Catalyst

  “It does. And I’m going to keep them as evidence of the astonishing feats of strength our bodies are capable of when given the right incentive. You should not have been able to get off that bed, much less save yourself the way you did.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Oh, yes you did. I was there. I heard it.”

  “Don’t argue with her, Lhyn. She’s even more stubborn than me.”

  Lhyn looked back and forth between them. “Is that possible?”

  Wells laughed. “Apparently so. I have something of a reputation. But I wanted to thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For renewing my belief in miracles. I stopped believing a little while back, but you and your tyree changed my mind.”

  Seeing Lhyn’s look of alarm, Ekatya said, “I had to tell her. And even if I hadn’t, she would have heard it while I was with you. It’s under doctor-patient confidentiality.”

  “Your secret is safe with me,” Wells assured her. “Really, I’m just angling for an invitation. I’ve never seen an Alsean bonding ceremony.”

  Lhyn lit up. “I haven’t either. I mean, not in person. But I’m looking forward to seeing Andira’s.”

  “Who is Andira?”

  “Lancer Tal,” Ekatya clarified.

  Wells looked at her, then Lhyn. “You’re on a first-name basis with the Lancer of Alsea?”

  “I think Lhyn was half in love with her before they even met.” Ekatya slid their hands together and reveled in the warm physicality of it.

  “Only a quarter,” Lhyn said. “It didn’t go up to half until after I met her.”

  “You weren’t kidding when you said I still had a few things to learn about you, Captain.”

  The next five minutes did more to calm Ekatya’s fears than all the sedatives in her medbay. Lhyn smiled, occasionally chuckled, and seemed miraculously untouched by the horrors that had been inflicted on her. But she moved only with the greatest of care and never shifted her torso. When her eyelids began to droop, Ekatya kissed her forehead, told her to sleep, and led Wells out of the room.

  “Let me see it,” she said once they were in the lobby.

  “See what?”

  “Her record.”

  “Captain, I don’t think—” Wells sighed when Ekatya stopped and held out her hand. “You will never be able to unsee it,” she warned as she pulled the pad from her sleeve pocket.

  “Do you think I’ll ever be able to unsee Lhyn in that chair? I need facts, not nightmares.” Ekatya took the pad and read through the clinical listing of Lhyn’s injuries. Then she pulled up the images and stopped breathing.

  “It’s not—”

  “Don’t tell me it’s not as bad as it looks,” she snapped.

  “No, it’s exactly as bad as it looks. But it’s not permanent. She will heal. The psychological injuries will take far longer than what you’re looking at there.”

  Ekatya’s vision blurred as she gazed at the image of Lhyn’s torso, which was such an unending mass of hematomas and horrific swelling that she could not recognize it. Only a week ago, she had touched her lips to the soft, perfect skin just above that navel, and now—

  The pad was gently removed from her unresisting fingers. “Don’t do this to yourself,” Wells said. “She’s safe. You saved her.”

  “I told her to go to that meeting.” Ekatya was staring straight ahead and seeing nothing. “She didn’t want to. She was going to cancel her keynote speech. I told her to go.”

  “This is not your fault.”

  “I told her to leave Alsea, too. She didn’t want to do that either. I said the Alseans needed her as an advocate, because some people—” She crossed her arms tightly over her chest and looked up at the ceiling, blinking back tears.

  “The Alseans did need her as an advocate. And she has been the best one imaginable.”

  “And look at the price she paid!” Ekatya rounded on her, ready to pour out her anger and self-blame, but was brought up short by the sight of the man coming through the doors on the other side of the lobby. Tall, with a bald spot and blue eyes standing out against black skin, she would have recognized him in any crowd even without the purple scarf of office draped over his shoulders.

  “Captain Serrado,” he said as he walked up beside Wells. “It’s a pleasure to see you again in person.”

  “Director Sholokhov, may I introduce my chief surgeon, Dr. Wells.” She watched the recognition wash across Wells’s face as they shook hands.

  “Your reputation precedes you, Dr. Wells,” he said.

  “So does yours.”

  His shaggy gray eyebrows lifted. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  Ekatya could almost see the You shouldn’t forming on her chief surgeon’s lips, but fortunately Wells had a sense of self-preservation. “You did a good thing yesterday,” she said instead.

  He glanced at the treatment room, then turned to face Ekatya more fully. “I’ve lost three operatives to Kane Muir. Two of them didn’t make it past twenty-four hours. The third lasted just under forty. Dr. Rivers outlasted them all and somehow managed to learn where she was and get a message out. She should work for me.”

  Ekatya fought down the snarl that rose in her throat and only then saw the glint of humor in Sholokhov’s eyes. He was baiting her.

  “I think Dr. Rivers is happy with her current job,” she said. “But I’ll convey your offer.”

  “Please do. In the meantime, I wonder if you’d like to accompany me to station security?”

  Her stomach froze into an icy knot. “You have him here?”

  “He’s awaiting transfer. I can give you some time if you wish to speak with him.” His manner was calm, but the slight emphasis on speak told her that he was indeed making her an offer. It was unethical, illegal, and immoral—and she would take it with both hands.

  “I very much wish to speak with him,” she said.

  “I thought you might. This way.”

  She strode out of the lobby at Sholokhov’s side and didn’t realize until much later that she had left Dr. Wells standing there.

  CHAPTER 50:

  Gift-wrapped

  Kane Muir was strapped to a chair in the center of an otherwise empty interrogation room. Ekatya had been to station security a few times in her career, usually to pick up—and dress down—young officers who had gotten themselves in trouble. She knew those rooms normally had two chairs and a table. The lack of furniture in this one was confirmation that she had not read Sholokhov wrong.

  They stood at the modified plexan window, which allowed viewing only one way. There was no one else in the area. It seemed that all of station security had taken a simultaneous break period.

  “The staff will be returning in fifteen minutes,” Sholokhov said.

  “That’s more than enough time. Do you have a knife I can borrow?”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “I’m not doing this with him strapped down.” It wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying.

  “Ah. I understand.” He pulled an expensive folding blade from somewhere beneath his jacket.

  She accepted it and moved toward the door, her blood thrumming with anticipation.

  “All I ask is that you leave him alive,” Sholokhov said. “I’m still hoping to get answers from him.”

  She paused in the act of tapping the door control as the realization hit.

  This wasn’t a gift. It was a trap.

  “Thank you,” she said, and stepped through the door.

  Kane looked unbearably clean and intact. Not a hair was out of place on his blond head, his beard and mustache were perfectly trimmed, and his inmate uniform was crisp and new. She thought about the wreck of Lhyn’s torso and took a deep breath to tamp down her instincts.

  “I’m Captain Ekatya Serrado,” she said. “Lhyn Rivers is
my bondmate.”

  “Bondmate?” He smirked. “Are you both Alsean?”

  “No, but I almost wish we were. Because right now I’m ashamed to call myself the same species as you.”

  “You’re here to exact revenge, then. I wouldn’t expect that of a Fleet captain.”

  He put up a good front, but when she opened the knife, he looked slightly nervous. She made a show of inspecting the blade, her eyebrows rising when she realized it was a sidian knife—sharp as a straight razor and nearly impossible to dull.

  She stepped up to him, pulled up a lock of his hair, and sliced it off.

  “What are you doing?” His calm had already evaporated. That was easier than she had expected.

  She dropped the hunk of hair to the floor in front of him and pulled up another.

  “Stop this right now!”

  “Stop whining. You need a haircut.”

  “That’s not a haircut!”

  She dropped another chunk of hair and went to work on a third. “I admit I haven’t been trained in proper technique. This might be a little uneven.”

  He clamped his jaw shut and visibly trembled with rage. In two minutes the floor around him was covered with ragged hanks of blond hair.

  She bent down and cut off his sleeves, taking care that one was left longer than the other. Then she did the same to his pants.

  Standing back, she examined him with a critical eye. “One more thing,” she decided. “You need a shave.”

  “Don’t you dare!”

  She grabbed him by the throat, curling her fingers around his laryngeal prominence and squeezing. He immediately stopped all efforts at speaking or moving, his eyes nearly popping out of his head from the pain. He had gone from angry to terrified in a heartbeat, and she couldn’t deny the pleasure throbbing at her fingertips, nor the immense temptation to squeeze just a little harder. A vision of Lhyn’s bruised throat floated before her mind’s eye as she lifted the knife.

  He began moaning as she cut away what she could of the left half of his mustache, and wound down to whimpers of distress when she reached across to the right side of his face and sliced off most of the beard.

  Releasing her grip, she blew off the knife, pocketed it, and dusted the short hairs off her hands. “Ugh. Disgusting. You’re so unclean. You should bathe once in a while.”

  He coughed, then twisted his head from one side to the other. “I am not unclean!” he cried, and coughed again.

  “Tell that to my hands. I need to wash them now.” She looked up at him and let a smile cross her face. Then she began to laugh, because he truly did look ridiculous. His hair looked as if one of her botanists had gone wild with the shears; he had half a mustache and half a beard, each on opposite sides of his face, and his clothes gave him the appearance of a stowaway who had been caught in the gears of the shuttle bay doors.

  His face turned red as she laughed, then purple when she took out her pad and held it up. “Say hello,” she said, still laughing. “Lhyn is going to love this.”

  “Lhyn,” he spat. “I broke her in less than forty-eight hours. I owned her. You think she’s your bondmate? She’ll never truly be yours because she will never get me out of her head. She obeyed every one of my orders, including when I told her to spread her legs. She told me she belonged to me. To me! Not you.”

  She put away the pad. While her laughter had died, she still managed to keep a smile on her face. “You never broke her.”

  He smiled as well. “But I did. Easily. I’m only sorry I never got to the third day.” His subtle hip movement told her exactly what he meant.

  “Well, why didn’t you? Could it be because she fooled you? Because she learned where you took her, got a message out to call for help, and got you captured? You avoided capture for years, and an untrained academic beat you at your own game and turned you in. That doesn’t sound like a broken person to me. It also doesn’t sound like someone who obeyed you very well.” She shrugged. “I heard you were good, but I have no idea how you got that reputation. Really, an academic. I mean, I’d understand if you were beaten by a trained operative. But an anthropologist?”

  His jaw clenched. “You should have been there. You should have seen her looking up at me and saying, ‘I belong to you.’ I know people; I know how their minds work. I’ve spent a lifetime studying and manipulating them. And I know that when she said that, she meant every word.”

  Ekatya nodded. “She did. Because she was talking to me.”

  Looking around with exaggerated movements, he said, “Did I somehow miss seeing you in the room?”

  “I just spoke with her. She told me everything. The only way she could say those words was to imagine that she was saying them to me, that I was looking at her instead of you. So yes, you read her accurately. She did mean every word. She just didn’t say them to you.” She looked him up and down disdainfully. “She also said that you were irrationally obsessed with your appearance, and I can see why. No wonder you work so hard to keep it up. You’re nothing without it. A pathetic little boy. A little boy with all his toys who still lost to an untrained academic. She manipulated you.”

  His face was red again when she pulled out the knife and cut the ties off his legs. “Little boys shouldn’t be tied up. It makes them think they’re dangerous. You’re not dangerous at all. You’re pathetic.”

  His wrist ties went next, and she pocketed the knife once more. Casting a glance around the floor, now littered with hair, scraps of clothing, and cut ties, she said, “There’s not much of you left, is there? You thought I was here for revenge, but I’m a Fleet captain. I hunt much bigger prey than you. You’re not worth my time.”

  She turned around and began to walk away, listening for movement behind her. When she heard the rustle of fabric, she smiled.

  Adrenaline flowed through her veins, slowing time as every sense poured data into her brain.

  One step forward, and there was the slight scrape of a chair being lifted from the floor.

  Two steps forward, and rubber-soled shoes slapped the tiles behind her.

  Three steps, and the air moved.

  Four steps, and she dropped to a crouch. The chair whistled over her head from right to left. That meant Kane was just behind her and now off balance, his body rotated toward her as he swung the chair.

  It also meant that his leg was in the perfect position.

  She shot upright, pivoting toward him as she brought up her leg, then lashed out with a downward strike to the side of his knee. Her boot heel tore through every ligament, breaking all cohesion in the joint.

  Kane barely had time to scream before she planted her boot on the floor and followed through with her spin, leading with her left elbow. It crashed into his jaw with stunning force. He was dropping, his broken knee going out from under him, but she was already unwinding her torso and using all of that force and speed to throw a right-handed punch. For a fraction of a second, she considered landing that punch in his throat, where it would crush his larynx and suffocate him.

  But if she killed him, Sholokhov would have her where he wanted her. She was too well trained in hand-to-hand combat to claim that she had made a mistake or that she had felt lethal force was her only option.

  Her punch smashed into the opposite side of his already fractured jaw, shattering the bone.

  Kane landed on his back, his howl cut off as he gagged, unable to open his mouth or spit out the blood that now filled it.

  She desperately wanted to break his other knee and destroy his testicles, but he was down and no longer a threat. She had no excuse. Instead, she stood over him and looked down as he rolled to the side, gurgling and moaning, tears mingling with the blood that dribbled out in strings.

  “Look at you,” she said, speaking loudly to be heard over his muffled wails. “Crying like an infant from two broken bones. You couldn’t break Lhyn in forty
-eight hours, and I broke you in less than ten minutes. You really are pathetic.”

  She walked out the door and closed it behind her, muting the sound of his agony.

  Sholokhov was looking at her with a small, incredulous smile. She held out his knife and said, “Thank you for the loan.”

  He took it off her palm. “That was quite a performance, Captain.”

  Straightening the sleeves of her dress jacket, she said, “It was…cathartic. I appreciate your giving me the opportunity.”

  “You didn’t take that opportunity in the way I expected.”

  “I know.”

  He stared at her for a moment, then broke into a low chuckle. “Well done, Captain Serrado. Well done. I’m sorry our agreement has been completed, because you really are a valuable resource.”

  “I’m a Fleet captain. I’m always a resource.”

  He offered his hand, and when she took it, he held the grip slightly longer than necessary. “Farewell and good hunting, Captain.”

  “To you as well.” She let go and glanced through the window, where Kane was still gagging on his blood. Looking back at Sholokhov, she said, “Take him apart.”

  Now his smile was vicious. “I will.”

  CHAPTER 51:

  Home

  Alsea, present day

  Never in her life had Tal felt such a homicidal rage toward a person she had never met. In the heat of her fury, she thought less of Ekatya for staying her hand. Surely no one deserved death more than the man who had hurt Lhyn so badly. How could Ekatya not avenge her tyree?

  She kept her head down, staring into her empty drink glass. Ekatya had an uncanny ability to read her and had once said that her emotions were all in her eyes. She would not let her friend see her eyes now.

  For a long moment, no one in the room spoke.

  At last Salomen said, “We are honored that you felt safe enough to share this story. Thank you for trusting us with so much.”

  “This is the only place I do feel safe,” Lhyn said. “Here and on the Phoenix. And sometimes not even there.”