“Why don’t you tell us?” His voice was sharp, a hairsbreadth from a snarl, and his fists clenched and unclenched at his sides. He swept a contemptuous look over her, from the tousled hair atop her head to the bare feet peeking out from under the sheet and everything in between.
“I can’t believe I let a human fool me,” he sneered. “What did they give you? An Altarian pheromone shot to ensure I’d bring you along for the ride? I’ll bet you didn’t argue much, did you? A chance to get it on with a cyborg, I heard that was the number one fantasy among women in your pathetic species.”
Samara’s heart froze in her chest, the organ stilled by the malevolence in his voice and skewered clean through as his words hammered home.
“What? No! No one gave me anything.”
Terrified as she was, her voice was high-pitched and panicked. She was in a room with two pissed-off cyborgs, creatures designed to kill. She’d be nuts not to be terrified.
“Lyon, you brought me along. The captain asked what you wanted. You said me,” she tried to remind him, but his expression was shuttered. He wasn’t even looking at her. Instead, his green-eyed gaze was wandering over her body darkly. She drew her knees up, pulling the covers tighter as she shivered.
That wasn’t a good look. Unlike when he’d looked at her earlier, this wasn’t the look of a lover. No, he was assessing her like she was a side of beef. Cyborgs weren’t cannibals, were they? A frown hit her. They didn’t think of themselves as human. Was it cannibalism if they counted themselves a different species?
“So where is it?”
She squealed in fright as he reached out and latched a hard hand around her ankle.
Kicking and screaming, she tried to get free, but her pitiful strength was no match for him. Had he been human, she might have had a chance with a few solid kicks from her free foot, but he wasn’t and shrugged the blows off like they were no more substantial than an insect buzzing around him.
He dragged her down the bed toward him, ignoring all her struggling and cries.
She managed to keep the sheet wrapped around her, just, and flinched from him as he reached out to touch her. This wasn’t the man who had held her in his arms and made love to her all night. The difference scared her more than she was prepared to admit.
What an idiot. You should have listened to all the stories. He’s done with you now and he’ll kill you without a thought.
“It will go easier on you if you tell us where it is.”
His demand was little more than a growl as he pulled at the sheet. Gasping she tried to cover up again, but he pulled at another section to reveal more of her pale skin.
Heat flooded her at being treated like an object as he ran hard hands up her legs. She risked a pleading glance up at Cael only to find Archon in the doorway as well, his expression as hard as his companions’.
“Where what is? I don’t know what you’re going on about. Please, you have to believe me!”
She twisted, trying to push his hands away, but he just grabbed her wrist in a grip hard enough to make her whimper in pain. Shoving the sheet up to mid-thigh, he carried on searching. She pressed her lips together, ignoring the burning in her wrist.
If she twisted a little, the pressure eased up, but left her vulnerable to whatever he wanted to do to her. Bitter amusement filled her as cruel fingers traced over her thighs.
Who was she kidding? He could do whatever he wanted to her anyway, no matter if she had her hands free or not.
“What’s this?”
His fingers stopped on her upper thigh, pressing against something buried under the skin. She resisted the urge to squirm at the discomfort.
“It’s a contraceptive implant.” His lip curled back, but she carried on. “I-I’ve had it for years. It’s nothing.”
His eyes glittered as he reached down and pulled a knife from the sheath on his calf. All the blood drained from her face, leaving her lightheaded. She couldn’t even whimper, she was too scared. This was it, he was going to kill her, right here and now.
“When was it last changed?” Lyon demanded, trying to keep his voice level despite the distaste surging through his veins at the thought she’d been using contraception.
She was a lying little human bitch, but still, procreation was procreation. It was the one perfect thing any being was capable of and something he and his kind had had to fight their own design to regain. The thought that she’d callously denied any chance of conception added to the flames of anger swirling through him.
“I-I…h-h-had it done last w-week,” she stammered, lying pliant under him. Her eyes were wide and fixed on the knife he held in his hand. “Please, it’s j-just an implant.”
Boss, back off with the blade. She’s terrified.
Cael’s soft warning filtered through his anger. He snapped his gaze up to Samara’s face. Cael was right. Samara’s face was pale and bloodless and her pupils dilated. Her heart pounded as tremors shook her delicate frame. He moved his hand, putting the knife out of sight. Her gaze followed it, and then stayed fixed at the area where it had disappeared from view.
She was in shock. Deep inside something twisted as he realized he was scaring her.
He let his anger sweep the feeling away. How pathetic was that? If she wanted to play games with the big boys, then she had to be prepared to get hurt. He let go of her wrist, expecting her to start fighting him again. Instead she let her arm drop to the bed and just lay there. Frowning, he hooked a finger under her chin and pulled it around so she had to look at him. She didn’t offer any resistance, her eyes blank and unfocused, like she didn’t see him.
It’s just shock. She’ll be fine.
Pushing the sheet out of the way, he focused on her thigh where the implant was embedded. How had he missed it? He knew every inch of her body, had been over it with hands and lips, but he hadn’t spotted this. Contra-implants should be sub-dermal, just under the upper layers of the skin, not this deep. For it to be this deep meant that someone didn’t want it found.
Cael, what’s the medical procedure for contraceptive implants?
Her reply was a stream of information on how to insert and remove implants. He looked at Samara’s thigh again, but didn’t see the satin skin nor the enticing curve as it flowed into her hip. Instead he used his onboard comp to display an anatomical diagram over the limb. He needed to cut into her flesh to remove the thing. The longer it remained active, the longer they were all in danger.
He moved to rest the tip of his knife against her skin. The soft whimper from her lips twisted his heartstrings. What if she didn’t know? Her leg would have been numbed when they replaced her implant. She may not have noticed the difference between the placement of the old and the new. He hadn’t noticed and there was no way his exploration of her body had been casual.
He started to press down, but stopped. His hand was shaking. A frown creased his brow as he stared at it. A quick check of his subroutines and hardware confirmed the limb was within operational standards. He pressed down again. The blade parted the skin and a bead of blood rolled down her skin.
His hand still shook.
Boss, let me. Go take a breather, okay?
Cael was at his elbow, holding her hand out for the blade. A sigh rumbled through his chest and escaped over his lips. He couldn’t do it. For the first time in his life, he couldn’t achieve the mission objective. He looked at Samara spread out over the bed. As furious as he was with her, he still couldn’t hurt her. She was the enemy and all he wanted to do was pull her close and protect her. How pathetic was that?
He handed the blade over and stood to let Cael take his place. Grabbing a med-kit from the wall, she knelt by the bed and rifled through it. Withdrawing an anesthetic, she administered it with quick, efficient movements and picked the knife up again.
Lyon hovered, his hands clenched into fists at his side. He couldn’t watch, but he couldn’t walk away either.
In the end, Cael made the decision for him. She looked over her shoulder and fixed him with a cool, gray stare.
“Boss, breathing down my neck isn’t going to help. You wouldn’t want me to slip with this—” She wagged the knife, which suddenly resembled a butcher’s meat cleaver, at him. “Now would you? If you want to be helpful, go and get Eoin for me. And make sure Archon isn’t doing something stupid. Like rerouting us to the Kilian pleasure resorts or something.”
An unwilling smile tried to crawl across Lyon’s lips. “Yeah, I wouldn’t put it past him.”
He headed for the door, but paused as he reached it and looked over his shoulder.
His gaze settled on the sheet-wrapped form on the bed. She was facing the other way, so he couldn’t see her face, but she hadn’t moved, her arm still outstretched where he’d left it.
She’d betrayed them. Betrayed him. A fresh wave of…something…gripped his chest. He turned, leaving the cabin before he could weaken any further over a damn human.
Chapter Seven
Lyon and his anger leaving the room lifted the crushing pressure weighing down on Samara and allowed her to breathe again. The gray on the edges of her vision receded and the world came back into focus. Blinking, she felt her heart rate drop down a notch. Apprehension still swirled through her veins as Cael dropped the used anesthetic shot into a biohazard bag, but didn’t seal it.
Wetting her lips, Samara plucked up the courage to speak. “What are you going to do?”
Far from the smiling, joking woman of earlier, Cael’s expression was blank and shuttered. As forbidding as the grim reaper himself. She shivered as the woman picked up Lyon’s discarded blade and fixed her with a steely look.
“I’m going to assume you’re intelligent enough to realize that this implant isn’t the contraceptive one you claim it is,” she said as she settled the tip of the blade against Samara’s thigh, as calm as though carving up someone’s leg was an everyday occurrence. Maybe it was, those horror stories about cyborgs had to have come from somewhere.
“I’m also going to give you the benefit of the doubt and believe you’re telling the truth when you say that’s what you thought it was.” Cael’s voice was hard. As though she really didn’t want to give Samara even that much. “It’s not. It’s a sub-dermal tracking device. I would guess your ship has been trailing us since we took you aboard.”
Samara closed her eyes, her head dropping back against the bedclothes.
“They called all the nurses in. Said the brand of implant we all had was under recall. I thought it was odd at the time…I mean, what are the chances we all had the same brand of implant? No medication suits everyone like that…”
She pressed her lips in to a thin line as she made the connections. She’d been played like a freaking concert violin. What an idiot! They’d called them all in and fitted the entire nursing staff with tracking devices.
“But why?”
She turned a questioning look on Cael, as though the other woman had all the answers. She certainly knew more about what was going on than Samara did. Why would her own people put a tracker in her? Unless…she paled, feeling sick.