Chapter 41
Hugo, you’re late! We’re going to miss the start of the show!
—Message from Kaia Luna (16) to Hugo Sorensen (16)
“LOVE ISN’T THAT simple,” Bo replied, and using that word, it came easy. It felt right. And yet his mind continued to churn, his heart fucking aching with the hurt. “A man who isn’t here has no faults, can’t make Kaia angry.”
Carlotta nodded after a long pause, a slight curve to her lips. “Absence does definitely make the heart grow fonder.” She looked at Filipe and something unspoken passed between them, the communication so effortless that Bo thought of a distant future in which he and Kaia sat next to each other and spoke with their eyes.
Filipe’s deep voice shattered the fragile daydream. “Hugo’s a charmer, as my ma used to say. That boy can make Bebe herself laugh, and when he was younger, he could make anyone, even my Carly, forgive him his sins.” Reaching out an age-spotted hand, he closed it over his mate’s.
She turned hers upside down, wove her fingers through his. “Black-haired, with skin as dark as Filipe’s and a smile like the sun, he’s got the devil in him—but it’s a charming, likable devil. There’s no meanness in Hugo.”
Bowen had never been called charming. “What’s he like as a friend?”
“He can be fickle,” Carlotta said with a smile. “But he’s so joyously dismayed about being late or forgetting an appointment or not paying back a loan that you forgive him instantly.” A glance at her mate. “He was careful with Kaia, though, always there when she needed him.”
“She’s special to him,” Filipe confirmed. “He’d do anything for her, I think. They laughed together a lot.”
Bo’s shoulders knotted, his thoughts snapping back once again to the exchange in the lab and to Kaia stepping away, putting distance between them. “Did he have curiosity?” he asked past the rock that sat in his stomach. “Like Kaia.” For the sake of the investigation, he needed to get a handle on why a poker-playing charmer would suddenly turn detective, but it was the man who adored Kaia who wanted to get to the core of this stranger who lived in her heart.
“Curious?” Carlotta pondered the question. “Not a word I’d choose to describe Hugo. He can find out information, yes. But it’s usually because he’s been told to find that information or because he needs it for a reason of his own.”
The hairs stirred on the back of Bowen’s neck.
Was it possible someone else had asked Hugo to look into the movements of the Alliance Fleet? It couldn’t have been Malachai—it was obvious the news had come as a shock to both him and Miane. So either Hugo had been so struck by what he’d heard from his drunk friend that he’d begun digging, or someone else in BlackSea had pushed him to it after Hugo shared what he knew.
But if that was true, why had that unknown individual left Miane and Malachai out of the loop, not even coming forward after Hugo vanished? It wasn’t as if Hugo and his hypothetical partner had been acting against BlackSea. They’d been doing the direct opposite.
The questions lingering on his mind, Bo took his leave from Carlotta and Filipe ten minutes later, then continued on in his attempts to understand Hugo. He was careful who he spoke to, and he didn’t turn all conversations to the missing man. That would leave too wide a trail if clanmates got together and began talking.
“I love Hugo, don’t get me wrong,” Tansy said when he tracked her down to the large growing area in habitat three where she was pruning plants using a sharp pair of shears. “But I never saw him as Kaia’s mate. I’ve always thought she needed someone stronger, someone who’d be her shield and her rock.” She put her cuttings in a basket by her feet. “With Hugo, Kaia was the rock and the shield and the one who got him out of scrapes. Been that way since they were kids.”
Bo still had more questions than answers by the time he called off the hunt, but he had begun to form a real picture of Hugo Sorensen. A charming and feckless friend, but one on whom Kaia could rely when it mattered. The man had a weakness for poker but was gifted with the comms, seeming to coax a signal from thin air sometimes.
He was also an accomplished hacker who’d once made every comm screen across BlackSea’s entire network display a fight scene featuring two samurai cats.
He’d been fourteen at the time.
Bowen had to like the guy for his balls and ingenuity.
However, before the dossier—and his childhood pranks aside—Hugo didn’t appear to have proactively done anything beyond the necessary that didn’t relate either to Kaia or to himself. He’d once spent eight days sourcing a rare food item for Kaia, and he’d learned how to tile because he didn’t like the tiles in his bathroom, but in general he seemed happy to grin and coast along.
Bo stopped on a connecting bridge, staring out into the black where nothing seemed to swim, the world beyond the lights of the habitat an endless darkness. Like the dark places in his soul, the scars on his psyche that meant no one would ever describe him as having a “smile like the sun.”
Despite Hugo’s faults, he was widely liked—and badly missed. Nearly all his clanmates had smiled when talking about Hugo. Others had frantically blinked back tears at the loss of him. Hugo could be careless, but he had the ability to make people love him.
Had their positions been reversed, Hugo would’ve already been a station favorite.
Bo didn’t have that gift. It took him time to earn people’s trust, time to build friendships . . . time to win a woman’s heart.
“You keep your promises,” he said quietly, even while knowing it was foolish to compare himself to a man who wasn’t here and who might never return. “You don’t forget to do the things you say you’ll do.”
Kaia, however, was the one person for whom Hugo had kept his promises.
Hugo had also made Kaia laugh. He hadn’t hurt her.
Again and again, Bo saw the smile fading from her face, the playful mischief replaced by shock and pain. The anger had come later. First had come the terrible hurt.
Why hadn’t she told him, he’d asked.
The real question was: why hadn’t he told her the one thing she needed to know to understand who and what he was?
Because his reaction had nothing to do with fear that she’d violate his mind. “You’re a fucking asshole, Bo.” Kaia would never go where she wasn’t invited. It wasn’t in her nature to act in a mercenary and cruel way. She had a wild gentleness inside her that was all about caring for others.
A hard object poked him in the thigh. He jerked his gaze to the left, to find himself confronted by a woman with night-dark skin who stood under five feet tall and was so heavily wrinkled that her wrinkles had wrinkles. But her eyes were bright and hard and sharp, and though she held a cane, it didn’t really look like she needed it. “What did you do to Kaia?” A querulous demand.
Bowen flinched inwardly at the wording of her question. “What business is that of yours?” He’d go to Kaia and he’d lay his worthless heart at her feet, and maybe she’d decide she didn’t want it, but that was between him and his siren.
The wrinkled little woman poked him again with her cane.
Bo could’ve easily grabbed the cane from her, but if she did actually need it, he’d be consigning her to a painful tumble to the floor. He decided to simply move out of the way of her next salvo—she was spry but he’d surely regained enough muscle mass to have the edge over a woman who looked three hundred years old.
“It’s my business because I say it’s my business,” she said, her beady eyes reminding him of—
“You’re the turtle,” he blurted.
She just snorted. “Well, whatever you did, you’d better fix it. Or I’ll throw you out an exit pool myself.” Lifting the cane, she shook it at him. “No one gets away with bruising a heart that soft—all that girl knows how to do is love. And she’s not one to betray her pain, so whatever you did, it must’ve been awful. Go fix it.” Pushing him out of the way on that command, the tiny turtle woman stomped off down the bridge.