Reclaiming Their Love

  I nodded. His words made sense, yet the anxiety in the pit of my stomach that had always been there surged back to life. I forced myself to breathe the way I’d been taught since I woke from the medically induced space coma and had to deal with my new reality. I controlled my anxiety as best I could, and when I couldn’t, I asked for help. Or I went totally numb. That had been a third option no one had liked. Right then, I needed to focus.

  “I am familiar with this side of the galaxy. Tell me what you saw.”

  Sterling tugged me up his lap a bit. “Are you okay?”

  “You’re reacting to my anxiety. It’s always with me now. I’ve got it handled. Let’s talk about what we need to really worry about, okay? It helps me to keep the stresses right out in front of me where I know what they are so I don’t start jumping at phantoms.”

  He ran a hand down my back, smoothing my shirt. “This is new. You weren’t anxious when you were with us.”

  “Don’t know if it’s because the infection almost killed me or if something in my brain chemistry changed when they saved me or if it was waking and thinking you were all dead or moved on without me.” Like Damian, I hated saying the word dead. “It’s changed me. In any case, I promise I’m not in a tailspin right now. I’ve had some help.”

  I turned to look at him. He’d raised his eyebrows but didn’t otherwise comment. “Okay.”

  The question had to be asked. “Are you wishing you’d stayed on the other side of the galaxy now that you know I might have a panic attack to go with my silence? Losing my ability to speak was one thing; downright can’t catch my breath in terror is something else entirely.”

  Fury passed through Sterling’s eyes for a second before he reined it in. “I love you. What I want is to be able to go back in time and make it so we never left so you’d never have had to endure what had to be hell. Okay? I’m worried about you, and I’m entitled to be so. You’re my wife. You have an anxiety disorder I can’t snap my fingers and fix.” He shook his head. “I worried about you not talking.”

  “I didn’t slip into that. I think I was too … mad at the universe.”

  He actually smiled at my description. “Don’t ever, ever ask me if I regret anything about you again.”

  “Fine.” I leaned against his chest. “What did you see that made you shift direction?”

  He pointed at the control panel. “There was a sudden flash—so brief I almost missed it, and that’s saying something—and a surge of petroleum output in the reading. Now, that might be a glitch. We used to see Francium all the time that wasn’t really there.”

  I took a deep breath. “That’s not good news. Don’t do anything yet. Okay? We are being followed, and the way Garrison Sandler screwed up his ships, we do sometimes see petroleum. We will have to defend ourselves. Don’t react yet. Let’s pretend we didn’t see. I need to let certain parties know this has happened before we take action. We may not take any. Someone else might do it for us. Wake the others.”

  I got off his lap, and he rose. “Sweet baby, I hate to ask this, but do you know what you’re doing? Conducting this kind of operation wasn’t something you did two years ago.”

  I’d always loved his nickname for me, and I hoped when this was over he still felt the same way. Some things had changed, in big ways. “Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, I know how to do a lot of this stuff now. Get the guys, please? I want to show everyone all at once how we’re going to send coded messages and whom we send them to. Then, if we get the go ahead to fire, we’ll do so.” I hoped Artemis was up to the task. She was an old ship, and she’d just been through the black hole. Again. “Otherwise we might keep going through space pretending they’re not there. That might be the best use of our time at the moment. We’re not supposed to be here; we didn’t anticipate you guys showing, obviously. My family will have had to adjust plans to account for us.”

  Sterling’s eyes were hard. “I hate that you live like this. I want Damian’s version of life where we’re all living on that farm. All right. I’ll get the guys.”

  “Great.” I took a long, deep breath. I didn’t know what kind of trouble we were in.

  They all arrived surprisingly fast and dressed. Only I remained half-attired, in Damian’s shirt. He must have liked it because he grinned from ear-to-ear before he reined it in. Judge and Lewis remained passive, but Cash looked me up and down before briefly scowling. Wearing one of their clothes clearly crossed a line I hadn’t considered. For now, we had more important things to worry about.

  “Sorry to wake everyone, but we have a situation.” They were all lined against the back wall, and for a second I felt like I was about to give orders like my mother did. The sensation was not particularly comforting, and I forced myself to move on. “I’ll be as brief as I can. For years now, Sandler Cartel has wanted Mars Station. Well, they want more. Garrison Sandler wants to control the universe. He wants to make himself a universal dictator. Mars Station is a stepping stone for him.”

  Cash nodded, fast. “We got that impression earlier. You’re faking fleeing.”

  “Correct. Since I was young, I’ve had a best friend name Paloma Delacroix. For a variety of reasons, she got sent away to live on the other side of the universe as a kind of a punishment. There, she met and fell in love with four men. They turned out to be Sandler’s missing sons. One of them, Quinn, was the original orchestrator of the plan Sandler uses, more or less, to fight us. With Quinn’s help, and a considerable amount of risk on their part, we have created counter plans which should win us the way, eventually.”

  Sterling cocked his head to the side. “I’d love to see those plans.”

  “I’ll get them for you. The thing is, one of the ways Sandler planned to beat my mother was to take me. Specifically me. He planned to kidnap me and sell me into bride slavery somewhere in the dark planets. It would have been a nightmare. He thought he could break her that way. He was probably right. She wouldn’t be able survive any of her children being taken. That’s what was happening when I got thrown through the black hole to you guys. That’s what they were trying to do.”

  Judge walked over and held me against him. “He didn’t get you. We did.”

  “I’m so lucky I can’t even believe it.” My tongue thickened in the way it did—or at least felt like it did—right before I temporarily lost the ability to speak for a while. I pushed away the sensation. Too much emotion always threatened my voice. “They don’t know we know. They don’t know Quinn and the others are working against them. They don’t know that by the time we’re done, Sandler won’t even have the planets he used to control. The Sandler boys plan to go home.”

  Damian cut to the chase, as usual. “So you’re at risk. And we’re at war.”

  “I am at risk. I always was. At least I know it now. If you don’t want to be at war …”

  Sterling cut me off. “Don’t say it. We talked about this. We’re with you. We love you. We’re not going into that hole again, although I’d love to whisk you away because I think going back to Evander-controlled space would be trading one fire for another. If this plan is solid, we’ll get on board.”

  Cash pointed at my arm. “And I have some ideas about some things we can do so you don’t need needles constantly.”

  I loved my guys so damned much.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Ari

  “If we use their communications devices, we can locate the ships tracking us.” I pointed at the screen. “Tommy Sandler, one of Paloma’s husbands, he designed them, and he knows their weaknesses. Even the ships’ captains don’t know the weaknesses the way that Tommy does. So if you enter this code”—I typed in the passcode granting me access to the Sandler comm databases—“then you send your information with the destination coded on the end, the enemy ship will actually send the message for you.”

  Sterling crossed his arms over his chest. “That’s brilliant but also incredibly stupid. Why would he put into circulation a communication array with that kind of flaw
in it?”

  “There is a certain amount of Sandler bravado that, until recently, Tommy suffered from. The general idea was that no one was smarter than they are and that nothing could beat them. That changed. He never anticipated anyone would get this good to be able to crack his code. And, to be honest, if he hadn’t turned on his father to save his brother and then fallen in love with Paloma, we would not have cracked it. Even my uncle Wes hadn’t figured it out.”

  Judge cleared his throat. “Betcha I would have figured it out.”

  I grinned at him. “I’m sure you would have.”

  A beep sounded, and I pulled up the screen. Dr. Ari Bennett stared back at me from the screen. “Diana … how are you doing, honey?”

  I didn’t have to turn around to know every one of my husbands had tensed at the use of the word honey. Ari was like that … every woman he meant was “honey” and “baby.” I might have wanted to kick his ass if he hadn’t saved my life when I woke from stasis and wanted to die. His brand of psychiatry wasn’t for everyone, but it had worked for me. From what I understood, he’d saved Paloma, too. He brought down my guard with his easygoing joking and then saw right through every wall I put up.

  “Ari.” I waved my finger in the universally understood movement for no. “Now, now, I wouldn’t want to have to tell Dane on you.”

  Ari’s way of talking to women was very Sandler Cartel-esque. He was some kind of cousin to the Sandlers. But he’d left Sandler years before anyone else had defected. I’d come to appreciate his friendship. That was, however, all it was.

  He grinned. “All right now. So, I heard from Commander Melissa that your husbands are on our side of the galaxy. I assume that’s why they’re all looking at me like they want to kill me. I know that look. I get it from your father and your uncles and, recently, even from my Sandler friends, too. Here is the deal.” His eyes hardened, and he was suddenly all business. “We took a look at the satellites. Whoever is flying that shuttle is good, but we’re better. Using the Sandler ships, I got a better look than they’d wanted us to. It’s one of the elite fighters, meaning you are dealing with a very smart pilot.”

  Behind me, Sterling tensed even further. He was going to give himself a headache if he wasn’t careful. He spoke through clenched teeth. “Are we at risk right this second?”

  “Not likely.” Ari shook his head. “They seem to be watching you just to watch at the moment. Artemis is an old ship. We don’t believe they know Diana is on it. They’d be much more aggressive if they did. Getting Lady D would still be a coup for them. So they’re tailing you. Who’s on Artemis? Who did we give the ship to? Where did it come from?”

  I crossed my arms. Discussing Sandler’s preoccupation with getting “Lady D”—their term for me, not my own—wasn’t my favorite subject. “Recommendation?”

  “Your mother wants you to come here. Lugers’ Station. You’re going to pick me up. They’ll expose themselves there. We can take them down on the station, tow the ship. Then onto location Bravo where your family is. Assuming your husbands know how to fire a weapon.”

  Before my guys could answer and start a pissing contest, I finished the conversation. “Thanks Ari. See you there.”

  “Before I get into how aggravating that man is, can we talk about the rest of it? How much danger are you in?” It shocked me that Lewis spoke first, but the strong set of his jaw indicated how dead serious he was about having this conversation right here and now.

  “That’s a complicated topic. On the station, I was pretty safe. If they’d ever been able to get me there, they never would have shoved me through a black hole. The problems with the Station, well the problems as far as Sandler was concerned, was my family was there and it turns out a lot of people who hate Garrison Sandler—like Ari—were also there. No one was taking me. At least not yet. They were starting to make headway. They blew up the promenade a year ago”

  Damian nodded. “Okay, then one of us is on you the whole time. Even on the ship. I’m going to make sure every security system is up to par.”

  “Right.” Sterling sat down in the Captain’s chair. “In the meantime, I’m going to study how this guy moves. Maybe I can give him the impression we’re amateurish and uninteresting.”

  Judge walked backwards toward the door. “I’m going to go look at Artemis’ armor. It’s really good, but I can make it better.”

  Cash crooked his finger at me. “Come with me, Boo. Lewis and I want to look at your arm. The Zombie spot. We both woke up thinking about it. Some ideas so you don’t have to keep getting poked every Monday.”

  “When did the two of you even get to talk about it?” I walked toward them. If they wanted to make my shots stop, they could have at it.

  Lewis took my hand, squeezing my fingers. “In the hallway. On the walk here.”

  The whole ten seconds they’d been together?

  Ten minutes later, I was seated in a chair in the medical lab. A bright light shined down on my arm. They both stared at the unhealed spot on my arm while the computer read out data.

  I cleared my throat. “This is very reminiscent. The first day I woke, Lewis shined a light in my eyes.”

  Cash raised his eyes to look at me and raised his eyebrows. “Sshh. We’re thinking”

  I closed my mouth. For about half a second. “Since when do you need quiet to think?”

  “Since we’re talking about you and your skin and I’m not going to screw it up,” Lewis answered for Cash. “So hush, Doll. And let me see what the hell your uncle did to save you that I could never have done.” He touched the skin lightly with his hand, running his finger over it. I looked away. There was nothing worse than my area of dead skin.

  “Ah.” I took a deep breath, looking down at the floor. “My uncle used your formulas, the ones that temporarily brought back the hands on the Zombies. It has to be constantly administered.”

  Lewis tapped my chin and made me look to meet his eyes. “It does. I agree. But not with all those shots.”

  Cash rocked back on his feet. “You’re thinking constant IV?”

  “Bingo.”

  I didn’t follow them at all. “Will it hurt? Whatever you’re proposing?”

  “No.” They both answered at the same time.

  “Give us a day to get it ready,” Cash finally finished. “You may never have to deal with another shot again, at least not there.”

  I took a deep breath. No more shots into that part of my skin? Ever? “I keep thinking I might wake up and you’ll all be gone. This will be a dream. I wake on the station. I’ll meet my parents on the ship, and you’ll still be over there on the other side of the universe having a life without me.”

  My statement earned me a hug from both of them at the same time. It was Lewis who spoke. “There would have been no life. Just endless years. And we’re real. If you need another night like last night we can do that again to prove it again.”

  I grinned into his shoulder while Cash rubbed my back. “Another night like last night and I might never walk again.”

  Cash snorted. “Then we did our job right. All right, look, I’m on this now. I need to get it started. I’ve got to make the pump. Micro design. I’m going to talk to Judge.”

  He had a bounce to his step. I almost laughed. Cash got really excited by micro design. It had to be my least favorite part of keeping up a ship. I much preferred the ability to use my hands and to be able to see with my own eyes what I worked on.

  Lewis hadn’t let go of me yet, and since I was sure there were a million small things for me to fix on Artemis, I moved out of his arms gently. Judge was great but he didn’t care about the small systems. Of course he’d had years on Artemis. Maybe he’d kept it really clean.

  “Years ago, before I went to Evander.” Lewis’ voice was low. I raised my eyes to look him in the eyes. “When I lived in the house for the unwanted on Ochoa.”

  I hated thinking about his early years, when he’d been found wandering around on the streets. He’d been a
lone as a toddler. He’d never recalled a single thing about his family or what had happened to him. If he hadn’t been brilliant, his future would have been something quite different.

  I kissed his neck. “Go on.”

  “I was a kid. Too young to think about things like love and marriage. Besides, it’s very clear to any street kid on Ochoa that there isn’t a woman waiting for him.” His voice shook and he looked away. “Well, you’re a miracle from across the universe. When I was about five, I followed this couple down the street. They were holding hands. She laughed at something he said. I thought she was beautiful. I wanted her to take me home and be my mother. Of course, they never saw me or paid attention. Street rats were all over Ochoa.”

  I pressed my head against his chest to stop myself from crying. He was here. He hadn’t died on the street as a child. “Why are you thinking about her now?”

  “You said you thought you were going to wake up and be alone. I wake every morning and wonder if I’m still on that street, desperate for someone to love me. Doll, if I ever love you too hard, too much, or I need you more than you can tolerate, please tell me. I lived for a few months in a universe where you were dead. I can’t do that again. Okay? Am I—”

  I kissed him on the mouth, stopping him mid-sentence. I don’t know how I knew he needed it, but he did. Lewis didn’t press for more, which was good because I wasn’t certain I could actually follow through on anything heavier than kissing. I hadn’t rested very much, and I was sore in places I hadn’t known I could be.

  But Lewis was warm, he was here, he was mine, and he needed me. Finally, he stopped, running his hands down my arms gently. “When I meet your Uncle Dane, I’m going to offer to do anything he wants for the rest of my life. A big, giant thank you.”

  “He’ll wave his hand in the air. Not because he wouldn’t care about your gratitude, but because he’s moved on to his next project. His brain moves like that. He either obsesses or he lets it go. I’m okay. He’s let it go.”