But Ash had. On Glory. Even on that hellhole, only the powerful knew his name: the precinct bosses, their most trusted advisors, and a few unfortunate souls who ended up dead. They knew not to contact Tahn. They knew not to mention his name or search for intel on his whereabouts, not if they wanted to keep breathing. If the KU had system bosses, Tahn would have been in charge of them all. He led a criminal organization that spanned governments and galaxies. He was powerful and dangerous and ruthless.
And Trevast had had monthly conversations with him.
A sharp headache chiseled the back of her skull. All the pieces were in front of her, but she couldn’t arrange them together in a way that made sense. She was too tired, too shocked, too… Yes, too betrayed. And she felt like she was floating through space without a tether.
“Thank you.” Her voice sounded empty.
“Who’s Neilan Tahn?”
“Someone you shouldn’t ask about. Ever.” She stood and turned toward the door.
“Hey, where are you going?”
Ash exited the isolation chamber without answering. She didn’t have an answer. She just knew she needed to walk, to move, to do something to keep her mind occupied.
“You, um, look like you could use some downtime,” Teal said. Why the hell was the crypty following her?
It was Ash’s sleep cycle. Had been for the past couple of hours and…
Ash stopped. If it was her sleep cycle, that meant it wasn’t Rykus’s.
Or Rykus’s XO’s.
Soldiers kept to a routine when they were shipboard. They slept. They ate. They drilled. They exercised. If she hurried, she might interrupt Brookins on rec deck.
She changed course, then stepped onto the nearest lift. So did the crypty.
“Ash, really, I think you should just head to your bunk,” Teal said.
“I need to beat the everliving hell out of someone.” The lift doors opened. “Want to volunteer?”
“Picking a fight probably isn’t the right way to work through your problems.” The shorter woman had to jog to keep up with Ash’s long strides.
“It’s exactly the right way to work through them.” She stepped into the rec area, found her target.
Teal followed her line of sight. “Okay, then let’s think about your career. Attacking a superior officer—”
“I’m not going to attack him,” Ash said. “He’s going to attack me.”
“Ash—”
“Hey, asshole!”
A sweat-drenched Brookins set down a heavily loaded barbell and stood.
“Let’s do this.” Ash pushed everything from her mind and closed the distance between them.
20
Rykus ended the comm-call with Specialist Teal and ran.
It took him only a minute to get to the rec deck, but an anomaly could do a lot of damage in that amount a time, and he entered on the raised jogging track that circled the open area, not on the lower level where Ash was straight-lining it to Brookins.
“Stand down!” Rykus yelled.
Ash stood within striking distance of Brookins.
“Too tired from your workout?” she taunted the other anomaly. “Or are you still weak from that hole I put in your chest?”
Damn it, Ash. She was determined to stir up a fight.
It would take too long to get to the stairs, so Rykus gripped the railing, looked down at the five-meter drop, and jumped.
He’d leapt from similar heights before, and while wearing heavy gear, but his landing was off. He didn’t disperse the force of the artificial gravity in his roll like he should have. Either that, or he was getting old. His breath whooshed out, and a sharp lance of pain traveled from his right ankle to his spine. He grunted past the discomfort, stumbled back up, then hauled ass to the two anomalies.
“You’ve found yourself a nice desk job,” Ash said. “Any reason you’re avoiding the stress of combat?”
“Ashdyn,” Rykus barked.
Ash tensed but didn’t turn away from Brookins.
Brookins stepped forward. His face was lowered so close to Ash’s their foreheads almost touched.
“We’ll do this,” Brookins said. “But the timing will be mine, not yours. Go crawl to your fail-safe.”
Ash hooked Brookins’s leg at the same time both her palms flew forward, striking the other anomaly on the opposite shoulder. It was a move that should have thrown off his center of balance, allowing her to take him to the ground. But Brookins knew her capabilities. He turned in profile to her, causing her palms to slide across his chest instead of pounding into it. All it took was the lightest hit on her back to drop her face-first to the padded gym mat.
Rykus lost sight of her behind the crowd that had gathered. He shoved aside the spacers, caught a glimpse of Brookins locking Ash’s arm behind her back.
“Move.” Rykus ordered.
The last man got out of his way. Rykus stepped onto the mat in time to see Brookins lean in close to Ash’s ear.
“When I decide it’s time to fight,” Brookins said, “it will be when you’re healthy and rested and prepared. So that when you’re left bleeding on the ground, you’ll know it’s because you tried your best and you failed.”
Brookins released Ash and rose. He grabbed his towel off a bench, slung it over his shoulder, then left.
Ash rolled to her back when Rykus approached. He stared down at her, not knowing what to say. He wanted to yell and shake and punish her. And he wanted to kneel down, take her in his arms, and hold her. Ash was the most broken person he’d ever met. He didn’t know what spurred her insanity this time—Specialist Teal had only said she’d learned something that upset her—but he recognized this self-destructive behavior. Ash wasn’t the only anomaly in the KU who picked fights for distraction.
“Up.” It was the only safe word he could say with Teal and two dozen other spacers and soldiers looking on.
Ash climbed to her feet.
Rykus made his expression as neutral as he could. Aside from the circles beginning to darken beneath her eyes, Ash’s face was flawless. Her injuries from her fight with Hauch had healed, and it was impossible to tell she’d suffered a knife wound half a standard day ago. If the boosters she injected could heal mental injuries as efficiently as they could heal physical ones, she would have been fine.
“Come with me.” He headed for the exit without bothering to see if she followed. He knew she would, but where would he lead her? To her room and her bunk where she likely wouldn’t sleep? To the med-bay where she could down a few sleeping pills? Or straight to the ship’s counselor? Seeker’s God knew she needed to end up at the latter eventually.
He opted for the only logical choice left. He led her to his room.
The light turned on when he entered. He waited until he heard the click of the door shutting, then he faced Ash.
She stepped forward, hips swaying with purpose, and raised her arms to encircle his neck.
He gently took hold of her wrists. “Sleep.”
Her eyes grew hooded. She took half a step toward his bed before she went rigid.
Blinking, she refocused on him. “I can think of better things to do.”
“You’ve been awake for at least forty hours, Ash. You almost walked to my bed despite me not putting any compulsion in my voice. You’ve had your ass handed to you by your teammate—”
“I didn’t lose that fight.”
“—and you were stabbed and mentally attacked. You need rest more than you need me.”
“That’s debatable.” She jerked her wrists free from his hands.
“What happened?”
Her nostrils flared. “Nothing.”
“I told you about Brookins so you would watch your back, not seek him out to pick a fight.”
She threw a glare over her shoulder on her way toward his bed. “I don’t like threats at my back. Better to confront them head-on.” She stared down at the miniature floating tree beside his bed, the only thing personal he had in his quarters.<
br />
He stuck his hands in his pockets. Her ability to set him off was unmatched. “If I have to track down the crypty to get information, I will.”
“Teal called you?” Ash shook her head. “She won’t say a word.”
“You stole files from Trevast’s home.”
Ash’s head whipped his way.
“I’ve kept track of you, Ash.” He stepped toward her. “I know you visited Trevast’s widow. I know you’ve been working on something since you’ve been on board, and you were spending time with Specialist Teal. I assume you know who she is, what she did back on Ephron. She’s an anomaly and the best crypty in the KU. You found something at Trevast’s home, didn’t you? Something Teal decrypted?”
The woman who faced him wasn’t the Ash he knew. His Ash wouldn’t have worn such a cold, lethal expression. She wouldn’t have stood there rigid as a soldier in a lineup, and she wouldn’t have been silent. The Ash he knew and loved was somewhere inside her shield-reinforced shell. He’d seen her like this once before. They’d been aboard the Fortune’s Citadel when Ash had awoken from a nightmare disoriented and distraught. As soon as she’d regained her bearing, she’d chased something—a telepath or a hallucination—to the capsule’s edge where it had disappeared. Either that, or it had never existed in the first place.
This had something to do with her teammates. It had something to do with telepathy.
“What did you learn?” he asked.
This time his question seemed to re-center her. She drew in a breath, and the impenetrable shell surrounding her shattered. It was replaced with a different method of defense, a siren’s seduction. She smiled in that way of hers that made men think of sex, and she closed the distance between them.
He shouldn’t have let her press her lips to his, shouldn’t have wrapped his arms around her, let her hips nudge against him in all the right ways. A man could lose his mind in her presence. But he loved her. He’d do what was best for her. So he ignored his body’s protest and broke off the kiss.
“You need to talk to someone, Ash.”
“I need to not think.”
“You need sleep.”
“I need you.”
“It’s not happening right now.”
Her gaze dipped from his face to the bulge in his pants. “Would you like me to leave you here alone with that?”
Calm. Steady, he told himself. Don’t react. It’s what she wants.
“The ship’s counselor—”
“Can go straight to hell,” Ash said. “I’m fine. It’s only been a couple of months. Time will make it better.”
There was nothing humorous in his laugh. It was harsh and cutting. “It took me two years to come to terms with the deaths of my soldiers at Gaeles Minor, and I didn’t see them die or have my mind telepathically altered.” He took a step back so he wouldn’t be distracted by her touch. “And now, almost eight years later, it’s still not better. I still regret being the one who stayed behind. The one who lived. If you don’t get help, Ash, you’re going to break.”
She crossed her arms. “The loyalty training keeps me from snapping, Rip. You don’t have anything to worry about.”
“You keep forgetting you’re human. You’re not infallible. You might not snap, but you can still suffer psychologically just like any other man or woman who’s been through traumatic events.”
She propped her hip on the edge of his data-desk. “All right, Commander Perfect. How many times did you talk about your feelings after Gaeles Minor?”
“We aren’t talking about me.”
“Why not? You want me to live up to your expectations. Tell me what those expectations are.”
“I don’t want to fight. I want to help.”
“You’re the one who says you’re not better after eight years. Tit for tat, Rip. Tell me how you came back from the dead, and I’ll talk to someone about my fucking feelings.”
How the hell had she turned this around on him? Gaeles Minor was the past. He’d come to terms with it and with the undeserved hero worship that had followed. Everyone who knew him knew not to touch that subject. Everyone but Ash. She’d been trying to discover the story behind that battle from the first second she’d touched dirtside on Caruth.
Ash let out a scornful laugh, then turned toward the door.
“Twelve,” he said, opening up that old wound for her. “That’s how many soldiers lost their lives because of my arrogance.”
Slowly she faced him. “You’ve never been arrogant.”
“I’ve been overconfident.”
Her green eyes held his, and for a moment he didn’t want to reveal his past to her. He didn’t want those eyes to acknowledge his failure. But if it led to her opening up to him… Though she’d given him her body and her trust, she shielded her heart. A counselor—if she ever broke down and talked to one—would likely attribute that to her upbringing or lack thereof. No one survived Glory if they left their hearts vulnerable. He knew that—had known it since he first admitted to himself he’d fallen for her—and he was willing to accept the way she protected herself if she couldn’t move past it.
But if she could move past it…
He walked to the edge of his bed and sat.
“The peace talks had gone to hell,” he said. “The minister prime had been executed along with his legislative assistants and I-Com aides. The Sariceans were sending drop ships dirtside, and it looked like they would easily break through the Fleet’s defensive line and take out our battered capsule.”
The noise of that day, the comm-chatter of people dying, ships bending and breaking apart… He could still hear it as clearly as if he were there.
“My team and two others had boarded one of the Sariceans’ warships. The thing was barely operating. Emergency lights flashed, gravity fluctuated between standard, heavy, and nonexistent. The idea was to use the ship as a means to infect its counterparts. Most of the Sariceans were dead or in life rafts. We took care of the others, left body after body in our wake, but when we reached the bridge, it was clear the ship wouldn’t be doing any communication with the rest of its fleet. Orders were to blow it before we departed, so we took out our charges.”
Ash sat beside him on the bed. Her thigh pressed against his, but he didn’t feel it.
“That’s when I had the brilliant idea to set explosives on the ship’s leeward side only. It would cost us a few extra minutes, but the chain reaction would rip through its hull, venting the O2 it had left and causing the ship to careen into the formation that was obliterating the planet’s ground forces and our capsule.
“We were heading for the life rafts when our cuffs alerted us that a charge had been taken off-line. When a second one went dead, we knew it wasn’t a glitch. We’d missed at least one Saricean in our quick clearing of the ship. I volunteered to go back, told the others to get in the rafts and get the hell out of there.”
He threaded his fingers through his short hair. “The bastard was waiting for me at the first charge site. I walked right into the trap. He set the charge off, I flew backward, a blast door dropped on my shoulder.”
Ash had turned toward him. Her finger traced the scar hidden beneath his shirt. Her lips had traced it dozens of times on the Citadel. She knew its path even in the darkness of space.
“The door should have severed my arm. I would have bled out, died there. But the blast damaged its frame, and it didn’t fully close. I managed to pull free”—Seeker’s God that had hurt—“and made it to the next charge. I reset it. Stumbled on. I don’t remember how I made it to the life raft, but that’s where I was when the final charges blew.”
“And that’s when I saw my mistake. I’d sent the soldiers to the wrong rafts. I didn’t know…” He closed his eyes. He should have known. Fucking fool. “When the ship blew, it did exactly what we wanted it to do. It careened. But I didn’t account for that when we made our way to the rafts. The explosion rocketed them straight into the Sariceans’ blockade. The enemy took them out.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Standard evasion procedure is to haul ass the direction opposite the enemy, not right into their field of fire.”
“You would have been dead too if you hadn’t stayed to reset the charges.”
“Yeah,” he said. That was all he could ever say to those words. His family and the Fighting Corps had pointed it out time and time again. It didn’t make him less responsible.
“The thing is,” he continued, “we didn’t need the ship to careen. I only realized that later when I reviewed the battle. The ship could have exploded right where it was, been caught in Gaeles Minor’s orbit, and shredded the enemies’ vessels without me losing even one soldier.” He looked into Ash’s emerald eyes. “That’s the biggest mistake. The arrogance. I wasn’t just satisfied blowing the enemy’s ship up. No, a part of me wanted to be a hero. I wanted to save Gaeles Minor and send as many Sariceans as possible straight to hell.” He laughed. “I got what I wanted. And it cost twelve good soldiers their lives.”
“You can’t see every option in the middle of a battle. Your soldiers didn’t see it.”
“They were trusting me to see it, and they had orders. They followed them.”
“It wasn’t—”
“My fault? Yeah. I’ve heard that.” He stood, paced away from the bed. “It was a mistake. An accident. Officers screw up sometimes. I’ve heard it all. The truth is you can be perfect ninety-nine percent of the time, but that last one percent… I should have been held responsible. Instead, the Fighting Corp’s PR team decided to turn me into the hero of Gaeles Minor. Word leaked out that I was dead. When I saw the Sariceans strafing the debris, I disabled my comm-cuff and killed the emergency beacon in my escape raft. Another hour, and my air would have run out, but a search-and-rescue team picked up what remained of my heat signature. They pulled me in and immediately ID’d me.” He let out a bitter laugh. “The Coalition decided not to tell anyone, not even my family. When I arrived on Meryk, I thought I was meeting them for a quiet reunion. I didn’t know I was walking into my own funeral.”
Shades of Honor (An Anomaly Novel Book 2) Page 20
