“You should have told me. We might have been able to prevent the crash.”
Shock isn’t the one who speaks.
“We couldn’t. And besides, we didn’t want to save the crew.” Risk looks at me with a clarity I’m too familiar with.She didn’t get on that ship by choice.
We don’t have to wait for her to wake up for her to confirm it. Risk is never wrong.
Burbling from the screen distracts me, but not enough to make me look away from her.
Risk’s face rarely betrays him, but I see him scowl in my periphery as he grabs the skin patch for her forehead.
“That explains why she didn’t strap herself in before they pushed her out. She’s been drugged. But otherwise, there’s nothing to worry about. She’ll probably have bruises from the landing and be groggy as hell when she wakes.”
I look at Shock. He said she’ll wake up, and I believe him.
“Four hours.”Give or take.
Nodding, Risk closes the panel and pulls out a thermal blanket, draping it over her.
I know I shouldn’t say it, but… “That means we have four hours to figure out how we’re going to keep Drift and her sisters from trying to take her away from us.”
“We don’t tell them she’s here,” Shock says. They’ve already had this conversation. I hear pieces of it in their remembered thoughts.
I look back and forth between them. “They won’t like that.”
Risk shrugs and checks the machine again as Shock says, “You always play the bad guy.”We’re happy to join that farce this time around.
“Her sisters might try to kill us.”
Shock snorts.Jess will want to kill you, but she won’t actually do it.
My brother’s bondmate—the one who hates me, and rightfully so—has wanted to kill me before. I’m okay with letting her repeat the exercise.
Neither object to risking Jessica or Laurel’s wrath. “Alright.”
Risk nods. “We keep her a secret until we know what, exactly, is going on.”
But that’s not enough, so I meet both of their eyes before I add, “And then we let her decide what she wants to do.”
They both nod, and I look at Shock, but I don’t ask him the question on the tip of my tongue. I don’t even want to hear him think what I already know.
There’s no way we can keep her.
RISK
The woman on the table is… soft, despite the glaring colors of her clothing and the dark lines and patterns tattooed on her skin.
We live in a world of hard, sharp, jagged things, and my first instinct is to get her out of here. To send her far away where she won’t be hurt any more than she already has been.
But that’s not possible.
Arc watches her like she’s the last thing tethering him to this planet. Shock has already made too many plans to go back and…once she wakes up, she’s not going to let us send her out of harm’s way.
Chrystal Ardem is an immovable force.
Sometimes knowing things is a curse.
Sometimes knowing things makes wanting them easier.
