Kyrion Caldaren growled, then lashed out and punched his fist against the clear barrier. I flinched, but it didn’t even shake. He tried again and again, battering at the barrier with his fist, but he didn’t so much as chip the glass.
“Don’t be an idiot,” I snapped. “It’s permaglass. The good stuff. Not even a psion like you can punch through it.”
His eyes narrowed to slits. His gaze was as hot as the lava that had almost incinerated us both on the battlefield, and I had to grind my teeth to keep from shivering.
Kyrion paced back and forth on the other side of the glass like a Tropics tiger trapped in a zoo. For the first time, I noticed he had removed his helmet and that I was seeing his actual face. I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting, but once I started looking at him, I couldn’t make myself stop.
He was around my age, late thirties, and his midnight-black hair was a bit wavy and a touch on the long side, as though he didn’t get it cut often enough. His skin was pale, probably from all the time he spent in space, and he had high cheekbones, a straight nose, and a strong chin.
At first, I thought his eyes were a dead, flat black, but on closer inspection, I realized they were a dark, inky blue. Strangely enough, the color reminded me of the sapphsidian eyes in my mindscape. Ugh. I shoved that thought away. I didn’t want to have any connection to a man who had just threatened me, not even something as trivial as that.
Kyrion Caldaren wasn’t what I would consider to be gorgeous. Not even handsome. But there was something . . . striking about his face. Something that captured your attention, as though his features held some sort of optical illusion, and you could figure out the puzzle if only you studied him long and hard enough.
I shook off my strange thoughts. He wasn’t a puzzle. He was a cold-blooded killer, and he’d been ready to hurt me to get whatever answers he thought I had. More rage roared through me, and I stalked over to the barrier and glared at him.
“I saved your life on the lava field! Why did you attack me?”
He gave me a disgusted look. “No doubt, that small kindness was all part of your master plan. As was your little performance in the docking bay on the Imperium cruiser. I’ll admit, it was a clever way to attract my attention and start the process. When did you dose me with the first chemical? What did you use?”
Every word he said only confused me more. “What are you talking about? I didn’t do anything to you! All I’ve been doing ever since I woke up on that Imperium ship is trying to survive.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Are you kidding me? Do you think I wanted to be attacked, drugged, and conscripted into the Imperium army? Do you think I wanted to watch all those conscripts die? Or be burned alive by lava myself? Or trapped on a ship with a man who has suddenly decided I’m his most hated enemy for no apparent reason?” I threw my hands up in frustration. “I didn’t want any of this! Not one damn bit of it!”
He kept staring at me, but the rage dimmed in his eyes, and his features turned more thoughtful than angry. “And yet here you are with me, despite all those odds and obstacles.”
I threw my hands up again. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“We’re bonded.” He growled the words as though they were the most horrific thing in the entire galaxy.
For a moment, I wasn’t certain I’d heard him correctly. But his tight, serious expression indicated that, yes, I had heard him correctly.
I couldn’t help myself. I laughed.
The chuckles flew past my lips one after another, and the force of them shook my body from head to toe. It was just so . . . laughable. Out of all the things he could have said, out of all the reasons he could have come after me, the fact that he thought we were bonded was insane. He was insane. Perhaps the Techwave weapon had scrambled his brains as much as it had scrambled his insides.
“I don’t know what drugs the medtable dosed you with, but you are out of your mind. There is no way that we are bonded.” I flapped my hand back and forth, indicating the two of us. “You’re a Regal lord, an Arrow, and the most notorious killer in the galaxy. I don’t even like to kill the spiders that sneak into my apartment. I always catch the spiders in a jar and take them outside to the nearest park . . .”
I was babbling, but I just couldn’t stop the random, rambling thoughts from rushing out of my mouth in a nonsensical, unstoppable stream of idiocy. It took a while, thanks to my O2 enhancement, but I finally ran out of breath, and I bit down on my tongue to keep from letting loose another stream of babble.
Kyrion gave me a cold, flat look, then glanced around the cargo bay. He marched over, opened one of the cabinets, and rummaged around inside. A few seconds later, he shut the cabinet door and flipped open a small tactical knife. He held the knife out where I could see it, then slashed it across his left palm.
Pain erupted in my own hand. I hissed and glanced down. A shallow slice now cut across my palm in the exact same spot where he had slashed himself. Kyrion stalked back over to the barrier and held up his hand. His gash was much deeper and oozing blood, whereas mine was as thin as a plastipaper cut, but there was no denying the two injuries were mirror images of each other.
Shock zipped through me. My legs trembled and threatened to buckle, and I had to brace my hand against the barrier for support.
“No,” I whispered. “This can’t be . . .” My voice trailed off, and all words, thought, and reason failed me.
“Do you believe me now?” Kyrion growled. “Or do I have to cut us both to pieces to convince you?”
He held the knife over his hand again.
“No!” I yelled. “Stop, you idiot! I believe you. Okay? I believe you.”
He lowered the knife, although he kept eyeing me with suspicion and hostility.
This time, I was the one who paced back and forth in front of the barrier. “How did this happen? When? Why?”
The questions tumbled out of my mouth, but I didn’t have any answers. For someone who spent her life figuring out how things worked, I couldn’t quite grasp the chain of unexpected and unfortunate events that had led me to this place and this moment.
“Who are you?” Kyrion demanded. “Who sent you? Who told you to do this to me? How did you trigger the bond? What chemicals did you use?”
I kept right on pacing. “No one sent me, and I have no idea how this happened—” I stopped and whirled around to him. “Wait. What chemicals?”
He gave me a disbelieving look. “Surely you know about chembonds.”
“Of course I know about chembonds,” I snapped.
Chembonds were just what their name implied, bonds that were induced by certain chemicals. Two people took the same cocktail, and as soon as the drugs started circulating through their bodies, the bond formed.
Basically, a chembond connected two people—for a while.
High-level, military-grade chembonds let soldiers share physical traits, like strength, speed, and combat skills, while other, less restricted, more cerebral chembonds allowed academics and scientists to share thoughts, theories, and knowledge. And of course, there were the common chembonds that were available to everyone and used mostly for sex. Find a willing partner, have a bartender mix the right cocktail, drink up, and you would supposedly have the best sex of your life.