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He walked over to the shed and lifted a wooden flap to expose an electronic control pad. Wrin waved his phone over it, and something clicked. With a yank on the handle, he sent the wide door sliding sideways. A light blinked on inside, showing a small craft. It looked like a flying car—an elongated oval body, metal on the bottom half and topped with a glass canopy. Inside were four seats, the front two each with a steering yoke in front of them.
Wrin pulled the hoverspeeder into the shed, then used his phone to open the glass canopy of the flyer. He leaned over the lip, tapped the controls to life, and gave a satisfied grunt. “Good. We can use this.”
“Can we go now?” A thrill of anticipation ran through me. If I got off-world, I’d finally believe I’d escaped. I doubted my captors would allow him to remove me from their jurisdiction. Making it all the way off planet would also be the last bit of proof I needed that Wrin was on the up and up.
“It’s not really space worthy. Flyers are designed for planetary travel. I’m going to need to contact my people and arrange the timing of our pickup.”
“Right,” I bit out. His reasoning sounded logical, but he could be stalling.
Argh! I hated this. I wanted to know, one way or the other, if I could trust him!
CHAPTER TEN
Wrin
Disappointment and suspicion warred in Vivv’s eyes as they flicked from the flyer to me.
Much as I admired her canny caution, I longed for her to trust me.
“Let’s get inside the cabin so I can call them on the secure comms,” I said. The sooner I got all of this resolved, the sooner I could begin to woo her.
“Okay.”
The purple vetch ground cover felt springy and soft as I walked back across the clearing. Its floral scent perfumed the air with a delicate sweetness that recalled all those childhood summers lost to distance and time.
A pang of homesickness hit me. In front of the cabin door, I spun around and looked outward. The sun rose behind me, bathing the grivwood trees before me until their needles shone a brilliant blue. A grove of valoree trees waited off to the right, their perfectly shaped tops forming large spheres of glimmering silver and purple. The soft shush of wind added a faint background to the noises of the forest, the stevroe bird song lilting the air.
Even though my family had spent most of the year living in Carilia City and had vacationed all over the globe, I’d always loved this place best on all of Zaar.
Vivv remained silent beside me, her intelligent eyes searching my face. Whatever she saw there softened her, some of the doubt fading from her eyes.
I used Kirel’s hacking program to unlock the cabin door, not trusting my decade-old clearance to still work and not wanting confirmation that I’d been removed from the family codes.
My hand palmed the wood, my muscles tightening as I hesitated. Would it be completely redecorated inside or exactly the same?
And which would hurt more?
Taking a deep breath, I shoved the door open and stepped into the summer home of my childhood. Time stood still.
Everythinglooked exactly the way it lived in my memory. The grivwood walls and floor, stained a light, silvery blue by the ancestor who’d built the cabin. The large square windows letting in lots of natural light. The overstuffed sofas covered in the deep blue of my mother’s hands, ofmyhands. Other species always thought all of the Zaarn were colored exactly the same, but some specific shades ran through family lines, and this was one of them.
The kitchen area waited to the left, separated from the main room only by the long wooden dining table. The table that still held the sculpture I’d made at sixteen of a grivwood tree, its branches reaching for the sun.
She kept it. My breath caught in my chest, my throat clogged with emotion. It hurt, by the Goddess it hurt. I’d spent years wondering if my parents thought of me or if they’d locked away every reminder of me the day of my banishment.
“Are you okay?” Vivv gently touched my arm.
“My mother—” My voice cracked, and I had to clear my throat. “My mother kept something of mine.”
“Oh, god. Everything you said about being sent away was real, wasn’t it?” Her eyes went big and sad. In a flash, she’d thrown her arms around me, hugging me with all the fierceness in her heart.
Something inside me broke open, a deep wound never allowed to heal. All of it poured out of me now in the face of Vivv’s care.
“I never let myself feel it. What it meant to be banished.” My voice sounded rough and raw. “I spent so many years being strong for my crew that I’d never allowed myself to acknowledge my own hurt.”
“And saving me made you come back.” Her arms tightened around me, and I slid a finger under her chin to tilt her head back so I could meet her eyes.
“Saving you is the most important thing I could ever do.” It was time. I could finally tell her. “I told you I was banished because I didn’t have a fated mate.”
