Tangled Fates (2 page)

their mating vows until his death. He’d certainly done a crappy job of this before, but his soul

felt a little lighter now that he had renewed his conviction. The ache of loss was still monumental, but it had eased.

After picking up the knife, he made his way to the bathroom, stopping at the bar for more

Captain Morgan. As he ran the knife under water, he watched the red ringlets of blood flow

down the sink. When the knife was clean, he staggered back to the black box laid open on the

floor. He knelt down and gently wrapped everything he had taken out, then placed them back in

the box and slid it under his bed to its original resting spot. He blew out the candles, plunging the

room into darkness, and fell into bed.

Chapter 2

Present Day

Cohen stared at the large, white screen hanging on the wall. He sat back in his chair and

crossed his arms over his chest, the black leather creaking. As he watched the images pop up on

the screen, he wished he could find some enthusiasm within himself to feel some excitement at

the impending results. However, he had none to offer.

Nevertheless, he could feel the anxiety in the room as the other seven people seated

around the black marble table stared at the screen. It was almost as if the tension was an entity in

itself and had been jacked with a good dose of crack cocaine as it morphed and built.

Noah, Rayner, Hudson, Jovan, and Annis were all leaning forward, their arms resting on

the black marble table, their eyes glowing their SR44 color. Blake sat back in his chair taking the

same pose as Cohen, and Talin slumped in his chair in front of the computer, his gaze shifting

from the big ideas the computer’s little brain was spinning and the large, white screen.

Talin, the resident tech-head, was always developing ways for the Six Saviors to catch

Colonists. A Colonist was base evil. The Six Saviors had been sent to eradicate the Colonists that

had been unleashed on Earth more than two hundred years ago from the planet SR44. Saying that

things hadn’t gone as planned would be a misstatement of epic proportions. They had been

hunting the Colonists all that time, and to throw a little salt in the wounds, the Colonists had

mated with humans, producing some of the most terrible criminals Earth had ever seen. Colonists

dropped black ash when they were in a heightened state before, during or after a kill. Humans

couldn’t see this ash, but the Six Saviors could. It had been a long, tedious hunt to find the

Colonists.

This newest program, aptly named
Columbo
after the detective on TV, consisted of little

cyber talons fingering through police department files from all over the country searching for bad

guys. It randomly ran a general family tree for those it chose. Twelve original Colonists had

landed on Earth, and the Six Saviors had done away with all but four of them. However, how

many offspring they produced, no one knew. And to make the game even more fun, sometimes a

Colonist’s offspring got the bad genes, sometimes they didn’t. It was all one big crapshoot.

Like that half-breed, Blake. He was an okay guy even though his daddy had been a

Colonist. Blake had shot the fucker and watched him turn into a pile of black ash many years

ago. Yeah, that would screw with a guy’s brain.

When Talin’s computer program detected something amiss, it let the Six Saviors know.

It had yet to catch a Colonist, or one of their offspring, but there was a first time for

everything.

Blue boxes with names and dates flashed on the white screen while black lines slowly

made their way between the squares, connecting them. The bottom box had one name within it:

Susan Kresper. All of the other boxes housed different names that were all connected to her:

sisters, aunts, mother, father, grandfather, grandmother . . . the family tree kept building before

their eyes.

Susan Kresper, age thirty-two, with shoulder-length brown hair, brown eyes, and a scar

on the side of her neck stood at five-foot-five and weighed one hundred sixty pounds. She stared

at them from the screen. It was her mug shot from two years ago when she was a foster care

parent and had been arrested for child abuse. She didn’t look happy. There were no tears, no red-

rimmed eyes to indicate that there had been any remorse. Instead, a cold gaze and hard features

stared into the camera, almost looking threatening. She looked like a mean bitch, but was she a

Colonist or related to a Colonist? Doubtful.

For one thing, they had never seen a female Colonist, and they had never seen the female

offspring of a Colonist catch the bad genes. They had always been male.

Another box appeared, then the timeline stopped.

“Is that it, Talin?” Noah, the Warriors’ leader, asked.

“Yep.”

Everyone stared up at the screen. The anticipation had grown to monster levels, but was

now slowly lessening.

It looked like
Columbo
was good for something after all. The last box in Susan’s family

tree read a name that only the Six Saviors knew translated to Jack the Ripper.

A Colonist. Huh. Color him surprised.

Not.

Well, Cohen probably would be surprised if he was able to muster the energy to do so.

“That seals the stink on this shit,” Noah said.

There were rumbles of agreement from around the table.

Cohen stared at the screen. So Susan in New York had some bad DNA floating in her

veins. He felt nothing. He probably should be surprised, as he was staring at the first female they

had come across who had gotten a bad case of Colonist chromosomes, but frankly, he couldn’t

care less about Susan’s gene pool. In fact, he cared very little about anything. He would eat

cardboard if it were set in front of him, and if his best friend Rayner hadn’t taken it upon himself

to remind Cohen to shower every couple of days, he’d forego that as well. As he scratched the

mess of whiskers on his chin, he decided he could go another day or two without shaving. He

just didn’t give a rat’s ass about any of it.

Yeah, ever since he found out Mia was gone, it had been hard to give a shit about

anything, whether it be Colonists, eating, showering, shaving . . . he just didn’t have it in him to

concern himself with any of it.

Well, scratch that. There was one thing he cared about, and that was his nightly, and

sometimes daily dates with his good friend Captain Morgan. Checking his watch, he wondered

how much longer the damn meeting was going to last.

He looked around the table as the other Warriors discussed plans of action for gathering

information on Susan. The end game would be her death, but if she was involved in anything

illegal, they had to get a grasp on that first and make sure there wasn’t anyone else playing along

with her.

Noah listened to Rayner and Jovan as they threw around ideas on the best course of

action. Noah’s eyes glowed a bright orange, the color of his SR44 form. Rayner’s were red,

while Jovan’s burned an emerald green. Cohen didn’t track what they said. They could be

reciting a grocery list for all he knew. Or cared.

Hudson sat across the table from Cohen, his eyes a sun yellow, his dark hair pulled back

into its standard ponytail, listening to Rayner and Jovan as he absent-mindedly played with his

son’s pacifier. An assassin with a pacifier landed on the south side of fucked up, as far as Cohen

was concerned.

Cohen looked at the two newest additions to their happy clan of Warriors. Blake, the

half-breed, was an okay guy, and he was dedicated to the Warriors’ pursuit of eradicating the

Colonists and their offspring from this world.

Not that it mattered. Not now anyway. At one time it did, but as far as Cohen was

concerned, the whole planet could burn, blow-up, implode . . . whatever it wanted to do because

there would be no going home for any of them. They were stuck on this rock for the rest of their

days.

Cohen felt the familiar ache within him when his thoughts turned to SR44, his home

planet being gone, and the sobering, mind-altering, gut-wrenching fact that his
lovren
, or mate,

was dead. He still couldn’t wrap his mind around the fact that Mia was no longer in existence. As

bile rose in his throat, he turned his thoughts elsewhere and looked at Annis.

Everything had been right in his world—well, as right as it could be for an SR44 male

without his mate—until six months ago. That was when he started to see Annis for what she was.

Her eyes glowed a gorgeous golden color, her skin a chocolate brown. She flipped the

long braids over her shoulder, the multi-colored beads at the ends making a sound that reminded

him of heavy rain. Her lips were full, her body thin, but very muscular.

And he wanted her.

Annis filled his dreams, both during the day and night. But he couldn’t have her. He had

made his
Tambaran
, his oath.

Not that she would want a sorry sack of crap like him anyway.

She absently massaged her shoulder.

Cohen knew that her shoulder was sore from being stabbed two days ago. He recalled

when Hudson had shown up at his quarters.

“How come you aren’t answering your phone?” Hudson had said.

“Because I don’t want to talk to anyone.”

Hudson nodded. “Sorry, man, but we need you down in the gym.”

Cohen sighed.

“You don’t need to talk to anyone, just do a healing.”

“Who?”

“Annis.”

Cohen had cringed hearing this news. Yes, he wanted Annis, but he didn’t particularly

like her for numerous reasons, number one being that she had been chosen to escape SR44 and

his
lovren
hadn’t. He had learned ten months ago from Liberty, Jovan’s mate, that their home

planet had imploded. There was simply nothing left, and he hated that Annis sat across the black

table before him, while his Mia has been left to die. However, his duty and oath as a Healer

needed to be upheld, and he’d followed Hudson to the elevator.

“What happened?” he had asked.

“I stabbed her.”

Cohen looked at his friend. “Excuse me?” No, he didn’t like Annis, but he would never

stab her. Well, he didn’t think so anyway.

“It was an accident. We were doing some knife work, and she’s really good. I mean, she

may be better with a knife than me, and she’s certainly better than anyone else in this house.

Anyway, I stabbed her.”

Hudson might as well have been talking about a bright sunny day. He wasn’t worried

about Annis, nor the fact that he had stabbed her. It was just what it was, and everyone could

count on Cohen to come to the rescue.

Fuckers.

“How bad is it?”

Hudson had shrugged. “She’s bleeding pretty heavily, but she says it’s not that bad. It’s a

shoulder wound.”

They pushed through the doors that led to the gym. Annis was sitting on some blue mats

in the corner holding a white towel pressed to her shoulder. They walked past the treadmills,

weights and heavy bags hanging from the ceiling. As they got closer to Annis, she gave Cohen a

small smile that annoyed him so badly, he thought his teeth might crack they were clamped so

tightly together.

“Thank you for coming,” she said in a quiet voice.

Cohen said nothing, just nodded.

“Hudson got a little irritated with me and stabbed me.”

Hudson laughed. “I wasn’t irritated. It was an accident.”

Annis smiled widely. “Ah, Hudson. I beg to differ with you. I believe right before you

stabbed me you had some choice words to say, and then you lunged at me. You, Warrior, lost

your composure. Perhaps you couldn’t take the fact that there is a female who is as proficient

with a knife as you?”

Hudson had laughed again, and Cohen found nothing funny about any of it. He just

wanted to get back to his quarters.

“Lay down,” he had said to Annis. He noted the commanding tone in his voice. Usually,

he was a pretty laid-back guy. Well, he had been until he had found out that he would never see

his home or the female he loved ever again.

She did as he instructed, and he knelt next to her, placing his hands on her soft, dark skin.

“You remember how to do this?”

Annis nodded and shut her eyes.

Cohen surveyed her taunt body for a moment. The black tank top hugged her firm

breasts, and her long, muscular legs peeked out from a pair of black shorts. She was beautiful,

and the front of his jeans got snug.

And he hated that she brought out that response in him.

Guilt raged through him for all the women he had slept with while he was mated to Mia.

He had cheated and broken his vows to his
lovren
, and now that she was gone, he promised

himself he would hold true to those vows. He couldn’t honor her in her life, but he could in her

death.

There was that, and he kept seeing Mia.

As Annis lay on the mats, the soft rose-red form of his
lovren
, Mia, swirled next to her.

Mia had shown up about the same time Cohen realized he was attracted to Annis. Mia never

communicated with him, never gave any indication of why she was there. But there she was,

always next to Annis. He never saw her at any other time, except when he looked at Annis.

He wanted to talk to her, to ask her why she was there, but since he only saw her when