I need to kill myself, too.
She scrambled off the bed, going to look instinctively for the wedding dress in the closet. It still had the little black poison pill sewed into the hem. She could swallow it and be gone forever in less than five minutes.
But no. She stopped before she even reached the closet door. She didn’t deserve to die. She had killed Brand—the only one who had ever really loved her. For certainly her father and aunt didn’t care for her, except as a way to gain more status among the Seven Great Houses. She had killed her one true love—death was not an option.
“You don’t deserve a quick death,” she told herself. And she couldn’t bear to be in the bedroom and look at Brand with the light dying from his golden eyes one minute more.
Running to the living area, she reached for the communications cube which sat on a shelf. When she had first come to the Mother Ship, Brand had showed her how to use it to call for emergency services.
“Just in case you get into some kind of trouble while I’m gone from the suite,” he’d explained.
Now Allara grabbed for the cube and pressed the buttons blindly, not even sure who she was calling.
The cube buzzed and hummed for a moment, then a pale blue hologram of someone’s head appeared above it. It was faintly familiar, Allara thought. Someone she knew but her brain wouldn’t tell her who it was.
“Hello?” the head said. “This is the Med Center. Allara—is that you?” The face looked worried. “What is it, hon? What’s wrong?”
It was Liv, her brain finally supplied. One of the kind Kindred brides who had met her on her wedding day, what felt like a thousand cycles ago.
“Please come and take me away,” Allara told Liv and now she was beginning to cry—hot tears forcing themselves from her eyes and running down her cheeks.
“What? Honey, what’s wrong?” Liv asked anxiously. “What happened? Is that blood on your face?”
“Please take me away,” Allara repeated. “Take me away and torture me—I deserve it.”
“You deserve to be tortured? Allara, what are you talking about?” Liv exclaimed.
“Take me and torture me!” Allara insisted, as sobs shook her. “I deserve it, Liv—I…I killed my husband tonight.”
Then the sobs overcame her and she could say no more.
Thirty-Seven
Brand woke from a strange and awful dream. In it, Allara was hovering over him, her lovely face slack, her indigo eyes terrifyingly blank. She was holding some kind of dagger and talking about an oath, an oath she had to fulfill…
“Hey, there you are! I was hoping you’d wake up soon,” someone said.
Looking up, Brand saw Olivia—the mate of his kin, Baird—looking down at him. She had an anxious look on her face but she smiled when she caught Brand’s eyes.
“Where…” He coughed and put a hand to his chest when the cough caused a sharp spike of pain. “What—?”
“You’re going to be okay,” Olivia told him. “You had a pneumothorax—a collapsed lung. Sylvan and Yipper were working on you all night. But you’re going to be okay now—we just need a few more hours for the regenerative to finish repairing the tissue and you’ll be good as new.”
Brand shook his head—none of this made any sense. How would he get a collapsed lung in the middle of the night? Then he remembered the awful dream he’d been having. Suddenly, a terrible suspicion began to come over him.
What if it wasn’t a dream?
“Allara,” he said hoarsely, looking up at Olivia. “Where’s Allara? Where’s my wife?”
“Oh, honey…” An agonized look came over Olivia’s face and she sank down to sit on the side of the bed as she gripped Brand’s hand. “You don’t remember, do you?”
“Remember what? Where is she?” he demanded, trying to sit up.
Olivia pushed him back down, gently but firmly.
“Brand,” she said quietly. “I need you to listen and I need you to be strong for me right now. Allara isn’t who we thought she was—she tried to kill you last night.”
“What?” Panic gave him the strength to sit up, despite the aching pain in his chest and the drugs still coursing through his system. “You’re lying!” he shouted, but even as he did, he had an awful feeling that she wasn’t. He kept remembering the dream of Allara hovering over him, a silver blade held in her hands as she stared at him with those dead eyes.
“I’m not lying,” Olivia said calmly. “I’m so sorry, hon, but it’s true. She tried to kill you last night—in fact, she thought she had killed you. She called us here at the Med Center asking to be taken in and tortured because she had murdered you.” She shook her head. “It was awful.”
“Tortured?” Brand was horrified. “What did you do to her? Where is she? What happened?”
“I’m afraid we had to return her to her people.” The new voice came from the doorway. Looking up, Brand saw Commander Sylvan coming into the room. “Kindred law does not allow the execution of women, even in the event of attempted murder,” he said, coming over to Brand’s bedside. “So we sent her back to the Q’ess for whatever they deemed was the appropriate punishment.”
“You sent her back?” Brand shook his head. “I don’t understand this—I don’t understand how any of this could happen!”
“Do you remember anything at all?” Olivia asked him. “Were you awake when she stabbed you?”
“I remember waking up from some kind of dream and seeing her hovering over me with a dagger in her hands,” Brand said. “Then she said something…” He wrinkled his brow, trying to remember. “Something about how she had to fulfill her oath.” He shook his head. “And that’s the last thing I remember aside from a shooting pain in my chest.” He touched the right side of his chest again, where the pain was greatest.
“We think she was trying to stab you in the heart,” Sylvan said grimly. “But she stabbed the right side of your chest instead of the left.”
“Probably because the Q’ess have all their organs reversed, so their hearts are on the right side, instead of the left,” Olivia put in. She frowned. “But tell me again—you said she was talking about fulfilling an oath?”
Brand nodded, unable to speak. The idea that his wife—the woman he had loved and trusted and protected and cared for—had tried to kill him, was finally beginning to sink in. And Goddess, it hurt so much.
“Do you think the mention of an oath was significant?” Sylvan asked, frowning.
“I don’t know.” Olivia wrinkled her brow. “I remember Kat saying she’d run across some kind of article having to do with a Q’ess oath-taking ceremony—only she said it sounded more like a religious rite meant to brainwash someone. She found it when she was looking for articles about the Q’ess so she could plan the wedding.”
“Call her,” Sylvan said. “Ask her to send us the article—it might shed some light on what happened last night.”
“I’ll do it right away,” Olivia promised. She squeezed Brand’s hand once more and left, presumably to call Kat.