Atonement (A Science Fiction / Fantasy Romance)

by Fall, Carly

  “What are you doing, Mama?” Megan asked from the kitchen table.

  “Nothing, baby.”

  “Why did you grab a knife?”

  Things were so complicated. “I’m helping Blake.”

  “You aren’t going to hurt him?”

  “No, honey.” Not unless I have to.

  Megan nodded, went back to her book, and Sophia headed for the shed.

  Chapter 33

  Sophia entered the shed just as Blake’s bladder was about to burst. Man, he needed to go, but he didn’t want to suffer the humiliation of pissing himself. He’d already puked all over himself, and he held out hope that Sophia would allow him a little bit of dignity.

  “Blake, I’m going to release the handcuffs from the hook behind you, and you will step outside to urinate. If you try to hurt me or run away, I will stab you.”

  He couldn’t help but chuckle. Hell, he wasn’t sure he could get to his feet without help let alone try to escape, and he’d never hurt Sophia—he wasn’t that type of man. Besides, she was living up to his original angel assessment as she took care of him.

  “Sounds good. You have my word I won’t do anything but take a leak.”

  She leaned over him, her breasts close to his face as she pulled the handcuffs from the hook. He shut his eyes as bolts of pain lanced through his chest. By now, his arms were numb, but the pull in his ribcage let him know all his muscles were still intact. That annoying child song from one of the TV shows Killian watched rang through his mind—about how muscles and bones connected together. He made up his own version: The arm bone is connected to the chest muscle, which hurts like a bitch when your arms are shackled to a wall. The chest muscle is connected to the ribcage, and all the muscles should be stronger and would be if you weren’t such a fucking junkie.

  Yeah, put that on TV and call it a “teaching moment.”

  Finally, the cuffs came loose, and as he slowly brought his arms down to his stomach, the pain intensified as the blood rushed to his limbs. He cringed and cried out, not knowing if he could take much more of the torturous agony rifling through his body. However, if he had to pee, he didn’t have much of a choice.

  Taking deep breaths, the suffering gave way to extreme discomfort. Was there a difference? He didn’t know. It just seemed to get a little bit better.

  After a few moments, he opened his eyes and sat upright. His stomach rolled, and he wondered if he would puke again. Sophia stood in the corner of the shed by the door where Megan had crouched earlier, the knife held out in front of her.

  “I promise I’m not going to hurt you,” he murmured. Even if he wanted to, he didn’t have the energy. Fuck heroin and these awful withdrawals. Jesus, he couldn’t even escape his captors—well, at least right now he couldn’t. Maybe tomorrow, but the effort it took to stand let him know that was doubtful.

  “Walk outside and go to the left,” Sophia commanded, her voice shaking almost as bad as the hand wielding the knife.

  He did as he was told, lifting one foot in front of the other with great effort.

  As the sun hit his face, the cool breeze whispered against his skin causing goose bumps. The dry dirt hurt his bare feet, but he kept going as Sophia followed.

  Once he reached the far brick wall, he stopped.

  “Please urinate there,” she said.

  He pulled down his sweatpants and relief flooded through him as he wet the wall.

  Once he was finished, she said, “Please head back to the shed.”

  As he glanced at the small building, he marveled at how far he’d traveled, but how he was going to get back? Looking around, he took in his surroundings. A garden stood to his right, behind it a small house. To the left, the property sloped slightly and he couldn’t see anything beyond six-foot-high wall except desert. It was the same behind him and in front of him.

  They were truly in the middle of the nowhere, and he realized he didn’t even know what state he was in.

  “Are we in Arizona?” he asked as he shuffled back to the shed, actually looking forward to lying down on the cot. How messed up was that?

  “Yes.”

  Glancing over his shoulder, she followed a few steps behind, the knife at her side. Her gaze never wavered from him. Small rocks dug into his feet, but he was beyond caring.

  As he entered the shed, she said, “Go to the farthest corner and don’t turn around. Don’t look back at me.”

  He did as he was told, his knees quaking. He heard rustling as she did something with the cot, and a few minutes later, just as he was about to beg for a chair, she said, “You can lie down now.”

  As he looked over his shoulder, he saw she had smoothed out the blankets. He hobbled over to the bed and stretched out. Tears stung his eyes from her kindness. His stomach rumbled, the sound carrying throughout the shed.

  “Drink this,” she murmured, holding the cup above him. He tried to sit up, but without success.

  “Let me help you again,” she said, slightly lifting the back of his head. He sipped the vile lukewarm liquid, but it seemed settle his stomach on impact.

  He took two more sips and lay back. Sophia removed her hand from the back of his neck and sat on the stool.

  “Would you like some vegetable broth? It will help nourish your body. All the vegetables are grown here on this property and—”

  “Sounds good, Sophia,” he murmured. He’d do whatever she asked of him. He couldn’t recall a time when anyone had been so kind to him.

  As she spooned the broth into his mouth, flavors exploded on his tongue. It was the best damn soup he’d ever had, or maybe it tasted so good because he just hadn’t eaten much in weeks.

  They sat in silence as she fed him, and Blake studied her features, longing to tell her that he’d hallucinated her, except he didn’t want to admit to drug use. She was even more beautiful in the flesh than when he’d seen her while high. Her intelligent gaze concentrated on getting the spoon to his mouth, and she pushed her blonde hair behind her ear. Her sun-kissed skin looked smooth and soft, her cheeks flushing with just a tinge of pink. The resemblance between her and Megan was uncanny.

  “You stare at me as if I’m a new animal you’ve just encountered,” Sophia murmured.

  Blake smiled and shrugged while taking another spoonful of soup. “I like to look at pretty women.”

  He was sick, not dead, and he always enjoyed looking at the ladies.

  Sophia’s cheeks reddened. “You cannot flatter your way out of here,” she said as she tried to hide a smile.

  “Just making an observation.”

  A moment later, he felt as if his stomach would burst. “I think I’m done,” he said.

  She set the bowl down on the serving tray and looked at him. “I would like you to tell me about the Saviors.”

  Blake shut his eyes for a moment. Sophia might be kind, and she probably had saved not only his dignity but also his life with her ministrations. However, that didn’t mean he trusted her. He wanted to give her the information she requested, but at the same time, he needed to keep things very general.

  “What do you want to know?” he asked.

  “What happened with them, Blake? Where do they live? How do they survive in the world? Are they all mated? If so, to whom? Are they the honorable males my people believed them to be?”

  Blake looked at her. She obviously wanted as much detail about the Saviors as she could get. He would give her what he could, but he refused to give her information that could lead Micah to them. “The Saviors are very honorable,” he said. “In fact, they are the most honorable people I know.”

  A small smiled played on his lips as he thought of Jovan and the times they’d ridden their motorcycles together, the laughs they’d shared. He missed his friend. Hell, he missed all of them. When he thought of Cohen, the seething hate wasn’t as strong as it once had been, and a wave of guilt washed through him as he thought of his last words to Cohen.

  Jesus, he’d been such a bastard. Sobriety had a
way of gleaming the truth.

  “Where do they live?” she asked again.

  Blake shook his head. “Sophia, I hope you can understand this. You’ve been very kind to me, but I can’t tell you where the Saviors are. Micah wants them all dead, and I’m not going to be responsible for leading him to their door if you choose to tell him what we talk about. I will tell you that they are somewhere safe, somewhere secure where no one can get to them. They take their security seriously.”

  And he’d left the front door to the silo open. God, he was such an ass.

  “Micah wants them to pay for the destruction of our planet,” she countered.

  “And they had nothing to do with that,” Blake said. “They’ve been hunting Colonists since the day they landed here.”

  “They have?”

  “Yes. They were devastated when they learned what happened to SR44.”

  Jovan had told Blake of the crushing flood of emotions that had almost destroyed him as Liberty delivered the news of SR44’s destruction. “It was a hard time for them,” Blake murmured.

  “Are they all mated?” Sophia asked after a moment.

  Blake nodded. “Yep.”

  “To whom? Micah says humans hate our race.”

  Blake glanced over at her. Her forehead creased as she listened to him. “They are mated to humans, except for Cohen and Jovan.”

  Sophia sat back in the stool and crossed her arms over her chest. “Does the human race hate SR44ians?”

  Blake shrugged. “I’d say ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the population doesn’t even know of your existence. There are some people in the government who want to know more about you, but I don’t know if it’s hate. I think it’s curiosity. See, most humans believe that Earth is the only planet with life on it.”

  “That’s not true,” Sophia scoffed. 'That seems incredibly small-minded."

  “You and I know that, but there are others who don’t. Whether it’s ignorance or just some shmuck refusing to even consider there may be other species, who knows. When people do find out there are other species, they get curious and want to know more about them.”

  “Do the Saviors . . . reproduce with these human females they are mated to? Do they have children?”

  Blake didn’t see any reason he couldn’t be honest with her on that. Maybe if she understood that the Saviors were family oriented, they wouldn’t seem like the traitorous bastards Micah described. “Yeah, they do. One of them has two children, and both were conceived with humans.”

  She stared at him for beat. “What do these females do? Are they tasked to bear children for our race?”

  “No! Hell, no!” Blake snapped. “Why would you ask that?”

  Sophia twisted her hands in her lap and looked down at them, her cheeks flaming red. Blake’s stomach rolled. Was that her role in this life? A goddamned baby maker?

  “Is that what you’re ‘tasked’ to do?” he asked, trying to keep the anger out of his voice.

  She gazed at her hands another moment.

  “Where’s the other SR44 female?” Blake asked.

  “You mean Beth?” Sophia countered.

  “Yeah.” Not that there was anything he could do for either one of them; it was more curiosity, as the Platoon women had been the focus of the Saviors for so long. He just needed all the pieces to that puzzle settled in his mind before he died.

  “She died about two years ago,” Sophia whispered, still staring at her hands.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Was she sick? How did she die?”

  Sophia looked away, then asked, “Why is Micah holding you here?”

  It seemed Sophia held her own in the dodge-and-deflect department, and he liked and appreciated that. He didn’t need to know how the female died, and it was obviously a sore subject for Sophia.

  Hell. How did he answer why Micah drugged him and kidnapped him? Probably the truth would be best, and maybe, just maybe he’d be able to get out of here. That was if she believed him, of course. Sophia was a smart cookie, and he knew she would process everything he told her before deciding if he was telling the truth.

  “Remember when I told you about the Saviors breaking out Micah and Annis from the government facility?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, before that happened, I was an FBI agent. I worked for the government in the classified branch where we gathered information on aliens.”

  Her brow creased again. “How did you come across the Saviors? And why did you leave your position to help rescue Micah and Annis?”

  Here was where things got tricky. He didn’t want to admit that he was part Colonist and he’d sought out the Saviors after seeing ash on a letter delivered to his office. She’d run out of here like her ass was on fire.

  “I . . . I came across some information on them, and I tracked them down. We realized our relationship could be beneficial to both of us, so I aligned myself with them.”

  “And?”

  “And that didn’t make the government too happy. In fact, they would like nothing more than to put me in jail, and they’re offering a pretty penny for it. Your mate, or whatever you call him, is after the money.”

  “He’s not my mate,” she snapped, her eyes flashing with anger.

  Blake stared at her a moment, elated at her reaction to his words. “I’m glad,” he whispered. “You deserve better.”

  Although his knowledge of this woman was slim, she deserved better than Micah. Now someone like Brandy, not so much, but he supposed she had gotten what she sowed, no matter how ugly it had been. He realized he never even really liked Brandy as a person, and had only used her for sex and drugs.

  Jesus, what a cliché. Guilt washed over him. If she hadn’t gotten tangled up with him, she would possibly still be alive today.

  “So what happened after you aligned yourself with the Saviors? Why are you now here, in my shed, and not with them?” Sophia asked, regaining her composure.

  “I . . . I did some things I’m not proud of,” Blake said, wishing he’d just stop talking. Baring his soul and dirty laundry to a complete stranger was messed up, but he couldn’t seem to stop the confessions and flow of information.

  The thing was, he didn’t think of her as a total stranger. He was her angel, the one who came to him in her ethereal beauty, looking as though she cared for him. In reality, he’d never seen her before. She must be his subconscious version of the perfect woman.

  Then a thought struck so hard, his brain rattled. What if she had some SR44ian voodoo abilities? Hell, Rayner saw people who were caught in the ether, the area between life and death, Cohen was a healer of his people, and Nico could walk in others’ dreams. Maybe she had some way of . . . leaving her body?

  In the FBI, they had studied people who claimed to leave their body and travel among others unseen. The term was “astral projection.” He decided he would think on that and ask her about it at another time. He didn’t want to spook her more than she already was.

  “What did you do, Blake? If the Saviors are as honorable as you say they are, what did you do to end up here and be out from under their protection?”

  I got messed up in heroin.

  Just thinking about the drug set his heart racing, the need for it coursing through his veins. At that moment, he’d give anything—absolutely anything—for a bump. Clenching his jaw and fisting his hands, he took deep breaths, fighting through the most horrendous need he’d ever experienced.

  It was one thing to need a glass of water when thirsty, or to need food when hungry. This desire was on a whole other level.

  No, this felt as if he would die if he didn’t sate the craving. He told himself it would pass, and after a few moments, it did.

  He opened his eyes, surprised to see Sophia. He forgot she was there while he fought his demons.

  “That’s the second time I’ve seen you do that,” she murmured. “Why is that?”

  “It’s nothing,” he said as he caught his breath.

  “No, it’
s something. You begin to sweat, and it looks as if you’re internally struggling with something. What is it?”

  Concern etched her face, and Blake considered his next words. If he was going to hop on the honesty train, he might as well ride that sucker the whole way.

  “I’m an addict,” he whispered. Admitting it felt good, yet scary. He’d never muttered those words aloud, and hearing them sent a tremor through him. What was it about this woman that had him confessing his darkest secrets? Or maybe it wasn’t the woman—maybe he just knew the end was near and nothing he said would matter in the next couple of days.

  Sophia tilted her head and stared at him for a moment. “What exactly are you addicted to?”

  Blake smiled, and just as he opened his mouth to tell her, her phone rang. She jumped up and pulled it from the pocket of her jeans.

  “Is that Micah?” Blake asked, knowing the answer.

  She nodded and stepped outside the shed.

  As he listened to the low murmurs of her conversation, Blake noticed her body language while she paced back and forth outside. Her shoulders tensed, and her steps were quick and short, while her posture straightened as if she were lining up for a military drill.

  So Micah didn’t elicit any warm and fuzzy feelings in Sophia, and he wondered how deep their relationship went. The baby-making must be loads of fun. Based on her initial reaction when she first saw him, she didn’t know he was in the shed. If Megan hadn’t ventured out, he wondered if she would have ever looked. Perhaps if she hadn’t, he’d be dead by now. He had to smile—if he died, Micah was S.O.L. in collecting a bounty from the government.

  Sophia hung up the phone and returned to the shed. “I must go check on Megan,” she said. “And I must clasp your hands back to the wall.”

  Blake nodded, stretching his arms over his head. Sophia locked the handcuffs on the metal loop, and he groaned as his muscles protested.

  “Thank you for talking to me, Blake,” she said before shutting the door to the shed. “I’ll be back in just a little while.”