Chapter 9:
What the hell am I doing?
Blade flew across the series of ripples in the space around him that signaled he was getting closer to the ships he had called up to meet him. The craft he was in was too small, and he needed more than just himself on the bridge. And he really needed to be concentrating on flying and not the woman in his bed in the ship’s single cabin.
His dick stiffened at the thought of what had happened the last time he had walked into that chamber, and he groaned and shifted, trying to get that dick of his to mind its manners and leave him in peace, but of course, it ignored his wishes.
He shifted, his hand trying to settle the thick and chubby girth of his member into a position that wouldn’t result in pain. It took a few minutes, but he finally managed to get it calmed down and set to one side of the clinging armor, and his balls loosened enough to actually sit down.
He breathed a little easier then, but that breath caught when his mind went back to Tara.
God, she was such a hell of a woman. Tough and beautiful and yet, vulnerable and frail. So many things all rolled into one and all of them delighted and thrilled him.
The only woman he had ever met who had been able to take his mind off Lauren.
Just like that, his dick went limp, and so did his heart.
Lauren. She had looked nothing like Tara. She had been a tall and willowy brunette with a rich and throaty laugh, a bold personality, and a set of hazel eyes that had the most direct way of gazing around that he had ever seen.
She had been fearless too. She was a flight captain in training when he had been in training, and she had been the envy of half the ones going through flight training. Literally, she could fly like she was built with wings and she had the uncanny ability to assess risks from a second away and somehow manage to stay alive even when flying under the most dangerous conditions.
And she had been the daughter of a man who had been a rebel. A man who had set his daughter up with false papers and sent her into training in order to get her into a high ranking within the Federation so that she could spy on their daily operations in a way the rebels needed to know.
They had killed her.
Taken her right out of her room one dawn and shot her on the very ground below his window. He had heard the commotion and woken up just in time to look out the windows and see her body falling.
He had tried to get to her, but before he could, someone had grabbed him and held him down, pinned to the floor of his room. A voice had whispered into his ears, “Now they know spies are among them. You may have kept your relationship with her secret, but that does not mean that they do not know of it.”
He had looked over his shoulder to see a rough-faced flight instructor staring down at him, one hand on a weapon and the other on the back of Blade’s skull. Blade moaned out, “Let me go.”
The flight instructor said, “Son, they’re going to come for you. They will interrogate you. She was a spy. If you knew of that, or even if you didn’t, I would suggest you get the hell out of here now.”
Blade had managed to roll out from under him, but he suspected that that was only possible because the older man allowed it to happen. He staggered to his feet. “Why do you care?”
The FI had sighed. “I don’t. Spies deserve to die. But what they didn’t tell anyone who was down there watching was that she was a double agent. She had agreed to turn on her father on the condition that they would spare her mother and sisters. They lied. They killed them all, and as soon as they had gotten the information from her. They had promised her that she could stay and live, and that she could fly. Instead, they killed her. They had no use for her anymore.”
His gut went heavy as he stared out at the ripples and the signs of cloaked ships all around him. Those ships were his—at least some of them—and he was nearing the meeting point, but his mind was far away, back in that moment when he had fully understood that the Federation was a liar and always would be.
He had faced off with his father, the father he was now on his way to meet, and all General Bates had said was that she should never have tried to fly for Federation.
Blade had spat out, “You’re right. She should not have. She should have flown against them instead.”
She should have. She would have been better suited for that, and he blamed not just the Federation, but her father—but her father was already dead and beyond his ability to make him pay for Lauren’s death.
The ships around him dropped their cloaking devices. His breath came out in a relieved sigh. He had known it was his crew. His sigh was relieved because he was weary to the bone and thinking about Lauren had tired him down even further. He needed rest: lots of it. He had had a bad few weeks before the Revants had shown up and announced they wanted open warfare with the Federation and their departure had set into motion a series of events that had left with little chance to sleep.
Of course, bedding Tara when he should have been sleeping had been a fault his own, and one he would not wish to take back either.
But right then he needed sleep.
Blessed sleep and a ceasing of the heartache that made his heart nearly stop every time he remembered the woman he had loved so much, and whose death he had witnessed and been unable to stop.
He stood there, waiting for that familiar ache to hit and destroy him the way that it always did, but it didn’t come.
Instead, his mind went back to Tara. To her body and her ability to read him like a missive she alone understood the message of. Her nature was not wild or daring like Lauren’s had been but she was brave, and she was strong.
She was also a woman he would not want to see harmed and he damn sure did not want to have to watch her die while he stood by helplessly, unable to lift a finger to stop what was happening to her.
War would kill off so many. He was prepared to die fighting the Federation, but until just that moment he had not considered that he was no longer the only person that he cared about.
Oh shit.
He had somehow got his emotions tangled up, and she was the cause of that. He cared about her far more than he would have liked to admit and he knew that that was dangerous.
He had to harden his heart because the truth of the matter was that they were likely going to die in some battle or another, and even before that happened, they might be separated by the battles that would, all too soon, rage across the universe. There would be safe zones, and he should stash her in one and pray he made it back to her alive.
Safe zones?
What safe zones?
Nowhere in the universe would be immune to what would happen when he and the others who were ready for war declared it. Innocents would die. The losses and casualties would be high, and the promise of a peaceful and free future aside, he had to reconcile that fact to the mission, and he had not done that yet.
He was an honorable man despite his criminal bent, and he knew it. It was honor that had triggered his anger toward the Federation. It was the Federation’s lack of honor that he hated the most, that and their enslavement of people who had every right to be free in the first place.
The Federation killed off those who would be free because for them, there were only two types of beings in the universe: the powerful and the weak. The Federation believed in upholding the ways of the former and subjugating the latter.
He would be free, or he would die.
But was he really willing to see her die too?