Dark Paradise (9 page)

Suddenly embarrassed, she pulled away from Mach and knelt on the ground, busying herself with her bag. She ignored the men standing silent and watchful.

Mach knelt beside her. When he put his hand on her arm, she jerked away. Confusion wrapped around her mind, and she wasn’t sure what she felt, what she wanted, or what she was.

The more she tried to stop thinking about it, the more vivid the images and the stronger her shame. And at the root of that shame was an insidious feeling of lust, a sneaky darkness that beckoned to her, whispering irresistible words that made her want to crawl in a dark hole and hide from herself.

And maybe even worse than that were her blossoming feelings for the men. Their connection was strengthening—whether she wanted it to or not.

“Cin.” Mach’s voice was stern. “Look at me.”

She buried her face against her bag. “Just give me a minute, would you? Leave me be for a while.”

But he was Mach, and would not leave her alone to wallow in her shame and regrets and furtive, coy need. He forced her bag from her hands and grabbed her chin.

Elder stood behind him, his brows drawn down, his gaze holding concern and understanding.

“Fuck you both,” she said. But her voice was mild and low, and she knew it was not these two men she blamed. Not really. It wasn’t even the fucking sick housekeepers.

Elder knelt on her other side, and they wrapped her in a tight embrace. Silent and warm, they held her quietly, saying nothing until her rigid body relaxed and she controlled the threatening tears.

“Cin,” Elder murmured, “you only need to accept yourself.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake.” But she grasped at his words with desperate fingers, needing something to make it okay, what she’d done. What she’d felt.

“You’re amazing, honey.” Elder forced her to look at him. “You’re amazing and special, and I won’t let you be ashamed of what you’ve done or who you are. You saved us. All of us.”

She snorted, but listened. “If I hadn’t been with you, none of that would have happened anyway.”

Elder raised an eyebrow. “But you were, and it did.”

Mach spoke, finally. “You’re a warrior.”

And it was his words, so simple, so heartfelt, that made her smile. She sniffed, drew back from them, and thumped her chest. “Yeah. Fucking right I am.”

But Mach didn’t smile. His beautiful eyes were as serious as she’d ever seen them. And relieved, as well. And finally, they seemed to sense she was okay. For now.

Elder laughed, and stood. “I’m going to cook some lunch. By the sound of your groaning stomach, you’re as hungry as I am.”

Mach grabbed her wrists. “All right?”

She nodded. “They’re fine.” Only slight red marks encircled her thin wrists, proof of her time in the restraints. And of a fucking she would not soon forget. At the thought, she turned her wrists in Mach’s big hands and ran her thumbs across the skin of his forearms.

His dark gaze met hers, and for a long moment, they stared at each other. She ran her hands up his arms, over his shoulders. She didn’t speak and neither did he.

Elder broke their silence. “Let’s eat, break camp, and get to the post. We’ve a long way to go, loves.”

Cin looked away from Mach’s hypnotic eyes and stood.

Something had changed with the three of them. Something had shifted, and it was good.
She
was good. So she was kinkier than even she had known. So what? Sex and friendship in this world was as good as it got. There was little else. Why should she hide from that? She wasn’t a fucking coward. She was a
warrior
.

She was more afraid to face the new feelings of…
tenderness
she felt for the two men. The last thing she’d wanted was to become attached to anyone. That wasn’t smart.

She was hungry, as usual. It was much better now that the men kept getting food for her. That was one skill she hadn’t quite mastered; other than her extreme patience when it came to catching a poe, she was pretty much useless at hunting and catching food.

“You’re going to make me fat,” she told Elder later, as she munched on a slightly scorched hunk of meat. The three of them hunkered beside the fire, contentedly chewing their gamy dinner.

He grinned. “You’re too skinny. You need fattening up.”

She snorted. “I don’t really think there’s any danger of that happening here. God, I miss pizza and chocolate and pasta and chips. I want a fucking candy bar. Is that too much to ask?”

“In paradise, one can have such things as the human’s food.”

She looked in surprise at Mach, then glanced at Elder. “Obviously he can speak better than he lets on. Always spouting that caveman muttering and monosyllabic bullshit.”

Mach raised an eyebrow and took another bite of his bird. His stare was unsettling, as usual, so she busied herself with her dinner and ignored him.

But after dinner, as they walked in companionable silence over the uneven ground that would lead them through the reach, she hitched her bag higher on her back and started talking.

“I’ve been hearing about paradise since I was born,” she told them. “The aliens came when my mother was a kid, and she would tell us stories…” For a second, she drifted into the long-gone past but jerked herself back to reality quickly. There was no happiness in the past. “I never really believed it, though. Not back then.”

“What changed your mind, honey?”

She shook her head. “I guess…at first it was like being told something over and over by people you trust. Eventually you’re going to believe like they do. But then, when I was eight, I met one of them. The aliens.”

“Cin.” Elder’s voice was reproachful.

She looked at him, surprised. “What?”

“They’re Alien Americans.”

She laughed. “Whatever. The
Gamlogi
. Anyway, I met one. This was before they’d become part of our everyday lives, before they blended in to the crowds and started being our…friends. Before we stopped being afraid of them.”

“Before the governments started making deals with them,” Elder said.

“Yeah. Anyway, it was before. Over the years, I met plenty of them. But that first one, he was the one who convinced me their paradise existed.”

“When you were eight years old?” Elder and Mach exchanged disbelieving glances.

“I wasn’t convinced right
then
. I was convinced later when I recalled that day and that conversation. And when…” She frowned.

“Yes?” Mach asked.

“Before I went to prison, I was all…stupid. I thought I could actually kill my husband and get away with it. I was seriously desperate.” She took a deep breath and clutched her shaking hands.
Dammit
. “In prison, the aliens come once a month to scout for miners. I saw that same guy again.”

“Honey, it was years later. It couldn’t have been the same one.”

She glared at Elder. “You don’t know. I was there. I know. He picked me. I…lost it for a while there. But he came back before they shipped me out. There are no choices when you’re in prison, see. I had to go. But he made it okay. He told me—again—about paradise. And this time I believed him.”

“Why?”

“He showed me.” At Elder’s sound of skepticism she stopped walking and held out her palm. “He showed me. It was in his hand.”

Mach grabbed her hand and peered into her palm like one of the Gamlogi hid there. “How?”

She shook her head. “It’s hard to explain. But I looked into his palm and there were…pictures. Images of another world.” She took a shaky breath and put her free hand over her heart. “I felt it. I mean…I—”

“Shhh,” Mach said. “I know.”

“You do?” Elder asked.

“I too have seen paradise in a palm.”

Cin couldn’t breathe for a second. “I wasn’t crazy?”

Elder raised his eyebrows. “I thought you believed.”

“I guess I
thought
I believed more than I actually believed.” She paused, then glanced at Elder. “I see Mach believes, but do you?”

He began walking, and she automatically fell in beside him, Mach at her back. He said nothing.

“Well? Do you?”

He sighed. “Sweetheart, paradise does not exist. The Gamlogi need miners to strip the viable moons of shrube and other goodies they need to survive. They can’t do it themselves, so they need us. To keep us happy, they’ll tell us things we want to hear to work. That’s how
we
survive.”

“That’s not true!”

“Cin, if you found out right now that you were going to be here or on another moon, mining for the aliens until you die, what would you do?”

“I’d…” She couldn’t finish her whispered sentence.

“Exactly. Most of the miners would end it.”

Mach strode ahead of them, then spun on his heel and pointed a long finger at Elder. “You did not see. Paradise waits.” He thumped his chest. “I saw.” He pointed at Cin. “She saw.”

Elder shrugged. “Believe what you need to believe, and I’ll do the same.”

“Why do you do it, then?” Cin asked. “Why do you keep looking for shrube?”

“Because I don’t want to die.” He gestured at the world. “This is life. I have life no matter where I’m living it. I’ll look for shrube because it’s a purpose. But no, darling. I don’t believe in paradise.”

“Then what happens when you go to the rocks, to the exit points? What happens when you have enough shrube, and they take you through? What
happens
, Elder?” She was furious at him, but beneath that was the sneaky shiver of fear. Terror.

“Maybe they take us to a new moon with new promises. Maybe they kill us. I don’t fucking know what happens.”

Mach grasped the other man’s chin and forced him to look into his eyes. “You
don’t
fucking know. You don’t fucking
know
.”

Cin thought she might have fallen a little bit in love with him right then. “You don’t fucking know,” she murmured, and took Mach’s hand. Unified, they stared at Elder and waited.

Elder sighed. “There’s only one way to find out, my loves. Let’s get some shrube.”

Mach led them across the reach, and despite having traveled it before, and alone, she was hypervigilant. She kept her fingers close to Saint and Satan, her eyes constantly moving. The reach was one of the most dangerous parts of Ripindal.

They didn’t stop to eat. Mach distributed jerky among them, and they ate as they walked. Dried berries followed as dessert, washed down with lukewarm water.

They made good time and reached the halfway point before dark. Cin looked up at the huge overhanging rock that marked the halfway point, awestruck anew by its ability to somehow just hang there, in midair, connected to nothing.

It was enormous, that rock, its vastness frightening for the simple fact that it was impossible for her to wrap her mind around it. It seemed to wait. For what, she couldn’t say, but she could feel it waiting. Like it was alive.

She shuddered, then picked a spot not too close to the rock and lowered herself to the ground. Pulling off her boots, she dried her feet of sweat, pulled on clean socks and dried the insides of her boots.

Mach and Elder took care of their own business, and then Elder slipped away to hunt. She would have offered to help him, but knew she’d only scare off the animals and slow him down.

“Shouldn’t you go with him?” she asked Mach.

He shook his head. “No.”

She shrugged and surreptitiously watched him, her gaze trailing over his half-human features, his muscled arms, his flat stomach. He sat on the ground with his back against a broken rock, his eyes closed.

His long, strong legs were crossed at the ankle, his hands near his weapons. His long hair trailed over his chest, and she considered offering to put it back in its customary braid.

She wanted to go to him, run her thumbs over the sharp edges of his cheekbones, nibble at his full lips and feel his hard chest against her bare breasts.

Shivering, she closed her eyes and tried to think about something other than the huge, gorgeous man sitting not six feet from her.

The soreness between her legs had become a puny ache, but the pain would flare should he try to push his oversize cock inside her right now. It was too soon. Still, at the thought of him, her pussy dampened with desire, and she had to clench her fists to keep from slipping her fingers into her pants.

Damn him. Sighing, she opened her eyes and found him staring at her, his eyes narrowed. Heat climbed her face when she remembered he could scent her. He knew she wanted him.

She growled and climbed to her feet. How humiliating, how infuriating, that she couldn’t keep her secrets. The bastard sniffed them out like a bloodhound after a wild boar.

“Cin,” he said.

She ignored him and went to gather kindling to build a fire. She enjoyed being alone with her thoughts, sometimes. She was grateful Mach didn’t follow her. Then she would’ve had to waste energy berating him for treating her like a helpless female. She’d leave them at the post if they started that shit.

But deep down, she was a little disappointed that he didn’t follow her, throw her to the ground and fuck her until she was mindless.

Bastard.

If she hadn’t been distracted with thoughts of Mach, she might have seen the wild-looking creature before it attacked her, but with her arms full of wood and her mind full of sex, she forgot to be careful.

Chapter Ten

The kindling flew one way and Cin the other when her attacker rammed her from the side. Cin lost her breath when she hit the ground and was afraid for a second she’d cracked a couple of ribs.

But she’d learned from time in prison and on Ripindal you did not just lie and wait when you were knocked down. That’d get you killed.

She didn’t even think of calling out for Mach or Elder. This was all her. She’d been in danger before. She hadn’t run from it then and wasn’t about to now.

The attacker was such a blur of movement Cin couldn’t tell if it was human or not. She got quick impressions of hair, masses of messy hair, and a pale face with strange, glassy eyes.

The creature was a whirlwind of movement, faster than it was strong, and finally, after a bloody nose, bruised ribs, and a quickly escalating temper, Cin was able to wrestle the mad urchin to the ground and hold it there.