The amount of sleeping pirates and slavers that Sierra snuck past had her on edge. From the way the buildings were set up, she got the idea that most of the activity, whatever passed for entertainment around here, happened at the center of the settlement. Most of the residents lived on the outskirts. Though outskirts was a misnomer. She could sprint from one end of the village to the other without running out of breath. The place was little more than a way station, a place where these terrible people could take some time to rest and re-energize before heading back out to terrorize innocent people out in space.

A few old-fashioned torches serve as the light sources for some of the more dilapidated huts and her fingers itched to tip them over and burn this place to the ground. But that would only send them fleeing, rats scurrying for survival. She and the agency would lose the lead they had on the abducted women and the way things worked out here, those women would never be found again. So she left the fires burning and didn’t stab anyone in their sleep, no matter how much she knew they deserved it.

Now would be a good time for her to check in with Mindy and catch her up on the situation, but Sierra remained silent. She didn’t want to risk making any unnecessary noise while she was so close to so many potential hostiles. And, if she were being honest, she didn’t want to listen to Mindy telling her to run away or take Raze out. Mindy couldn’t order her to do it, but there would be a notation about it in the mission log and that could complicate things. And things in Sierra’s head were already complicated enough, she didn’t need to add job troubles to the list.

She cleared her half of the town with no sign of the men that Raze was looking for and too much evidence of the women. She hadn’t found where they were being kept, but she could hear their screams and see them sleeping beside some of the pirates, dirty and unkempt. Her soul lurched and ached with every one that she walked past, but saving one now would doom the rest and Sierra wouldn’t do that. They were getting everyone out of this mess. Soon.

Dawn threatened on the horizon with no new clues. She’d used her journey to get a more accurate map of the town, but she’d need to return the next night to find the women. The longer she and her team stayed here, the longer it would be before the abducted women could be rescued by an extraction unit. Sierra promised herself that she’d find what she needed tomorrow and be done with this place. She’d stick the strange encounter with Raze into a box in the back of her mind and never think of it again. Or, well, maybe if she wanted to fantasize about what ifs, she’d think on it from her own place on Earth, many light years between them, which seemed like it was probably a safe distance.

They hadn’t specified the rendezvous point, but Sierra found Raze waiting for her at nearly the exact center of the town. His face gave away nothing, but his body thrummed with energy and she would have called him excited if he hadn’t said that thing about not feeling emotions. They slipped out of town in silence and she let Raze take the lead. She knew of a few places that would serve as decent hiding spots during the day, but she didn’t want to give them away if she didn’t have to.

But great minds clearly thought alike, as he led her past two hills and into a little cave that was obscured by bushes and moss. It was at the top of her list for potential hiding places. She was glad to see no signs of life on the inside; it didn’t seem like the pirates knew about the place and there weren’t any droppings or remains of animals. She might actually get a few hours of almost pleasant sleep, despite the company.

Or because of it.

“Any luck?” she asked as she settled herself into a little corner, trying to get comfortable.

Raze didn’t need to fidget like she did. He swept an area large enough for him to lay down and sat still as a statue. “Why are you here?” he asked in lieu of an answer.

“Why are you?” He didn’t get to know without a little quid pro quo.

“I found Toran and Kayde,” he said instead.

He hadn’t said their names before, but there were only two people he could be talking about. “Do you need help to get them out?” Now why did she have to go and offer that? She’d offered recon assistance, that was it. She couldn’t afford to get even more side tracked. Mindy wasn’t going to be silent for long.

“They’re being kept with about a dozen human women at the center of the settlement,” he said. “I can get them out by myself. But if I do…”

If he did, he risked the women. And if he did, the women wouldn’t be there for long. “They’ve been taking women from Earth,” she said, no longer playing games. “They finally nabbed someone important enough for the government to give a damn. I’m here to get the information we need to send in a team to get them out.”

“That seems like a lot of work for twelve abductees.”

“I thought there would be more.” Anyone saved was worth it, but space bound missions cost money, a lot of money. And part of her assignment was to confirm that the senator’s niece was among those held captive here. Sierra had been trying to ignore what that meant, but she knew. If the girl wasn’t here, these twelve women would be abandoned to whatever fate the slavers had in store for them.

“You are concerned for these women.” It wasn’t a question, thankfully. She might have slapped him if it was.

“If…” Sierra shook her head. “Every day they’re here is another day they suffer. And if—when—I leave them here, I’ll feel… complicit in this whole thing. I can’t guarantee that the follow up mission will be approved. I can’t guarantee that they’ll still be here if it is. The only thing that I can be sure of is that they’ll be abused every day until someone intervenes. And I want that someone to be me so bad that it hurts.”

***

Those psuedo feelings were getting to him again. Raze was torn between leaving this little cave to go and slay every pirate and slaver out there in Sierra’s name and closing the small distance between them to wrap her up in his strong arms and give her the support that she seemed to need so desperately. Her arms had started to cross in front of her, like some sad imitation of a hug.

He needed to stay where he was, needed to keep his distance. He’d found Toran and Kayde, and when the time was right he would retrieve them. He could not deviate to rescue the human women and he could not offer them a place on his ship if transportation was an issue for Sierra. But there was a flicker deep inside of him, one he’d extinguished so long ago that now relit, it burned like an inferno. He shifted to his feet and closed the distance between them, slinging an arm over her shoulders and pulling her close, careful to avoid contact with her skin.

“What are you doing?” she asked, not pulling away. In fact, she leaned in closer, letting her cheek rest against his chest where his heart pounded faster than the occasion called for.

That abnormal bodily reaction was one he should have noted in his log for further investigation of destabilization later, but sitting beside Sierra, he’d never felt more whole. He tried to come up with the proper thing to say, the words that would make this connection between them make sense. But nothing in his experience could explain it, and nothing short of immediate attack could make him let her go. “You need comfort,” he finally murmured, her hair soft against his lips.

Her own fingers danced across his stomach until she had a hand wrapped around his side. “How do you know that if you can’t feel anything?”

With you, I can. He didn’t say it, couldn’t quite believe it was true. This had to be some anomaly or some sign of degradation to himself. “You’re from Earth?” he asked, instead of going down the path of questions he couldn’t answer.

Sierra seemed to sense the conflict within him and accepted the change in topic. “Born and raised. Where do you call home?”

“That’s not something I can answer.” The location of the legion was one of the most closely guarded secrets they held. That, and the process to make the soulless. But Sierra stiffened in his embrace and he could sense she was about to pull away. To stop that, he had to say something. “It is not my home planet. I was born and raised there, but we have no home.”

She tilted her head up to look at him and their cheeks almost brushed. He pulled back enough to give them space, but that impossible part of him wanted to lean forward and see what would happen if they touched once more. What would she do to him? How would she change him? Would he survive it? Could he be whole?

“No home?” she prompted after several seconds.

“My race, Detyens, are originally from a planet called Detya. A little more than a hundred years ago it was destroyed, completely uninhabitable. Now there are survivors scattered throughout the stars. But there is no place that can really compete with where we’re supposed to be.” He’d seen the images of the planet in the run up to the final day, and he’d seen footage of what happened. An entire planet gone in minutes, with no explanation or foe to fight.

“Were you at war?” She settled back against him and something in Raze’s chest eased at her acceptance of the contact.

If he didn’t know better, he’d say that she was comforting him as much as he comforted her. But that was impossible. “No, it had been a long time since my people made an effort at anything besides peaceful exploration. Our military existed to protect our ships and our home, nothing more. Then one day a weapon was dropped from space. It incinerated the land, boiled the oceans. And whoever dropped it never claimed credit, never left any evidence of where they’d come from. And as far as we know, no one has ever used such a weapon again. News of a planet killer would have spread fast, and yet almost no one has heard of Detya or what happened to us.”

“That’s terrible.” Now she looked up at him with an unreadable expression in her eyes.

An awareness swelled between them, something too big for Raze to understand. It had him leaning in a little closer, breathing deep and catching the warm scent of her skin. He found himself saying more, even as he drew nearer to dangerous truths not meant to be shared with anyone. “Tens of thousands, perhaps even more, survived the attack. Mainly those who were away from the planet or on one of our space stations. A few craft managed to escape land before it was too late. But that was not the end of our suffering.” A strand of her hair had come undone from the braids she’d styled to tame it. Raze wrapped it lightly around one finger, careful to avoid her skin. The soft texture was a knife against his flesh, but he couldn’t make himself let go. “Every Detyen is meant to have a denya, a mate. They are the person who completes our souls. With billions of Detyens on a single planet, finding matches was no issue. Very few people were left alone. But when we scattered, we lost that connection and that hope. And if a Detyen doesn’t meet their mate by the time they turn thirty…” She stiffened against him slightly and he surmised that she knew the direction of this conversation. “We die without our mates. So the bomb may not have destroyed us in one instant, but we will not survive for many more generations as we live now.”

“So what does your mate think about that?” she asked. “You said that you turned thirty-two years ago, so you have a mate since you’re alive.”

He could say no more. Raze let go of her hair and pulled away. “My decisions are my own. Sleep now, I will take first watch.”

***

Oh, so he was going to do the stoic warrior thing. Great. Before the mission, Sierra would have said she preferred that attitude to the cowboys and bravos that she sometimes had to work with from the Earth military, but Raze cutting her off like that made her wish for a dozen of those guys from back home. She knew how to handle them. Raze, though? With his emotionless act that she was starting to see through and his heartbreaking story and the pain he couldn’t keep hidden? No, he was making her want things that she couldn’t afford to want. She’d never see him again after tomorrow.

Besides, he had some mate or something to go back home to. He wasn’t her problem in any way. Why that sent acid coursing through her veins, her stomach clenching with an emotion that was not jealousy, she wasn’t going to examine. She watched as he stalked away, each move dripping with the fluid grace of a jungle cat as he settled into position near the entrance to their little hideaway. He didn’t look back at her, but every cell in her body was attuned to him.

For a second back there, she’d thought he was about to kiss her. And she would have let him, no questions asked. Maybe emotion meant something different to the Detyens because she could no longer believe that Raze didn’t feel anything. She’d even begun to distinguish little inflections in that flat tone of his, micro-changes in pitch that she would have never noticed if they hadn’t been speaking for more than an hour. And that time had just flown by, seconds bleeding into minutes and more, without ever dragging on into awkward pauses and boredom.

She wanted more than a night with him, wanted to see what he’d do if she laid her hands on him, wanted to taste him and memorize the shape of his lips under hers. She wanted with such a fury that it frustrated her, lodging a sound of longing in her throat as she tried to find a comfortable position to rest in.

What was his denya like? Was it a mate for life sort of gig? Or did they have kids and then separate for good? Did he have kids? No, she decided, she didn’t believe that he did. She couldn’t imagine someone like him sacrificing the love he felt for his children in order to do whatever it was he did without his emotions. So maybe the mate thing was just a onetime deal, not a woman he had loved and given up to be a warrior for his people.

“If you would prefer to take the first watch, I can take my rest now,” Raze interrupted her thoughts. “You seem restless.”

No shit. “You gave me a lot to think about.” Her training usually meant she could fall into a light slumber in a blink and wake up alert with no issue. But not with her mind racing like this. “How does the denya thing work?” she asked. He had angled his body towards her and she chose to believe he’d answer some more questions, but she had to be careful because he would turn away in an instant, she was sure.

He was silent for so long that she started to think she was wrong about him being willing to answer, but after several moments he spoke and it was clear that he’d been putting his thoughts into logical order. “There is supposed to be a moment of recognition, when a Detyen knows his denya on sight. Then, commonly, they will bond as quickly as possible. Many choose to remain together, choose to love and have children. Some, though, find mated life not to their tastes and separate. Once bonded, they are safe from the Denya Price and may go on to live long happy lives, whether with their mate or not.”

Supposed to, commonly, many, some. But nothing about what he did. And then she remembered what he’d said earlier. He’d sacrificed his emotions to lengthen his life. “You don’t have a mate, do you?” There was no woman back home, no passel of children. If she had to guess, he had a small, cold cot with neutral colored sheets and no decorations wherever he slept. A cold, lonely little existence.

“No, I don’t.”

“Was it worth it?” If she were facing the prospect of death at her next birthday, would she make the same choice? Some days she felt ancient, but twenty-nine was so young, she didn’t want to die. But was Raze really living anymore?

She didn’t expect an answer, but she could feel his gaze on her, the weight of it as heavy as an emergency supply pack. “If you cannot sleep, you should take the first shift.”

That was it then. Sierra settled back into position. “It’s alright. Wake me when it’s my turn.” She flipped over and faced the wall, her mind strangely more at ease, even as it roiled with questions she knew Raze wouldn’t or couldn’t answer. Static crackled in her ear and she hoped that the signal had been disturbed and Mindy hadn’t heard their conversation. It wasn’t pertinent to the mission, and if he wanted to share his secrets with her, she’d gladly take them.

She drifted off to sleep with the weight of his gaze weighing her down and dreamed of darkness.