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“I’m not scared of you,” she answered, giving me another of those guarded smiles. “Back on Kychek, I saw the worst of the worst. At least, that’s what they thought of themselves. But me? I could see right through them. And I can see through you too.” She tapped insistently on my fake arm, making a pinging sound that I hated, before continuing. “This thing might not be the source of your pain anymore, but you’re not okay.”
I had to turn away. I couldn’t keep looking into her face, feeling like she was staring straight into my past and reading me like a book.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I grumbled, standing abruptly and grabbing both of our dishes off the counter.
I placed them in the sanitizer and stalked away, wishing I could be as far away from her as possible.
“Hey! Where are you going? You can’t just leave me here.”
She was following me again, and I groaned, now more furious with myself than anything else. She was right. I couldn’t leave her there. At the very least, I needed to find her a place to sleep until I could figure out what to do with her. And before I could figure out what to do with her, I had to figure out how to keep my head on straight whenever she was in the room.
9
COSMA
My plan was working.He was letting his guard down. If I could just get him to soften up a little, maybe he’d reconsider. If there was anything I’d learned back on Kychek, it was that men just wanted to be seen. They wanted to feel like someone understood them, even if they wouldn’t say it that way. I didn’t suppose these burgundy-skinned aliens were any different, secret Brotherhood or no.
“Fine. Come with me,” Malik grumbled, sighing as he turned away again.
I smiled to myself, amused by his persistent irritation with me. I was not the one who asked to be here, so until he returned me to where I belonged, I supposed he was just going to have to deal with being a little grumpy.
However, I was feeling something else, too. There was a softness in my heart when I looked at him now. I could trace the way his shoulders slumped as he walked ahead of me, the rippling cords of his muscles gone slack with defeat. That wasn’t the look of a man merely outwitted by me. It was the look of a man defeated by life, who was struggling to hold his head high even as he insisted he was the dangerous one. There was more to his story than he shared with me, and the curious part of me meant to get it out of him, even if I had to use questionable means to do it.
“Here. This is the best I can do for tonight,” he said, placing his hand on a keypad and waiting for the door to swish aside.
When I looked in, it surprised me to see that I was not looking at a bunk or a private cabin. Instead, I was looking at a row of medical bays set up side by side. All of them were empty for now, save one, and when my eyes traced their way up to the face belonging to its occupant, I sucked in a sharp breath. Torgus.
“What is she doing here?” He asked dryly, glaring at his brother.
“Sleeping,” Malik answered, placing a hand on the small of my back and nudging me into the room. “I’ll be back for her in the morning.”
Torgus grunted disapprovingly and glared at me, stopping me from moving any closer. A second later, the door swished closed behind me and we were alone. Malik had really just abandoned me here with his brother and had zero intention of making this easier on me. Great. Either he could see straight through me or he wanted me to suffer.
“Do you mind if I…” I started, trying to decide the best approach to take with this man. Was politeness the way to go? Or should I have gone with assertiveness?
“I do mind,” he cut me off flatly. “But whether I mind is not really important now, is it? You’re already here, so pick a bed. Not that one,” he added, nodding at the one directly beside him.
I laughed lightly in agreement. I had no more interest in cozying up to him than he had in me. I went to the bed furthest from Torgus’s and climbed in, trying to go about my business quietly so as not to disturb him. It was going to be a long, awkward night already, and I didn’t want to make things worse.
However, I really wasn’t very sleepy, either. I had slept for much of the ride back to the Vaclanheim, and now my mind was racing with thoughts and questions about Malik’s past. Even with my head resting on the plushest pillow I had ever encountered anywhere in the universe, I could not bring myself to sleep. Eventually, I rolled onto my side, facing away from Torgus so he wouldn’t catch me staring at him.
“I’ll give it to him. I didn’t think he had the guts to stick you in here,” Torgus broke the silence at some length.
“What does that mean?” I asked, not fully expecting an answer.
“I figured he’d let you take his bed and put himself in here. It would’ve been the chivalrous thing to do.”
I snorted. “I didn’t realize Malik was so big on chivalry.”
“He is, but I guess he is less afraid of you than he is of me at the moment.”
I waited, unsure of what to make of that remark. It was true that Malik had defended me against Nivek, but I had assumed that was a matter of ego, not any kind of good will toward me.
Torgus continued, “Malik and I were raised together. We agree on a lot of things. But the one thing we will never agree on is Mia.”
“Mia?” There was that feeling again. Back on the Patrol outpost, I’d felt it deep in my belly, like a warm coal, when I thought Malik was there to rescue his lover. Only, that coal had cooled when I discovered it was Torgus he had come for. Now, hearing this woman’s name, that coal came back to life, hotter and heavier.
“Mia was his first love. She may be his only love. I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. They were twins. They shared some kind of connection. Ever since she died, it’s like he’s only half alive. I don’t really get it. She was my sister, too, but I guess it’s not the same.”
