by Nalini Singh
Bo's shoulders knotted, his thoughts snapping back once again to the exchange in the lab and to Kaia stepping away, putting distance between them. "Did he have curiosity?" he asked past the rock that sat in his stomach. "Like Kaia." For the sake of the investigation, he needed to get a handle on why a poker-playing charmer would suddenly turn detective, but it was the man who adored Kaia who wanted to get to the core of this stranger who lived in her heart.
"Curious?" Carlotta pondered the question. "Not a word I'd choose to describe Hugo. He can find out information, yes. But it's usually because he's been told to find that information or because he needs it for a reason of his own."
The hairs stirred on the back of Bowen's neck.
Was it possible someone else had asked Hugo to look into the movements of the Alliance Fleet? It couldn't have been Malachai--it was obvious the news had come as a shock to both him and Miane. So either Hugo had been so struck by what he'd heard from his drunk friend that he'd begun digging, or someone else in BlackSea had pushed him to it after Hugo shared what he knew.
But if that was true, why had that unknown individual left Miane and Malachai out of the loop, not even coming forward after Hugo vanished? It wasn't as if Hugo and his hypothetical partner had been acting against BlackSea. They'd been doing the direct opposite.
The questions lingering on his mind, Bo took his leave from Carlotta and Filipe ten minutes later, then continued on in his attempts to understand Hugo. He was careful who he spoke to, and he didn't turn all conversations to the missing man. That would leave too wide a trail if clanmates got together and began talking.
"I love Hugo, don't get me wrong," Tansy said when he tracked her down to the large growing area in habitat three where she was pruning plants using a sharp pair of shears. "But I never saw him as Kaia's mate. I've always thought she needed someone stronger, someone who'd be her shield and her rock." She put her cuttings in a basket by her feet. "With Hugo, Kaia was the rock and the shield and the one who got him out of scrapes. Been that way since they were kids."
Bo still had more questions than answers by the time he called off the hunt, but he had begun to form a real picture of Hugo Sorensen. A charming and feckless friend, but one on whom Kaia could rely when it mattered. The man had a weakness for poker but was gifted with the comms, seeming to coax a signal from thin air sometimes.
He was also an accomplished hacker who'd once made every comm screen across BlackSea's entire network display a fight scene featuring two samurai cats.
He'd been fourteen at the time.
Bowen had to like the guy for his balls and ingenuity.
However, before the dossier--and his childhood pranks aside--Hugo didn't appear to have proactively done anything beyond the necessary that didn't relate either to Kaia or to himself. He'd once spent eight days sourcing a rare food item for Kaia, and he'd learned how to tile because he didn't like the tiles in his bathroom, but in general he seemed happy to grin and coast along.
Bo stopped on a connecting bridge, staring out into the black where nothing seemed to swim, the world beyond the lights of the habitat an endless darkness. Like the dark places in his soul, the scars on his psyche that meant no one would ever describe him as having a "smile like the sun."
Despite Hugo's faults, he was widely liked--and badly missed. Nearly all his clanmates had smiled when talking about Hugo. Others had frantically blinked back tears at the loss of him. Hugo could be careless, but he had the ability to make people love him.
Had their positions been reversed, Hugo would've already been a station favorite.
Bo didn't have that gift. It took him time to earn people's trust, time to build friendships . . . time to win a woman's heart.
"You keep your promises," he said quietly, even while knowing it was foolish to compare himself to a man who wasn't here and who might never return. "You don't forget to do the things you say you'll do."
Kaia, however, was the one person for whom Hugo had kept his promises.
Hugo had also made Kaia laugh. He hadn't hurt her.
Again and again, Bo saw the smile fading from her face, the playful mischief replaced by shock and pain. The anger had come later. First had come the terrible hurt.
Why hadn't she told him, he'd asked.
The real question was: why hadn't he told her the one thing she needed to know to understand who and what he was?
Because his reaction had nothing to do with fear that she'd violate his mind. "You're a fucking asshole, Bo." Kaia would never go where she wasn't invited. It wasn't in her nature to act in a mercenary and cruel way. She had a wild gentleness inside her that was all about caring for others.
A hard object poked him in the thigh. He jerked his gaze to the left, to find himself confronted by a woman with night-dark skin who stood under five feet tall and was so heavily wrinkled that her wrinkles had wrinkles. But her eyes were bright and hard and sharp, and though she held a cane, it didn't really look like she needed it. "What did you do to Kaia?" A querulous demand.
Bowen flinched inwardly at the wording of her question. "What business is that of yours?" He'd go to Kaia and he'd lay his worthless heart at her feet, and maybe she'd decide she didn't want it, but that was between him and his siren.
The wrinkled little woman poked him again with her cane.
Bo could've easily grabbed the cane from her, but if she did actually need it, he'd be consigning her to a painful tumble to the floor. He decided to simply move out of the way of her next salvo--she was spry but he'd surely regained enough muscle mass to have the edge over a woman who looked three hundred years old.
"It's my business because I say it's my business," she said, her beady eyes reminding him of--
"You're the turtle," he blurted.
She just snorted. "Well, whatever you did, you'd better fix it. Or I'll throw you out an exit pool myself." Lifting the cane, she shook it at him. "No one gets away with bruising a heart that soft--all that girl knows how to do is love. And she's not one to betray her pain, so whatever you did, it must've been awful. Go fix it." Pushing him out of the way on that command, the tiny turtle woman stomped off down the bridge.
Chapter 42
"He hasn't cried once."
"He's a tough kid."
"But holding all that pain and horror inside . . . I want him to cry. I want our boy to cry and I want to hold him and rock him and promise him nothing will ever hurt him again."
"That's not the world he has to live in."
--Leah and Jerard Knight (2065)
DR. KAHANANUI BLOCKED Bo's plan to go straight to Kaia and attempt to mend what he was afraid he'd broken; the doctor summoned him to the lab by flashing up his name on the public comm panels around the station. Spotting him after passing by a panel, Oleanna pointed him in the direction of the lab. "Attie's looking for you, handsome."
"I have to take another set of scans," Dr. Kahananui told him crisply when he entered. "Everything is balanced on a knife edge. I must have continuous data to check if I need to recalibrate the third dosage and the only choices are multiple scans or to ask you to stay in the monitoring bed all day."
"This is definitely the better option." Bo took position in the scanning chair, but this time, it wasn't Kaia's competent hands strapping down his arms, it wasn't the scent of coconut and tiare flowers in his nose. Dr. Kahananui made no small talk, their interaction strictly subject and doctor.
Bo didn't attempt to bridge the cool divide. He'd hurt Kaia and he had to try to fix his fuckup first. Unfortunately, Dr. Kahananui told him she had to inject him with a sleeping agent as part of this round of scans. His muscles bunched in rebellion, but this was why he was here. This was a promise he'd made.
So he walked with her to his room and lay down in the bed. "How long will I be out?"
"Until about eleven thirty," the doctor told him. "I should be able to take all the readings I need during that time." She pushed up his sleeve and touched something cold and hard to his biceps.
/> Bo didn't remember falling asleep, but sometime later, he was aware of a presence in the room. A presence that was fiddling with the machines that surrounded him. George. He mumbled a groggy greeting and had the sense of Dr. Kahananui's assistant going preternaturally still.
The door swooshed shut only seconds later, leaving behind only a faint scent of something familiar. He frowned, tried to capture it . . . and fell into sleep once more.
* * *
*
THE time on the machine closest to his bed glowed a soft blue: 23:23.
Twenty-three minutes past eleven p.m.
His brain shaking off the last vestiges of sleep on that realization, Bo rose and went to splash some water on his face. He'd lain down fully dressed, so he was ready to find Kaia as soon as he'd dried off his face. Even if it meant waking her, he'd do this. He couldn't bear the idea of her believing he thought her capable of such a monstrous act.
The lab door down the corridor was open, George hunched in front of a computer inside, his bony shoulders poking up against his lab coat and his arms appearing too long for his body. "Do you know if Kaia's still awake?"
The other man jerked up his head, his eyes bulging for an instant before he recognized Bowen. Color streaked across his cheekbones in the aftermath. "I think she might've gone to the central habitat." It came out a mumble. "I saw her walking that way about fifteen minutes ago. You know where it is?"
"Yes." He'd memorized the map of Ryujin at the back of the "Emergency Evacuation Procedures" manual that Kaia had made him read. It had been in the sweet, sensual aftermath of their dinner under the stars, when she realized he hadn't been briefed on the evac protocols.
"Most guests receive a briefing before they ever get here." She'd scowled as she grabbed her organizer to pull up the manual, a siren with long, love-tangled hair tumbling over bare breasts marked by his touch.
He could've watched her endlessly.
As it was, he'd been fascinated to discover that the small toe on her right foot overlapped her fourth toe. Such a small, intimate fascination, one that could only exist between lovers learning one another.
"Broke it as a teenager," she'd told him absently while she downloaded the manual. "Didn't really notice it till the healer would've had to rebreak it to fix it, and it made no difference to me physically, so . . ." She'd shrugged. "The nail never grew back, either. I had multicolored dots tattooed on it. I call it my diva nail."
Examining the tiny tattoo, her bare foot close to his hip and his hand around her ankle, he'd said, "The ink lasts through the shift?"
"Uh-huh. Special changeling formulation." That was when she'd thrust the manual at him, then quizzed him to make sure he knew what to do should the station suffer a catastrophic disaster. Taking care of him. As she did everyone else.
For those unable to survive underwater, the procedure was simple: Get into a lifepod, close the seal by pushing the large green button above the entrance porthole, then eject the lifepod by pushing the red button. Beacon will activate automatically. You will be retrieved within the hour if not pulled up by station-mates who have the capacity to survive in the black.
Bo didn't like the idea of floating helplessly in a sealed capsule, but he'd learned the locations of all the lifepods. Kaia had tested him on those, too, making up increasingly horrible disasters for him to escape--culminating in a "Godzilla-sized kraken" on a rampage.
His heart squeezed at the memory of how she'd giggled, snorting accidentally in the midst of it, then laughed so hard tears had gleamed wet in her eyes.
Leaving George to his solitary work, Bo forced himself to detour to the kitchen to wolf down a triple-layer sandwich. He thought of it as fuel necessary to keep his brain and body functional and the experiment stable. It was as he was walking out of the kitchen that he realized the lighting had been muted to silvery moonlight, the station settling in for deepest night.
Only a couple of people sat on the sofas in the atrium, both looking out at the water, cups of what might have been coffee or hot chocolate in hand. The connecting bridges he needed to take were empty, and when he looked out into the darkness this time, he saw huge creatures moving at the very edge of his vision.
He couldn't glean any details, just a sense of enormous size.
Kaia's kraken?
But even that mystery wasn't enough to distract him from his goal, his heart thundering with the need to find Kaia. However, when he finally entered what Kaia had told him was the recreational hub of the station, complete with a basketball court and a park filled with tall trees and myriad flowers, it appeared empty.
Desolate.
But he swore he could smell the lush tropical flower that lingered in the air when Kaia moved, twined with faint threads of coconut and . . . chocolate?
He'd seen remnants of chocolate cake in the cooler when he'd raided the kitchen. Kaia must've made it for tonight's dessert. His siren was somewhere in this huge habitat where trees whispered in the airflow currents and nocturnal insects made irritated sounds at the interruption of his presence.
Moonlight glimmered over his every step. There were also pathways lined with what appeared to be old-fashioned gas lamps but were more likely very cunningly camouflaged ecolights. The faux-lamps gave off a soft golden glow that didn't penetrate the shadows beneath the trees.
It should've taken him hours to find Kaia.
Five and a half minutes later, he walked up to where she sat on a carved stone bench in front of a pond. "Why would you need a pond in the middle of the ocean?"
Hex peeked over from where he sat on her left shoulder, but Kaia kept her eyes resolutely forward, her sleeveless and scoop-necked green dress flowing like water in the moonlight. She'd tied her hair into a bun at the back of her head, revealing the delicate skin of her nape, and he wanted nothing more than to bend and press his lips to that soft, warm spot.
But he'd given up that right when he did what he'd done. He'd have to earn it back. And he would, even if it meant splitting open his veins. "I'm sorry." Naked, primal, the words came from the equally primal heart of him.
Kaia ignored him with regal grace.
"Siren." Knowing he deserved nothing less, Bo went down on one knee in front of her. "I was a bastard." There was no other way to put it, no way to dress it up. "I reacted out of fear"--it twisted him up inside to admit that--"but I never, not for a single fucking second, believed that you would violate anyone's mind, much less mine."
Kaia spoke at last, her voice devoid of emotion. "Atalina's been in touch with Ashaya Aleine. She'll leave San Francisco for Ryujin tomorrow morning."
He could've taken it if she'd yelled at him, but she'd shut down. Gone inside that protective shell Dr. Kahananui had warned him about--and he'd fucking pushed her into it. "Ashaya doesn't need to come." He'd contact Ashaya himself to call off the trip. "I trust you with every cell in my body."
Kaia still didn't look at him. He couldn't blame her.
Trembling inside, he flexed then curled his hand. Again and again. "There's something in my past not many people know about." His voice broke under the weight of the nightmare. "A Psy once forcibly breached my mind."
He didn't know if Kaia looked at him--because he couldn't look at her, couldn't bear for her to see the echo of the terrified boy he'd been. He stared at the grass that grew so far underneath the sea, tried to focus on the wonder of that, but his mind was in an old barn eighteen years in the past.
"I was thirteen at the time." Sweat broke out along his spine. "The short story is, the telepath who had me succeeded. She shoved her psychic fingers into my mind and tore it wide open." It had felt like daggers of ice stabbing into his brain. "She didn't need to be that violent--human shields are agonizingly thin."
The Tp-Psy had been so brutal as a message. "The shock caused my spine to spasm. I also lost the ability to speak or to see for four point five seconds." Each instant of the terror had felt like a year. Bo would never ever forget those four point five seconds.
"My father was Alliance." One of the good ones, already being nudged to the margins by a subtle corruption it had taken Bowen's generation to dig out. "I don't know if I was meant to be a warning, or if they wanted to twist me after breaking me, but the result was the same." Bo screaming while Cassius lay unconscious and bloody on the floor.
Bo took care not to mention Cassius--he'd made a promise to never speak of what had happened to his best friend. Cassius had locked the incident deep in his mind and preferred to pretend it never happened. "The worst of it was that I was led to slaughter by a Psy neighbor I considered a friend of sorts--she'd tutored me in chemistry, known me since I was an infant." Not many Psy lived outside the cities, but the ones who did learned to get along with their human and changeling neighbors.
"And the telepath who did it was a friend of hers I'd admired from afar--a boy's dreams." But the very worst was that Cassius had had a serious crush on the eighteen-year-old telepath, too compelled by her intelligence and ice-queen beauty to care that she was part of an emotionless race.
Kaia's fingers touching his jaw, her fingertips smoother than his as a result of handling heated pots. "How did you escape?"
He held on to the sensation of her touch to keep himself in this time and place. "Back then, the Psy used to think their minds made them invulnerable. The telepath didn't physically bind me." She'd violated Cassius first, stripping his mind bare and forever shattering his psyche.
"All it took was a single moment of distraction." Cassius rising to consciousness and attempting to get up even though his arms and legs wouldn't work right, the insult to his brain so violent that it had taken a year of rehabilitation for him to recover--physically at least. "I didn't think. I just drove a pen into the telepath's carotid and I was free." Drenched in hot, metallic arterial spray, with a badly wounded friend on the straw-covered floor and a possible enemy outside the barn, but free of the telepath's viciousness.
Kaia's penetrating gaze was absolute midnight that glowed at the edges, and only then did he realize he'd lifted his head, met her gaze.
