Chapter Eighteen
“Listen,” the sleek man in the lumpy suit said. “They’re not stupid. They know the lizards needed help, and they know you provided it. There’s security footage of your moving their gold for them, making purchases, aiding and abetting them through criminal acts. There’s a stolen car…”
Aria was barely listening to the man. She was exhausted and miserable beyond what she had known her capacity for misery could be. She had been thrown into a cell, clothed, but stripped of all hope. The collar Vyktor had made for her had been cut from her neck and had no doubt been entered into evidence against her. It was strange, but she could still feel it in spite of its absence.
She sat in the tiny cell, with the light perpetually on, the walls so close she could reach out and touch them with both hands. Guards came twice a day to feed her, but not on any particular schedule. It would have been bad if they had called her names or judged her, but what they did was worse—they ignored her completely. The treatment was designed to break her spirit, a cruelty on top of the cruelty of her situation.
Aria did not know how long it had taken for this lawyer to come and see her. It could have been a day. It could have been a week.
Things have to get worse before they get better.
Vyktor’s words came back to her, floating through her memory. She smiled down at the table a little. She missed him with all she had, but parts of him were still with her. Even with her feet shackled to the floor, her hands shackled to the desk, there was a little tiny part of her that felt free in his memory.
“Listen,” her lawyer repeated. “If you ever want to see the light of day again, you’re going to have to explain how you were captured and tortured…”
“I wasn’t tortured,” Aria said bluntly. “I was… tamed.”
The lawyer’s eyes narrowed a fraction. “What do you mean, tamed?”
“I mean…” How to explain what she’d been through without sounding insane? Aria really didn’t know. These people didn’t understand. The matter was simple to them. Dragons = evil. The only reason someone would offer the dragons aid was if they were insane, or evil themselves. The government was making the latter case against her, looking for the death penalty.
“They confined you against your will?”
“I was a prisoner,” Aria said. “Right up until they attempted to make their retreat. They behaved with honor. We did not. We…”
“So you were held captive,” her lawyer interrupted her. He wasn’t interested in learning the truth, he was just trying to cobble together a narrative that would get her out of trouble. She supposed that was a good thing, but it wasn’t the truth. This close to death, the truth of what had really happened suddenly mattered to her a lot.
“They wanted to know how to get along with humans,” Aria tried to explain. “They wanted to see if there was a way to… train us.”
Nothing she said made the process sound any better. Had she been brainwashed into thinking she loved Vyktor? Was it really as her lawyer was telling her it must have been? If so, why had it felt so different?
“In the beginning, yes, he was experimenting, I guess,” she said, trying to explain better. “But he did it because he wanted to find a way to stop the battle. The dragons didn’t really know what we were. They thought we were like animals.”
“So he trained you like an animal?”
“At first, yes.”
“Was sexual contact involved at any time?”
Aria nodded.
“So you were abused.”
“Not by him.”
“By who?”
Aria looked her lawyer dead in the eye. “You.”
“Me? I wasn’t there.”
“I mean you as in… society. I was a lost, fucked-up kid when I joined the service. They took care of me, and then they used me as a tool to get a job done. I was okay with that. But he taught me what it was to be a woman. And they… the dragons… never wanted war. They wanted to retreat.”
Her lawyer didn’t seem to care about any of that. His face was bland and unsympathetic as he repeated himself yet again. “I’m trying to get you off a charge of treason, Ms. Thomas-Jones. It carries the death penalty.”
“Maybe I was meant to die,” Aria said. “In that desert, when my plane went down. If that dragon hadn’t been on my ass, I would have died there and then. He gave me months of a love hardly anyone gets to have. If I die now, fine. At least I won’t spend a lifetime missing him.”
Her lawyer gave her a long look. “I’m going to argue diminished capacity and psychological compromise,” he said. “Whatever they did to you, it changed you.”
“That is true,” Aria agreed.
“It’s in your best interests to make an appeal to the court as a victim. You were a prisoner of war.”
“Yes,” Aria nodded. “I was.”
“So all we have to do is explain why you helped them after the Final Strike. Coercion on their part, perhaps. Did they force you to assist them? Were you a captive on that island?”
She should just lie. Vyktor was gone and she was on her own. But Aria couldn’t bring herself to do it. All she had left was her memories, and the truth of what had been between them. Besides, she didn’t believe for a second that she was ever going to get off these charges. The government were determined to make an example of her. Her face had been splashed over every magazine, website, newspaper, and letterbox flyer in the country. In the eyes of the world, she was deeply guilty already. They didn’t understand that the government had lied to them and blamed much of the destruction they had caused on the dragons.
A tap on the door interrupted the meeting. Her lawyer looked relieved.
“We need the prisoner. We need to run some medical assessments on her.”
“You have to make sure I’m healthy before you execute me,” Aria laughed sadly. “Just give me a bullet and be done.”
Nobody paid attention to what she said. Nobody cared. They unshackled her and led her to a medical chamber where she was shackled to a bed while a doctor with a chronically flat affect went through the motions of an exam. Aria did as she was told, there was no point resisting. She peed in the cup when they asked her, then went back and allowed herself to be shackled again.
“Oh,” the doctor said a few minutes later. “That’s interesting.”
“What?” Aria lifted her head.
The doctor looked at her with his dull milk eyes and said two words that changed everything.
“You’re pregnant.”
Aria stared at him. “I can’t be. I haven’t been with a man in…”
She hadn’t been with a man—but she had been with a dragon. Vyktor. Holy… was it even possible?
“Lie back, please,” the doctor said. “Lift your shirt.”
He produced an ultrasound machine, squirted gel on her belly, and began moving the probe back and forth over her stomach. Aria watched the doctor’s face as it began to contort.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I think it has a defect.”
“What’s wrong?”
“It… er… it… uhm… it has…” The doctor called his assistant over. “What would you say that looks like?”
“It looks normal. Strong heartbeat… all limbs present and correct… and…” The assistant’s voice trailed off too. “Wings?”
Oh, god. It was Vyktor’s.
The doctor was talking again, not to her, of course. “We will have to make alternative arrangements until the… offspring is born. The possible studies are…”
Aria had thought she knew fear when she flew her first fighter mission. She had thought she knew fear when the dragon ripped her canopy off and stood above her with its fire breath and sharp claws. But she had never known the deep, primal, true fear of someone wanting to harm the life inside her.
“No,” she said, her voice shaking with rage. “No, you will not hurt…”
“Sedate her,” the doctor ordered his assistant.
Obeying directly, the assistant pushed a dose of sedative directly into Aria’s neck. Almost immediately, the world began to fog over.
“No…” Aria reached out for her cuffs. She had to get free, but already the weakness was overcoming her.
She felt herself being unshackled and moved, but she was powerless to do anything as two guards lifted her onto a stretcher and began carrying her back to her cell.
“Lizard fucker,” one of them muttered. “She fucked the lizards. Now she’s got a lizard in her belly.”
“Maybe they made her,” the other replied.
“Nah, she’s defending them,” the first guard said. “She’s a filthy lizard fucker. That’s what she is.”
Where the fuck were you when I was flying missions, huh? Down here in this bunker, nice and safe, I bet. You’ve never been within a hundred miles of a lizard, let alone close enough to be fucked by one. You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Neither one of you.
She tried to say all that and more. But it all came out in a long, incoherent moan of vaguely word-like sounds that didn’t do anything but make the guards laugh.
* * *
When she came to, Aria ached with the agony of a sadness so deep she could barely stand it. When it was her and her alone, she had been content with death. But that was no longer the case. She had someone else to fight for. Someone infinitely vulnerable. Someone who would be born of her body and Vyktor’s blood—if the doctors did not decide to do their ‘studies’ first.
It had never been so important to fight before, and she had never been so totally incapable of fighting. There was nothing in the cell to use as a tool, and there was no way out. The walls of the thing were several feet thick, so there was no chance of burrowing.
It was all she could do to slow her breathing and try not to give into panic. There would be a way out. There was always a way out. What she had to do was be calm and quiet and then when that opportunity came, she had to take it no matter what the cost. There was no longer any room for caution in her world.