned.
“Was there talking involved?” she asked. “I thought you just followed the first naked woman you saw.”
He gaped at her, wondering how much she meant to hurt him with that. Raena gazed back, seemingly just as relaxed as if they were bantering in some surfside bar.
He’d put his life in her hands, expecting nothing more than a quick swim in the ocean, then a roll on the beach. A little gratitude for everything he’d done for her, everything he’d given up for her, his whole life thrown away hunting her, and for what? So she could go back to the monster she’d served before the War ended, the one who taught her to kill without remorse, to take pleasure in causing pain and fear.
She handed him a fabric strap with a silver buckle. “We’re going to have to stick together,” she said. “If you swim too deep or jog left when I go right, you’ll be on your own. I don’t have anyway to find you down there.”
Numbly, he took the buckle in his hand. She had the strap’s other end wrapped around her fist. He realized it was her knife’s sheath. He thought about asking her for the knife as well, but decided just as quickly that he’d feel safer if she kept it. If anything attacked them, the one with the knife would have to fight it off while the other one fled. Ashamed of himself, he held his tongue.
She continued to calmly give him orders. “I don’t want to tire myself out with pulling you,” she said, “so I’ll let you set the pace. Let me steer. I’m much more used to darkness than you are. Those animals give off enough light that I can see.”
Gavin nodded, still too close to panic to speak.
“Deep breath,” she encouraged. “We won’t go far on the first dive.”
She watched until he was ready, then turned a fluid arc and plunged into the water. It was tricky to find a rhythm that didn’t pull the holster strap out of her hand. They floundered a little before Raena set out strongly, pulling him along despite what she’d said. They hadn’t gone too far when they found their pace. Gavin realized she needed to swim two strokes for every one he took. Still, she kept going, not straining. Just as he began to worry about running out of air, she touched the heel of his palm with her forefinger and tapped him to indicate “up.”
They might survive this, he thought hopefully. And hopefully he’d have the strength left when they reached the shore to demand the mercy fuck she had better be saving for him.
* * *
Eilif confronted Jamian in the corridor as he headed to bed. “You have to tell him,” she said.
Jamian stared at her, guilty as only a teenaged boy could be. Then he regained control of himself. He was a Thallian, after all. In a cold voice he asked, “Tell him what, Mother?”
“I heard you questioning the other boys.”
Merin had stopped just beyond the dim security light behind Jamian’s back. He wasn’t the brother Eilif would have chosen to talk to first. Jonan sometimes let his affection for the boys color his judgment, but Merin never allowed anything to distract him.
“The video is a trap,” Eilif said before Jamian could argue.
“How do you know?” Merin asked.
Jamian spun, obviously frightened. He managed to reassert his control again, but Eilif was sure Merin hadn’t missed the lapse either.
“The boys didn’t find the video on the news,” Eilif said. She was guessing now, but it was more important to protect her sons than herself, since she would shortly be irrelevant. “Someone sent them the link.”
“You were coming to tell me this?” Merin asked the boy.
“Yes, sir.” He hadn�
��t been, but he made the lie sound enthusiastic.
“Which boy got it first?”
“They’re going over the logs, but we think it was Jaden. He and Jarad are trying to trace it back now.”
“Let’s go tell Jonan,” Merin commanded. “Not that he will recall Revan and Jain, but we can at least make certain they know they are expected.”
* * *
The mercy fuck on the beach wasn’t all that Sloane hoped. Raena wasn’t feeling mean any longer. She was simply compliant and silent, busy thinking about something that didn’t include Sloane.
He dragged things out, hoping to get her attention. Sloane wondered if she was thinking about Thallian, but didn’t dare ask because he feared the answer he might get.
Eventually, she came back to him enough to get him off. Then she got up, businesslike, brushed the sand off and retrieved her clothing from the rock. If she’d taken any pleasure in their coupling, he couldn’t tell. That the whole transaction meant so little to her broke Sloane’s heart.
He followed her back to the hotel room because he didn’t know what else to do. Ariel was already pretending to be asleep, so when Raena quietly crept into bed beside her, Sloane lay down on the edge, as far away from them as he could get.
* * *
The room was cavernous, so enormous that Sloane found it difficult to believe it was enclosed, except that the blackness was absolute. He stamped his foot to check the echoes. The dead air around him swallowed the sound made by his bare foot. Where were his boots? Where was he?
Raena’s tomb. The realization poured ice through him. He’d never stepped inside, never even returned to the planet once she’d been found. But this utter isolation was just as she described it. It felt like being trapped in the void of space after the stars had burned out.
As he puzzled over the whys and wherefores of his imprisonment, the grinding of stone on stone shattered the silence. His hand dropped to the top of his thigh only to find it naked as well. His gun, his clothes: everything was gone.
In the complete darkness, he didn’t know if he was hidden behind something—if there was anything to hide behind—or if he stood in the middle of the room entirely exposed.
