Bahre cleared his throat. “You have the transport beacons?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Get your mate off this fucking planet. We can’t protect her here, not from the Hive and her own people.” He walked over to Carmichael, towered over the much smaller human lying in the grass. “Your commander, Jennifer? She and I will have words over this betrayal.”
“We didn’t betray you. We just need the pictures.”
Bahre used the toe of his boot to nudge him in the ribs. “To what end?”
“Fuck. That hurt.” Carmichael groaned and rolled onto his side, away from Bahre’s feet. “I don’t know. I’m just following orders. Command wants them. That’s all I know.”
My mate sighed, the sound loud and full of frustration. “You all are out of your minds. There is nothing spectacular or intriguing on those pictures. Nothing. A few aliens, the Hive guys, all you warlords, the poor old man the Hive murdered trying to get to the woman. There’s nothing you all don’t know about. You were there, Kai. Bahre. You were all there. I have looked at all of the pictures, more than once. There’s nothing there.”
Bahre’s quiet tone made my instincts scream to life in silent warning. “Perhaps that is what they are looking for.”
“Nothing?” Larkspur asked.
“Something hidden, something we did not see but your camera somehow captured.”
Larkspur’s mouth dropped open. Closed. She tilted her head and I saw the moment she realized she did know about something like that in her images, something odd or unseen. Rather than speak out—which would have been both ill-advised and dangerous with Carmichael listening—she looked up at me. “I’d like to go see Lavender now. I’m tired. I barely slept the last two days and I’ve almost been killed twice in the last twelve hours.” Tears gathered in her eyes.
The sight crushed my heart into a pulsing bag of pain. I had failed her, yet again. No male of worth would push his mate to such extremes, willingly place her in danger. Yet not coming after the flash drive had not been an option in my mind. I should have taken my mate to Bahre’s home and allowed her to rest. Nothing could break through the fortress he and his mate, Quinn, called home. If they managed to breach the perimeter walls, there was an entire unit’s worth of Atlan warlords in residence. They lived on Bahre’s estate while they either hunted Hive or waited for their turn on the Bachelor Beast television show.
She would have been safe there. I should have cared for her first. Fuck the I.C. and Commander Helion. Fuck the Hive. Fuck these images that caused my mate so much suffering.
A tear slipped free and rolled down her cheek. “I’m so tired. Can we get out of here? Please?”
Sirens from a human ambulance wailed in the distance as I secured the flash drive in a storage compartment in my armor. Opening another pocket, I removed two transport beacons. I placed one on my chest and held the other out to her.
Arms out, she took two steps back, away from me. “Oh no. Not one of those buttons again.”
“Again? You have seen something like this before?” Where would an innocent human female have seen a highly regulated piece of Coalition technology?
“The Hive tried to put one on me right before you crashed through the wall.” She stared at the transport beacon as if it was going to bite her. “What does it do?”
“This is a transport beacon. It makes travel possible without the use of a transport pad. They are extremely rare and heavily regulated Coalition technology. The Hive should not have them.” Vaguely I remembered hearing rumors about rebels on Rogue 5 stealing Coalition technology and selling it to the Hive. I had ignored the whispers as impossible. Why would the criminals on Rogue 5 sell anything to the Hive? Should the Hive win this war, Rogue 5, along with hundreds of other planets, would be attacked and integrated. Cooperating with the Hive meant assisting in their own downfall.
“Well, he did.” With a slight tremor in her hand, she reached for the beacon. “It won’t zap me as soon as I touch it, will it? I want to get my suitcase out of the car.”
Fuck. I’d been about to transport her without her belongings, things she’d told me she cared about. What was I doing? Had I been alone so long it was impossible for me to act as a true mate and put her needs above my own? Were my ingrained habits more powerful than the beast’s instinctive need to care for a mate?
Why are you so fucking quiet? This was the beast’s fault as much as it was mine.
Focus. Not kill human.
Ah. The glimpse of raw, animalistic fury the beast showed me made me stagger. I took three steps away from Carmichael, making sure Bahre’s body blocked my view of the human. His relief was palpable. His restraint was heroic. Neither one of us wanted to cause our mate any more trauma than she’d already been through. Killing the human would upset her.
Mine.
I held out my hand and sighed with relief when Larkspur placed her delicate hand in mine. Gramps came back out of the house and resumed his position on the grass, watching over Carmichael until the human medical personnel could arrive. “Go on. Get out of here. No reason to tell them I had a bunch of alien warlords in my back yard. Go. Go!” He flicked his wrists at us to hurry us along. “Don’t forget to tell Angela hello from her Gramps!”
“I won’t forget.” Larkspur called out over her shoulder as I led her into the house, out the front door to the parked SUV.
Bahre opened the vehicle’s hatch in the rear, and I lifted Larkspur’s bright red bag with one hand as Bahre and the other warlords climbed into their seats. Carrying her suitcase like it was the most valuable thing in the universe—to her, it was—I gently pulled Larkspur along until we stood in the middle of Gramps’ front yard and activated transport.
10
Larkspur, The Colony, Twelve Hours Later
