One, two, three . . .
Four, five, six . . .
Seven, eight, nine . . .
Kyrion moved back and forth between the three mercenaries at a dizzying speed, slicing his sword across their stomachs, their chests, and finally their throats, as though they were rungs on a ladder of death he was climbing.
The three men barely had time to scream before he killed them, although they all hung in midair for a second, as though their brains hadn’t received the messages that they were dead and were still telling their legs to prop them up.
Another second ticked by, so quick and yet so curiously slow at the same time, and the three mercenaries toppled to the floor.
Hal’s mouth gaped. For once, he actually did the smart thing—he ran, trying to get back to the open boarding doors so he could flee into his own ship.
No one was paying any attention to me, so I scooped up one of the mercenaries’ blasters from the floor. A fresh wave of pain exploded in my side, but I gritted my teeth, aimed the blaster at the fleeing Hal, and pulled the trigger. He yelped, but he didn’t go down, so I pulled the trigger again. This bolt clipped his shoulder and spun him back around toward me.
Hal snarled and reached for the blaster on his belt, but I pulled the trigger again, and this bolt blasted straight into his face, charring his features. He too hung in midair for a second before crumpling to the floor.
An eerie silence descended over the ship, and the only sound was the continued popping, cracking, and sizzling of Hal’s melting face. The stench of his fried flesh filled my nose, but it didn’t bother me. The bastard had gotten exactly what he deserved.
I glared at him another moment, then turned my attention to Kyrion. The Arrow was standing amid the three dead mercenaries, blood and guts oozing on the floor all around him, but he was strangely untouched by all the death he’d just dealt out.
He stared at me, his sword still glowing in his hand. The shimmering blade matched his eyes, a dark, inky blue that bordered on utter blackness. Another one of those razor-thin smiles curved his lips, and he opened his mouth, probably to tell me how much he was going to enjoy killing me the same way he had the mercenaries.
I snapped up my blaster and pulled the trigger.
Click.
Click-click.
Click.
A sick sense of dread flooded my stomach. The blaster was empty. Of course it was. Cheap piece of Kent tech. I snarled and hurled it at Kyrion, who calmly swatted it away with his sword. The lunarium blade easily sliced through the blaster, and the resulting pieces clattered to the floor, landing in the mess around the three mercenaries.
I tensed, fully expecting Kyrion to wave his hand and toss the blaster bits back at me, to pelt me with them the same way he’d slammed his helmet into Hal’s face. But instead, he just stood there, his lips puckered in thought, as though debating the slowest, most painful way to kill me.
Kyrion stared at me, his gaze cold and unreadable. When we’d been talking earlier, I had almost thought he was enjoying our conversation, snarky and threatening though it was. But now he had morphed back into full Arrow mode, and he had just killed those mercenaries without batting an eye. Why, he wasn’t even breathing hard. Arrogant, deadly bastard.
Me? I felt like I was back in the lava field. Only the lava was inside my veins, and it was quickly boiling me alive. I had to push down another wave of pain before I could speak. “Well, you’re going to get your wish.”
“What’s that?” he murmured.
I gestured down at my side, trying not to notice how much blood was coating my hand. “You’re not even going to have to bother with killing me. I’m going to die, and the bond will be broken.”
He didn’t respond, although he kept staring at me with that inscrutable expression. It suddenly occurred to me that his face was going to be the last thing I ever saw—
My legs buckled, my ass hit the floor, and blackness crashed over me, blotting out everything, including Kyrion Caldaren.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
KYRION
Vesper was right. Blood was already pooling under her body, and the wound in her side would kill her in a matter of minutes.
Unless I did something supremely stupid.
Unless I broke the vow I had made to myself twenty-five years ago when I’d killed my father.
Unless I saved her.
I studied the three dead mercenaries crumpled around my feet. I’d heard everything they’d said, and the story wasn’t hard to follow. Vesper worked at Kent Corp, and she’d been assigned to figure out why the Velorum had crashed. Even Callus Holloway had been concerned about the crash, especially since the Velorum was a prototype for all the military cruisers, blitzers, and other ships he had ordered to help fight the growing threat of the Techwave.
According to the chatty mercs, Rowena Kent had sent them to retrieve the information Vesper had stolen and then kill her. You didn’t do that if your new spaceship had crashed because of pilot error, like Kent Corp was claiming.
I stepped over the dead mercs, crouched down, pressed my index finger to the floor, and then held it up. The remains of the broken microdot drive clung to my fingertip. It was smashed beyond repair, so I flicked it aside, straightened up, and went to the flight deck.
I punched a few buttons on the console, but all the scans came up negative. The mercs had come alone, and no other ships were nearby. Good. That gave me time to consider my options.
I returned to where Vesper was still sprawled across the floor. Now that she was unconscious, I didn’t sense the pain of her wound quite so vividly, but it still ground into my side like shards of hot glass slowly being shoved deeper and deeper into my flesh. If I lifted my shirt, I would probably find a vicious burn on my own skin.
Given such a painful, debilitating injury, I was surprised—and impressed—that Vesper had stayed on her feet so long and that she had grabbed a blaster and killed the last merc. I was less pleased that she’d tried to kill me with the same blaster, but I couldn’t fault her for it. She’d thought I was going to attack her again.
I had actually been debating the best way to propose a truce when she’d fired the blaster and then thrown the empty weapon at me. Even when faced with her own death, Vesper was still full of rage.
It was . . . She was . . . intriguing.
I set that troubling thought aside and focused on what was important: discovering what House Kent was so desperate to cover up. And like it or not, the quickest, easiest way to do that was by healing Vesper now and then questioning her later.
That was the only reason I was thinking about saving her. This had nothing to do with our unwanted connection. I might feel her injuries as if they were my own, but the truebond couldn’t influence my thinking, emotions, and decisions. It couldn’t make me give up my independence, my free will, or any semblance of my own self the way my father had for my mother.
Not yet.
And if it ever did, then I would eliminate Vesper anyway, information or no information, and regardless of the possibly fatal consequences to myself.
I shoved my sword onto my belt, bent down, and scooped Vesper up into my arms. The instant I touched her, the bond stirred to life deep inside me, a thin, fragile ribbon anchoring me to her. That ribbon, that thread of connection, of awareness, vibrated in warning, wanting me to share my strength, my power with her, wanting me to help her.