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"He's in Cabo, meeting with those foreigners. They are bad news, but he made a deal with them, and now it's too late."
"Too late for what?" Kalugal asked.
"Too late to get out of the deal."
Kalugal looked up at Aru. "I hoped we wouldn't have to do this, but we need to take out Carlos and those bad foreigners."
Negal shifted on his feet. "Later. We need to move out."
"Right." Kalugal returned his focus to Modana. "You will give money to these villagers that your brother wronged. You will build a school and a hospital, and you will give out scholarships to kids that do well in your new school and send them to college." He leaned even closer to the man. "I will be checking up on you, Julio. And if I find out that you were a bad boy, I won't give you another chance. Do you understand?"
"Yes, El Diablo. I do." The guy bobbed his head in gratitude.
"There is one more matter we need to settle, Julio. You’re holding two women on your yacht against their wishes. I don't approve."
"I will let them go. I promise."
"Yes, you will, and you will do it right now. Where is your helicopter, Julio?"
"On the helipad."
"Get up slowly and lead us to it. We will retrieve the women." Kalugal tapped his earpiece. "I need the pilot."
55
MARINA
As Marina moved around the kitchen, the clink of cutlery and the soft rustle of packing materials was a relaxing soundtrack to her thoughts.
The lunch shift in the dining room was over, the tables were clean, the floor had been vacuumed, and all the dishes had been loaded into the dishwashers. The cooks were already starting to work on dinner, but she had an hour-long break until she needed to be back, and she wanted to spend it with Peter.
He hadn't come to the dining hall for lunch, so she assumed that he was still on duty. She also realized that she didn't have his phone number and he didn't have hers.
Her simple flip phone was a far cry from those fancy smartphones that were like mini-computers, but she could send and receive messages as long as it was with other people on the ship. Communication with the outside world was not permitted, but that was nothing new to her.
The same rules applied at Safe Haven.
The human former members of the Kra-ell compound knew too much to be allowed to roam free or communicate with whomever they pleased on the outside whenever they pleased. No one could erase a lifetime of memories, and the compulsion they were put under to keep the aliens a secret needed periodic reinforcement to stay effective.
Marina understood, but she still hoped that they would one day be allowed more freedom. After all, the students were allowed to attend universities, and to reinforce their compulsion, they had been required to return to the compound once a month. Now that their new home was Safe Haven, they only had to come back every three months.
If she were allowed the same freedom, perhaps she could've done something more with her life than being a maid.
The thing was, Marina had no idea what she would have done if she were free. She hadn't been exposed to enough experience to know what that thing was.
Perhaps the lack of communication had been one of the reasons that her relationship with Nicolai had fallen apart. They had exchanged letters, but knowing that they were being censored precluded any romantic declarations and made the entire thing awkward.
Besides, she wasn't good at expressing herself in writing, and neither was he, and seeing each other for one or two days a month just hadn't been enough to keep the flame alight.
Nicolai had hung in there for a long while, but eventually he'd replaced her with someone who was readily available to him at the university.
Why was she still thinking about him, though?
She'd managed to block thoughts of him for weeks, but now that she was entering a new relationship, she was examining all the ways in which things had gone wrong in the previous one.
But that was stupid.
Peter wasn't human, there was no future for them, and even if she figured out where things had gone wrong with Nicolai, it wouldn't teach her anything useful about keeping Peter.
