Page 42

He scowled. “Doubtful.”

“We’re not so bad. Although I’ll never be one tenth the fighter you are.” She applied healing salve to several more cuts.

“You fight well enough. You fight with spirit. You fight for something you care about. That makes you a warrior. If you don’t have something you consider worth protecting, it means you’re only going through the motions.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t exactly make me an Apexian. I don’t have these muscles.” Daisy traced a finger down his bicep, her already overheated body growing increasingly warm. He was so damn hot. She may be sick, but she’d have to be dead not to get excited by him.

“You don’t need the muscles. Not when you have me by your side.”

Daisy lifted her gaze to meet his. The intensity in his eyes made her heart swell, and a tingle tracked down her spine.

She looked away, focusing on a neat scar by Rexx’s heart. “This looks like it was done with a laser scalpel.”

He glanced down at his chest and frowned. “It was.”

“You have several of these scars on your body. What were they done for?” There were six laser incisions across his chest.

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know why they were done.”

“How can you not know when you’ve had a medical procedure?”

“Probably for the same reason you don’t know how you got the alien technology inserted behind your translator chip.”

Shock reverberated through Daisy as she traced her fingers over the scars. “Someone did this to you without your consent?”

“You must have heard the rumors about me.” His voice was tight.

“I know you were missing for several months. I don’t know why, though.”

“Yeah, I vanished.”

“And that’s when you got these scars?”

“That’s right.” Only his quiet breathing passed between them for a moment. “I was on a mission that got screwed up. It was a new team. They were green and shouldn’t have been in the field. But we’d had losses in a recent battle. The morons in command insisted the squad was ready. I argued against it, but they overrode my protests. So I put myself up to lead them. I figured I could keep them from messing up.”

“But that didn’t happen?”

“It should have been straightforward. But the intel we’d been given was wrong. Not just wrong, it was faked.”

Her heart stumbled. She was almost afraid to breathe in case Rexx closed up. It was the first time he’d spoken about this to her. “What happened?”

“You don’t need the details. Let’s just say the team proved they weren’t ready. The attack was brutal, the squad scattered, what was left of them, and I was left defending a base with only a few weapons and twenty-five combatants approaching.”

“Rexx, I had no idea.”

“No one does. It was a long time ago.”

“And they took you?”

He let out a long, strained sigh. “They did. They thought I was dead and took my body to parade through their base. They wanted to show off to everyone how they’d killed one of the Apexian elites. But I was biding my time. I got in there and took out half the base before they brought me down.”

His tone wasn’t bragging, Rexx was simply stating facts. It still made Daisy’s heart curl in with sadness. He must have gone through hell and back, yet he’d kept fighting.

“You got out? Or did someone come for you?”