Still infuriated about the situation, Bianca truly wanted to go back to the Terran Empire and throttle Bron.
Damn menace would probably get turned on by it.
Bianca brushed off the thoughts because she needed to focus, not on what mattered to her, like throttling the Emperor, but on what she needed to do right now. How to get through this and get back with the others.
Hopefully, everyone was safe somewhere. She wanted to believe if the others were like Harbin, they would be keeping each of them safe, and she trusted that more than anything at the moment.
Harbin would make sure she was safe.
She trusted him.
Quite a bit, in fact. She knew he would help her through this. Whatever it was, this wound up being.
The cold started to sink into her bones. All her layers mimicked a blanket to a degree, and she twisted as much as she could, keeping herself covered and as warm as possible. It seemed the cold was getting to her, though. She shivered even more and rubbed her arms.
“May need to add gloves to the formal attire,” she muttered. She looked around the pod and saw the necessities loaded into the pod. Survival packs—with food and water and whatever basic needs she’d require.
Veta always thought about those things, she mused.What a good girl. Fallon would have loved her.
She detached the bag so she’d be ready when Harbin came back.
“Maybe there are some gloves in here,” she whispered. And noticed that her breath fogged over. She pressed a few keys to warm up the temperature inside the pod, hoping to stay warm while she waited for Harbin to return.
Surely he was not going to keep her in the pod.
But he hadn’t been specific about when he would get her out. At least, she assumed he was gone. She could not see one way or the other. His ship’s wings wrapped around hers.
She yawned as the adrenalin rush crashed down. Her whole body felt like dead weight. Cold and tired.
“Maybe I should just, uh, take a nap. Conserve on my oxygen. Or something.”
Her eyes fluttered closed, and she tumbled off into a deep sleep.
Her last thought was that sleep might not be the best thing.
* * *
Crackling woke Bianca.
Crackling and the smell of fire. And something else, but she couldn’t put her finger on what it was just yet. Her head swam, and she felt disoriented. She twisted around, looking for the fire’s source.
Not far from her, on the wall was a large fireplace made of stone, spread out wide with a border of rock in a crescent shape around the front of it.
It was built into a cave wall.
She was in a cave.
From the look of it, a deep one, as far as that went.
Turning her head a little, she could see the white of light outside.
“Harbin?” she whispered.
An arm draped over her. “Shh.”
She froze. Who was this? Where was she?
His arm wrapped around her, and it was large! He pulled her to him, his forearm cold against her from the metal gauntlet—
