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  He’s dulling my sharp edges.

  It would be smarter to kill him in his sleep, before he breached her emotional perimeter completely. But even as it occurred to her, she knew she wouldn’t do it. Prudence and caution had flown away when it came to Jael. He wasn’t just the new fish she’d recruited because he fought like a demon. His speed and strength were beside the point. Exhaustion stole over her, and she lay down beside him, muted fury still simmering in her head.

  It was the middle of the next downtime when he woke. Dred registered the change in his breathing even in her sleep and propped up on an elbow to peer at him. The lights were low, just lines along the base of the wall to keep her from stumbling fresh from sleep. In the pale glow, his color was a little better, and he was no longer soaked in pain sweat.

  “It looks like I’ll live,” he said, sounding surprised.

  “Possibly. You still have a lashing to get through.”

  “We both know that’s not going to happen. If you punish me, everyone will discover that I acted without your authority. They’ll think you can’t keep your dog on a leash, love. And that’ll wreck the image Tam’s spent so much time crafting.”

  Dred rolled over him nimbly. “I didn’t say it would be public.”

  His expression was . . . priceless. “You mean to do it in here?”

  “You will learn to talk to me,” she said quietly. “You will discover you can’t make unilateral moves without consulting me.”

  “You think pain will teach me?” His mouth curved in a lopsided smile. “It’s been my tutor every day of my life, and I never seem to learn. But if it’ll make you feel better—”

  Epiphany crashed over her. Normal discipline wouldn’t work on him. Tying him to a pole and going to work with a whip would only drive a wedge, make him more convinced he couldn’t rely on anyone but himself. Whatever he told himself, that’s why he did this. To prove that I’ll turn on him—that I can’t be trusted. So what am I going to do with you? It was obvious she couldn’t punish him, and he was hurt already.

  So she did the hardest thing imaginable. She told him the truth. “I’m angry because I was worried about you. I don’t want to care, but I do. And it makes me sick to my stomach.”

  He lost the devil-may-care air immediately. In fact, he looked as if he’d taken a blow to the sternum. “Caring?”

  “Especially about someone who has so little regard for himself, who seems to think he’s disposable.”

  “Aren’t I?”

  “Not to me.”

  “Then you’re too dependent on my freakish abilities for your own good, queenie.” He made a valiant effort to rebuild his walls.

  Not this time.

  “Your physiology has nothing to do with why you’re important to me. Let’s have that shirt off.”

  Jael seemed stunned as she helped him out of the sweat-soaked clothing. Her gentleness had reached him. He needs to feel like he matters, maybe more than anyone else in here. Dred recognized the hunger; she’d known it a time or two when her parents were distracted with other problems. He’s never had anyone in his corner. There’s always a price, always a point where betrayal becomes inevitable. If discipline and punishment couldn’t reach him, maybe kindness could. She’d had good parents. Dred remembered what it looked and sounded like. Let this work. I don’t know what else to do. I can’t let him undermine me, and I can’t defend Queensland alone. In economical motions, she dipped a rag in cool water and perched on the bunk beside him. The covers revealed the deep bruising on his side, now faded as if it had been several days instead of hours.

  “I’ve no idea what you’re about,” he said in a shattered tone.

  “Just a quick bath. It should tide you over until you’re strong enough to shower.”

  With careful motions, she washed every inch of him, and it was beyond intimate, done in silence. He watched her hands sweep over his body with a ravenous, bewildered expression, and that was exactly what she intended. By the time she finished, he was obviously stirred up. She sat back with a faint smile.

  “I don’t know if that was brilliant or diabolical,” he murmured.

  “Bit of both?”

  “Definitely.” He tried to pull her hands back to his chest, but she resisted. “Especially if you intend to leave me this way.”

  “That depends on you,” she said softly. “I can make you very happy. Or I can leave you be. What happens next hinges on your answer.”

  “What’s the question?”

  She flattened her hands on either side of his head, leaning down so their faces were close. “Promise me you’ll never do that again. Promise you’ll talk to me first.”

  “If I do?” He raised a brow, trying to seem unconcerned, but she glimpsed his shaken aspect, echoed by the glimmering sparks of emotion streaming off him, too strong for her sixth sense to ignore.

  “Then I’ll forgive you, and we’ll have make-up sex.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “I leave you to recover and go about my business. But I’ll never trust you again.”

  He seemed perplexed, slightly incredulous. “It’s as simple as that. You’d believe me if I promised? How do you know I won’t lie?”

  “I can tell,” she reminded him.

  Jael drew in a deeper breath than he could when he first returned, another sign that his healing had kicked in, albeit slowly. “Then I promise. I won’t go rogue again. And . . . I’m sorry.” From the way he rushed the words, she suspected he’d never said them before.

  “Forgiven. Scoot over.” He did so, looking puzzled, but he was in no shape to orchestrate the sex she’d promised. “I’ll be slow and careful with you.”

  “Then you will kill me.”

  Dred stroked her bare fingers everywhere she’d touched first with the damp cloth, and he shivered, lit up from the inside with longing. It was obvious he was ready to dispense with the preliminaries . . . but she wasn’t. So she followed the path she’d blazed with fingertips with her lips, until he was trembling.

  “Please,” he whispered. “I’ve learned my lesson.”

  She smiled at that. “Have you?”

  “I swear. I think I’d rather have the lash than another minute of this.”

  His hands came to her hips, hard and desperate, and she let him pull her up, but she was cautious, making sure she didn’t put any weight on his chest. She sank down on him in an easy motion.

  “I’ll do all the work. I don’t want you to hurt your ribs.”

  Frustration flashed bright as blue flame in his eyes, but he stayed still. Dred knew what she was asking of him—complete faith that she’d bring him to pleasure. That didn’t come easy for a man like him. But she rode him and watched his face, and he let her see what he needed, shifts in pressure and pace, until they were gasping. She could’ve cheated and broadcast her desire so that he was swept into it. Instead, she took him there by centimeters, and when he arched, it was a tsunami of an orgasm. She fell just after, relaxing control only once she was sure of his. Then she rolled to the side, mindful of his ribs.

  “Think you can leash me with sex, love?” His hand was gentle on her back.

  “No,” she said gently. “Because you don’t need a leash. You need to trust me.”

  He drew her into his arms, whispering, “Mary help me, I’d walk into a fire for you.”

  10

  The Sword They Die On

  The sun beating down dried the mud on his skin into an itchy scale, but the boss man didn’t slow the march. Ten men died in the last engagement, but leadership didn’t care about things like loss of life. Every man who died in the killing fields increased the cut for survivors, so that meant nobody was too interested in guarding his brother’s back. Jael hadn’t known most of their names anyway, just taken the job to put paste in his gut and keep one step ahead of the Science Corp. />
  They passed from plain to forest, and the air thickened with the scent of damp, growing things. Thick canopy overhead, sharp needle green, interlaced with fronds, giving the others’ skin a peculiar, sickly glow; glint of yellow in the foliage, slither-crawl of webbed feet slipping out of his line of sight. The marsh was alive with noises, most natural, chirps and croaks, crackles of snake grass and the sploosh of something sliding into the water outside his line of sight.

  Told him this plan would never work. But I’m not known for brainpower.

  “Jael, you’ve got the vanguard. Soften them up for us.”

  Since that was no different than most orders he’d received, he only nodded. He broke from the rest of the team, relieved to be away from their stink, now a permanent ache in the back of his throat. He could taste the tang of their sweat, the mildew growing in their boots. Most of them hadn’t bathed in weeks, unless you counted sluicing down with standing water, after first scooping away the algae on top. It made it harder for native wildlife to track them, but Jael never adjusted to the smell. Fragging enhanced senses.

  He ran silently through the tangle of jungle vine, ducking where necessary, leaping the pools of stagnant water that rippled lazily with things hidden beneath the brown surface. A scanning gaze showed him minutiae that other people wouldn’t notice: a cocoon on the underside of a leaf, the bulge of eggs laid in the dense clay at water’s edge, and the twinkle of a silver charm. Cold washed over him, and he didn’t want to kneel to pick it up. But he didn’t control his muscles anymore and he stooped to retrieve the small jewel, a sparkling blue stone banded in silver and dangling from a broken chain.

  He spun, pulled by the echo of laughter. It rang on and on like a bell even as his heart raced. Jael sped up and broke from the undergrowth into the burning heat of the noonday sun. This was supposed to be a stealth mission—what the hell’s a kid doing out here? A cluster of houses had sprung up, nearly in the battle zone, prefab units that said they belonged to hopeful settlers who didn’t think the reported conflict was serious. Or maybe they didn’t have the money to go farther. Then he saw her, a little girl with brown curls. She had on a yellow dress, and the sky was blue and cloudless overhead, just the burning orange sun blazing down.

  “You found it!” She sounded so happy.

  “Get out,” he called.

  But she didn’t seem to hear him, and he glimpsed the shine of light off the barrels of enemy guns. Jael sprinted toward her, knowing he would be too slow—

  He came awake with a smothered cry. Dred stirred behind him and roused with a sleepy frown. “Problem?”

  Jael metered his breathing, eyes shut against the memory. “An old one. Don’t know why it’s bobbing to the surface now.”

  “You want to tell me about it?”

  His voice came out in a rasp. “The last job I did before retiring as a merc, there was this little girl in middle of the hot zone. I was supposed to clear a path for my unit, and there she was. Both sides unleashed on us, and I ran. Landed on her. I took the hit, hurt like hell.”

  “Did you save her?” Dred asked softly.

  “That’s the shit of it, love. I didn’t. When I rolled over, I had a big-ass hole in my back and blood all over her. The blast went all the way through. She died anyway. I got into salvage work after that.”

  She didn’t say anything. Maybe she could tell he felt like a big exposed nerve, and no words would do. She has that bloody Psi whatever-it-is. First time I’ve ever been glad somebody could rummage in my feelings. Instead, she lay beside him in silence until he felt like he could stand being touched, then he wrapped his arms around her and didn’t let go.

  * * *

  FIVE days after the failed recon mission, Tam could limp about with relative facility. Things had been fairly quiet since Mungo’s mongrels died outside their border, and the mercs hadn’t made any moves on Queensland. Frankly, the silence worried him. He was the one who gathered intel, so at the moment, they were operating blind. Tam tried to tell himself that Vost’s men were engaged elsewhere, and they’d turn their attentions on Queensland soon enough.

  To distract himself from futile foreboding, he circulated, listening to the populace. He overhead scraps of conversation: gossip, bets regarding which zone went out first and how long it would take for the mercs to wipe out Mungo’s mutts, idle chatter and the usual shit talk among men with too much time on their hands. But there was little aggression, much less than when Artan ran the territory. Most convicts had settled down and were no longer whispering about the benefits of Vost’s offer. It seemed as if the majority of Queenslanders knew a baited trap when they saw one, and they were capable of convincing their comrades, with a clenched first if necessary.

  He was less sanguine about the recruits they’d acquired from Grigor. While they had desperately needed the numbers—and that was the only reason he hadn’t protested Dred’s clemency with them—he suspected they wouldn’t quietly yield the unchecked violence they’d enjoyed under Grigor’s rule. They didn’t in Queensland, either. So far, the fresh meat had offered complete obedience, and he hadn’t caught any of them with contraband weapons, but he didn’t have the time to police them exhaustively. Sooner or later, that situation would explode, but the mercs made it impossible to turn his gaze inward; instead, all of his skill had to go toward ensuring their survival.

  Or all of your plans will go to shit.

  They might anyway, of course. For the moment, they were on hiatus, as the balance of power had shifted, not just with Jael’s arrival. The decimation of two territories and the advent of the mercs made prior plots no longer viable. Frustrating, maddening, even, but in a place like this, it was impossible to calculate the odds with complete precision, as things had a way of shifting by the day. As his mother had been fond of telling him, That which cannot be changed must be borne.

  His sullied schemes certainly fell into that category, so he went to assess the new training program; this was Jael’s innovation, initiated after a planning session with Dred. “If you want them to fight as a unit, you need to teach them how. You can’t expect a bunch of convicts used to fighting for their own lives suddenly to care about the assholes next to them.”

  Though Martine had come in a few minutes before, he wasn’t actively spying on her. Since he couldn’t collect information on the other zones, he could analyze the internal dynamics, so as to offer Dred the best advice when it came time to plot their next move. Tam stood by the door, watching the men spar. Training occurred without weapons, and Calypso, Mistress of the Ring, was in charge. There hadn’t been any death matches lately—too much real fighting for the men to build up rancor over grievances real or imagined—and she had been chafing over her lapse in personal prestige. So it made sense to give her this responsibility. She officiated the games because she was fierce enough to defeat any man in single combat, so if the fighters cheated or objected to her authority, she ended them. Before the coup, Calypso had served Artan, one of the few women who never shared the man’s bed. Tam recalled her efficient brutality when she performed an execution.

  Martine stood near the other woman, talking quietly. She was the last person he could’ve imagined being attracted to. Other men fantasized about the Dread Queen, but he’d never shared Einar’s infatuation, possibly because he’d played such a large role in her creation; it would be too much like onanism, fine as an outlet, but it seemed like a waste of time with a partner. Those factors aside, Dred didn’t share Tam’s interests, rendering her useless as a potential bed partner. Mary, it was difficult enough getting her to play the part in public; she was unlikely to take up the whip for fun.

  Before Perdition, he’d preferred a sort of icy elegance that masked a predilection for dominance, and gender was less important than other aspects of sexual compatibility. Martine was bold and brassy, not in the least elegant, but she had . . . something, a puzzle he lacked the time and opportunity to e
xplore. As a man whose inner life was primarily intellectual, he could go turns without being drawn to a potential partner, and he didn’t mind the long gaps. In short, his libido had picked an odd time to come to life.

  Using the perimeter, he moved closer, hoping to overhear what had Calypso looking so pensive. Martine was still speaking earnestly, her hands moving with a fluid grace. You could tell a lot by a person’s hands, whether they had passion or restraint, what sort of work they’d done or crimes committed. The lack of scars on Martine’s told an interesting tale.

  “. . . don’t think that’s a good idea,” the smaller woman was saying.

  “Of course you don’t,” Calypso answered. “You’ve thrown in with the little man and the would-be queen.”

  Tam froze, wondering if he was about to hear the mistress of the ring propose what amounted to sedition. The tall woman called out a few suggestions regarding the form of the men sparring nearby. The pairs she singled out redoubled their efforts, likely hoping to impress her. Then Calypso glanced at Martine. Her face in profile was lovely and stern, like a woman laser-etched from dark marble.

  “That’s not why,” Martine argued.

  “Yeah, you say so. But I say it’s time to break away from big groups. We could wait out the fighting, just the two of us.”

  “That’s not a permanent solution. The mercs need to die, end of story.”

  “I can tell you never lived through a war, my sweet. The first thing you learn is to get out of populated areas. They take the most damage in a firefight.”

  From what Tam could extrapolate, Calypso wanted to leave, not stir up a rebellion, and Martine didn’t think that was a smart plan. Hiding wasn’t a bad strategy in the short term, but it didn’t resolve the core problem. With any luck, Martine could convince the mistress of the ring to stay, as the training program would suffer without her.