by Susan Grant
Johnson had thrown a rope across the raging river of conflict and hate, expecting Dake to yank it tight and bridge their differences. Instead it would look like Dake dropped his end. He’d think Nezerihm was right about the pirates: reliable only in their penchant for causing trouble.
On his exhausted return home, he stopped to watch the sun sink below the horizon. A second night beginning for a lost boy. As the last rays retreated, Val joined him, clutching Jaym’s abandoned drink cup in a white-knuckled hand. She hadn’t let go of it since he’d handed it to her. “He can’t be dead. Dake, if he is…if Jaym’s gone…I don’t think I can survive it.”
He swore. He’d been so focused on the search all day he’d forgotten about her. “You got through today. We’ll get through the next hour.” He slowly advanced, his arms out, his hands turned palm up. “That’ll be our goal tonight. Hour by hour. Minute by minute if we have to.” Dake snatched her wrist. “You’ll survive this. We will.”
She swung her tangled hair. “I’ve let down my clan. I’ve let down my son.”
“Not true!” She swore at him when he dragged her close and wrapped her in his arms. “You can’t control everything. I learned that a long time ago. Leader or no, there are times that fate will overrule you.”
She was shaking her head.
“You can try your best, and we will, I swear it. But Blue girl, fate has the final word in good things and in bad. We can do no more than accept it. A raider knows when the battle is won or lost.”
With a wrenching, despairing sound, she broke down. This, coming from a woman who the Blues bragged had never shed more than a tear or two in all the years they’d known her.
She wept, alternately pounding her fists against his chest and gripping him close for all she was worth. The only constant was her tears. With the same hands that were forced to fire Drakken rifles and grip sledgehammers to smash blocks of rock, he held her with all the tenderness he knew how. He could tell the moment she surrendered her fight when she let her head sag to his chest, without words, simply drawing on his soul to feed hers, exactly what he knew she’d do for him if the tables were turned.
This was what love was at its most basic, he realized. This was what you got when you stripped away infatuation and lust to uncover what was unconditional and true. This was what he’d lived for, and would fight for, for all the days of his life.
This, he thought, would get them through this crisis and all the ones to come.
Finally Val stirred in his arms and looked up. He took her sweet, pretty face in his hands, stroking her cheek with the back of his hand. But in her eyes he could see her broken heart and felt helpless to heal it.
HE LEFT VAL WITH ORDERS to get some sleep and to ignore clan business until she did so. He and a mixed team of clansmen did another sweep through the woods. When he finally returned at sunrise, he caught up short seeing Val sitting with Ayl, her hand in his. The man had brought her flowers and a few hot pies, all still lying untouched on the table. As irrational as the feeling was, jealousy pricked. Why the hells was this troublemaker here, pretending he was torn up about what had happened? And why was he holding his wife-to-be’s hand?
Dake shoved open the door and stomped inside. “If you care so much about her, then you should be outside helping search. They need all the hands they can get. I didn’t see you all night. Where were you? Here?”
Ayl stood, wary and for good reason. He was tall for a Blue, but Dake was still inches taller.
Sashya put down the cloth she’d used to blot her endless tears. “He’ll go out and help. Right, Ayl?”
“He’s been here only a short time, Dake,” Val said, defending the man.
A ball of outrage swelled in his chest. “I don’t want him here.”
Val’s eyes darkened. “I speak to anyone I want. I’m clan leader.”
“I know you’re clan leader. And I’m protecting her.” He turned to Ayl. “I’ve been hearing things out there. Things I don’t like that you’re saying. Is it true you still think we’re to blame for my son going missing?”
Ayl gathered his jacket and tossed it over his shoulder. “I’ll talk to you later, Val. When he’s not so tense.”
Dake grabbed hold of Ayl, forced him outside to the front porch and swung him up against the side of the house, his knuckles wrapped in the fabric of Ayl’s collar.
Ayl hit with an “oomph” sound and Dake ratcheted down his force a specken. He was fine with killing, just not accidental killing. “Tense, you say? I had five years of my life stolen from me. Five years fighting someone else’s wars, being beaten and starved. Five years of waking up to someone poking me with a stick to see if I was breathing or another carcass. I watched my crewmates die, Ayl, good men all. I watched them die and I could do nothing to help them. I was forced to leave my future wife alone in her darkest hour, leaving her to give birth to a son whose father she believed betrayed her. All this, Ayl, all this because of your good friend Nezerihm.” Dake fairly shuddered in rage at the idea and at the panic that flashed in Ayl’s dark eyes. “I swear it, I’ll block you at every step, if you’re wanting closer clan ties with that monster.”
“Then maybe you’re as guilty of laying blame on others as much as anyone else around here. Maybe you can’t get past what happened to you either. Maybe there isn’t any hope for unity after all.”
Dake paused, never expecting this turn in the conversation.
“You keep bringing up what you went through, Sureblood. I’m not saying it wasn’t hells for you, but you can’t let it go either.”
Dake set his jaw. How did one let go of something like that, when the man who caused it still walked free?
“What I’m saying, Sureblood, is that I’m not the only one clinging to old transgressions. You’re as guilty as anyone else is around here, hanging on to the past. Aye, your heart’s as filled with hate as mine is.”
Hells be, he thought, scowling. It was like the man had held up a mirror with a reflection he didn’t want to see. He loosed his grip and let Ayl slide lower until his weight was back on his feet. One hand spread on the wall, Dake hung his head. The frenetic pace and emotional toll of the past two days finally caught up to him. He was wrung-out and exhausted, sick with worry for Jaym and for Val. “Maybe you got a point there about the blaming, but I like to think the forces that be, the fates, the gods—whatever you want to call them—let me live so I could do some good. I thought I could start here, on Artoom. But everywhere I turn there’s you and your posse causing trouble from the shadows ’cause you’re too scared to fight fair and in the open, where we can debate the issues and even solve them like Conn would have wanted us to. Why won’t you meet me halfway, or at all? Why, blast it? How can I get you to work with me, and not against me?”
Disgusted, Dake pushed away from the wall. He started to turn away when Ayl said, “I wanted her, that’s why. Is that the answer you want to hear, Sureblood? I wanted the clan captain’s daughter to love me. Everyone would look up to me, then. They’d think of me as a great man because she wanted me. Instead all she ever wanted was you.” His chin jutted out. He seemed to struggle to compose himself. “It’s all gone to hells now. Everyone hates me.”
“I don’t hate you, Ayl,” Dake said quietly. “I freepin’ feel like killing you sometimes, but I don’t hate you.”
Ayl’s eyes were suddenly moist, and it didn’t look fake or generated for pity. “That’s why you can’t blame forever. Sometimes people do things for reasons you don’t know or even understand. Sometimes…they make mistakes.” Ayl dabbed at his bleeding lip with the back of his hand. He seemed a man overcome with misery. “You were right about Nezerihm all long,” he said softly. “It was me you couldn’t plan for.”
A terrible pounding started up in Dake’s head.
“I made a mistake…a big mistake. But I’m gonna make it right. I promise.”
Dake’s heart hit his rib cage with a sickening lurch. He hurt Jaym.
“Not all mistak
es can be made right.” The men jolted at the sound of Val’s voice. She sent Dake a warning glance to keep him at bay as she stepped onto the porch. “But they can be mitigated.” Her quiet, measured voice accompanied the grit of her boots as she stepped closer. Her skin was still pale, but her jaw was hard and her eyes flinty. Captain Val was back.
She might as well be in full armor, dozers drawn, as she stopped in front of Ayl. “Where’s my little boy?” she asked, cold enough to extract the information she needed, but not sharp enough to spook him.
Ayl broke down, sobbing into his shaking hands. “Nezerihm’s got him. Fates save us all, I let him take Jaym.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“THROW THE DOUBLE-CROSSING mucker in the brig!” Grizz’s orders echoed as Ayl was led away in cuffs.
“Traitor,” Grizz growled, his haggard face flushed with hatred as Sashya stood close to him, hollow-eyed, her hand pressed over her mouth. “Outsider’s whore.”
Their horror and those in attendance made the very air in the meeting house tremble. Val had to hold Dake back from striking down the shamed raider as he was shoved out the door. Hells, she could barely hold back herself from murdering the man with her own hands. She’d thought she’d seen the utter depths of human behavior in what Nezerihm had done to Dake. Ayl’s confession convinced her she was wrong. He’d believed his actions were necessary for the good of the clan. Only in the end did he realize his mistake.
“Let them take him, Dake,” she urged. “He gave us what we need—times, dates, places, plans…” Even his supposed reward once Jaym was disposed of. The more he’d confessed, the sicker she had felt. It was hard to think clearly despite the horror of hearing how Ayl had lured Jaym away during the party with promises of a joyride on his patrol ship, only to hand him off to a man who was arguably the most wicked in all the Borderlands if not the galaxy, who now had her five-year-old son in his clutches, the child of the two pirates he hated most. “For now, he’ll be more use to us alive than dead.”
“Bah. I care less about his ‘use’ to me than how good strangling him will make me feel.”
“We’ve got a raid to organize,” she urged. “The most important raid of our lives.”
He turned to her then. The sight of her broken heart reflected so clearly in his face nearly brought her to her knees.
But she was already cried out, and growing colder and more determined by the minute, a frightened, distraught mother who in the space of hours had become a merciless, relentless instrument of rescue and vengeance. She would find her son and then eradicate Nezerihm from the face of existence. Aye, she’d do it without hesitation and with no regard for her own life.
The stunned clansmen around her continued to ask themselves how such a thing could have been allowed to happen. It was a very good question. Outsiders had never been trusted. No pirate in that room had been shocked to learn Nezerihm aimed to destroy their people. Most already suspected him of tampering with their communications and raids, and of pitting the clans against each other. But Ayl’s betrayal blindsided them. All of them. Not one soul could have fathomed one of their own would betray them so completely. The boggling treachery was so far removed from any pirate’s cultural expectation that it simply could not have been predicted. Within that bubble of naïveté Ayl was able to act. It caught them with their pants down.
The goal now must be to do the same to Nezerihm.
Ayl claimed Nez intended to keep the boy imprisoned on Aerokhtron and not kill him, but Val didn’t trust Nezerihm’s promise any more than she did his fragile grip on his sanity. They had to get their boy out of his clutches before Nezerihm snapped, or found that keeping a five-year-old alive was more trouble than it was worth.
With Ayl gone from the room, Dake pushed a hand through his hair. “We’ve got to contact Frank Johnson. He expects me back with his shuttle. At the very least, he expects to hear from me. The longer we remain silent, the more suspicious he’ll get, and then he’ll send the Triad after us, which will complicate any rescue mission we launch.”
“What will you tell him?” Val demanded.
“The truth.”
That they knew Nezerihm kidnapped Jaym? “No.” She pushed at Dake, and he grabbed her hands, pinning them to his chest so she couldn’t use them. “He’ll say something to Nezerihm,” she pleaded. “We can’t risk him feeling cornered while he’s still got control of Jaym.” She tried not to let thoughts of the monster torturing her son fracture her dwindling composure.
“Johnson won’t say anything. We’ll tell him not to—and why.”
“But he’s an outsider,” she argued.
“Not like Nezerihm. A different kind.” Skeptical grumbling rose up around them. “He’ll cooperate. I know what the Triad wants—and what Nezerihm doesn’t—all of us sitting down at the negotiation table. That’s what we’ll give them if Johnson works with us.”
Boots started thumping on the planked floor. No raiders liked the idea. “We pirates owe Nezerihm nothing!” some bellowed. “Or the Triad!”
“The meeting will be our forum to show what a monster Nezerihm really is! He’s holding a five-year-old child hostage, for fate’s sake. A baby. If we prove Nez is capable of that, we can prove just about everything else we say he’s done.” Dake glared around the bustling room. “And bring him down.”
Protests about trusting outsiders shifted to chants of “Bring him down.”
“Are you sure?” Val asked. “Do you trust him?”
Dake paused, squeezing her hands. “More than any man should be asked to wager rests on me making the right decision. Aye, Val. I trust Frank Johnson.”
And was willing to balance their son’s life on that impression.
Sashya pushed away the raiders crowding in on her, her shawl flowing. “And if Nezerihm denies he took the boy? What use is the forum, then? He’ll sit there and lie if he thinks it’ll save his hide.”
Grizz nodded. “He’s the main source of zelfen. Your Frank Johnson has more to lose believing us pirates than Nezerihm.”
“We don’t need to worry about that,” Dake said. In the chaos of yelling and stomping boots, Val saw, and recognized, the telltale glint in his eyes. Dake Sureblood was one step ahead of them all. “Because we’ll rescue Jaym from Nez before the muck-rucker ever reaches the Unity—and Johnson.”
As the raiders whooped their approval and boots thundered against the planks of the floor, Val saw in Dake a reflection of her deadly resolve to find their son. Together the clans would pull off the most important and daring raid ever undertaken. It would be done at the risk of angering their one ally, Frank Johnson, and alienating the entire Triad Alliance with their false change of heart to hold mediated negotiations with Nezerihm. But only with her son back safely in her arms would Val sit down at any table on the Unity, with or without Nezerihm. That was, if Johnson was still willing to talk after he found out what they were about to do.
STRIKING A POSE IN FRONT of his mirror, Nezerihm dressed in his most resplendent finery. The boy would know he’d met a king.
He went back to pacing, wringing his hands in his impatience to begin the final stage of his plans. Ayl had given him something better than his most fervent dreams, and without a hitch. How easily he’d fooled Ayl into believing he intended to use the child as a hostage to further their aims. Hostage? Please. Try casualty. So trusting and dim-witted the pirates were, even when it came to their own offspring. Didn’t they know the consequences of not being constantly alert to threats to their realm?
Nezerihm knew all about such threats—and how to get rid of them. He’d exterminate the brat like a common housefly. It would gut the Blue-Sureblood resistance movement. They’d lose the will to fight.
And he’d win, just as he always knew he would. The pirates were simply no match for him.
His staffer Rolm commed him. “My lord, I have the child.”
“Very good. Bring him to me.”
Nezerihm trusted no one else with the task. Rolm wo
uld have been his chief of staff if Nezerihm were to assign such titles. But rank always went to men’s heads, and so Rolm was no higher in status than any of the others.
Ever so impatiently, Nezerihm faced the doors as they opened. He rubbed his hands together. He simply couldn’t stay still as a small boy stumbled through the doors. Anticipation shot Nezerihm so full of pleasure that he trembled from head to toe. There was something so pure about a child’s terror.
The disheveled youngster straightened and searched out Nezerihm. His eyes narrowed, appearing so much like his sire’s eyes. “Let me go, you muck-rucking, dirt-digging outsider!”
The strength in that piping voice startled Nezerihm. He didn’t like the way the boy stood there, boots placed sturdily apart, his clothing tattered and torn from struggling. He didn’t like the way he showed no fear at all.
Just like the unrepentant transport captain he’d executed for allowing Val Blue to raid his ship. That man had been disrespectful, too, as disrespectful as this brat!
Nezerihm sauntered toward the boy in his glittering finery. He saw the child’s eyes drawn to the zelfen and jeweled trim, undoubtedly nothing like he’d ever seen before. “Would you like a frozenade?”
“No!”
“A sweet cake, perhaps?”
“No!”
“You are being difficult, you know. It won’t make it any easier.”
“I want to go home,” the boy demanded. “Take me now.”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible.”
“You’re lying. You just don’t want to take me back.” The boy’s chin jutted out defiantly with confidence that belied his few years.
Nezerihm quaked with outrage, lifting his fist to strike the boy.
The brat didn’t flinch. His fisted hands hung at his sides.
Nezerihm trembled now. He wanted to throw the little creature to the floor and beat him to within an inch of his life. He wanted to hear him sob and sputter for his mama.
