“On three.” I slipped the plasma charge from its specialized pocket and activated the targeting array in my helmet. I held it up, knew Ethan would recognize the type of device. It didn’t look much different than a human grenade. The effect, however, was closer to something the human’s bombers dropped from their airplanes.
Warning lights flashed as my weapons system analyzed the blast radius, confirmed what I already knew.
Ethan and I were in the kill zone.
17
Lyra
“One. Two. Three.”I threw the charge and screamed at Ethan at the same time. “RUN!”
I expected him to take off at a dead sprint. Instead, he raced to me and grabbed my hand, yanked me to my feet.
That fucking hurt. Every movement felt like small daggers were being shoved between my ribs. But I clung to him, holding his hand as we ran.
Maybe, if we could get back to the other side of the roof, jump down to the lower level… maybe the blast wouldn’t kill us.
I heard the explosion before the shockwave came for us, lifting us off our feet and throwing both of us over the edge of the roof.
Ethan pulled me toward him, twisted in the air so his body would take the brunt of the ten-foot fall.
We hit the tar and gravel rooftop hard. Rolled. Thank the gods for the armor we both wore as it protected us from the blast of fire that roared over our heads. Heat alarms blared inside my helmet as Ethan curled his body around mine, arm around mywaist, shielding me with his back to the flame. Bahre and the others were shouting at each other over comms, racing to us. Shouting at the two human drivers waiting in the vans to get their asses moving.
I lay wrapped in Ethan’s arms as the dust settled, afraid to move, to speak, to believe we’d survived.
My pulse jumped, not due to the battle we’d just fought, but because now he would see me. Now we had to talk. Now I would have to show him what I had become and hope he didn’t turn away.
“Are you all right?” Ethan’s voice trembled.
Was he hurt?
I shifted, ignoring the agony screaming through me, and turned to face him. Touch him. Inspect him from head to toe. “Are you hurt?”
Our helmets bumped together, our faces as close as we could get with smoke and ash floating in the air around us. The air wasn’t fit to breathe, not yet. So we settled for helmet-to-helmet contact, arms around one another. We waited. Knew the others would come.
Kovo was there first, cursing as he lifted me off the ground as gently as he could. I winced and his beast snarled, clearly agitated. Where was Adrian when I needed her? A pissed off Warlord would only answer to one person in the universe.
I needed Adrian to tell Kovo to stop being an asshole to my man before I broke out my claws on my own brother.
Krag and Rohn flanked Ethan and pulled him to his feet, Krag reaching for the Scion blaster that had saved our lives.
Ethan grabbed it back, shaking his head. “Oh no, you don’t. Finders keepers. This is mine.”
Krag didn’t argue. We weren’t exactly following the rules right now, being here, going to war with the Silver Scions in the middle of a human city. The Interstellar Coalition of Planets’treaty with Earth did not allow for distribution of Coalition weapons on Earth. But the plasma weapon in Ethan’s hands was not Coalition made. It was a Scion weapon. Black market. Already illegal. A weapon I now realized Ethan must have literally torn from the dead body of one of the cyborgs.
That gem of a thought made my beast purr in approval.Strong. Mine.
He hasn’t seen us yet. He might not want us.
My beast was not concerned.I am beautiful.
I hoped Ethan would look past the fact that we were, technically, from the planet he hated most. The planet that the now dead monster on the rooftop above us was also from. The planet and people responsible for the death of his brother. For nearly killing him as well.
“Jenkins?” Ethan asked as he regained his footing. Krag steadied him as Rohn left us to leap up into the blast zone and inspect the damage.
“He’s in the van with the hunters and Egon. They’re already gone. Taking him to the Processing Center. Warden Egara has a ReGen pod and she’s closer,” Bahre informed us.
Rohn’s head appeared above us and he whistled. “You need to come up here and see this.”
