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Black spoke first after a long silence. “Let’s find another ship.”
I opened my eyes. I don’t know why, maybe because this was all so confusing that I thought being able to see would make it easier. There was no controlling my body. And a dagger of fear had spiked through my heart, so I could barely control my breathing.
I heard a shuffle of feet and bodies, and sensed Black approaching me, so I closed my eyes.
He put his hand down to my neck, and stroked from my throat to my cheek. “She’s waking up,” he said.
Another silence, more footsteps. My eyes wanted to flutter open and it was all I could manage to keep them closed and not squeezed shut as my heart began fluttering wildly.
What did all of this mean? I couldn’t make sense of it, it was all just a wild puzzle and I never felt awake enough, or alone enough, or clear-headed enough, to sort it out.
“What do you want me to do?” Black asked.
The silence that followed seemed longer than all the others combined.
“Take her to her quarters.”
“You can’t keep putting this decision off, Cap, it’s -”
“Don’t tell me what I can do, Ergan Black.”
Rhys’s voice had a quality to it that seemed like acid poured into my veins. My eyes flew open and I pushed myself up with one hand, turning toward them.
Rhys didn’t look at me. His eyes were on Black and they were vicious and intense.
Black was staring back at him with equal intensity, and it looked like a serious fight was about to break out. Not that there was any reason for me to feel that way; until this adventure, I had never seen men fight at all. Not even in films. They removed those parts for even citizens like me, who served as guardians of foreign culture knowledge.
Black, however, broke the stare first, and looked over at me. His features softened somewhat. “Don’t be scared,” he said.
Rhys’s eyes shot to me as Black approached. But as soon as he met mine, he turned away and left again, through the door. “I’ll be in the hub,” he shot at Black. “Get her back.”
*
“Please tell me what’s going on,” I pleaded with Black, when he set me down on a chair in my room. He seemed to want to get away from me as soon as possible, which was unusual for him. He usually placed me in bed, covered me up, kissed me on the forehead. Sometimes he sat down and talked to me. Now he had pretty much poured me into a chair and was trying to leave.
I clung to his shoulders. “Black,” I pleaded.
He paused, almost like he was going to cave in and kiss me, pick me up and take me to the bed, and tell me everything I wanted to know.
But just when I was sure he was going to do that, he sighed loudly and seriously. His features had lost all his usual lightheartedness and comedy, and he looked stern and dangerous now. He put his hands to my wrists and pulled my hands from his neck, a little roughly. He placed them in my lap and held them there. “I can’t,” he said.
Then he, too, turned and headed for the door. “It’s going to be okay,” he said.
He looked back at me, like he was going to say something, and then he stepped through the door, and left, forgetting to lock it behind him.
CHAPTER11
Rhys
I stared at my hand shaking over the console as he knocked away at his “secret” knock. I clenched my fist closed and brought myself down, exerting maximal will to dampen my rage. “Come in,” I almost shouted.
The door hissed open, and Black ducked through. He saw what was inside of me as soon as he walked through the door. Black was good like that; it’s what made him my right-hand man. And as long as we had lived, best friends from early days, paired together as alpha and beta from puberty, I had trusted him with my life and everything in it. I had always believed that I would share my mate with him, that disloyalty was unfathomable with him.
And yet Alena had changed that. I could see it in his eyes, and maybe he could see it in mine.
This damned woman.
I resolved, in that moment, to get her off the ship, to send her in the exchange as planned, to perform my duty and to rid this clan of our worst nightmare, a thing no one really believed in until it came into our own lives:
