Kidnapped By Her Husbands (Wings of Artemis Book 1) (16 page)

“They’d gotten nowhere. My work, it helped. Soon there were five of us working on it. I almost never went home.

“Boom. We did it. Breakthrough. I was so damned proud of us. All those women I thought we were helping. They’d had such bad, sinful lives. Anything the Nobles believed, so did I.”

“Something changed.” I didn’t phrase it as a question, because obviously something had shifted for Dane or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

He nodded. “I’d been monitoring a woman they brought in. She was about thirty-five years old. She begged me not to put her in the machine. I assured her, as I did all of them, that she wouldn’t remember the pain. She asked me not to do this to her son. He was five, and he needed her.”

“Oh, wow.” I’d been pregnant and focused on that while I lived in Master’s. It never occurred to me to wonder if the other women had left more than a lifestyle I wasn’t to approve of anymore. Had they left families? Did I have any other children? What about my parents? Were they alive, worried about me? Wow, I really was a selfish, narcissistic person. I had to do better.

“I know. I tried to stop the wipe, but the Nobles wouldn’t hear of it. I got so angry. It really made me start to reevaluate the whole thing. Who were we to decide these women didn’t get to keep their memories? The child would never have his mother. Surely, mind wiping should be saved for special circumstances, like if the woman asked for it. Trauma or no other choice.”

“What did they do to you?”

He shrugged. “Oh, you know, the usual. Threw me out of the program. Made me look like a fool publicly. I got off easy. The Nobles are vicious. We know, for example, they routinely infect populations of planets with diseases we can’t cure to wipe out undesirables.”

I gasped. “They do
what
?”

He nodded once. “I only wish I was lying. The things they do are so awful, Mel. I don’t think there are lines they won’t cross. I went home. My parents took me in, even though I’d humiliated them. I was there the night my mother killed herself.” His voice broke. “Although we wouldn’t know about it until the next morning, or I’d have done something.”

“Oh, Dane.” I threw my arms around him. “I am so, so sorry. Why? What happened?”

“When I erased her memory, I never gave it much thought past bringing her back to us. I didn’t consider the ramifications of what her life would be. Everyone knew something about her she didn’t. Years of that, it wore her down. She couldn’t take it anymore.”

I could see how it would become too much, although I had no intention of telling him that. I wasn’t suicidal. We didn’t need to put worry about my mental health in his head.

“You have to promise to tell me if this gets too huge for you. We’re not telling you about your life because we plan on taking you to The Bridge to get your memories returned. Otherwise, if you want, I’ll tell you everything I know about you.”

He’d followed my train of thought. I almost told him to go ahead. I opened and closed my mouth twice. I didn’t know what I wanted yet. If he was one of my husbands, I wanted the memory of our time together. One of these guys had made a baby with me. I wanted to remember doing so, even if getting in that machine scared the crap out of me. I asked the next logical question instead. “How did you end up with the Nomads?”

“I had a very public nervous breakdown in Ochoa. I actually screamed at the King during a ceremony. They locked me up. That should have been it. You don’t publicly humiliate a member of the royal family. But the Nomads rescued me. They wanted me to build them a machine to reverse the memory loss. I was desperate for redemption, so I agreed.

“After I spent five years on the project, I did manage to make the science work, but not as easily as the erasing went. Sometimes it doesn’t work, and protocol aside, I don’t know why. Some women get it all returned. For others, it doesn’t work. Still, some get it weeks later. Months. Years. And the third group is the worst. They get their past, but the brain doesn’t integrate it. They’re always operating in two versions, like the pre and post wipe are in constant argument. That’s very rare.”

I closed my eyes. “I really don’t want that.”

“It’s much more likely you’d have one of the first two things happen. And there are things we can do now to help. Drugs, to make the process work better.”

I placed my hand on his mouth to stop him. There was nothing he could tell me about the technique to make it more palatable. I’d really rather he simply stop trying. “At what point did you end up here?”

He needed me to move my hand so he could speak, which made me smile and him laugh. The sound cut the tension in the room, and he kissed me again, this time on my nose. “My wife, ah, she came in. Her friend had been through the process. Hadn’t recovered any memories. She came in to yell at me. It was a bad day. I’d reached the end. Guilt ate at me, the process for recovery wasn’t perfect, my mother was dead, and the blame fell on me. I yelled at her, threw her out. She came the next day and the next day after that. Every time I kicked her out, she laughed at me. One day she simply asked if I wanted to come with her. Since it was go with her or throw myself out of an air lock, I left The Bridge and joined her family.”

“You didn’t even know each other. It couldn’t have been love.”

“Eventually, for me, it was.”

I couldn’t miss the aside of his answer. “Just for you?”

“I’d follow her into the pits of hell. I’m not sure she felt the same. We all have to share her. It’s part of the deal. The Nomads make family groups. One woman, many men, all committed to her. It works for us. That said, it doesn’t lend itself to a lot of nights like this one.” He kissed my fingers. “And that is my sad story. Lots of woe is me, I know.”

“Dane.” I threw my arms around his neck and held him close. What sort of woman was I in this other version of myself, that I hadn’t made him feel loved? Why had I brought him here if I hadn’t intended to do that? He’d made terrible mistakes, and they were eating him alive from the inside out. He wasn’t blameless, but neither could he be expected to foresee every outcome to things other people hired him, at sixteen years old, to do.

“It isn’t lost on me that you had your mind erased using my technique. I haven’t failed to see the perverse road that brought us here.”

“Enough.” I kissed him hard on the mouth. “I’m sure she loved you. And if you need me to forgive you for building the technology that took my memory, then I forgive you.”

His eyes watered before he blinked fast. “You are kind in a way I never could have anticipated.”

“Let’s go to sleep.” I needed time to make sense of everything I learned. “Do you need more of the Russo’s to do so? Can you sleep without it?”

“I’m not going to change how any of this feels by using any more tonight. I want my memory of it as it happened. Beautiful and sad and hot. If that means I don’t sleep as well, then fine.”

Whatever happened, whatever choices I had to make, I wasn’t losing Dane.

“Let’s get some shut eye. Tomorrow I need you to figure out how to get this thing out of my heart so I don’t explode into a million pieces.” I’d meant it to be a lighthearted joke about the device we both knew was in my body.

He didn’t laugh. Instead, he kissed me hard on the mouth, a reclaiming again. “I won’t lose you. Do you understand? I know what it’s like to be alone in space without you. I’ll get it out of your heart. I promise I will.”

The baby kicked so hard against my stomach Dane felt the movement. He looked at my stomach, and then grinned at me. My daughter had saved me a response.

I pressed my head against his chest and closed my eyes. Sleep didn’t come for me. Rather quickly, however, Dane was out cold. Surprise made me stare hard at him. He’d been so worked up, I’d expected sleep to come hard for him, too. When I let myself, I pulled away a bit from where I gazed at him. He rested, a content look on his face. Had telling me helped?

His story wasn’t so different from Geoff’s. They’d both been men lost to the darkness, brought to the Nomads to serve a purpose, who ended up during their darkest days on the Artemis and, even though they wouldn’t say it outright, married to me. Why had I collected such wounded souls and not better protected them?

None of my thoughts brought me rest. Two hours later, when the clock told me it was dawn, I crept out of bed and left him sleeping under my sheets.

I had to go in the machine. How else would I ever make anything right?

* * * *

I managed to clean the kitchen and make some semblance of breakfast from the very limited supplies by mixing raisins into oatmeal before I plowed into Nolan. He jerked to a stop as I whacked into him in the hallway. His hands steadied me before I hit the floor.

“I’m always having to stop you from falling over.” His tone told me how boring he found the whole thing.

“Sorry?” I stepped away and then paused. “When was the other time?”

“When you decided to faint on Dane’s medical bed.”

Oh, he meant when I’d just been told I had a device attached to my heart which might very well end my life. “My apologies for the inconvenience.”

I’d spent the night with Dane, holding him in my arms and being held. I’d heard his story. He was to blame for a lot of his struggles although some of it wasn’t anything but circumstance. At his heart, he was tender. I hadn’t gotten to know Wes as well yet, but he’d opened up. I’d never think of his eyes as angry again, more like wounded. Geoff, on the shuttle, had been nothing but kind. C.J. still proved a riddle to me but he seemed funny, nice to have around.

What the hell had I seen in Nolan?

Particularly since I knew from Geoff’s story that I’d been with him first.

Had I liked being talked down to and treated badly all the time?

“I didn’t say it inconvenienced me. I said I keep having to do it.”

I held out my hand. “Here’s the deal. I think in our conversation yesterday I said something that hurt you a lot more than I intended. I’m still not exactly clear about how that happened, since you intended to insult me and I didn’t intend to harm you. Yet here I am, saying I’m sorry. Can we start over? I’ve asked both Wes and Dane if they would be my friend. I mean to ask C.J. and Geoff, too. How about you? Maybe we could try friendship. There’s lots of things I’m apparently not allowed to talk about. I’ll just say this baby might be reason to try.”

He didn’t answer me right away nor did he move even the slightest. Nolan became stillness. His black hair, pierced ears, and the tattoo on his neck were all designed to intimidate. They worked on me, even as I recognized them for what they were.

It was everything I could do to stop myself from taking a step away from him. If I did that, this was over. He’d never take me seriously or be willing to co-exist with me on the Artemis.

“I’m not your friend.”

His answer didn’t surprise me, although it disappointed me a great deal. My shoulders fell. “You hate me because I’m your wife and I’m also not. That’s it, right? We might as well talk plainly. This idea everyone has of hanging on to this one bit of protocol is ludicrous. We all know who I am.”

A muscle ticked in his jaw. “Someone’s been breaking protocol with you? To the extent that you have knowledge about who you are?”

Huh. Okay. He hadn’t known they’d broken protocol. Nolan hadn’t been there when most of it had come out.

“I’m not an idiot. It didn’t take a great deal to figure it out.”

“Motherfucker.” His turning around and punched the wall hard several times.

I reacted without thinking. If he kept pounding on the wall, he’d hurt himself. “Stop it.” I grabbed his arm, trying to wrench it backwards, and managed to get thrown to the side instead. He didn’t mean to hurt me. I saw it the second I hit the other wall. His eyes widened, and he rushed toward me as I sank to the floor.

“Shit. Are you okay?” He dropped to his knees in front of me. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. Why did you grab me? What sane person grabs a guy when he’s pounding the wall?”

My arm hurt where it slammed into the wall, but other than that I felt mostly okay. Maybe the pain would come later.

“What sane person pounds on a ship’s wall?”

He shook his head, running his hand over his bald head. “I never said I was sane.” He took my arm to help me rise, which proved the wrong move. Pain shot from my shoulder to my fingers. I cried out and then wished I hadn’t. This was a man who only respected strength. He let go of where he’d held me, and I gasped when he scooped me up instead, like I was a baby.

“We’re going to see Dane. He’ll fix you.”

This was only going to get worse. “He’s not in the medical bay.”

“I’ll get him from his room. I’ll buzz him there.”

If I gritted my teeth any tighter, I might never get my jaw open again. “You’re going to need to buzz him in my room. He’s asleep in there.”

Nolan quit moving. If I wasn’t pressed against his chest in his arms, I wouldn’t have felt his sudden intake of breath. What exactly was the way to handle this situation? When I had to tell one husband I’d had sex with the other?

He poked at his wrist and after a second a beep sounded. “Dane, get your ass up. I think I broke her.” Nolan clicked at his wrist again and the beep went off.

“It’s just my arm. I’m sure I’m okay. The baby is moving.”

He started walking again. “He spent the night in your room in what capacity?”

“I don’t think I want to answer you.”

“Which answers me just fine.” Nolan spoke through clenched teeth. As I was doing the same myself, we were both bound to give ourselves headaches.

“Hold on,” I yelled, and he actually stopped. “We were in the middle of a conversation before you went and had a temper tantrum and hit the wall.”

What was it about this man? I could never manage to speak to him without ending up shouting at the top of my lungs.

“Well, maybe we could have finished it if you hadn’t been a dumbass and grabbed onto me when I swung.”

“Why do you even care? You told me you won’t be my friend.”

“Hey.” Geoff’s voice sounded into the hallway. “What the hell is going on here?”