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“What was it, then? Why did you force me to…”
She trailed off when Orion turned his head, watching her rough outline shimmering in his augmented vision in the darkness. “Because you ran.”
She shifted, the outline of her face turning toward him. “I don’t believe that.”
Doesn’t she?
She couldn’t be that clueless.
“So what’syourtheory, princess?” he asked.
Her silhouette shrugged.
She was wrong, of course. He did it because he could. Because the chase was in his blood. The same blood that was responsible for keeping everyone on this ship alive. If it were up to him, Orion would have been born normal. Fully human, like the rest of them.
The silence that followed wasn’t charged like before, nor heavy like a boulder on his chest.
“You need to eat—” He didn’t finish his thought. When he turned to look at her again, she was fast asleep.
CHAPTER40
KAIA
She woke up freezing. Kaia opened her eyes and recoiled at the sight of the uhyre sprawled out in front of her. The realization that he was naked followed, snapping her attention back up to his face.
Kaia shifted the flimsy cover she’d cocooned around herself and slipped out of bed. Carefully, she extracted her tablet from under her mattress and padded, shivering, to the next room with the cover.
It wasn’t any warmer there, and Kaia had no clothes in the suite, so she decided to do the only thing that would warm her up considering she was locked in her violent alien fiancé’s cabins: she took a hot shower. While standing under the steaming water, Kaia took stock of her body. She was used to seeing the marks by now, first from the sparring, then from the… other thing that had happened. So she didn’t bother dwelling on the bruises. Instead, Kaia searched for any signs of addiction she’d read about. Trembling, jitteriness, increased heart rate.
Still no cravings. No hunger. Well, notthatkind of hunger. She was actually really fucking hungry, having not eaten since before the Zenith. Seemed like her dear fiancé was more concerned with keeping her locked up than keeping her alive.
She grabbed a towel from the rack and scrubbed it over her hair, giving the steamy bathroom another onceover. Orion’s suite was mostly tidy, except for the regular signs of life and everyday use, like the weird-looking spatters she noticed on the shower wall.
When she came out in the same oversized shirt she’d been wearing, he was up. She hesitated in the doorway as Orion buttoned a pair of black low-slung jeans over his hips and jerked the edges of a white shirt down over a flash of abs.
“So are you gonna keep me prisoner in here from now on, or what?”
He glanced up at her, working the last button on his jeans. “I don’t know. Are you gonna run off on me?”
Kaia raised her arms, gesturing around her. “I don’t know, Orion. Where do you think I’m gonna run?”
“Oh, trust me, this ship has plenty of hiding spots. Here.” He walked to the hydra station and opened a compartment beneath it, pulling out a box of fries. “They’re cold.”
He stuck them out at her like some kind of offering. Making sure your trapped fiancé didn’t starve to death wasn’t a very high bar, so Kaia chastised herself at the momentary surge of gratitude.
“Thanks,” she muttered.
“You can get a proper breakfast in the canteen.” Orion was already at the door, preparing to leave.
So he was letting her out, after all. Did he decide she couldn’t run far enough to bother cooping her up? Whatever it was, Kaia didn’t press her luck. She focused instead on the droplet of water in this fucked up situation. Orion’s cruelty had only reminded her of what she was here to do. She wanted revenge. Show the asshole what a huge mistake he made fucking with her. But revenge was a missile best launched from a safe distance, and when she was in Heaven, none of it would matter.Thathad to be her focus.
Kaia gave Orion a thin smile as he left. She should probably be more upset, or scarred, or something after what happened on theZenith. She sure as fuck wasn't letting Orion off the hook for what he’d done. But even she was surprised by this lightness inside her.
She couldn’t prove it, but she felt it in her very bones: she was immune. Orion’s exorin had no effect on her. Part of it was logic—she’d perused the ship’s virtual library on information about exorin the previous day, while locked in Orion’s suite. She went through all the material she could get her hands on. Papers from Old Earth, video footage of humans after exorin administration, textbooks on the issue. There was an approximately fifty percent chance of getting addicted to the substance, either via oral ingestion or sexual transmission, per incident. But even if one dodged the bullet in one instance, there was always an intoxication aspect. An arousal and suppression of inhibitions that were measurable and faded over the course of the next two to twelve hours.
Kaia had felt no such thing. She tried to find the caveat. Did prior ingestion of alcohol interfere with the effect? But no—exorin bulldozed over whatever substance one had in the body, quelling any existing effects that had wrought and taking its place.
It was so effective that on Old Earth, doctors had begun to use it as a way to combat drug addiction. A dependency on exorin seemed better than one on something more deadly and damaging to the organism. That was until they realized the uhyre would not keep providing the stuff out of the goodness of their hearts and they were left with a bunch of exorin-addicted people scrambling for their next hit.
