Chapter Twenty-Five
Maybe it made him a complete coward, but hell, if only he could have stayed unconscious for a while longer. Until say a rescue party turned up, or crazy-pants-Carrie decided she’d played with him enough and simply killed him.
Despite her tactics, he hadn’t told her anything, though she’d certainly enjoyed herself in every way possible. Thank God she’d received a call and hadn’t gotten around to making certain threats a reality.
Whatever the message, she seemed pleased and immediately set herself straight and disappeared. A few moments later, everything around him had hummed to life, confirming he was in the hold of a ship. He estimated they’d been traveling for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes—deeper into enemy territory if he had to guess.
He’d considered trying to get free again, but his last attempt had only left him with sore, bleeding wrists. His plan was to wait until Carrie released him—assuming she was going to move him off this ship at some point—and fight his way free.
Since he’d come out on the losing end the last couple of times he’d fought her, he didn’t expect to win and escape. No, this was more a sacrificed-at-the-hand-of-the-enemy thing. There was probably no hope of saving himself, but he could make sure that Jenna was safe… Or at least not in danger because he spilled his guts. Plus, there was absolutely no way he was going to take another round of interrogation like the last he’d just endured. He would die before he let that psycho bitch lay one more finger on him.
Everything around him rattled as the ship bumped down to land and then went quiet once the engines were offline. And now the fun would begin all over again.
Carrie appeared from the hatchway, strutting through like a cheap stripper on a stage, wiggling her fingers at him.
“Hope you’ve settled in, lover. We’ve got company.”
He only glared. She smiled back at him as if he were a cranky puppy, which only kicked his already wildfire-burning temper up a few more notches. When he got his hands on her, she wouldn’t be so chummy any longer.
She pushed some junk out of the way then hit the ramp release controls. The atmospheric doors cracked open, sending more unsecured stuff tumbling as a shaft of sunlight cut right across his eyes.
Carrie called a greeting and two male voices answered, one so familiar, it sent an ache through his guts, before it tipped the boiling anger into outright savage fury.
Lawler.
He’d recognize the guy’s voice anywhere; it’d been haunting his dreams.
“I’ve got a special guest,” Carrie said as she led the two men into the ship.
Seb blinked, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the brighter light, and focused on the CSS traitors in front of him. He didn’t know the other guy’s name, but he was a supply runner who worked shuttles between the UEF Ilari base and the Knox.
“Sebastian Rayne.” Lawler walked over and clapped him on the shoulder, squeezing painfully, digging his fingers into the joint. “Didn’t think I’d be seeing you again so soon, buddy.”
“Get your filthy hand off me, asshole.”
Lawler laughed, and then reached down to pluck at the ruined remains of his shirt. “Carrie, I see you and Seb have become intimately acquainted. He always was a magnet to the ladies. Used to drive me nuts. One smile, and he could have any girl he wanted. Couldn’t understand why he didn’t plow his way through the entire female population on the ship. I certainly would have.”
“Maybe because I’m not a sleazy dick-bag like some people,” he muttered through clenched teeth.
Lawler backhanded him, reopening the cut on the inside of his lip, leaving blood welling in his mouth.
“Why exactly is he here, Carrie?”
The agent stepped forward, bracing one hand on the back of his chair and catching his chin. “Besides the fact that he’s gorgeous? I thought he knew something about the drive or its whereabouts, but so far, he’s proving uncooperative.”
He didn’t bother telling her for the millionth time that he didn’t know anything about the damned-to-hell drive, instead he wrenched his head out of her hold, leaving scratches across his jaw.
“Looks like he’s still got some fight left in him. Maybe you just need to work him over a little more. Actually break him this time?”
Carrie crossed her arms, pinning Lawler with a scowl. “I was working my way up to it when you commed. You said you found the drive.”
Lawler glanced at his companion, who’d remained silent so far. “Deric knows where it is.”
“Well?” Carrie shifted her glare to the man in question.
“The rebels have it,” Deric answered, a note of hesitation in his tone.
Yeah, he could get that, telling crazy-pants-Carrie bad news would probably not end well. She seemed like the type who would shoot the messenger.
Carrie strolled forward. “And how did the rebels come to acquire such an important item?”
“We think one of them was following the CI deep-cover agent who had the drive, and swapped it out with a blank one when the CI agent, Jenna, was killed.” Deric stiffened, but otherwise didn’t move as Carrie reached him and trailed a finger up his arm, to his shoulder, and across his upper back as she stopped behind him.
A hard surge of relief swamped Seb, making him dizzy for a second. They still thought Jenna was dead. Thank God. Now all he had to do was make sure it stayed that way. The tidbit about the drive was interesting, because according to Jenna, the deep-cover agent had never made the handoff. So however the rebels had gotten their hands on the device, it’d been at some other time, not when the ill-fated meeting with Jenna had gone down.
“Well, I suppose the rebels having it is slightly less inconvenient than the UEF having it.” Carrie shifted closer to Deric, pressing her chest against his back as her hands landed on his shoulders. Now the man wasn’t looking so nervous…more intrigued. Obviously the moron hadn’t gotten the memo about how sociopathic the woman was.
“Still, we don’t have the drive, and that’s a problem.” Carrie’s hands slid upward, until they were all over Deric’s neck and head, and the guy definitely thought Christmas had come early.
With a sharp jerk, Carrie twisted, snapping Deric’s neck and leaving him to drop to the floor. She stepped over his body and leaned closer to Lawler, who didn’t seem either surprised or perturbed by his companion’s sudden demise.
“So we need to find those rebels and get the drive back. Yes?”
Lawler gave a slow, calm nod. “I’ve already got people on it.”
Carrie patted his cheek. “That’s what I like to hear.”
Turning, she set her eyes on Seb, making his blood run like ice water through his veins.
“In the meantime, let’s figure out once and for all whether my darling Sebastian has any useful information.” She sent Lawler a coy smile. “I’m in the mood for a threesome.”
The churning in his guts surged up to the back of his throat, but he swallowed down the burn. Bad enough that Carrie had put her hands all over him. If Lawler so much as touched him—
A furious, white-hot flaring rage the likes of which he’d never felt before alit, leaving his very limbs smoldering.
Despite already knowing it wouldn’t do him any good, he subtly tugged at his wrists, pulling and twisting, trying to yank free or loosen the binds.
“Let’s move him to a safer location first,” Lawler answered, making Seb’s pulse spike.
This was it. His one chance to get free. When they released him from this chair, he’d take them both on, and even if they killed him, he’d come out of this the victor—taking the truth of Jenna to his grave.
Lawler came over, but instead of reaching down to unfasten the chair tether, he stared down at him for a moment. Seb’s chest hurt to look into the face of a man he’d all but loved as a brother and later find out everything had been a lie.
“Knowing you, buddy, I’m sure you’re thinking about doing something kamikaze as soon as I release you.”
He clenched his jaw, focusing on the utter contempt and fury festering toward this man.
“Sorry, but I just can’t let that happen,” Lawler continued. “Not until we’re finished with you.”
Lawler produced an old-fashioned stunner—put into use after the early-technologists of the 2000s had used Tasers—but since replaced by other, more efficient and less painful tech.
“Screw you, jerk-faced bastard.” He wrenched against the binds in one last effort to pull his hands free as Lawler laughed and hit him with a round from the stunner, punching him into darkness with all the subtlety of taking a bat to the face.
…
Seb came around, head aching, bound hands now attached to a hitching post in a stable. The stunner hadn’t put him fully under—things had definitely gone black there for a moment, but it’d left pain reverberating through his body until he wished he’d been rendered completely unconscious. Unfortunately, he’d still been with it enough to be even more pissed off when Lawler dragged him out of the ship and into a disused stable on some kind of abandoned farm.
“Is he secured?” Carrie asked, attention on the comm in her hand as she stopped nearby.
“You think I’d be standing here waiting for you if he wasn’t?” Lawler drawled in reply, sounding bored, or maybe inpatient.
“We’ll have to postpone our plans. Stanton has been comming me. I need to get back before he gets suspicious.” She crouched in front of Seb, threading her fingers through his mussed hair. Goddamn, even his skin ached from that antiquated stunner. The last thing he needed was crazy-pants-Carrie touching him. “Try not to get lonely without me. I’ll be back in the morning.”
She patted his cheek, hard enough to leave a slight sting, then stood and turned to Lawler. “And I know it’ll be hard to resist, but try not to have too much fun without me. I want him in decent condition when I come back.”
“I’ll try to contain myself.” Lawler’s voice came out deadpan, but there was a glint in his gaze that suggested he was probably counting down the seconds until his psychotic partner left.
The comm in Carrie’s pocket chimed again, and she took it out with a muttered curse. “Stanton is all worked up about something. When we win the war and I finally get out of pretending to be an uptight CI agent, I’m going to make sure I shoot him in the face to celebrate.”
Not waiting for Lawler to answer, Carrie left, no doubt fabricating a response to her superior agent concerning her whereabouts.
Lawler stretched, then went over to a pack and pulled out a cloudy bottle of what Seb guessed was some kind of liquor.
“You look like you could use a drink.” Lawler strolled over, holding the bottle out.
When Seb didn’t react, simply glaring in response, Lawler splashed the alcohol in his face, sending it streaming down his chest. He clenched his jaw over a curse as it dribbled over every cut Carrie had given him, stinging like a hundred fire ants swarming his flesh.
“Oh, my bad. That had to hurt, right?” Lawler sent him a nasty grin, then took a swig of the liquor. The ex-fighter pilot shifted to sit on an upturned crate. “So, how’s things been on the Knox the last few weeks? Bet you’re bored out of your skull without me around.”
Said like he’d simply shifted posts or something, not betrayed them.
“That crippled commander of yours must be pissing in his boots over the moles we had right under your noses for all these years.”
More than anything Lawler could have said about him personally, the taunt about Yang jacked his temper.
“Then obviously you didn’t learn much in the years you spent on board, because otherwise you’d know Yang is about ready to bring the Knox down here and raze every shitty CSS outpost and base to the ground. UEF politics are pretty much the only thing standing between you and complete annihilation.”
Lawler saluted him with the bottle. “Why do you think we knew we could get away with it? Why do you think this war wasn’t over two years after it started, instead of continuing on two decades later? The CSS aren’t the real enemy here, it’s the UEF and their bureaucratic BS that we’re really fighting.”
“That’s what you think this war is about?” Disbelief dampened his pain momentarily. “You think you’re fighting some noble revolution, the little guy making a stand against Big Brother?”
“This universe is overgoverned.” From the tone Lawler used, this was no doubt a spiel he’d given before. “The UEF decide everything with their committees, and commissioned hearings and senate debates—they’re completely out of touch.”
“You’re calling them out of touch? You’ve been on the ground, you’ve seen what this war is doing to the families of this planet. This is about a man who got too powerful and instead of abiding by the laws every other planet and system live by—peacefully for the most part—he dropped a bomb on his own people to take out a handful of UEF representatives and send a message.”
“The so-called Pontifex is insignificant. He’s terminal and will be dead soon anyway.” Lawler waved a hand, dismissing this otherwise huge piece of information. “But there are people ready to step in, people who’ll take this fight to the wider universe. People who see this one small system as the birthplace for a larger change. People whose message will reach all systems and all planets. What will the UEF do when a dozen systems rise up against them?”
Seb stared at Lawler, taking in this conjecture. The guy had to be crazy, right? That the small war in this system could spread to the rest of the universe. The UEF wouldn’t let that happen. But as he studied Lawler’s calm, confident features, he didn’t see one hint of crazy in the guy’s unwavering gaze. If what he said was true, this was so much bigger than the CSS. In fact, it wasn’t even about one religious zealot with cultlike followers any longer. Other factions—more dangerous, more organized—were set to take advantage of a situation the UEF had always viewed as more of an annoyance than an actual problem.
And if Lawler was happily sitting here divulging all these plans? It meant the guy didn’t plan on leaving him alive long enough to tell anyone.