Seduce Me in Flames (18 page)

Then she seemed to realize what she had done, and awkwardness flushed over her face. She dipped her head, drawing back a little.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not used to … No one touches me. Everyone else who knows who I am would never think of touching me like this. Except for you. The sensation is so strange for me, and yet I find I am drawn to it.”

“Why is it that no one can touch you?” He didn’t point out the obvious, that he should be the last person
she should allow to touch her. Those scorches on her back made that all too clear.

She sighed. “The idea is that I am royalty and too precious for the common touch. But I am also poisonous fruit, the daughter of a traitor and a whore. I am doubly cursed, then, to know no comfort.”

“I am as common as it gets, Princess. And I don’t really care who your parents were. They have no bearing on who you are as an individual. There is only so much you can blame your parents for. At some point you have to hold yourself responsible for your own actions.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” she whispered. She studied his face, her gaze sharp and discerning.

Whatever else she was, he could tell she was intelligent. Perhaps not learned in worldly ways, but that would quickly change once she was out of her controlled exile. He could see that very clearly.

“I suppose you blamed your parents for what you are for quite some time,” she speculated carefully.

He nodded shortly. He had treated his mother abysmally during his adolescence, his anger overtaking his love for her. He had hated what he was, and she had not made him feel any better about it, refusing to even discuss the matter. She wouldn’t even tell him who his father was. No one else had known, either. It was a strange sort of thing in a tight-knit clan like theirs. Everyone always knew what was going on with whom, and who was in whose bed. But apparently his mother had been intensely discreet about her affair. She had never spoken a word of it, had never given him a clue as to whether she felt positively or negatively about the experience. He could only assume a negative. If she had loved his sire, wouldn’t she have wanted to share that with him? Or perhaps what had once been love had turned to hate the moment she realized she had given birth to a freakish
little child who one day could destroy everything she held dear if he didn’t learn to control himself?

He had resented her for what he had determined to be a lack of love for him. A real mother, he had thought, would have loved him no matter what he was. If anyone should have loved him, it should have been his mother. So his behavior to her just before she died had been horrible. The lashing out of a confused boy under the pressure of becoming a man in a tribal system that worshipped personal strength above all else. After all, wasn’t he the strongest and most powerful of them all? He could make a scathing mark in his clan, be the most powerful of men. It hadn’t been until he had taken that brutal, life-changing step that he realized she had been right all along. That she had only been trying to protect him out of love for him, not trying to hold him back, as he had mistakenly accused her of in his heart.

“I learned it was wrong to blame my parents. They could no more control the manner of their genetic material than I could. Perhaps they ought not to have had children at all,” he amended, “but for me to say that would be to say I believe that my life has no value. My life has had its trials, but it is because I am here that other lives have been spared. Not just one or two. Many.”

“The lives of an entire nation, Rush,” she reminded him quietly. “If not for you, countless people would suffer in Allay.”

“Perhaps.” He shrugged it off. “If it hadn’t been me it would have been someone else. My team could have gotten you out of here just as well without me.” He tried to repress a quick smile. “But I did it with far more style.”

That made her laugh out loud, and he had to hush her with two fingers resting heavily over her lips. He regretted the need to do so. He felt that she probably didn’t
get the opportunity to laugh very often. It was a shame. She had a nice-sounding laugh. Not jolly or even raucous like Justice’s could be, not even genteel like Ravenna’s was. It was just … normal. Not what he would consider the laugh of an empress, but eminently suited to the woman before him.

“Ender?”

The sound of Bronse’s voice in his ear made him jolt away from her guiltily. He straightened up and touched the comm piece in his ear. “Yes, sir?”

“We’re two minutes out. You?”

“Sittin’ and waitin’,” he assured his commander.

There was a distinct beat before acknowledgment.

“Hang tight.”

Rush’s brow furrowed. In just a few words he heard things that no one else would have heard unless they were as tightly knit into their squad as he was. Chapel was notoriously sharp and efficient. It wasn’t like him to hesitate in the least. In that small nuance, he knew there was something wrong, something left unsaid because he didn’t want to share it over an open communications channel. Was someone injured? Had there been a casualty?

“Shit.” He stuffed his shirt deep into his pack as tension ratcheted through his body. He had been under orders to protect their principal at all costs, but had his absence from the squad caused him to lose a good friend? Who hadn’t he been there to protect? Fallon? Justice?

“What is it?” Ambrea asked him, worry etching lines into her face almost instantly.

“Nothing,” he said, shrugging off her concern. Whatever it was, they were minutes away from finding out. He shouldn’t have shown her his worries to start with. It had been thoughtless of him. Truth be told, he’d been
off his mark, it seemed, for this entire mission. He would be grateful when it was finally over.

But there was still a long way to go. The mission would not end for him until the matter of her rights to her throne had been adjudicated and he had walked her into her palace and seen her take her rightful seat. As far as the IM was concerned, this was the most pressing matter in all of the Three Worlds at the moment. A great deal hinged on this single woman achieving her place in Allay. The economics alone could have far-reaching ramifications if all did not go as it should. As could Allay being plunged into civil war, or worse yet grasped in the grip of a dictator like Balkin Tsu Allay, who had orchestrated much of Benit Tsu Allay’s iron-fisted imperial rule …

Balkin was far from being an unknown to the IM. It was Balkin’s grasp of the laws of Allay and the laws of the Interplanetary Militia that had tied the militia’s hands all these cycles. The IM had always lacked the solid proof it had needed that there were crimes against humanity being perpetrated in Allay, Balkin’s brutal efficiency at seeing to it there were no witnesses, no evidence, and no one brave enough to raise a voice against the emperor. But when Benit died and the boy had inherited the throne, the nobles had finally found the backbone to speak up, seeing the opportunity for what it was … and seeing the writing on the wall if Balkin was allowed to control the boy absolutely.

It was unexpectedly ambitious and sloppy of Balkin to murder his nephew. The IM could only assume it was murder until evidence was found otherwise, but there was always the possibility that it had truly been a run of bad luck in the imperial family. After all, why would Balkin be so methodical for so long and then seemingly impulsive all of a sudden? And it was very strange that he hadn’t seen to the princess’s death first. He’d had her
completely in his grasp in his prison. The only way he could claim the throne was if she were dead.

It didn’t make sense.

Rush shrugged off the worry. It was none of his concern. His job was to protect Ambrea’s life, not puzzle out the whys and wherefores of the politics around her. He was a grunt with a job to do and he was just going to do it.

The next sound he heard alerted him to the approach of a person, or group of persons. He cocked his head, listening sharply, automatically putting a powerful hand around the princess’s upper arm, ready to pull her in whatever direction he needed her to go. Whoever it was knew how to walk with care and in near silence, in spite of all the noisy things littering the floor of the forest that made it nearly impossible to do so. He believed it was Chapel approaching at first, but then remembered something.

Suna.

Suna wasn’t trained to walk a forest floor soundlessly. So he ought to be hearing her clumsy, crashing footsteps since she was with them.

He didn’t know what made him throw up a guarding hand, but it allowed his forearm to block the sudden slice of a nasty double-edged blade. Rush stopped the thing from hitting his throat by a fraction, the metal so close that when he grabbed the offending arm on the other end of the blade, the metal scraped the underside of his jaw as if to shave him close and clean. He yanked the attacker out of the cover of the trees and threw him against the resonance boundary that cut them off from their escape. The contact made an impact wave shimmer through the energy of the resonance field. The sound was like the buckling of fatigued metal. The shock that burst into the attacker was meant to discourage animals from escaping onto the tarmac, or people from doing
exactly what they were planning to do—escape the planet without going through proper channels. Unfortunately, since Rush had a tight grip on the man, the shock went straight into him as well, the power of the conduction rattling every nerve in his body. But like the stun guns, he could tolerate far more than the average person.

It immediately struck him as odd that the attacker, dressed in an imperial uniform, would take the risk of eliminating him with hand to hand. Rush was clearly superior in strength and size. Why not just shoot him from a safe distance if he knew he was there?

The question was answered when a streak of energy struck him hard in the side of his face. It felt as though he’d been smacked with a ball of acid, the sting fierce and burning. It was a shot from a 240, meant to painfully take him out of the picture.

All it did was piss him off.

He reached for his munitions belt with his off hand, his dominant hand crushing the first soldier into the resonance barrier. He realized that the first man was unconscious about the same time as multiple laser hits began to spray the air around him. He threw the spitter bomb he’d pulled from his belt, aiming directly for the first gunner. He let go of the knifer and grabbed for Ambrea, folding her into his arms and into the protective bend of his body. The spitter went off, spraying the area with bio-corrosive gel. Shouts and mayhem filled the air. The gel was meant to burn any living organism it touched, so any exposed skin, the trees, the brush—all of it sizzled as it corroded away like metal infested with virulent rust. He’d chosen the spitter because it was quieter than anything else he had, had a low radius of effect, and immediately incapacitated anything it touched. No one could tolerate the pain of the corrosive. It dropped them in their steps instantaneously.

Ambrea had gripped his arms, her breathing panicked and ragged. Her face was burrowed against his biceps. He reached up to touch her hair, stroking it gently for the briefest of moments but conveying the comfort she needed to get her to release her deathly grip on him. She silently nodded, moving free of him, realizing that he didn’t have time to be dragged down by her.

“Get low. Stay here until I come back. I’ll only be a second.”

She crouched down into the fan ferns, trying not to look at the body of the soldier that lay crumpled on the ground mere inches away her. She had never seen anything like the jolting, clawing horror in that soldier’s face as Rush had held him trapped in a place of excruciating pain. Ambrea knew that the power in the resonance boundary was incredible, a tremendous repelling force that was not meant to be used as anything other than a fierce repellent. It was not deadly as it repulsed whatever touched it, forcing it hard away. But Rush had used his incredible strength and that awesome mutation of his body to fight the repulse and keep the guard firmly against its power.

The power to create fire with a thought, the ability to withstand energy fire from the most savage of weapons, and now the strength necessary to endure the pulse of the resonance boundary. A skilled, trained warrior. An expert, clearly, in all sorts of munitions. Dogged and loyal.

That was when Ambrea Vas Allay knew she had to keep Rush “Ender” Blakely at her side at all costs.