by Adara Wolf
Aside from the little, inconsequential cut on his face, he was perfectly fine. He was fine, and he was crying and whimpering, while Alex was a mere shell of himself.
That low-level resentment he felt towards all of Anna’s children flared up again full force. He knew it wasn’t Johan’s fault, but if he hadn’t been there—if Johan hadn’t been there, if Anna and Vasilis hadn’t felt the need to procreate, if the kidnappers had simply chosen a different event for their plans—then Alex wouldn’t have been caught in this situation.
Tracht hoped that cut scarred over. He wanted Johan to carry this event with him for all time, to never be the simple brat he’d been before. It was unlikely that Anna and Vasilis would allow that though. They would expend every penny necessary to keep Johan’s face pretty and unmarred.
“Alex? Are you there? I don’t want to be alone,” Johan whined through hiccups.
In a fit of pique, Tracht slapped Johan, on the same side of the cut, and Johan cried out, his soft sobs turning into outright crying.
Tracht shook his head in annoyance and turned back to Alex. He kissed Alex’s temple again, and Alex once more flinched and whimpered.
The kidnappers would pay for this. How convenient that they’d left all of their torture implements on display. Alex’s bloodied tooth lay on the tray alongside them, right next to a branding pen.
Tracht dropped both the tooth and the branding pen into his pocket and left.
==
“Where’s Scarface?” Anja Nilsen asked. “Thought you’d be eager to get him out.”
“No. I assessed the damage. He’s catatonic. A few more minutes won’t hurt him. I want to deal with the person who did this first.”
She shrugged and motioned into the other room. “In there. I’ll watch.”
Not a request. That was fine. Tracht didn’t particularly care.
The ringleader of these professional saboteurs was a woman.
“Do you have a name?”
“Fuck you,” she spat, and she smiled. “What are you gonna do? Want the payout from the job?”
“You don’t recognize us?” Tracht asked, and that was disappointing. “That’s sloppy on your part.”
“I’ll say,” Anja Nilsen said. “Atalanteans always think they can ignore Cadmus customs.” She gave a sarcastic bow. “Anja Nilsen, at your service. In general, it’s good manners to ask the local leaders when you’re going to start working in their jurisdiction.”
“Never heard of you,” the woman said, but Tracht suspected she was lying. In her line of work, there was no way she hadn’t heard of the Nilsens.
“You had a lot of fun with Alex,” Tracht said quietly.
She turned her attention back to him. “Who?”
“My bondservant.” Tracht held up the branding pen. “You cut him up and tortured him. He’ll be useless for weeks.”
He saw her brow furrow in confusion. “Yours—not Anna Tracht’s?”
“I’m her brother. And I’m a lot less nice and forgiving than she is.”
He set the branding pen into the corner of her eyelid. She flinched, but to her credit she didn’t make any noise beyond a mild grunt, despite the burning.
She didn’t start screaming until he burned through the skin of her eyelid entirely.
==
“Thanks for leaving enough for me,” Anja Nilsen said, afterward. She hooked her arm around his. “You’re a lot more interesting than I thought. We should have fun together sometime.”
“I’m not interested in women.” Tracht gently extricated his arm. “I suspect you may well be more extreme than I am, in any case.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “That was plenty extreme. I mean, I’m going to have fun making her disappear for a long, long time, but damn, you laid some beautiful groundwork.”
He automatically looked back at the closed door where they’d left the woman—he hadn’t bothered to ask for her name, but he assumed Anja Nilsen knew.
“Will you be leaving now?” Tracht asked. “I’ll call Vasilis as soon as you’re gone.” He paused. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t mention your role in this.”
She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter to me. Just remember that you owe me one. I’ll collect within the year.”
The Nilsens took all the members of the little saboteur gang with them—mostly incapacitated, with their leader bleeding and looking the worse for wear. Tracht waited until they were all gone, and then he waited another fifteen minutes to call Anna.
“I found Johan.”
Predictably, she shouted, but then she didn’t care, just had him send her the address and she was off.
He took the time to untie Alex first, careful of his wrist. Alex wasn’t responding at all, his eyes still staring off into nothing. The nearby bathroom provided towels and water, and Tracht cleaned off Alex as best he could. The cotton gauze in his mouth had soaked through, but it looked like the bleeding might have stopped.
When Alex was as clean as was reasonable, Tracht kissed his forehead. Still nothing. With reluctance, Tracht let go of Alex and went to tend to Johan.
As soon as he removed the blindfold, Johan burst into tears. “Uncle Hannes!”
Tracht undid the rest of the bindings, and then he had the brat in his arms, embracing him and refusing to let go, getting his snot and tears all over him.
“Are you all right?” Tracht forced himself to ask, hoping he sounded remotely like he cared.
Johan just cried and cried, and even when Anna and Vasilis showed up, he was barely willing to let go of Tracht. Thank god that Anna insisted.
With his arms free again, Tracht circled back to Alex. It took some coaxing, but he got Alex to stand and lean on him. The paramedics who’d arrived with Anna were fussing over Johan, tending to his infuriatingly mild little scratch.
“Alex. We’re going to get you patched up,” Tracht whispered into Alex’s ears, and that got him a slight reaction.
“What—” and then another hiss of pain, and Alex shaking his head. His eyes did lock on Tracht though, and then there was fear, real fear that Tracht hadn’t seen since their early days together.
Alex slid from his grasp onto the floor, and he placed a bloody kiss on Tracht’s boot. “Sorry,” he slurred, “sorry, sorry, sorry.”
“No. Alex, get up,” Tracht ordered sharply.
Alex complied, pressing his weight onto his broken hand in order to leverage himself upright. The only indication he was aware of anything was the loud hiss he gave. He didn’t try to get close to Tracht, and damn it, this was not the Alex that Tracht wanted.
“Sorry. Sorry. Sorry,” Alex mumbled.
At least the display got the attention of the paramedics. They approached Alex with open concern in their eyes.
“Sir? Please, calm down,” the taller one said.
When he attempted to touch Alex, Alex punched him. Tracht wouldn’t have cared, but it was with the broken hand, and Alex shouted and curled into himself.
“Alex!” Tracht shouted, and he put on the nastiest, most authoritarian voice he could. “Pull yourself together and pay attention!”
The tone broke through to Alex enough that he stood straighter and looked at Tracht properly. Tracht took hold of Alex’s wrist and held it up for the paramedic to look at.
The paramedic—the one who hadn’t been punched—grimaced. “Yeah. That’s going to need a cast. We’ll x-ray it at the hospital and see the extent of the damage. It’ll… it’ll be better if you don’t use it for a while.”
He put a temporary splint on Alex, although it took some effort with the way Alex kept jerking away and panicking. In the end Tracht had to help restrain Alex in order to get it done. Then they got everybody packed up into the ambulance. Johan was still clinging to Anna while Vasilis stroked his hair. She kept reassuring him he was safe, he was fine, they would never let anything like this happen again.
Tracht didn’t say anything to Alex, but he kept his hand on the small of Alex’s back, and every so often he
felt Alex press further into that hand.
[Chapter 7]
While the doctors attended to Johan and Alex, Koteas and Vasilis questioned him in a private waiting room. They sat to either side of him, which they probably thought would keep him from leaving.
“How in the world did you find them?” Koteas wanted to know. “We’d already narrowed the location down to the underside warehouses, but…”
“I called in a favor,” Tracht said. “That’s all that you need to know.”
“So where are the kidnappers? They need to be brought to justice.”
The coffee at the hospital was abysmal. With the amount they were charging, they really should provide better food services.
“The favor included handing them over. I elected to remain ignorant of what they intend to do with them.” He could have insisted on calling station security and letting them handle it. But that would have precluded revenge, and that was intolerable.
It hadn’t been as satisfying as taking the whip to Parsons’ back, but he supposed it never would have been. He wished the sab’s leader had been male.
“So the kidnappers are running free, safe from the rule of law—”
“No.” Tracht set his coffee down on the coffee table. “They are not running free, of that I’m certain.”
“What did they want?” Vasilis asked quietly. “They did all this, had us terrified and scrambling for money—but what did they want?”
“From my understanding, they were professional saboteurs.” Anja Nilsen had helpfully sent along a profile of the sab group. “That new business acquisition of yours pissed somebody off.”
Rather than looking relieved, Vasilis’s face blanched further. “They hurt Johan over a business deal?” In the next moment, he was pulling out his tablet and scrolling through files. “I knew it was going to be unpopular, but we were going to keep most of the original staff, and—I suppose if you were with Gutenberg, that might be—” He shook his head. “It’s just business. It’s not worth hurting people over.”
“Vasilis, it’s not ‘just business’ and you know it. Don’t pretend you aren’t as ruthless as everybody else in the business. The only difference is that you keep that ruthlessness to the boardroom.” Tracht got up and threw away his empty coffee cup. He decided to remain standing, ignoring Koteas and Vasilis’s stares.
Koteas coughed lightly to break the silence. “It makes sense, given how they were operating. If you were completely focused on Johan, that would delay the acquisition. Might even cause the deal to fall through, if enough shareholders could be convinced during that time. Still. To hurt a child...”
This again. Johan was fine! It was Alex who had suffered the most. But Tracht held his tongue, letting Vasilis and Koteas discuss the situation between them.
“Do you think it was Argos?” Vasilis asked, this time addressing Tracht directly. “They pulled that stunt with your sailor too.”
Argos was the second largest company on Cadmus station, competing directly with Vasilis’s corporation. Tracht had actually taken contracts for them in the past, before Anna married Vasilis. Whatever goodwill Tracht had towards Argos had disappeared when they’d hired Parsons to do industrial espionage.
Tracht shook his head though. “It doesn’t feel like something they would do. The risk is too great. Do they have any investment in Gutenberg?”
“No, we triple checked on that front. And—” Vasilis broke off when the doctor entered the private waiting room.
The doctor glanced between Vasilis and Tracht, finally settling on Vasilis. “Sir, your son is doing well. The cut was surprisingly clean, given the circumstances. It should be all right for you to join your wife now.” Then he turned to Tracht. “As for your bondservant... We had to drug him because he kept panicking, but we have his hand in a cast now and the tooth replaced.”
“What about his face?” Tracht asked.
“Ah... the new cuts should heal clean. We can discuss pricing options for the old scar and his nose, however. We have a great rhinoplasty surgeon on staff who could straighten it out—“
“No, as long as the new cuts are fixed that’s enough.” Tracht caught the strange looks from everybody in the room, and he smiled lightly. “His debt is far too high to justify wasting money on his face.” He was sure that he hadn’t fooled Vasilis, but at least Koteas and the doctor accepted his explanation.
“Yes, of course, sir.” The doctor paused and looked down at his tablet. “The face aside... we noticed some behaviors from him consistent with PTSD. Not surprising given what he went through. I can recommend a therapist here on station.”
“Don’t bother,” Tracht responded. “We’ll be going back into space in ten days.”
“There are therapists who will do video call sessions, and set him up with exercises to help him cope during the stretches without communications.”
And have them undo all the work Tracht had put into Alex? Absolutely not. But he saw the way the doctor was looking at him, and it was fairly clear that his man did not have Dr. Singh’s attitudes towards bondservants.
“Fine. Send me the information and I’ll see if it’s something that will fit into our busy schedule. Is that all? May we finally go see them? I’m sure Vasilis is dying to join Anna and Johan.” Tracht hoped his tone was enough to discourage more commentary from the doctor.
“Indeed.” Vasilis got up, stopping to look at Koteas. “Could you please coordinate with station security? Even if Johannes is correct that the kidnappers are not on the loose, I’d rather be sure. And now, I’m going to see to my family.”
Tracht followed Vasilis out the door.
==
Alex woke feeling really, really fuzzy. His jaw didn’t hurt though. His nose wasn’t clogged. His hand—
Actually, there was an itch in his hand. But when he used the other hand to scratch, instead of skin he encountered a hard surface.
He raised the arm up and saw that it was covered in a cast.
“You’re awake.”
Alex turned his head and saw Tracht sitting on a chair next to him. The chair confused him, because it didn’t match the other ones Tracht had, and Tracht would never have mismatched furniture.
Then he realized he wasn’t on the ship at all. The lighting was all wrong, and the bed wasn’t half as comfortable.
“Where?”
“We’re in the hospital on Cadmus.” Tracht put his tablet on the small table next to him. No flowers or teddy bears there, just some water. In movies there were always flowers in hospital rooms.
“Thirsty,” Alex said. Tracht nodded and poured the water into a cup with a straw already in it.
Alex was grateful that Tracht didn’t expect him to hold the cup himself. He sipped from the straw while Tracht held the cup, and man, that was nice of him. That was so nice. Even Alex’s good hand felt too heavy to manage curling around a cup.
“The doctors were highly concerned with your reactions when we arrived.” Tracht said mildly. “I suggested they mind their own business, but they were concerned with the possibility of PTSD as a result of the torture you had endured.”
Torture—oh. Alex shrugged and stopped sipping. “Was the same tooth. What are…” he coughed. “What are the odds?”
“One in twenty-eight, but I helped it along by giving her the specific one.”
“Huh?”
Tracht set the cup aside and petted Alex’s hair. “That tooth had the artificial nerve. They tend to not be as deeply rooted, and they send fewer signals than real nerves. I—” Tracht grimaced. “I wanted to spare you some of the pain.”
Alex thought about it, but he couldn’t tell if it had hurt less. He just—he’d panicked. He’d panicked so much and everything after that was a blur.
“Thanks. For coming for me,” Alex said. “Sorry.”
“What are you sorry for?” Tracht asked. There was enough flatness to his voice that Alex figured he was mad about something.
“Dunno. Being such a pussy
.”
Tracht sighed. “No. You were nothing of the sort. You were incredibly brave and beautiful.”
No matter how often Tracht called him beautiful or handsome, it still made Alex’s chest feel funny. “You get off on watching them do that shit to me?”
“Unexpectedly, no.” Tracht kept petting Alex. “When you are discharged and feeling slightly better, I’m going to coddle you for a week straight. And after that, I’m going to punish you.”
Alex tensed, but Tracht’s petting was nice and soothing, and the fuzziness he’d been feeling hadn’t quite abated. He tilted his head and tried to kiss Tracht’s hand, and he made an embarrassing noise when Tracht leaned down and pressed their lips together.
He opened his mouth for Tracht’s tongue, and was surprised when Tracht didn’t push inside immediately. He ran his tongue over Alex’s lips and nibbled lightly, but he didn’t try to use Alex’s pain.
When he pulled away, Alex felt unmoored and completely unsure why.
“Do you know why I’m going to punish you, Alex?”
“For getting caught?”
“No.” Tracht traced Alex’s face gently. “Because you, like an idiot, jumped into a situation you had no business being involved in. Johan told us how you tried to save him.”
“That was bad?” Alex asked, bewildered. He’d kind of figured—well. He’d heard the kid yelling, and he’d seen them dragging him down the stairs, and all he knew was that Tracht would be pissed about Johan being missing. “I just—it seemed like you wouldn’t like it if I let them take Johan.”
He half expected a pinch or his hair getting pulled, but Tracht kept his touches gentle. “I suppose I can understand why you would believe I give half a damn about my family. But I’d like to make this very clear, for future reference.”
Tracht’s gaze was so intense that Alex couldn’t look away. He loved it when Tracht looked at him like that.
“There is not a single person more important to me than you. Not one. And while I am sure you will continue getting into trouble, because that is your nature, I will not tolerate you throwing yourself into danger to shield somebody who is worth less to me than dirt.”
