It was the only thing she could think of doing. She couldn't ask the question out loud, not here, in a room full of their teammates. But she could look at him and let the question sit in her eyes.
Pavel smiled.
That was all. He smiled, that infuriating one-corner smile, and he did not look away.
She wanted to punch him.
She also wanted to do several other things that she'd only read about and had no practical experience of, and the combination of wanting to punch him and wanting to do the other things was so disorienting that she had to look away first, which felt like a defeat.
"The briefing's starting," she said, to save face.
It was also true.
Yamanu, who had been talking to Julian up until now, stood up, and he was now facing the room and waiting for the conversations to die down.
"Last brief before we kit up and board," he said.
Behind him, a screen showed the cove and the tunnel and the basement in a schematic that Drova had stared at so many times that she could draw it from memory. The cove was completely hidden, accessible only from the water or through the tunnel that ran up from the waterline into the mansion's basement on one side and the harem on the other. Navuh had built it as a private escape route, a way off the island that no one else knew about, and now the clan was going to use it to take the one thing that mattered the most to the Clan Mother.
"With a team of Guardians, Kra-ell, and Odus, we should be able to handle whatever they throw at us."
Someone near the back said something about butlers bowing politely before punching the enemy in the face and then sweeping the mansion's basement clean after extracting the chests.
Anandur snorted. "You'll be thankful for their help when we need to move boulders the size of jeeps out of the way. They are our heavy equipment."
Okidu dipped his head in a perfunctory bow. "We prefer to be called the muscle, master."
"Of course." Yamanu dipped his head in return. "The Odus and the Kra-ell males are the muscle. The footing is bad, and the site has come down twice already. I'd rather have too many hands than too few. If everything goes the way it's supposed to, the extra muscle is overkill, and we all stand around watching Okidu and Onidu pull out the chests. That's the outcome I strive for. I want to be bored."
"You won't be," Pavel murmured, just loud enough for her to hear.
She glanced at him. "Why not?"
"Because things never go according to plan. There are always surprises."
He said it lightly, but there was no humor in it.
"Compulsion is our get-out-of-hell free card," Yamanu said, and his eyes found Drova's across the room. "If we encounter any opposition on the way in or the way out, Drova handles them, but let's hope that her talent will not be needed. The goal is to get it done without anyone knowing we were there. The excavation crews work only days now, so the basement should be empty after dark. There is always the chance of a night patrol stopping by or someone deciding to look for treasure. According to the rescued harem occupants, the basement is full of discarded luxury items."
"Like what?" Drova asked.
"Furniture, artwork, other household items of the pricy kind."
Boring things. "Why would anyone risk their lives for such nonsense?"
Yamanu flashed her a bright smile. "What would you find worthy of looking for?"
She shrugged. "A mystery. Ancient scripts, artifacts from the time of the gods, Navuh's personal journals full of his evil schemes…"
Chuckling, Yamanu lifted his hand to stop her. "We get it, Drova. But whatever the reason anyone gets down there who isn't supposed to be, they are yours. Your job is to silence them before they have a chance to sound the alarm."
Drova nodded while pointedly ignoring the looks from the other Guardians.
They were glad to have her on their team, but that didn't mean they were comfortable around her, and it wasn't just because she was a compeller who could make them do things they would otherwise not do. It was enough that she was a pure-blooded Kra-ell, an alien with alien looks and alien attitudes.
Or so they thought.
If they only knew that on the inside she was just as silly and confused as any other teenage girl, human or immortal.
