11.
MADDIE
Damien was here and Maddie felt like she couldn’t breathe. Her body was giving up from the shock. How had they gotten there so quickly? Was this really it?
Redek was frozen, too, and that was the really scary part. He was the experienced one. He was the one she had to rely on to save her from this mess. If he was stuck, then they were screwed.
“What do we do?” she urged him again, ignoring his comment. “We have to get out of here. We could still get to the ship.”
“If the IU are invading they’re going to be stopping anyone from leaving.”
“Are they invading? Or are they just here to look for us?” Maddie had no idea what was happening. She’d known that Damien had powerful friends, but enough friends to get IU forces to intervene in a runaway case? It was far beyond what she’d expected. “What do we do?” she pleaded, hysteria in her voice.
Redek turned to the hangar employee, who was pulling open his drawers and arming himself with various knives and guns. “What’s procedure on the planet?” he asked. “Do you know how many people are here? What they’re here for?”
“Stay the fuck away from me,” he replied, voice wavering. “I’m not getting into trouble because of you.”
Redek clenched his fists and looked ready to threaten the employee, but restrained himself. “Tell me how to get out of here without going on the street.”
The man shook his head, muttering under his breath and ignoring Redek.
The wail of the siren got louder and faster, and Redek snapped. He strode forward, lifting the man off the floor with a fist bunched in the front of his shirt. “How do I get out of here without going on the street?” he demanded again. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will.”
Maddie believed it, too. She could see Redek’s rage coming on. His skin was splitting and when he spoke his canines looked like the fangs in traditional vampire flicks.
“There’s a door in the back,” the employee sniveled. “Behind a dumpster. It leads into the gang’s tunnels, they own the hangar and use it for smuggling. You can go there. But it’s dangerous.”
Redek dropped the man so suddenly he couldn’t find his footing and collapsed into a heap on the floor. Maddie was too on edge to feel bad, though.
She accepted Redek’s hand when he took hers and began dragging her from the office. “We have to risk it,” he said. “I don’t know how big this is or how long it’s going to last, but if they find us it’s over.”
They found the door easily enough, and then they were jogging down the corridor. “What if we run into someone?” she asked as she tried to keep up with Redek’s long strides. “Do you really think there’s a whole army out there?” She looked up, but the hangar roof had been closed and she couldn’t see the sky. They were blind.
“I have no idea.”
“Do you think we should surrender?”
“Absolutely not.”
“But people might die.”
“You might die.”
She swallowed her argument, feeling warm despite everything.
They ran for what felt like forever, zigzagging down different corridors and making choices as to what path they should take seemingly at random. Somehow, they never ran into anyone else. Eventually, Maddie had to shake her head and tug on Redek’s hand. “I can’t,” she gasped. “I need a break. Just five minutes to catch my breath.”
She’d never done much exercise on the compound before, and her lungs were burning from the exertion.
Redek retrieved some water from the bag of groceries for her. “Here.”
She sipped in between breaths, looking around the corridor and finally taking a good look at their surroundings. This was more of a tunnel than a corridor. They’d started off metal, but now they were encased with packed earth. “Where are we? What are these?”
“I have no idea, but I’ve been taking ones that are leading us downhill. We must be quite far underground by now.”
“I didn’t even notice,” she muttered, looking at the floor. It seemed level. “Is that a good idea? We’re trapped under here.”
“It’ll take them longer to find us.”
“But they will find us. With tunnels like this there’s no way they won’t get into them eventually.”
“Well, then maybe you should have shared your plan,” he snapped, skin a dangerous shade of pink. He was losing control.
Tears stung at her eyes. “I don’t know what to do.”
“I don’t know either. I guarded people. I never did anything like this before.”
She buried her palms into her eyes and tried to take some cooling breaths. “Maybe I can get some information from the phone. Maybe we can at least see what’s going on.”
Redek leaned against the dirt wall and nodded, taking a sip of the water himself. “If these are the gang tunnels, the gang must be on the surface dealing with the IU,” he decided while Maddie added the local data pack to the phone and began searching to see if she could find any news. “This planet isn’t exactly known for its cowardice. Maybe they’ve already chased the IU away.”
“They have an alarm system, so they must have done it before.”
Maddie scoured local forums and social media to try and get a feel for what was happening on the ground. People reported thousands of IU soldiers, all armed, walking the streets of the city searching for two fugitives. So far no one had been reported as hurt, and there was no mention of any gang activity. She relayed all of this to Redek.
“They’re planning something,” he said. “If they’re not here but there are no reports, they’re planning something. The territorial gangs must be working together, too, if no one has made a move yet.”
“So what do we do? Just wait until they make their move and see who wins out?”
“I don’t know what else we can do.”
Maddie slumped. “I feel like a sitting duck.”
Redek wrapped his arms around her, letting her rest her head against his chest. “I’m sorry that I brought you here. It was a mistake.”
“No, it wasn’t. It was the best call. We could never have guessed this would happen.”
“I should have known better.”
Her lip quirked. “You’re not a god, no matter how convinced I was of it when I first saw you. We had to get money at some point no matter which planet we landed on, and Damien would have found us.”
He tightened his grip on her. His skin had lost its pink tinge, and that was scarier than the thought of him losing control. He seemed to have given up, to have lost faith that they had any chance of getting out of there.
Maddie wasn’t out of hope yet. They were on a notoriously lawless planet that had apparently kept the IU at bay for years. They could do it again.
“I just wanted to keep you safe,” he murmured against her hair.
“I didn’t want you to keep me safe. I wanted you to make me happy. And you did.” She pulled back. “If we’re going to just wait until the gangs do their thing, can we at least find somewhere that isn’t a stuffy mud tunnel to do it in?”
It didn’t spur him on like she’d hoped for, but he nodded. “Yeah, it’s not the most glamorous place.”
They walked down the corridor with laced fingers and a deafening silence. The fact there was still no noise from above them was welcome and awful at the same time. It meant they were completely blind, just waiting for Damien to find the tunnels and send his men charging after them. It also meant they were still alive, for now. They could still pretend they had time together.
After the next corner, the mud turned back into metal. “We’ve not started ascending again,” Redek said in low tones, pausing. “This is still as far underground as the dirt tunnels.”
It was still silent, though, and he kept walking. There were doors off this corridor, and he pressed an ear to the first one. “It’s quiet.”
“Then let’s go in.”
The door was unlocked, and inside rows of bunk beds lined the walls. “Oh. It’s a dorm room,” she said. The beds looked like they hadn’t been slept in, and there were no personal effects on the bedside tables. “I guess we stumbled across their barracks. Do gangs have barracks?”
Redek had strode straight to another door on the other side of the room. “Right now all I care about is that gangs have bathrooms.”
She chuckled, sitting down on the bottom bunk closest to the corridor and pulling out her phone.
Finally with a couple of minutes to spare, she searched for the news articles on her parents’ deaths. She’d looked at them a thousand times before, but she’d still doubted herself. Part of her was convinced that her mind was tricking her: it was just denial, or confusion. After all, Damien had clearly tampered with her memory to make her forget everything before the night he’d stolen her away.
She rubbed her head as the memories assaulted her. She’d thought about it all night when Redek was asleep against her, her fingers running through his hair.
After taking a deep breath, she tapped on the link to the article that had been open on her screen back at the compound at least once a month.
And the picture that stared back at her wasn’t the same woman from her memory.
She closed her eyes. She could picture her mom, see the exact face as Damien’s henchman had extinguished the light in her eyes, and it wasn’t the same woman.
In her heart of hearts she knew that the woman from her memory was her mom—she’d known it from the moment the memory began, as if she’d just woken up a truth that had always been inside her—but the woman in the article was someone else.
Maddie had no idea who. All her memories of this face were from the article in front of her.
The bathroom door opened and Redek emerged. He frowned when he saw her face. “What’s wrong? Did something happen above ground?”
“No. I subscribed to some feeds but none have updated.” She showed him what was on her screen. “This is a different woman than the one in my memory.”
Redek took a seat beside her on the small single bed. He had to lean sideways because he was too tall to fit underneath the top bunk. “You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
“Then who is this?”
“Then who am I?”
She’d thought she was Maddie Lancaster, daughter of Lucille and Timothy Lancaster, who had been murdered in a horrible crime that she’d been the sole survivor of. Damien had convinced the papers to print that she’d died along with her family to try and prevent the perpetrators coming after her.
She’d already known the second half was a lie, but the first half? She’d always believed that.
Maybe she wasn’t even Maddie. Maybe that wasn’t even her name.
Damien had really taken everything from her, even her identity.
Redek wrapped a secure arm around her shoulder. “A name is nothing,” he said. “You could be called anything but you’d still be the same beautiful, smart, tech geek that I fell in love with.”
Her lip quirked, but it wasn't a real smile. She didn’t even register the L-word. She had so many questions and no one to ask for the answers.
"Thank you," she said to Redek anyway. "It's one of those things I'll deal with if we make it out of this alive, I guess." She paused, gnawing on her lip. "Do you think my dad could be alive, though? If the people in the photo aren't my parents, and I only saw my mom being killed. It's possible, isn't it?" she begged. “In my memory, he wasn’t planning on killing my mom. Maybe he just left my dad alone.”
Redek's smile was sad, and she wanted to be annoyed that he pitied her, but couldn’t muster the energy. "It's possible."
She sighed and closed the article. There was no point in thinking about it now. She'd been Maddie her entire life, and that wasn't going to change if these were her last few hours.
"Do you think he'll kill me?" she asked. She hadn't even thought of it before; she'd just assumed they were being hunted down to be murdered and forgotten about, but the whole reason Maddie had been taken in the first place was to help Damien become a financial success. "He has to know that even if he took me back to the compound I'd never do what he wanted."
"I don't know."
"I'd rather die than go back there."
"It's not going to come to that."
She laughed, and it was a little hysterical. "Yes, it is. And you know it."
"Now that you know the truth he wouldn't be able to let you near a computer even if you agreed to keep hacking for him. You'd be able to send a message out to someone to come and rescue you. If he finds you, he'll kill you."
"It really shouldn't have been such a relief to hear that."
Redek shifted down the bed so he could fit beneath the top bunk and ran his fingers through her hair, tilting her head up to kiss her. It was a good distraction from the depressed mood she was slowly falling into. All her hope had been eradicated in an instant when she opened that article and confirmed her identity crisis.
"One thing I know is that I can't die without having had you," Redek murmured against her lips.
A shiver ran down her spine, and all thoughts of Damien were gone from her mind. Redek invaded her senses, his rough hands slipping below her shirt to caress her lower back, avoiding her stitches.
Maddie had expected to be terrified when she kissed someone for the first time—she'd expected to be shy and embarrassed and to make a fool of herself. With Redek, though, it was like she'd been doing it all her life. He kissed her softly at first, easing her into it and letting her find her footing. His hands wreaked havoc with her mind. How could she concentrate on being embarrassed when his thumbs were edging closer to her nipples and sending her into a frenzy?
It was so much better than anything she'd been able to conjure in her mind. Even a kiss from Redek had her heart pounding more than touching herself did.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him harder, taking his bottom lip between her teeth and biting softly. Enough to make him growl at the back of his throat and lift her onto his lap by the hips. She rolled her hips against his hard shaft.
This time, finally, she was going to get to touch him. She'd been so exhausted the first time, in her room, that she hadn't been able to run her fingers over his muscles and take him inside her.
Now it was her turn to have her way with him.
She pushed his shirt up from the bottom, fingers dancing over solid abs. She could have spent a lifetime just touching him, feeling his rough skin beneath her fingers.
Redek wasn't hesitating, either. He held her like he was a man starved, pulling her as far into his lap as she'd go and cupping her ass with rough fingers.
Then, suddenly, he stopped. He broke their kiss and pressed a finger to her lips when she went to ask him what was wrong.
Footsteps.
There were footsteps coming down the corridor.
"Shit," she muttered, straining her ears. They were definitely coming toward their room, and there were lots of them. "What do we do?"
Redek was in action. For such a big man, she had no idea how he could be so stealthy. He lifted her from his lap and deposited her on the bed before standing up. He pulled off his jacket and retrieved his knife belts from his backpack, strapping them around his chest. He holstered two pistols at his waist. All of it was done in under a minute and without a sound.
There was nothing more they could do.
Redek stood in front of where Maddie cowered on the bottom bunk, knowing she should get her pistol but being unable to move.
She couldn't even have this one thing with him before it all went to shit?