1
Darren
Unnamed asteroid on the Outer edge of the Asteroid Belt.
Darren sighed and staredat the white ceiling, a habit he seemed to have developed in the month since their prison break from Horizons. Waking up in the middle of a sexy dream about Aiden wasn’t the best way to start the day, but it was easy enough to deal with unlike the longing such dreams etched into his heart. Sometimes he managed to ignore it, other times it was harder, his body and mind as if unwilling to let go even if he knew he should.
Slowly, his interest in Aiden Kesley had grown into more, solidifying that yearning to get to know the man he couldn’t have, one dream at a time. It lived in his stomach, in his chest, in the tips of his fingers, and Darren didn’t really know what to do with it or how to shut it down. And when he was in Aiden’s company, often he didn’t want to either, because there was just something so… enticing in Aiden, so familiar and comforting in his haunted eyes, in the way he too was broken just like Darren.
On a soft groan, Darren grabbed his half-hard dick and took care of his erection. The conversations with Aiden after that night they’d spoken in the mess hall really didn’t help either. They didn’t happen every day, and they didn’t tend to last long or go beyond ‘What did you do today?’, but they ran into each other roaming the frigate often enough for him to conclude that Aiden had trouble sleeping, too.
Was he also anxious about meeting Sara’s AI in the hideout? Finding out about the legacy? Worried that Marcus would catch them? Or was he still tormented by his fiancée’s death and betrayal and his choice to help the one who’d murdered her?
Knowing Aiden, it was probably all of that.
Darren lounged in bed for a while, fighting with his jumbled thoughts. Eventually, they let off a little, and he felt sufficiently awake to get up even if he knew it was way too early. The twenty-four-hour cycles they kept to on the spaceship were arbitrary, not synchronized to anything at the moment, so, technically, it didn’t really matter when he was awake. He did try to keep to a routine—because having one helped him deal with the anxiety—but his sleeping schedule had been hectic ever since the prison break.
Because Marcus DuLaurent was looking for them. Forhim. Darren wasn’t ready to meet the man who’d ended the Valrais reign and taken his sister and family away from him, but he hoped he would be one day. And the first step was the Valrais Legacy Sara was guarding. It was what Marcus was after, why he’d been chasing Darren for so long, why he’d killed so many people. Why Claudia DuLaurent, his daughter and Aiden’s fiancée, had had to die.
Once Darren took a quick shower, he dressed and went for coffee. There wasn’t much on his agenda besides the call later with Nyle’s grandmother, so he busied himself with checks ofthe ship. He didn’t know as much as his fiery pilot and friend, Bea Kingston, but he knew just about enough to be able to tell if some system wasn’t working right.
Starting in the cargo hold, Darren made his way up, running system and hardware tests and coming short of any issues. It brought a smile to his face. Aside from Bea, both his sassy hacker, Nyle Owens, and his engineer, Kristen Tiverich, were practically obsessed with the frigate—theIFCSV Maineas it were now called—tweaking, updating or customizing something whenever he happened to run into them.
Darren couldn’t blame them; it was indeed an impressive ship and the only infiltration and stealth class frigate that was not under the control of the Global Nations. Bea had ‘acquired’ it and recruited Kristen while Darren was sitting in prison, and they’d equipped it with all its fancy tech and stealth modules.Even if there had been no guarantee that Darren could escape.Knowing Bea, she would’ve probably tried to break him out at some point, but then Aiden had charged into Darren’s life with an attempt to kill him, only to end up being the one to help him break free.
Darren paused in the doorway of the engine room, one foot inside and one still in the hallway. Rows of consoles and monitors occupied the sides, and the ship’saltenergycore floated beyond the thick glass that bisected the space in two. There was a wide gap between the sectioned-off core and where this floor of engineering ended in glass railing, which meant that the core could only be accessed via an extended gangway unless you descended all the way to the bottom of the cavernous room. Two narrow staircases off the bridge’s sides accommodated that.
Aiden and Kristen were leaning with elbows on the railing, facing the core and chatting. The sight made Darren’s heart flutter with joy. It had taken the better of the month they’d spenthiding on asteroids before Aiden had started to offer more than curt greetings and occasional opinions to the rest of the crew.
First had been Nyle—which wasn’t surprising as the blue-eyed blond was a force of nature—the two of them bonding over their love for coffee and Nyle’s hacking career. Then Aiden had begun talking to Kristen, discussing designs and materials that Darren couldn’t even pretend he knew much about. Only recently, he’s opened up to Bea, perhaps because she was the one who’d been on Darren’s team long before the other two.
Not announcing himself, Darren just observed the two men as he leaned against the doorframe, helpless as a smile formed on his face when Kristen patted Aiden on the shoulder and got only a slight wince. Touch-starved, that was what Aiden was, Darren was sure of it, though at the same time the man was resistant to it. Maybe he was partially afraid… definitely out of habit, too.
Darren caught himself craving to be the one to change those things. He yearned to be allowed to touch Aiden again, to be touched in turn if Aiden so wished. That familiar tug in his gut told him he had no right hoping for such things because he’d ruined Aiden’s happy life. But his heart didn’t care, never had from the start, it seemed. It wanted what it wanted, so he was done trying to convince it otherwise and enforce logic where logic had no say.
Darren watched for a while, eavesdropping on their conversation now and then.
“I’d much rather we go somewhere else too,” the black-haired engineer was saying, “but it’s best we wait until we hear back from Nyle’s grandmother. We still need to be careful, even if Marcus has been more focused on the inner planets.”
“And while we are on the topic of Nyle and his grandma”—came Nyle’s sultry voice over the ship’s comms along with what sounded like doors hissing closed—“how about you drop by myquarters, Kristen? It seems like I have a bit of a…plumbingissue.”
Shaking his head, Kristen looked up at the ship’s speakers and grinned. “How urgent is it?”
“Veeeery,” answered Bea over a snort while Nyle giggled in the background.
This was Darren’s cue to make a hasty escape unless he wanted to be spotted. Darting down the corridor as his heart ran a marathon, he took the elevator to the upper deck all the while pondering what Aiden’s reaction would have been if it wasn’t Kristen’s, but rather, Darren’s hand squeezing his shoulder.
Would he jerk away? Frown? Snarl? Wince? Or would he yank Darren against one of the metal panels and kiss him into delirious oblivion like the Aiden he fantasized about?
He didn’t let himself arrive at an answer and instead made his way to the empty cockpit. A short ride down via the cockpit elevator and he was in the section of the ship that housed his quarters and the conference room. He sat in a chair in the conference room, stretched, and then waited for the encrypted video call to come.
“Hi, Darren, dear.” Nyle’s grandmother beamed a radiant smile at him, gray hair curtaining her face. “It’s been a while.”
“Hi, Nan. It really has. It’s great to see you.”
“Likewise, dear. My lovely Nyle isn’t with you?”
Grinning widely with a shake of his head, he winked at her. “He’s occupied at the moment.”
