Heart of Winter: A Sci-fi Alien Warrior Romance (Winter's Edge Book 2)

by Harper, Charlotte A.

  “To say the least” said Jane under her breath.

  Sabetha turned her gaze on Jane, as if seeing her for the first time. “And who might you be?” She gave a look at Jane that bordered on dangerous.

  “I’m Jane.” Jane matched Sabetha’s glare with one of her own.

  “And do you have a last name Jane?”.

  Jane felt a blush began to creep across her cheeks but she held it in check. “No.”

  “A commoner then.” Sabetha’s mouth twisted into a slight sneer. Jane felt her hands clench into fists, any fear she had since she had landed on the planet, evaporating from the heat of her fury. Her parents had been from the lower class and thus bereft when it came to actual wealth. Names had to be bought and if one didn’t have enough money, they had to make do with one instead of two. And then there were those who never had two coins to rub together and were left nameless entirely.

  “Having two names doesn’t mean you’re not a cunt,” said Jane.

  Sabetha looked at her for a moment before breaking out into a laugh. “She’s got a mouth on her, doesn’t she? I can see why you like her.” Sabetha turned to look at Damion.

  “Are you going to give us the stone or not?” said Damion. Jane knew he was close to losing his patience.

  “Maybe I’ll give it to Saunter. Maybe to you. You’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out.” She gave them one last look and then turned on her heels, her footsteps echoing up the hallway until they faded and Jane and Damion were left alone in the silence.

  He reached out and rubbed her arm affectionately. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” Jane felt the anger drain out of her. It wasn’t worth it to stay angry at that woman. Not at the moment anyway.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow. Like I said before, it’s going to be okay.” He planted a quick kiss on her forehead. She watched him walk away before slumping against the wall and letting out a deep sigh of exhaustion. The day had been a long one and had done little to curb her anxiety.

  “Excuse me?” A small voice broke through the air, its tenor barely rising above the quiet. Still leaning against the wall, Jane turned her head to the side to see a small girl dressed in white with a pile of brown hair that reached her shoulders and that looked like it hadn’t been washed in a long time. Jane’s eye was drawn to the girl’s mouth which was trembling at the corners.

  “Hey,” Jane spoke unconfidently, unsure of what to make of this latest intrusion.

  “I’m Grace,” said the girl.

  “Jane. Nice to meet you.” Jane extended a hand. Grace looked at it like it was a foreign object that she couldn’t make sense of and made no move to reciprocate the gesture.

  “Alright then.” Jane put her hand down. “What can I do for you Grace?”

  “I work here. In the kitchens.”

  “Then you should know that the food was great tonight. That Peach Pie was amazing.”

  The girl gave a small smile. “My mother taught me how to make that.”

  Jane nodded. “Does your mother live here too?”

  The girl’s face sloped from nervous fright into sadness. “No. I haven’t seen here for the past two years.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s okay,” said Grace, who looked like she was about to cry.

  Jane stood there, not knowing what to say so instead she reached a hand out and put it on the girl’s shoulder. The girl grabbed Jane’s hand with her own and Jane felt something press against her palm.

  Jane took her hand away, spreading her fingers open to reveal a small piece of paper lying in the center of her palm with a key taped to it. Jane removed the key and unfolded the paper.

  Look in the Cellar.

  Jane folded it back up and put it into her pocket along with the key. “Thank you Grace. It’s been a pleasure meeting you. Before you go, do you mind telling me where I can find....” Jane struggled for the right words, “What I’m looking for,” she finished.

  Grace pointed down the hallway to another door. “Through there. Then left, right, left.” She said, her face now looking openly fearful. She began to back away. Jane repeated the directions in her head. Left, right, left.

  “Hey Grace,” Jane said, a sudden flash of curiosity striking her. “Do you have a last name?” Grace shook her head before turning and walking away.

  No last name. Just like her.

  Jane took a deep breath and steeled herself for what she was going to do next. She walked down to the end of the hall with slow and measured steps. She put her hand on the door that Grace had pointed to, coaxing it open just a little so that she could peer around the corner. Another hallway, this one shorter than the last and which came to a dead end. It contained nothing. No stairways. No furnishings or decorations. The one thing it did have was a door, halfway down, on the left. Jane stepped into the hallway and hurried towards the door.

  In the silence of her mind, she repeated it once more. Left, right, left.

  Chapter 5

  Jane found herself standing before a door made from wood, a single keyhole cut into its frame. She took the key that Grace had given her out of her pocket and pushed it in, twisting it until she heard a click. The door slid back on its hinges and drifted backwards. Jane stepped inside and found herself at the top of a flight of stairs, which curved downwards in a winding manner submerged in darkness.

  The stairs were narrow, their width coming to little more than half a foot. Recognizing this, Jane put her foot down carefully, testing her balance and making sure her footing was secure before putting the other one down. She made her way with care, taking each step one at a time while she traveled steadily downwards.

  After a few minutes, she could see a soft orange glow coating the steps below her. She made her way down several more steps until she rounded the corner and found a lantern hanging several inches from her face which illuminated the end of her journey; cutting away the darkness and revealing the last few steps she needed to take before reaching solid ground once more.

  She took the final few steps, ducking under an archway and into a short hallway, its floor paved with stones. On both sides of her were two cells, their bars rusted and in some cases decaying. The one on her left was empty except for a few old chains and the occasional moth eaten bed covering. The one on her right was occupied.

  A thin man, his hair thick with grease and tied back into a ponytail, sat with his back against the wall. He looked up at her with two coal black eyes, his features slender and worn but not emaciated to the point where he looked like he was being starved. Instead, he had the appearance of being only slightly underfed.

  “Who are you?” questioned the man.

  After a brief pause Jane whispered her name to him.

  “I haven’t seen you before. I don’t suppose you’re here to let me out?”

  “That depends,” said Jane. “Why are you here?”

  The man titled his head, like he was looking at some far off point. “I’m here because its in her best interest to keep me here.”

  Jane felt her heart began to pound a little faster. “Who’s ‘she’?”

  “Sabetha. Sabetha Grey.” He choked out the name like it was something ugly that his tongue couldn’t wait to be rid of. “Judging by the look on your face, I’d say you know her. Of course, if you’re on this planet, it’s hard not to.”

  Jane took a step closer to the cell. “Why’d she put you here?”

  “I’m a galactic federal agent in the employ of the Planetary Coalition.”

  She looked at him in disbelief. The Galactic Federal Agency was the closest thing that the Planetary Coalition had to a peacekeeping force. When there was a problem, they were deployed to fix it.

  The mane continued, “I came to this godforsaken shithole because we had heard rumors that the colony here had been taken.”

  “Taken?”

  “Yeah, by a group of bandits. When I came here, I disguised myself as a colonist from the inner edge. You know,
somebody looking to get away from it all. When I first set down, she was the first one I saw. She didn’t even come with an entourage. Just her, all by herself, out on the desert sands waiting to greet me.” He coughed at this point, his body lurching forward.

  “Are you alright?” said Jane, taking a step closer to the cell and then took a step back when a foul stench assaulted her.

  “Oh, I’m just fucking fine as a fiddle as you can see” the man said with a bitter edge to his voice. “Just been trapped in a cell for the past four months, eating whatever garbage they throw my way and shitting infrequently. What I wouldn’t give for a fucking laxative right now.”

  “You’ve been here four months?” Jane choose to ignore the rest of the man’s ramblings.

  “Yeah.”

  “If you’re an agent of the coalition like you claim, then why haven’t they come for you?”

  “You mean the rest of those assholes at the GAF? They don’t have the manpower or the resources to follow up on every agent that goes missing. You know how many of us disappear each year?”

  “How many?” Jane asked knowing the answer was going probably going to surprise her.

  “Several hundred. And it can take up to a year before a disappearance is followed up on. Sometimes longer.”

  Jane shook her head. She didn’t know whether to believe this man just yet, but his story seemed plausible based solely on Jane’ own impressions of Sabetha Grey. There was something off about the woman. It wasn’t only that she had hit on Damion, although that had been enough to instill in Jane a severe dislike of her.

  “So, Sabetha figured out you came to investigate and threw you in this cell for your troubles. Is that about right?”

  “More or less.”

  “And she was the one who invaded the colony in the first place.”

  “Bingo.”

  “What did she do with the colonists?”

  “You probably saw them as you walked through the town. They’re tending the fields for her. Making food for her and her men.”

  The image of the colonists she had seen when Sabetha had guided them through the city flashed into her mind. They had looked weary and beaten down and very much how slaves might look, their bondage potentially having been written on their faces all along.

  “Say I believe you” began Jane.

  “You should, seeing as I’m telling the truth.”

  “Say I believe you” repeated Jane. “Then where do we go from here?”

  “Letting me out would be a good place to start. You wouldn’t happen to have a key, would you?” His voice cracked with hope and Jane felt sorry for the man in that moment. Whether he was lying or telling the truth, there was no denying that he was desperate to be out of that cell.

  She considered her options for a moment. She had a key that might be able to open the cell in question and even if it didn’t, Jane had always had an affinity for picking locks, a skill she had acquired during her time at the orphanage. Of course, there was always the possibility that the man was lying and by letting him out she was putting herself and the rest of the crew in danger. She had been praying that they would avoid that this time around. Despite that, she couldn’t shake the feeling that he was telling the truth. She didn’t have any hard evidence, but the primal fear that she had seen in Grace’s eyes when she had given over the note and key was all the proof that Jane needed.

  The man looked at her intently. “What’s it going to be?”

  Jane put her hand in her pocket and felt the cold metal of the key that Grace had given her. “What’s your name?”

  “Jack Abbott” the man said quietly, as if he hadn’t spoken it in a long time.

  Jane nodded and took a breath. “Okay.” She took a step forward.

  “Well, what do we have here?” sneered a voice from behind. A voice that chilled Jane to her core. She turned around.

  “Care to explain yourself?” said Sabetha Grey.

  Chapter 6

  The room was white to the point where all of its color had been drained away. Even the edges had been sanded off, the door shorn off so that it lost the appearance of a room and came to resemble some kind of empty void, an infinite stretch of white spreading in all directions. There were only three objects in the room. A single white table and two white chairs on either side. In one chair sat Sabetha Grey, her arms folded and her expression as calm and devoid of emotion as the room she was sitting in. In the other chair sat Jane, who was feeling more than a little disoriented by the whole experience.

  Jane had been taken to this room after Sabetha had discovered her talking to Jack Abbott, the man who claimed to be a Galactic Federal Agent. She had been hauled back up the winding staircase she had come down by two of Sabetha’s men, then up another staircase and down another hallway until they had reached this room. Now one of her men stood by the entrance, his hulking frame blocking any chance of an escape. This, coupled with Sabetha’s cold and almost lifeless stare, was causing Jane to question the chain of decisions she had made that had led her to this moment.

  They sat in silence for a while, Sabetha gazing deep into Jane’s eyes until Jane felt an urgent compulsion to look away. Despite this, she held on, never breaking eye contact with the woman sitting across from her. If she was going to survive this, Jane knew she couldn’t show any weakness.

  Sabetha shattered the silence without warning. “Who?”

  “Who what?” Jane asked coldly.

  Sabetha’s voice barely rose above a whisper. “Who gave you that key?”

  “I found it.”

  Sabetha raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

  “Yeah, really. It was just lying on the floor. You should really be keeping better track of it.”

  Sabetha grinned so that all her teeth, a few rotten, were on full display. Jane tried to suppress a shudder. “And what about the prisoner I caught you talking to. I imagine he had some stories to tell.”

  Jane shrugged. “Unfortunately we didn’t have the time. The only thing he was able to tell me before you showed up was that his name was Jack Abbott. Beyond that, we didn’t get the pleasure of a full conversation.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Of course. Why would I lie to you?”

  Sabetha snorted. “Oh, I can think of plenty of reasons.”

  “I’m just as honest as you are,” said Jane with a slight smile.

  Sabetha leaned forward, her usually delicate features contorted into sharp vicious lines, the scar along her cheek seeming to ripen until it was red. “You think you’re so fucking clever, don’t you?”

  “To be fair, clever is all I’ve got left at this point.”

  “I won’t argue with you there. But even that will leave you at some point.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so. You’re going to tell me everything I want to know, sooner or later. Do you realize where we are?”

  “A room,” said Jane, trying to feign indifference.

  “Not just any room.” Sabetha face contorted with a twisted smile. “This is the room where we do all the interrogations. Can you imagine why?”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “Because there’s no color here. No interesting shapes or anything else for that matter. It’s just a white room. When I leave I’m going to take this table and these two chairs with me so that your left all alone in here, by yourself. It will just be you. No sights. No colors. No sounds. Just you and your thoughts. We’ll leave you in for a few days. Maybe longer if we have to. But at some point you’ll talk. It’s just a matter of time.”

  Jane gripped the handles of her chair and resisted the urge to leap over the table and attack the woman in front of her. “Fuck you.”

  “You stole my goodbye,” said Sabetha.

  “What about Damion and the rest of us?”

  Sabetha turned to look at her. “I don’t know yet. Perhaps, I’ll be able to convince him that you disappeared on your own accord. If not, then maybe I’ll kill him. On the other hand
, I wouldn’t mind keeping him around. A man like that would make a good trophy, don’t you think?”

  “If you lay a hand on him, I’ll kill you.”

  “You, kill me? That would be a twist, wouldn’t it?” With that, Sabetha walked out the door, her men grabbed the only furnishings in the room and followed behind her. Jane heard the door lock.

  She was all alone.

  Chapter 7

  The next several hours found Jane feeling her way along the walls of her surroundings, searching in vain for a weak spot. She caressed, rubbed and pounded her hands against the wall until her knuckles began to redden and her palms blistered. She had tried the door as well, which had yielded similar results. The door itself was incorporated so seamlessly into the room that it almost looked like part of the wall until one took a closer look. On closer inspection, there was a small keyhole embedded into it on the right side. If Jane had any sort of pick or suitable material at her disposal she might have been able to pick it, but Sabetha had made sure that she was thoroughly stripped of any possession including the small pistol she had tucked away on her person.

  She sighed and sat down in the middle of the floor. All around her, there was only white. She felt detached from any sort of reality, like she was drifting in some sort of shapeless, empty void. The feeling wasn’t entirely unpleasant, bordering more on disconcerting than anything else. A couple of days in here though? Or a couple of weeks? She didn’t want to imagine what she might be feeling then. And of course there was the matter of breaking out of here so that she could warn Damion and the rest of the crew. In frustration, she laid back on the floor and stared up at the empty white canvas that was the ceiling.

  A stretch of indeterminable time passed before Jane heard the first sound that didn’t come from her. It was the slow creaking of the door as it swung open. Grace appeared in the doorway, the shy servant girl looking as timid and afraid as she had when Jane had last seen her, a tray cradled in both of her hands. Behind her was a broad shouldered man with a shaved head and a slim torso. He stood back towards the door as Grace approached, his arms folded across his chest.