“Fuck,” she said breathlessly as she shifted first to her knees and then stood up. The transport wobbled beneath her.
Adjusting her hold on the blaster, she stepped down from the transport’s bed and surveyed the corridor, seeking the little controller. Not three seconds had passed before her stomach cramped, and she spun back toward the transport. She slapped a hand against the vehicle for support and bent forward as her body again threatened to purge itself.
“Puke if you’re gonna puke,” she said between ragged breaths. “Don’t have time to stand here undecided, damn it.”
She needed to hurry, needed to get to Leah before Murgen and his people did something harmful to her in the name ofscienceorcuriosity. She needed to get her baby before they moved Leah somewhere beyond Shay’s reach.
Bile rose in her throat.
No, you had your fucking chance.
She swallowed it back down, spit out a mouthful of bitter, acidic saliva, and shoved away from the transport. Her first few steps were stumbling and unsteady, but she refused to accept that. She regained confidence and stability quickly, and within ten or fifteen seconds had spotted the small controller lying on the side of the hallway about five meters from the stationary vehicle.
Checking behind again—the corridor was eerily quiet now, and that unsettled her—Shay walked to the control and crouched over it. She set down the blaster and picked up the little device. Fortunately, it appeared undamaged. The buttons were labeled with tiny pictures; she pressed the one marked with a broken circle.
As one, the cuffs around her wrists and the collar around her neck clicked and unlatched. She shookthem off immediately. The sound of those heavy metal restraints hitting the floor was more satisfying than she could ever have imagined.
She snatched up the blaster and checked its charge level. Ninety-two percent. It would likely hold out long enough for her purposes, but she couldn’t afford to take the chance. She turned and rushed back to the dead guards. Without allowing herself to acknowledge the fact that she was stealing from men she’d just killed, she wrestled off the borian’s blood-stained suit jacket, pulled it on, and loaded spare energy cells—along with the groalthuun’s blaster—into the pockets. She buttoned the jacket and hurried down the corridor in the opposite direction from that which the cart had been traveling.
The corridors were big and quiet. Now that she was moving, she guessed that this place was under the effects of sound dampeners that prevented noise from carrying very far—otherwise, there would’ve been echoes of every little sound bouncing up and down these halls. The place was terribly lonely despite the numerous display windows through which various alien animals could be observed, not that she had any interest in any of those displays. Murgen meant for her and Leah to be held in similar cells, waiting to be gawked at by him or his guests.
She adjusted her two-handed grip on the blaster and growled.
Not again. Never again.
Shay increased her pace, bare feet padding over the cold floor. Her imagination flashed an image in her mind’s eye of Leah, so small and helpless, alone and lost in these corridors, still too young to crawl away. Shay shook the imagining away. Nothing like that was going to happen. She would fight her way to her baby, and once she had Leah, she’d fight her way out of this place. After that…she’d hunt down Vanya and kill theshitout of her to win back her mate.
God, I hope Drakkal is okay.
If Murgen and Nostrus had considered Shay dangerous before, they were in for a surprise now. She’d never pulled her punches here, but the odds had always been stacked against her, preventing her from inflicting real damage.
Now the odds didn’t matter. These motherfuckers had Shay’s baby, and they’d sold off her mate to a psycho azheran bounty hunting bitch. Even if she had to kill a hundred more guards, a thousand, Shay would not stop until Leah and Drakkal werebothsafe and secure.
Shay slowed as she approached an intersection. She’d only been moved around this facility a few times during her prior captivity, and that had usually been while restrained in the back of a cart, under the watch—and sometimes the pinning bodies—of Murgen’s security guards.
She paused before crossing into the intersecting corridor, uncertain of which direction to go. Wasn’t she supposed to have some kind of…mom super sense or something to lead her toward her baby? She didn’t want to spend any more time in these corridors than was absolutely necessary—they were too long and lacked any practical cover apart from support frames every twenty or thirty meters, and those only jutted from the walls about thirty centimeters. Perfect if she wanted to get a tit shot off.
There was no choice but to move on.
“So what?” she muttered. “Eenie, meenie, mi?—"
Nostrus walked around the corner from Shay’s right, bumping into her shoulder before either of them could act to avoid the collision.
Shay reeled back and simultaneously swung her blaster up. Nostrus’s eyes—rounded in surprise an instant ago—narrowed. He raised his arms and caught her wrists in his hands, stopping her before she could aim the blaster at him.
“You’re going to regret this, terran,” he grated through bared teeth.
Shay bared her own teeth in a wild grin that would’ve made Drakkal proud as rage dulled all her aches and pains. “You turned down the wrong hallway, motherfucker.”
TWENTY-SIX
“They know their surveillance system is compromised,” Arcanthus said over the commlink.
Drakkal made a final adjustment to his earpiece and grunted his acknowledgment before returning his hand to the foregrip of his auto-blaster. Urgand had tended to the worst of Drakkal’s wounds, but it had been impatience and rage that chased away his pain, leaving room for little inside him beyond that persistent heat and his thundering heartbeat.
He was in a large, dimly lit access tunnel deep below the Gilded Sector with one shoulder against the wall, standing just to the right of a wide blast door. Urgand and Thargen were positioned to the left of the door, and Sekk’thi was at Drakkal’s back with her eyes and weapon trained on the large bay door a few meters away. Both entries were closed.
“Cren, you three in position?” Drakkal asked.