No Limits (21 page)

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Authors: Jenna McCormick

Tags: #Romance, #Science Fiction, #Adult

BOOK: No Limits
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Bending down, he retrieved the knife. “Now what?”
She sucked in a deep breath. “You’re going to have to cut a strip of skin off me.”
Horror filled him at the thought. Maybe she
had
gone crazy. “No—”
Her gaze held steady. “It’s the only way to ensure the seal will hold. We need to wrap the cut in organic material first. Take from the outside of my upper thigh. It’s the only place you can get a long enough strip of skin.”
Did she have any idea what she was asking of him? Requesting he inflict pain on her. His hands shook.
She leveled her gaze on his, an apology written clearly on her beautiful face. “Pain is better than death, Rhys. I wouldn’t ask you, but there is no one else. If you don’t do this now, I will die.”
Overwhelmed by the fierce emotions she projected, he sank to his knees and rucked up her skirt. A muscle jumped in her jaw as she gritted her teeth against the coming ordeal.
He stroked a hand over her perfect, unmarred flesh. “I’ll try to take as much of the punishment for you as I can.”
She looked down at him, her eyes swimming in unshed tears. “I know you will.”
Leaning forward, he kissed her leg in gentle tribute. “I love you.”
The knife slashed down and he cried out with her, taking the white-hot agony into himself.
Always me before her; always let me spare her hurt.
He worked quickly at his gruesome task and removed the strip of skin, tying it around the cut line. Hands trembling and coated with her blood, he took the sealant from her.
“Don’t waste it on me—”
“Nonnegotiable.” He ground the word out. “You need to run to make it out of here.”
Mercifully, she quieted and let him patch her. Rising to his feet, he murmured, “Hold it still, sweetness. We have less than a minute to go.”
After her sacrifice, there was no way he would botch this. Squeezing the tube in a serpentine pattern, he worked the bonding agent over the patch twice before dropping the empty tube and gripping her hand. “Time to move.”
She stumbled at his first tug, and now that the detail work was done, he drank her pain in huge swallows, losing his focus as the magnitude overwhelmed him. Adrenaline coursed through her veins, and between that and his efforts, Gen moved with fluid grace. He heard her heartbeat thudding in his own ears.
“Keep the candle with you!” he yelled as he boosted her over the last obstacle. The access panel was in sight, and he merged with the flame, sucking everything from Gen but the need to run.
“Ten seconds!” he heard Zan yell. “Give me your hand!”
Rhys forced his will for her survival into her and drew strength from Zan to urge her on. Chanting a prayer for fortitude, Rhys barely noticed when the candle slipped from her hand and the wick snuffed out, his power fading. Gen screamed his name once before he was sealed in the bowels of the living ship, alone in the darkness.
22
“S
taci, try to contact Gen again. I need to talk to her, ASA—” Alison’s voice died in her throat as she entered her office to find it already occupied.
The man with his feet propped up on her desk made a slicing motion across his throat and gestured to her comm link. Absently, she shut it off and stuffed it into the pocket of her suit jacket. He didn’t acknowledge her movement as he turned his head to face the window. Alison clenched her hands into fists to hide the tremors. No, it was too soon.
“The board has heard a rumor.” His voice was thin and dry, like a snake slithering through dead leaves. “I am here for an explanation.”
Alison stared at his reflection in the pane of unbreakable self-cleansing glass. She had seen him before, lurking in the shadows during Illustra board meetings. The assassin had no name, and to hear his voice was to hear the sound of death. Her stomach clenched in a knot as she looked upon the face of her executioner.
His long hook nose was the only remarkable feature on an otherwise ordinary face. His brown hair had been slicked back against his head, and he wore head-to-toe black, including a pair of black faux leather gloves covering his steepled fingers.
Her mind raced. Was there any hope for a reprieve? It depended on how much the board knew. “I am handling the situation.”
He turned to face her, his expression devoid of any emotion. “Marshal is dead. The tracker I put on him personally alerted me the moment his heart stopped beating.”
Shit.
Alison felt as though he’d wrapped those gloved hands around her neck and started to squeeze. Dispatching Marshal as one of Gen’s boy toys had been a calculated risk. For Gen.
Alison had wanted to know if Gen had any of her grandmother’s considerable telepathic ability. Though Gen had never shown any signs that she was a mind reader, Alison had hoped that sending an empath to her would help reveal her talents. Never in a million years would she have guessed Gen would have been capable of killing Marshal.
She licked her lips and opened her mouth to reply, but he took his feet off her glass-topped desk and rose to his full height. “The concerning aspect is not that the informant is dead but where he died.”
“Where’s that?” Alison pivoted to keep him in her sights.
If he noticed her discomfort, he didn’t give any indication. “Outside the Alpha Centuri Lanes. You were there when he was requisitioned, Alison. Do you remember the conditions for his help?”
“That he would never have to leave Earth.” Though she couldn’t remember the why of it, Marshal had insisted on staying planet-side in exchange for lowering the defense grid on the empath’s moon. The board had agreed immediately. They had approached the empathic people several times to request volunteers for the emotional interactive program, but the empaths had refused. Finding Marshal—who not only provided them with access to hundreds of empaths but also a way to contain them—had been a major coup.
“The board has also learned that one of the monks might have survived.”
Alison shook her head. “No, I oversaw their executions personally. Every member of the order was taken care of.”
Idly, he leafed through the stack of info disks and personal communiqués on her shelf. “So your report stated. Yet we have received word of a man with red-gold hair and green eyes who has invaded dreams of several of our former targets. None but the members of the brotherhood had the knowledge to project their own images.”
Her heart pounded. “Merely a coincidence.”
He made a tsking sound. “I do not believe in coincidence. Neither does the board. It’s an election year. The time is coming, Alison. Everything the board has been working to achieve is at hand. But you’ve created this problem... .” He stopped directly in front of her, tilted her chin, and stared into her eyes. “Why do you think I’m here?”
It wasn’t a question. A stab of white-hot pain in her mind nearly blinded her. She cried out, but he held her firmly. She tasted blood, felt the wet stickiness spilling from her nose, her ears.
“Please,” she begged as her vision dimmed. “I know who is helping him.”
He released her, and she crumpled to the carpet in a sniveling heap, hating her own weakness. But what could she do against an assassin who killed with the power of his mind?
Removing a white cloth from his pocket, he methodically removed her blood from his hand. “It is not enough. The board wants action.”
Wiping the blood from her chin with the sleeve of her suit, Alison fought to regain composure. “We’ll move the slave bodies. Even if there is one strong enough to project his image, he is likely untrained and has no way to prove his tale. We move the slaves and then set a trap for them on the abandoned moon. Problem solved.”
He stared at her for a minute, his thoughts unreadable. Her comm link buzzed, but she ignored it, waiting for his decision.
“Evacuation of the moon has already commenced,” he said, almost as an afterthought. “A military escort has been arranged.”
“Let me oversee the takedown,” she pleaded. “I can be on the next shuttle off-world—”
He slid a small disk over to her. “Your flight leaves in an hour.”
She reached for it, but he pulled it back. “For your sake, I hope I never need to come after you again, Alison.”
By the time the door slid shut behind him, the tremors shook her whole body. Stumbling into the lavatory, she shucked her ruined white suit and stepped into the sonic shower. Wrapped in only a towel, she buzzed Staci.
“I want an inventory on all the candles in the facility as well as a list of those authorized to use them and any customer complaints about those professionals. Bring the information and a new suit to my office and cancel my schedule for the rest of the week. If anyone asks, I’m on a last-minute business trip.”
She disconnected and stared out the window, wondering when she had sold her soul and if she could ever get it back.
 
“Rhys!”
Gen cried out as Zan and one of his cohorts dragged her through the access hatch, ripping the patch from her throbbing leg. Blood spilled over her knee and ran down her calf, but she ignored it, fighting to go back for the candle.
“Seal that off, now!” Zan bellowed as he dragged her away from where the other man was working. Golden eyes went wide as he laid her back on the deck. “What the hell did you do to yourself in there?”
She struggled against his hold, her gaze glued to the sealed-off panel. “You have to let me go back. I dropped the candle—he’s trapped in there!”
“Gen, it’s all right. The ship can absorb the radiation from the star. We can’t.” Zan spoke slowly as if lecturing a child on the cruel realities of the universe. “Hold still so we can get you patched up.”
She fought harder, filled with all the horrific possibilities of what might happen to Rhys alone in there. Could he die, cut off from all emotion? Would radiation melt the candle?
I have to go back for him.
Zan swore in a language she didn’t recognize and immobilized her upper body in a full nelson. She twisted, landing on her open wound, and hissed in pain. He held her tighter. “Damn it, girl. Don’t make me trank you.”
“Please, you don’t understand.” Tears spilled down her face. “I have to go get him.”
Zan lowered his head so his lips brushed over the shell of her ear as he spoke. “No,
you
don’t understand. Once that panel was sealed, a barrier was put up. We breach that now and we’ll all get a lethal dose of radiation. Nothing you can do right now but lie still and let us patch up your hurt.”
“Zan, she’s fucked in the head.” Finished with his task, the crony who had doomed Rhys to his fate stared at the two of them. “It’s just like all the others. The ship talked to her and now she’s a space case. Be a piece of kindness to put her down.”
Gen stopped struggling, desperation morphing to despair.
Rhys.
No answer.
“Mind your station,” Zan snapped. “Don’t you worry none about her. I’ll see to our guest.”
Gen barely paid attention as the man’s footfalls receded, her eyes glued to the panel. “How long?”
Zan slowly removed his hands. “How long what?”
Though she didn’t want to, she met his gaze. Zan was the only one who might be her ally right now; she couldn’t afford to alienate him, or worse let him “do her a kindness.” He would, too, if she left him no other choice. “When can we open that back up?”
“Lie back,” he commanded, and she did, barely feeling the cold metal decking against her back. He rose and circled around her to where her leg bled. He eyed the patch job that had been partially scraped off before meeting her gaze. “This is no accidental cut.”
She shook her head. “The ship isn’t organic. You said so yourself. I needed organic material to create a bond so the patch would hold.”
He stared at her, no emotion visible. “So you cut a hunk out of your leg?”
“Not me. Rhys did it.”
Zan’s eyes narrowed. “Your man? I thought he was gone.”
Reckoning time.
Gen bit her lip, considering her choices. Either she admitted to intentionally misleading Zan before or she’d have to lie now. Rhys was a liar but she was, too, her falsehoods motivated by the need to survive. Didn’t change the fact that she’d misled Zan, then gone to bed with him.
“He’s why I went to get the candle.” Haltingly, she explained how Rhys could cohabitate within her, how he’d sought her out after Marshal had been shot. “When I got back to my room, he returned to the candle.”
She’d hoped he wouldn’t put the timetable together right away, but apparently he was just like any other man—his mind leaped directly to sex. “As I recall, you took an overnight detour before returning to your room.”
Forcing herself to hold his gaze, she nodded.
A muscle jumped in his jaw. “You’re telling me that while you were screwing me, he was tagging along for the ride?”
She nodded again.
Off he went, swearing in that alien tongue again. Gen could do nothing except hold her hand over her wound and bleed while he ranted. It took a full five minutes of Zan’s uninterruptible chastisement before she could understand him again. “Here I thought I had done some kinky shit, but this, this beats all. Was it his idea or yours, this little revenge fuck? Mind telling me why the pretty women are
always
insane?”
She offered him a grim smile. “Too busy bleeding here.”
With another mumbled curse, he scooped her up. “If I was smart, I’d space you out of the torpedo bay.”
She didn’t argue, figuring anything she said would only be fanning the flames of her pyre. Despite his gruff exterior and disreputable way of life, Zan didn’t kill aimlessly.
He strode into the medical bay and set her down on one of the antigrav pallets. Punching in commands, he turned his back and scrubbed his hands up like a professional surgeon. “Are you allergic to anything?”
Her mouth opened and closed on a few false starts. Looking to mend her or poison her? She cleared her throat and forced out the words, “Not that I’m aware of, no.”
Zan didn’t reply as he set about sterilizing various instruments. To heal or to torture? Gen swallowed and murmured, “I’m sorry. I never should have led you on, especially while things were so unsettled with him.”
He didn’t respond, but she pushed on. “I didn’t set out to seduce you for any reason other than I wanted to. Rhys and I have an impossible relationship. I know it, he knows it, and we torment each other nonstop, but I can’t help how I feel.”
Zan met her gaze, held up a hypodermic needle. “Local anesthetic.” He injected it into her damaged thigh and tapped the skin a few inches above the wound.
She braced for another wave of pain but felt only a dull contact. “I didn’t feel anything.”
He nodded in satisfaction and set to work, cutting away the semibonded sealant. Other than a few bizarre tugging sensations, she felt nothing. Her heart waited elsewhere, suspended in time.
After a while, Zan spoke in a level tone. “You don’t need to make excuses. I’m not going to kill you over something that can’t be undone.”
The idea that he’d want it to be undone at all disturbed her. Even now she could not regret being with him. Zan was by turns a forceful and patient lover, taking his time to pleasure her as well as himself, demanding the most her body had to give. If she’d never met Rhys, she would have been more than content to explore him on a regular basis for the rest of her natural life.
Unfortunately, she
did
know Rhys, and craved him like air in her lungs, a light in the abyss. Tears threatened to overwhelm her again as she thought of him trapped in the dark, nothing to feel but his own fear and the residual traces of her pain.
“You really love him, don’t you?” Zan’s soft words broke her from her obsessive thought cycle. He’d flushed out the wound and applied a thicker coat of sealant, a stark-white strip of artificial skin running down her leg like she’d been detailed.

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