Lords of the Sea (24 page)

* * * *

Raen was so furious all he could do for a while was to focus on fighting the urge to erupt into violence and smash something. The red cloud of rage didn’t begin to dissipate from his mind, in fact, until he abruptly became aware that he was searching his mind for some outlet for it, something, or someone he could expend his rage on—preferably someone. He wasn’t certain if it was the fact that it suddenly dawned on him that he was actually mentally flipping through the images of the males in Cassie’s party, trying to decide which one he most wanted to break in half. Or the realization that the one he most wanted to get his hands on hadn’t actually been involved, as far as he knew, 143

in the most recent event and that, moreover, unprovoked violence against prisoners already in custody was not only unheard of but punishable by demotion, fines, and imprisonment, or all of the above. It sobered him, however. It didn’t completely eradicate the boiling fury. He still toyed, for a while, with the idea of provoking Mark into an act of aggression that would relieve him of the responsibility of having done so, but the thoughts brought his temper down to a more manageable level.

He wasn’t entirely certain why his focus was on Mark to begin with except that there had been a connection between him and Cassie when they’d first come. Their behavior since seemed to indicate that whatever had been between them was over, but he wasn’t as sure as he wanted to be that it was.

And he didn’t particularly care for the fact that there’d ever been anything between them at all.

He didn’t trust that there wasn’t anything between them, he realized after a while.

He didn’t trust Carl or David, either. All of the males seemed to have become protective of the females—in a general way—not specific that he could tell, not particular to any one female, but he’d noticed that Carl and David seemed to have more interest in Cassie than the other two females. Both men had focused on her at the celebration, he remembered. They were the two most reluctant to allow Cassie to leave with him, and it was them who’d come to look for her later.

She’d protected them. Knowing they were up to something, she’d tried to protect them from getting caught at it.

For several moments, his rage threatened to gain the upper hand again as his mind moved from those thoughts to the possibility that, regardless of what she’d said, she’d known about their plan beforehand and helped them by seeing to it that he was occupied.

It angered him that they’d outwitted him, he realized finally.

But that paled by comparison to the fury he had felt when it occurred to him that Cassie had helped them by playing on his feelings for her.
That
had made him feel like a complete fool.

The sense of betrayal swelled inside of him all over again, but he resolutely refused to acknowledge the hurt that accompanied it as having anything to do with the excessive rage.

It

was
all out of proportion, he knew, to what had happened. They’d been under surveillance the entire time. They hadn’t succeeded in their plan, and it wouldn’t have mattered if they
had
succeeded in passing the information. It would’ve been of no use to the outsiders. The crime was that they’d tried, successful or not.

He wanted to believe Cassie hadn’t had anything to do with it. That was why he didn’t. She’d sounded convincing, but he’d wanted to be convinced so badly that he knew he couldn’t trust his judgment.

She’d looked so white and shaken when he’d interrogated her that he’d felt sick to his stomach, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to allow anyone else to handle the interrogation. Worse, he was no more certain afterwards than he had been before he started. He hadn’t been able to see anything past the stricken look she’d given him, and he couldn’t decide if she was scared because she was guilty, or if she was innocent and just frightened about being arrested and interrogated.

144

Despite his fury and his focus on trying to sort his thoughts and bring some order to them by eliminating the emotions from the equation that were demolishing his reasoning abilities, he was keenly aware of Cassie.

He’d found it insulting that she thought he would further compromise his professionalism by resuming their relationship as if nothing had happened, but his repudiation of that possibility had been purely personal.

He hadn’t wanted her to take him as her lover to begin with, he thought angrily.

He had wanted to convince her he was worthy of more than recreation.

He just hadn’t been able to resist the temptation.

It seemed to him, though, that females who took a male as a lover rarely developed deeper feelings for them and usually moved on to another lover before very long—generally just about the time the male became comfortable with the relationship and began to think his place in her life was assured.

He’d wanted more from her than that, though. From the moment he’d finally stopped lying to himself that he was interested her, he’d also had to accept that it was far more than just the physical attraction. He’d had to. He’d no more than begun to toy with the idea of taking advantage of the physical attraction between them than he’d realized the notion left him feeling completely unsatisfied and worse, uneasy.

More accurately, he supposed, the idea of being her lover had been tremendously appealing, but he’d no sooner begun trying to seduce her than it occurred to him that such a position was too tenuous to make him feel easy in his mind. A union between them would hardly be written in stone. She could still set him aside—just as Kira had—but it was a commitment to form a life together and the bond of bearing and rearing children together, not merely a casual agreement to amuse one another until they grew bored enough to look around for someone new and interesting.

The fear that that was now a lost cause, he finally realized, was the root of the sick rage inside him that barely settled before boiling up inside of him all over again and threatening to erupt.

He was spoiling for a fight, he realized abruptly—with her. He’d given her every opportunity to reassure him that she cared too much about him and their budding relationship to consider betraying him and instead of doing so she’d assured him she had made her choice—and her choice was to remain loyal to
her
people.

He supposed it was unreasonable, given the situation, to expect her to cast her lot with him—
Him
, damn it to hell!—not his people, not her people, but him—when their relationship was so new and fragile, but he’d been so certain that she was on the verge of committing to a union between them that he felt completely deceived.

She’d ignored the broad hints he’d given her, of course, when he’d shown her his home and told her about his plans so that she’d know he was open to the idea if she decided to choose him, but he’d been sure that was nothing more than an encouragement to try harder. A female never liked to appear too easy to attain. A male could get the idea that she wasn’t as worthy of his interest as he’d first thought if she was too easy to please—Kira had had him jumping through hoops until he’d been on the point of giving up entirely before she’d finally decided he was worthy of her.

And Cassie had not turned her nose up at his meager offering, despite the fact that the house was a disaster. He wouldn’t, in fact, have shown it to her in that state if he’d felt like he had time to dress it up into something a little more presentable first. He 145

supposed it was a sign of his own desperation that he had, and maybe she’d sensed that, but she’d not only
not
condemned it out of hand, she’d offered suggestions to improve it to suit her and he’d taken that as encouragement of his suit.

He got up from his desk when she finally settled on the bed, and he realized she’d gone to sleep, deciding he’d spent enough time pretending he had any gods bedamned interest in the reports he’d been staring at on his display for the past hour.

He hadn’t had any more sleep than she had, and he felt like he’d been through hell and back, but he was humiliated enough about the incident without making it obvious to everyone why it was that he wasn’t at his post and was unavailable at the time it went down. He wasn’t comfortable about lying about it. But he was a hell of a lot more comfortable lying than he was about admitting that he’d been preoccupied with trying to impress one of the conspirators in his bed at the time her cohorts were attempting to breach their security.

Jadin looked him over curiously when he arrived at the observation room, but he was wise enough not to attempt to presume upon their personal relationship to question him about his failure to respond promptly to the threat of a security breach. “Replay the security vids,” he said curtly.

Nodding without comment, Jadin brought up the vids in question. “Starting at the point where Lady Cassia signaled that she wished to have a meeting.”

Raen slid a speculative glance at Jadin, but he could see nothing in Jadin’s expression to indicate that he attached any particular significance to that point in time.

There was no audio, of course, once she left the rooms where they’d quartered their guests, since it wasn’t their habit to intrude on the privacy of Atlantean citizens and they’d had to add audio to the rooms when they’d set up the surveillance devices. Even the vids set up for security about the city were sparse, intended only as a means of locating a citizen in an emergency situation.

And he knew where they were located, which was why he’d chosen the spot where he’d stopped to speak to Cassie. They were not completely out of range of being captured on the vids, but he had known the images would not be clear.

It was still clear enough to discomfit him. He’d completely dismissed the vids from his mind when he’d pulled her into his embrace to comfort her. Watching it now, he realized that, despite the poor quality of the vids, it was still patently obvious that his behavior toward her was that of a lover—not a soldier questioning a person of interest to the state whose status was in doubt.

He itched to command Jadin to speed the footage up but refused to yield to the impulse since he knew that would only make his discomfort more obvious.

“This is the point that I find most curious and interesting,” Jadin said after a time, pointing his finger at the holographic display showing Cassie rising and slipping out of their quarters.

Raen cleared his throat uncomfortably. “For what reason?”

“Her behavior strongly suggests that she is sneaking
away
from her party, which would support her claim that she wasn’t involved. But then she simply vanishes for nearly three hours without a trace. It seems to me that she either had to know exactly where all the vids were and how to avoid them, or she was meeting someone who did.

Though
that
, of course, is very unlikely.”

146

Raen felt his face heat. “I am not certain what point you are trying to make,” he said uncomfortably.

“It seems to indicate she knows far more about us than she admits to—and I also wonder where she was and what she was doing during that time.”

Raen nodded without comment, squelching the urge to admit, to his friend at least, that he knew exactly where she was and what she was doing during her absence, and how she’d managed it. He would, of course, have to tell his superiors, but he had no desire, at all, for it to become common knowledge and food for gossip and, as fond as he was of Jadin, he was well aware that the man was far too fond of gossip to keep a juicy tidbit like that to himself. If nothing else, he’d let it slip when he was in his cups—because his tongue became loose on both ends when he’d had a few drinks.

He dismissed his discomfort the best he could and focused on studying her behavior carefully from the moment she first, supposedly, discovered the absence of Carl and David until he’d arrived to arrest them. He discovered, as he’d feared, that it was impossible for him to observe objectively. His command of the English language, in particular the idioms and slang commonly used among their particular group, was still a long way from a complete understanding, but the interpretation of ‘crazy about him’

seemed to be an indication of strong feelings. And the suggestion that she was admitting to caring about him was enough to throw him into turmoil all over again.

“I do not know about the males, but it seems to me that none of the females had any idea what was going on,” Jadin commented.

Raen slid an assessing glance at his friend.

Jadin looked uncomfortable. “Pardon, my lord. You did not ask for my opinion.”

“You have my permission to give it.”

“I have gone over these several times myself. The female named Shelly slept through the entire incident—not necessarily an indication of innocence, but certainly of a lack of nervousness that might indicate guilt. Lady Cassia seemed genuinely surprised and distressed to discover their absence and Lady Linda, also.”

Raen frowned, distrusting the urge to accept Jadin’s explanation. “Lady Cassia’s behavior might also be interpreted as surprise and dismay that they had not returned,” he pointed out, “not that they had gone.”

Jadin frowned. “I had not thought of that.”

Irritation flared in Raen when Jadin agreed with him instead of maintaining his certainty of Cassie’s innocence.

“It is still my impression,” Jadin said after a moment, “that their behavior and conversation together lead me to feel that they were unaware of the plot and distressed by it.”

“They were all aware, however, that they were being watched and their conversations monitored—which calls both their behavior and their conversation into question. It might have been rehearsed.”

147

“I had not thought of that, either,” Jadin admitted.

Raen ground his teeth, wondering why he had even bothered to ask Jadin for his opinion.

“On the other hand,” Jadin offered, “I have not seen that any of them are actually very good at deceit. They all seem far too prone to react instantly, and generally emotionally, to every occurrence—not to allow themselves time to consider before they speak or act.”

Raen nodded and told him to replay the vids again. After watching them several more times, he realized he was not only no closer to certainty than he had been to begin with, but he was no less affected every time he watched. He felt no more comfortable watching as he pulled Cassie into his arms and held her—In fact, he felt
less
comfortable because he found his mind wandering from the image to his own perception of those moments—and every time he heard her telling Lady Linda how she felt about him, it twisted in his guts all over again. It didn’t matter how closely he studied Cassie’s body language for a sign that it was stilted or unnatural, or how hard he listened to the inflections in her voice for some minute sign that she was playing to the vids, he was distracted
every
time by his reaction to them.

He had developed a blinding headache by the time he finally accepted that he wouldn’t find what he was looking for—something that would dispel the doubts in his mind.

Abandoning that avenue as useless, he left the observation room, headed to his temporary office, and summoned Adan and Aureleous—the two sentinels he had originally assigned to observe Lady Linda and Lady Shelly. Neither man looked thrilled to have been summoned, but since a summons to his office generally meant disciplinary action, he couldn’t fault them for appearing white faced and looking extremely ill at ease.

“I am releasing Lady Linda and Lady Shelly into your custody,” he announced without preamble when they came to attention before his desk.

Neither man reacted beyond a questioning, sideways glance at each other. Both men saluted, but neither made any move to leave. Finally Adan, looking even more uneasy, spoke. “Permission to speak, my lord?”

Raen nodded.

“I am … emotionally attached to the Lady Linda,” he admitted uncomfortably. “I am not at all confident that I can perform my duties to your satisfaction.”

“You would prefer that I release Lady Linda into Aureleous’ hands and vice versa?” he asked irritably.

Dismay flickered across the faces of both men before they managed to resume the stony faced lack of expression required at attention. “I would not prefer that,” Aureleous stated emphatically, breaking protocol. “…my lord,” he added belatedly. “If you will give me permission to express my opinion, my lord,” he added uncomfortably.

“A preference is not an opinion,” Raen said coldly.

“No, my lord,” Aureleous agreed promptly, turning red faced.

“I also do not recall that I
requested
that you take the ladies into your personal custody,” Raen growled angrily.

Both men turned whiter and grew more rigid in their stance, saluting yet again.

“I am not convinced,” Raen continued after a moment, “that they were not all involved in the attempt to breach our security. However, I do not believe at this point 148

that the ladies were. Regardless, I am of no mind to give them another opportunity and, rather than allow them the chance to hatch another plot—which would then require us to do something we would all find unpleasant—I have determined that it will be best to prevent them from doing so by separating the group. So long as you do not allow your personal feelings to lead you into doing anything stupid, you will be keeping the ladies safe.

“Take them to your personal quarters and keep them there. They are not allowed to leave without your escort—you will not let them out of your sight at any time they are outside of your quarters. And I
will
expect you to be at your posts when you are assigned duty.”

“My lord?” Adan asked.

Raen

nodded.

“Are we still required to make daily reports regarding our impressions of the natives?”

“You are, and also to report anything that they might say that could be considered useful information. You are dismissed.”

When the two sentinels had left, Raen sat drumming his fingers on his desk for a time, struggling with the urge to return to his quarters to see how Cassie was faring. He still had to make a decision about the males, however, and, unfortunately, he would have to report to High Councilor det Ophelia and endure a very uncomfortable interview himself.

Carl and David’s guilt was unquestionable. Both men would have to be confined until High Councilor det Ophelia determined that it was time to release all of the natives.

He had not thought it wise to interrogate the males himself, particularly not Mark since he could not be around the man without having to struggle with a desire to plant his fist in the man’s smirking face.

Deciding after a while that there was no point in putting off the report he had to make to det Ophelia, he rose and went to present himself for the ass chewing he fully expected.