“Dare I trust you behind the wheel?” the captain drawled, jaw tight when he opened the door and ushered me inside, giving me no room to fight him. Almost as if the great and powerful Captain Rawlings were hesitant to give up an inch of control.
“See,” Marco said, and shifted the coach into gear, “it’s this kind of flagrant disrespect that really erodes the confidence of the men, sir.”
Hurling down the cobbled streets, Marco sent the vehicle lurching to the left, narrowly avoiding a collision with another parked coach before careening around a sharp corner carrying too much speed.
“We needencouragement,” Marco said, dragging the word out as the coach picked up a nauseating velocity. Buildings and pedestrians zipping by at an ever greater pace. “A leader who builds confidence and rewards the skills of his men”—he jerked the wheel and sent us into a fishtail around another sharp right turn—“with incentives. Like access to high-quality pussy. All expenses paid. Vacations that last longer than a night off at the bathhouse.”
Knuckles white, I clung to the door handle and slid into the captain’s hip, a gasp of shocked terror caught high at the back of my throat.
“Fucksakes, Marco,” the captain hissed, and dragged me off the bench and into his lap. “Slow down or the only pussy you’ll see for the next year is the one between your own cheeks. You’ll have to find a mirror and bend to see it.”
Marco gasped, his attention leaving the cobbled streets as he spun to stare at the captain in open-mouthed shock. “You wouldn’t dare!”
The only response offered was a tight jaw an unblinking glare.
With a huff, Marco flicked the last half of his smoke out the window where it flew by in a shower of sparks, steering one-handed as he took another aggressive corner and sent the captain and I rocketing toward the opposite door. “We’re almost there, you old prude. And just for the record,” he grumbled, “you’d be lost without me.”
Taking a deep breath, the captain reached with his left hand and wrapped white knuckles around a handle hanging from the roof. Enveloping me in his scent, he anchored me to his lap, pressed his lips to my ear, and murmured, “Just close your eyes, pet. Deep breaths.”
And for the first time, I didn’t fight for space. Didn’t argue or bicker. Heart in throat, a visceral fear for my life pulsed behind my eyes. Writhing as if it were a living thing that sent vicious, icy cold barbs spiking into my heart and racing down the inside of my spine, leaving my hands to tingle. My toes numb where they were braced against plush carpet, feet tangled between the captain’s.
“Annnd”—Marco threw the vehicle into park—“that’s a new base record, lady and gent!”
Staggering from the coach, the captain hauled me out. Fingers too tight where they were wrapped around my elbow, his face sallow and tinged just the slightest shade of green—a sentiment surely reflected on my own face.
Before either of us could cherish the relief, the captain was surrounded by solders. Swamped with a deluge of information and questions. And, sending one last scathing glare over his shoulder at Marco, he silenced them all with a raised hand, and said, “What’s the situation, Gabe?”
“They’ve built a shield, sir,” the soldier said. “Our weapons don’t have enough firepower to punch through them.” Gabe patted a matte black weapon strapped to his hip with a grimace. “Hoping an elite can get the job done where we can’t, or we’ve got some serious problems. General Tilcot wants it to be you, sir.”
I jerked as if slapped. Eyes flicking between the captain and Gabe, impending murder forgotten in the face of this new information. This sneak peek behind enemy lines, for everything I’d heard over my years of battling the empire, it had been my assumption that only an elite could use an energy weapon.
None of the slavers I’d come across had access to such a thing, but if the soldiers of the Caledonian army did?
The Elorans had already lost this war, no matter what kind of technology they managed to forge in the depths of their exile.
But… if the Caledonians had managed to give their regular soldiers the power of an elite, unfettered access to their devastating weaponry… perhaps there was a glaring opportunity for me to do the same…
Long legs propelling him up a set of rickety stairs and into a shoddy, makeshift building, the captain hauled me along in his wake without saying a word. Without touching me, he held me in thrall. His influence a gentle pulse of pins that pierced my veins mid-way up my forearms. Wrists and throat tingling, he kept me utterly enslaved as he approached a large glass case in the center of a room packed with soldiers. Running his fingers along the edge of a sealed lid, he paused to caress a bronze latch. Eyes going bottomless and inky with the same gleam I’d seen only minutes before.
Lust.
I could name it, now. Recognized the thing that burned and left me with scars I could only feel. Couldn’t see.
He flicked the latch.
Silence fell on the gathered soldiers. A hush that drew my nape tight with the sort of tension that spoke of something deadly lurking in the wood. That I’d stumbled into the den of a predator more vicious than any I’d ever known before.
Reverent, he put hands on the massive, cruel thing inside.
A cannon twice the length of my forearm, three times as thick. Matte black with chrome accents marking levers and knobs.
At the first instant of contact, it came to life with an angry series of beeps. The muzzle glowed the most intense, vibrant shade of green I’d ever seen. Enough that it made me hiss and recoil, overshadowing the burn of my manacles—now creeping past my elbows in a slow, agonizing burn—but only for an instant.
The men cheered.
“Shiiit, sir,” Marco said, and slapped the captain’s back. “Looks like the wildcat packs a helluva punch!”
Grinning, the captain merely caught my eye. Watching as I tried to rub. Tried to push the golden burn back down into the manacles from which it had come. That sinister glimmer swirling in his eyes growing all the more ravenous the longer he looked.
