“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?”
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
Annis was around, he never said anything. The other Warriors would lock him away if he started
talking to his dead mate, who might or might not be real. Maybe he was finally losing his shit
and his brain had blown a gasket, because no one else seemed to acknowledge she was there,
even Rayner, who could see spirits caught between life and death. Maybe the guilt he felt for his
infidelity incarnated her, and every time he felt his desires for Annis surface, Mia showed up to
keep him in check. A deep, gut-wrenching sadness had swept through him, and his eyes stung as
he watched the red-rose smoke swirl.
Tearing his gaze away, he had taken a deep breath. He channeled his energy and put it
into Annis’s body, once again surprised by what he found there. He had healed her once before,
and the savagery her body had been through was heart wrenching.
She had been raped repeatedly, the scars in her pelvic area substantial, and Cohen could
only guess the government doctor, who had gotten his hands on her after her craft had crashed to
Earth, was the culprit. It was simple guessing and speculation. He couldn’t imagine one of his
own doing something so awful to a female, as SR44 males tended to love and cherish females.
Human men, not so much. On any night he could turn on the news and hear about some jack-off
arrested for hurting a female. Human men were a step above cockroaches, as far as Cohen was
concerned, and a cockroach was more likeable that most human men he had met.
Annis’s eyes also held long, slim scars consistent with a needle penetrating the delicate
flesh.
He’d tried to feel pity for her, but he didn’t. Only more hate, and that brought more guilt
that he couldn’t feel compassion for another.
Quickly, he’d mended her shoulder, stood, and headed back to his quarters without
another word.
“Cohen?” Noah said, bringing him back to the present. “Are you hearing me, my man?”
Cohen looked around the table, all eyes on him. He nodded.
Look at him going all Pinocchio on Noah.
Annis looked at him. He wanted to tear his gaze away, but he couldn’t. Her golden eyes
held his stare, and she didn’t back down. This only angered him more and made him want to
break something or hit someone. Finally, she looked away when Blake said something to her.
She laughed and gently touched his arm.
Mia appeared behind her.
He hated Annis with every fiber of his being. He despised her beauty and her pleasant
disposition. He loathed the sound of her deep, throaty laugh. There were so many things he
disliked about her, and he didn’t know which he hated more. She had put through hell; her body
had been defiled, used, and possibly studied if he was right about the doctor being the
perpetrator, yet she sat across the table from him able to laugh.
And there was the fact that he simply wanted her.
He knew he didn’t really hate Annis, but he hated everything that she was, which in turn,
was everything that he wasn’t.
The hate writhed and twisted within like an angry serpent, threatening to lash out. He
couldn’t direct it inward or he would be likely to slit his own throat, so his target was Annis.
He inhaled deeply, trying to contain it. If she had been through so much and continued to
live, why the fuck couldn’t he move on? Why was he devastated over losing his lovren who he
hadn’t seen in over two hundred years? What made the very pretty Annis so strong? What was
she spiking her orange juice with every morning that gave her the edge over him? Why was she
living and he wasn’t? Was it because he was an SR44 male without his mate, or was he was just
a pussy?
“What do you think about that plan, Cohen?” Noah said.
Cohen tore his gaze from Annis and Mia and focused on Noah. He hadn’t heard a word
of what had been said. “Great.”
There was silence as Noah glared at him.
“I need a little more input, Cohen. We’re all in this together.”
“Solid. Fucking fantastic. My boxers are in a bunch just thinking about it.”
Cohen clamped his jaw shut before he said more. He hated the person he had become. He
was a miserable son of a bitch who had broken his mating vows. He was physically attracted to a
female he could not have, a female he didn’t want to desire. A female who brought out the very
worst in him, because she reminded him of when honor, integrity, and strength flowed through
him, not guilt, sadness, and hate.
But the fact of the matter was that he didn’t care about the plan. He would do what he
was told to do. He would heal who needed to be healed, and he hoped that it kept him far, far
away from Annis, no matter how close he wanted to be.
Chapter 3
Annis turned toward what she thought were the windows. She had seen airplanes before
and noted that they had windows on both sides of the tube, but she had no idea if this particular
plane had any. She was completely blind in the daylight hours due to the defective body she had
been given when leaving SR44. How a member of the military received a defective body, she
didn’t understand. Honestly, as a Warrior, she should have been given a human body of
perfection that was usable at all times, but it was what it was. There was nothing that could be
done about it.
She wondered what the sky looked like during the day. She had been told it was blue, but
she wondered what shade of blue. She had looked at pictures, but she also knew that pictures
sometimes didn’t do the real thing justice. How she would love to look up at the large, blue mass
laced with white, puffy clouds and soaring birds spreading their wings, riding the winds.
A few hours ago, she had boarded this small plane headed for New York with Blake. He
sat across the aisle from her and said he would be watching a movie with someone named James
Bond in it. She couldn’t hear the dialogue in the movie, so she guessed he had plugged in some
earphones.
“High action, sexy women. Shaken, not stirred,” was the way he described it. She loved a
good action flick as much as the next Warrior, but today she was glad to be alone with her
thoughts.
Besides, it was daytime and she couldn’t see a blessed thing.
But, whatever, as many of the Warriors said. Or nut-up and deal with it. Or many other
colorful phrases they tossed around.
She had been living in the silo for ten months with the Six Saviors and their mates. She
had expe
rienced Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve, and it was almost time for those
holidays again. Smiling, she remembered the season fondly. The huge feasts had engorged her
belly, the laughter of what seemed like a potential family had bathed her soul in the warmth that
only a true family could.
Yet, she still felt so alone.
As a Warrior, she really had nothing in common with the females of the house, but she
found herself bonding with them despite this. They were all kind, funny, and embraced her even
though they really didn’t know the first thing about hand-to-hand fighting, knives, or guns. Faith
knew a little, and she was very proficient with a gun, but it wasn’t a passion of hers as it was to
Annis. She would much rather be down in the gym with the other Warriors grappling, working
with knives, or lifting weights. She also enjoyed the shooting range they visited out in the desert
with flashlights in the dead of the night.
However, her daytime activities were fairly limited because of her non-functioning eyes.
It had been Blake who suggested that she try a little hand-to-hand during the day, and after she
got over the initial awkwardness of it and applied herself, she had found the exercise improved
the use of the rest of her senses. Her hearing became more acute, and she developed what Blake
had referred to as a sixth sense. It was almost as if she established some type of radar and was
aware when another Warrior was in striking distance.
Not that they had always been comfortable working with her, and they really weren’t
now. They said they were okay with going one-on-one with her, but she sensed otherwise. No,
the SR44 Warriors were a little hesitant and shy, yet Blake jumped right in. She understood the
Warriors’ hesitancy, as they were from the era where a female Warrior was unheard of.
Yes, all had been a little wary of her, especially Cohen. She often caught him glaring at
her, his eyes shining with stark hate. She had spent hours going over their few interactions to see
what she could have done to produce such disdain from him, and she always came up with
absolutely nothing. She was always polite to him, offered him a smile, and she’d even tried a
little small talk every now and then. But she was only met with short answers and, recently, that
hateful glare. After a while she just accepted that those were his feelings for her.