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Nooo!
A pain greater than the one raking my back clawed at my chest, and tears welled in my eyes. My child. My first child whose existence I’d not even been aware of. A keening sound rose from my throat. Heedless of my wounds, I curled up in a ball and wept.
“Mercy. Mercy. Do not cry, my love,” Ravik’s deep voice said in a gentle whisper. “We will get out of here and make them pay. We’ll make them all pay a thousand fold. Do not cry, my mate. In time, we shall have another, you and I, and as many more as you wish.”
His voice seeped through the sea of sorrow I was drowning in.
He knows. He knows what we’ve lost.
Had his sensitive Braxian sense of smell told him? Had he already known I’d been pregnant?
But even as these questions fired in my head, my anguish and loss slowly shifted to anger and hatred for Lorik and the Fifteen. They had taken too much from my mate and me.
“Ravik,” I whispered between two sniffles.
“I’m here, my love. I’m right here,” he said, looking at me over his shoulder. He still kneeled on the restraining bench, hands and feet shackled, blood trickling from wounds that should have closed by now. “You must be strong for a little while longer. I need you. We can only make it out together.”
He needed me like I needed him. And they needed to die. I embraced the rage and hatred filling my heart.
“They will pay,” I said.
Ravik smiled, a savage glint in his eyes.
“They will pay,” he repeated.
Muscles bunching and teeth clenching, Ravik pulled on his restraints. I realized then that he’d managed to tear the shackles free from the bench they’d been bolted into, for both his wrists and ankles. My lips parted in shock, awed by the incredible strength it must have required. Blood seeped from his wounds. No wonder they hadn’t closed. From this angle, it looked like he could get up from the bench but needed to rip out the rivet that secured his chains to the floor, limiting the range of his movements. From the fissuring around the rivet on the right, he’d been working on it a while and would tear it out soon.
A pair of shackles bound my own wrists—different from the ones on the spanking bench I’d been tortured on. Heart pounding, I pressed my right palm over the metal ring on my left wrist and pushed my psionic power into it, seeking within any type of nanites that could be reprogrammed. I nearly wept when the white noise of their presence manifested itself in both the shackle and the chain. My initial impulse was to command them to unravel the metal, making it crumble but I chose a more discreet approach instead, setting the shackles’ locks to open instead.
Slipping my wrists free, I clambered to my feet with a hiss of pain. What didn’t hurt felt stiff, or numb. My stomach roiled, and more blood ran down my thighs. I shut it out, refusing to allow myself to sink into anguish. There would be a time to mourn. But first, we needed to survive.
“I can release us,” I said.
With stiff steps, each movement pulling on wounds and bruises, I approached the cell’s door, my eyes flicking this way and that in search of potential surveillance cameras. To my relief, I didn’t see any. That didn’t mean there were none, but at this point, we’d take our chances. Sadly, a quick look at the locking mechanism of the cell’s door made my heart sink.
“Can you unlock it?” Ravik asked, his voice filled with hope.
I shook my head then realized he couldn’t see me in the darkness.
“Not exactly,” I said. “Technically, I can, but not without triggering an alarm. It would probably only take me seconds to disable the alarm but the damage will be done by then.” I looked at his restraints, an idea popping in my head. “Can you get your chain close enough for me to touch it?”
“Not yet,” he said, shaking his head. “But I should be close to getting this one loose.”
“Yes, you are. I can see the cracks all around it.”
The look of relief on his face told me how worn out he was. I couldn’t even begin to understand how he hadn’t collapsed yet judging by the severe whipping he’d endured, the blood loss, and the amount of effort he had exerted so far to get free.
“I’ll make this quick,” he said, resuming his efforts. Grimacing from the strain, he stifled his grunts to avoid being heard outside the room.
“Let me see if I can make us some weapons,” I said, returning to the chains lying near my bed.
I pushed my power into four of the big chain links, ordering the nanites to straighten. That done, I placed the metal sticks they had turned into end-to-end then ordered them to merge. Together, the four pieces had the length of a small dagger. Starting at one of the tips, I issued a command for the nanites to flatten the metal as much as possible. The number of nanites present in the chain being fairly low significantly slowed the process. I might as well have been watching grass grow. Putting it aside, I repeated the process with four more chain links.
Once again, I envied my sister Aleina’s kinetic ability. She wouldn’t have needed all these steps or suffered from such delays, simply visualizing the object she wanted to create and, in seconds, have her power reshape any inert material accordingly.
However, the ability to change the nature of the material—up to a certain extent—constituted a major upside of my power compared to hers. Once the ‘blades’ would be ready, we wouldn’t be able to hold them for combat without hurting ourselves. The first one having sufficiently flattened, I pushed a ‘stop’ command so that the nanites wouldn’t make it too flimsy. Handling it with care, I carved out a handle from the mattress, inserted the blade into it, and then ordered the nanites inside the handle to harden the material.
Just as I finished pushing the ‘stop’ command into the second blade, a clang, followed by the rattling sound of chains, startled me.
