If this were a base, though, they’d be packing swords, and the rezals would be sheathed. He blew a long stream of air out of his nose. Everything was going perfectly according to plan. He just needed the Premier to show up and confirm that the leaders back on Vesta had solidified the peace in time.
Tor just needed to delay. A well-aimed kick to the solar plexus or the neck would put one of them down. Maybe he could even get lucky and kick them both, but irritating them too much could get him killed.
Merona smiled and leaned against the wall, arms crossed, like he was waiting too, but what the hell was he waiting for?
They were supposed to be taking him off to torture him now.
Tor shouted behind the gag, but no one paid him any attention. Not even when he made his way to his feet and backed himself in the corner of the room. Those rezals just stayed trained on him.
He shouted at Merona.
Merona waggled his eyebrows at him. “Be silent, Vestige. Klymeni will be here soon with her future-mate. And you will help me force their Bond. Did you seriously think I would let my own daughter defect to Vesta? Bond with an enemy barbarian?” A smile stretched across his face. “I saw her holo-vid. She thinks she’s in love with you. But she’ll forget all about you in the wake of a Bond with Spiro. Which I didn’t have a hope in hell of forcing her to accept—until you showed up. So, thanks for that.”
42
I had to try
KLYM STARED UP at the massive building that housed Central War Command, where Spiro had just parked. “They have him there?”
Spiro’s blue eyes were grim. He had to be thinking the same thing she was. No Vestige warrior, no Vestige regio, was walking out of there alive.
Her eyes burned. “He shouldn’t have come here.”
“No,” he said, the acerbic turn of his mouth intensifying. “He will surely die.”
The very idea was unthinkable. A universe without Tor couldn’t be allowed to exist. It would be flat and dead and gray, with no dimples and laughing and fighting. No.
Tor would not die. He could not die. She refused to accept that as a viable option. Even if she had to sell her soul, she would not let him die. She chewed on her lip.
“My father sent you to the ball to bring me here, didn’t he?”
Spiro inclined his head.
“Then he has something in mind. Something specific that he wants.”
Spiro made a noncommittal face.
“Do you know what it is?”
He blew out a long breath. “I can guess.”
“You and me?”
It had to be that. And if that was what he wanted, there might be a way to get Tor out of there alive.
“I think so.” The quiet of the street, and the cool water, underscored the rasp of his voice.
Klym’s stomach twisted, imagining what her father was going to force her to do. “Your voice, does it hurt?”
His stony face didn’t change. “It’s fine.”
“It’s not.”
A slight smile played around his lips. “You didn’t throw it.”
“I may as well have.”
He lifted a shoulder. “It wasn’t personal. It was him or me.” He gestured at the building, and she climbed the steps beside him.
Tor would have loved to hear that.
“I am sorry.”
He lifted a shoulder, and the light pooled on his face, in the hollows below his cheekbones, in the lines that bracketed his mouth.
Her father wanted her to Bond with Spiro, and now he had Tor’s life in his hands.
“Spiro, will you give me your word that you’ll Bond with me if I ask?”
His eyes widened. “Strange thing to hear, from you, after the way you escaped.”
She wrapped her hand around his forearm, staring at him with all the intensity of her broken soul. “My father didn’t ask you to bring me here by accident. He wants something from me. If it comes to that, I need to be able to save Tor’s life.”
He stared back at her. “I’d have given you as much time as you needed.”
“I knew that, even then.”
After a long moment, he jerked his head in tight agreement and yanked open the door.
She hesitated on the threshold. “Will you give me one of your knives?”
With the barest glimmer of a smile, he shook his head ruefully.
She sighed. “I had to try.”
43
Just wait
“HERE SHE COMES,” Merona crooned.
Yesterday, Tor would have said he’d been angry before. Angry when Klym had locked him out of the ship. Angry when she’d disappeared in a riot and showed up with Sanger and without a mark.
No. Those had been good times.
He’d never been angry before. Never even come close.
Staring at Merona’s red face across the cell, a new height of fury raced through his bloodstream.
He stood in his corner, drooling around the ball-gag, arms loose behind his back to minimize the strain to his muscles, and thought up a thousand different ways he’d make Merona suffer.
He garbled a few times, hoping Merona would come close enough for him to head-butt, but the bastard stayed stubbornly on his side of the cell. The guards—and their rezals—stayed stubbornly trained on Tor, out of reach.
A double-tap at the door announced she’d arrived.
Klym.
She wasn’t supposed to be here.
He wanted her a thousand miles away from here.
She was supposed to be somewhere safe, watching the holo-vid. She was supposed to see it and understand that he’d loved her all along and know that he’d come for her. She was supposed to trust him and know that he wouldn’t come here without a plan, a reasonable plan. She was supposed to know he’d never risk their future without a hope in hell of success.
But she didn’t. Because she was Klym, the woman who’d handed knives to prisoners and asked them to help escape, the woman who’d taken a hover into an unknown city because she’d been lonely, the woman who’d befriended her enemies, and sold the only possession her mother had touched—because she’d done what she’d had
