Her own reasons were just as bitter. It had not just been that they had sent her off with her mind wiped and to become a slave for a pleasure planet, where she would have died in chains and in a filthy cell, but because the Federation had destroyed all that she had loved.
She had managed to keep her deepest secrets, even in the mind wipe, because Yori had taught her to build memory caches in her brain and hold things within. They were like lockboxes that she could open and close at will, and she had slammed them shut, locked them, and then buried them deep in a hidden chamber of her mind when she had been captured by her fellow Capos after her betrayal was discovered.
Of course, she had betrayed them, her fellow Capo and the Federation.
Under the ground lived far too many humans, all starving and sick, all of them virtual slaves to the credit chips implanted in their arms at birth and whose bills were always so high.
There were some down there who birthed their children outside the Nexus, and so they escaped that fate of being sent above to work while being forced to go underground again after their twelve-hour day to slowly starve to death.
She had not been able to stand it. She had helped more than one person remove their credit chips, and she’d also learned a secret that not even Jeval, one of Talon’s brothers and a being blessed with the gift of being able to slip into people’s minds, could uncover.
The ship hewed hard right. The shudder and thrust of the engines made the floor rumble below her feet. Her eyes scanned the space around the ship yet again.
Nothing.
It was highly possible that she was afraid of the thing growing in her, the desire that made her want to go to Talon’s bedchamber and slip into his bed, and arms.
She did want that.
She craved it.
More than anything else.
More than credits.
More than revenge.
More than knowing what it was that she had hidden with her brain.
She wanted Talon and so badly that her body ached continually with that want and need.
And he did not want her.
