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The man agreed with a grunt.
“Don’t worry,” Brent said. “They’ll hold you for a bit to piss him off, but they’ll eventually let you go.”
She smiled gratefully. “And you?”
Brent exchanged a look with the man next to him.
“We’ll be lucky to come out of here alive.”
Nova’s stomach dropped.
“As long as those rebels keep causing trouble, the Mudden clan will keep coming after us,” the man said.
A Mudden military man walked up to her. “You go in here,” he said, opening a cell door with metal bars. The room inside was empty and barely large enough for her to lie down. Not that she’d want to lie on so much filth.
She looked back at Brent, but he’d moved away from her when the military man had come over and was lost in the crowd of men continuing down the hallway.
She stepped inside, and the guard closed the door. She heard the lock mechanism automatically take hold. Hopefully, Brent had been right and they would let her go soon enough.
She didn’t know how long she waited. She was getting very hungry and her legs were tired, but no amount of leg cramps could make her sit down on that floor. A prison guard finally arrived, opened the door, and told her to follow. They climbed back up the stairs, and she heard Altair’s voice coming from down the hall.
“You had no right to take her.” The anger in his voice made her heart jump to her throat.
“She impeded our investigation.”
“She’s only been here a couple of weeks,” Altair growled. “She hasn’t even begun to integrate.”
“My men didn’t know that,” the voice answered calmly, almost with glee, like he enjoyed pissing off Altair.
Her guard showed her to the door.
Altair looked relieved as soon as his eyes laid on her. The man he was yelling at was another military man, but not the one who’d taken her.
“There you go,” he said. “Unharmed.”
The anger didn’t leave Altair’s face as he looked her over, and she half-smiled back at him, feeling awkward to have him as an ally when she was so used to seeing him as the enemy.
“You look stressed, Altair,” the man continued with a small smile on his lips. “You should take your new wife and go somewhere on holiday. We’ll take care of the situation here.”
Altair, if possible, got even angrier. “I have a job to do here, Gary.”
“Devon briefed me,” he said. “I can take care of your productivity problem. I’ll send some more men to the mines if needed. And you can bet no one will be breaking into your office with us here. Go home. In a couple weeks, we’ll have this region purged of rebels.”
Altair glared back at him. The anger seemed to have rendered him speechless.
Nova coughed. “I didn’t finish my delivery,” she said, feeling silly but needing to get out of this prison before they discovered her real involvement. “There’s a patient waiting to eat.”
Altair looked at her. “I’m sure someone else took care of it when you were taken.”
She shifter her feet, eager to get moving.
“Let’s go,” Altair said, probably sensing her unease. Then he turned back to Gary. “Stay away from my wife. And my job.”
He marched to the door and pushed Nova in front of him and out of the room.
Chapter Six
Altair walked her home, told her to eat and rest and stay put. He went back out, saying he had to check in at his office. He didn’t ask her what had happened. Maybe he suspected they’d taken her for the sole purpose of angering him.
