Wrexxon’s expression did not change, and I worried he hadn’t heard me. I glanced at Venik, but he also did not appear suitably alarmed.
The Raas clapped a hand on my shoulder. “We got your transmission and understood the message. We determined that the governor we saved had been implanted with a tracker. Actually, Jasmine discovered it. He claims to have been unaware, and I believe him.”
Putting a tracker in an unaware person sounded like a Zagrath tactic. “Did you destroy it?”
Wrexxon gave me a wicked grin. “That would have let on that we had discovered their plan.” He shook his head. “We rendezvoused with another horde and gave them the tracker so they could lead the Zagrath on a merry chase and straight into a Vandar trap while we continued to hunt for you.”
My chest swelled with pride at the clever ploy and at the thought of the Zagrath trick being turned back on them. “Which other horde?”
“Raas Lorken.”
I blinked at him as the name registered. “The one they call The Demon?”
Wrexxon’s laugh was deep and low. “It is only the Empire that calls him that.”
I had heard plenty of dark tales about the ruthlessness of the youngest warlord. Ruthlessness that made Wrexxon look tame. But perhaps that was the perfect Raas to deal with the Zagrath who’d taken me and Skye.
Skye.
I turned back to where she and her friend had been standing, but Jasmine was leading her away with an arm thrown over her shoulder. I wanted to call to Skye. I wanted her to look back at me. But neither happened. She kept walking and talking with her friend, and I remained silent, wishing that this was a moment I could forget.
Chapter
Forty-Nine
Skye
Now I was alone in the quarters they’d assigned me, sitting on the edge of a bed that was wider than anything I’d slept on in weeks and staring at my hands in my lap and replaying the moment in the cockpit.
The way Kolt had gone still when the warbird filled the viewport. I’d watched his face change, and I knew. Even before he turned to look at me, I’d known. Everything that had slipped away from him had come rushing back.
I remember all of it.
I’d smiled at him, even as I’d known that it changed everything. Because what else do you do? You tell him you’re happy for him, which I genuinely was because he deserved to be whole. He deserved to know who he was.
It was just that who he was and the Kolt I knew were apparently not the same person.
I’d seen it happen in real time in the shift in his posture and the set of his shoulders. He hadn’t been cold, exactly. But he hadn’t been warm either. The man who’d held me through the dark hours on Kashara and said things I was still trying not to think about had stepped back into himself like slipping on armor, and I was left standing there wondering if any of it had been real.
I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes until I saw stars.
This was always how it was going to go. I’d known, on some level, that whatever existed between us had an expiration date stamped on it the moment he started remembering. I understood that the real Kolt was a warrior who’d spent his whole life believing humans were weaker and less trustworthy.
Another thing I knew was that I didn’t want to sit around the warbird waiting for a conversation that might never happen. I hated loose ends and things left unsaid. I needed to be the one to end things, and I needed to do it before he tried to give me some emotionless speech that would break my heart.
I jumped up and hurried out of the door before I could talk myself out of it, but once I was outside the room, I stopped.
The warbird was massive in a way that made me feel like an enormous metal beast had swallowed me whole. I craned my neck and stared at the criss-crossing bridges above me as I walked, squinting at the tiny figures moving across them at heights that made my stomach lurch.
After a while, it occurred to me that I didn’t know where I was going.
A Vandar rounded the corner ahead of me and slowed to a stop, cocking his head at me.
“You are lost,” he said. Not a question.
“I’m looking for the battle chief.”
He grunted and pointed upward. “Command deck. Up that ramp, then across the swinging bridge, then up the wide stairs at the south end. You will know it when you find it.”
