The Scarlet Empress (3 page)

Bree scanned the horizon, half expecting something dark and formless to appear on the edge of the world and swallow the peace she’d hoped to find here.
If this is supposed to be a safe haven, then why is my gut screaming at me to run, to get the hell away from this place?

It defied all logic, the sense of dread dogging her all day. But she couldn’t shake it, couldn’t help wondering if someone had followed her here.

Like Ty’s father. Her gut told her that the elder Armstrong wouldn’t stop until he pinpointed their location. The general’s back was to the wall. With the UCE rushing headlong toward revolution, everything he’d worked for all his life hung in the balance. With Bree as that revolution’s inspiration, if she lived, he lost; it was that
simple. She knew a military man of Ax’s reputation would see only one way out: her immediate and efficient execution, along with the deaths of all those in her company. Hadn’t that hypothesis been substantiated by the past few weeks?

Which, of course, meant Ahmed the pirate and his merry men were as good as dead. Dead like almost everyone else who helped her and Ty.

Bree squeezed her eyes shut and swallowed. Personal danger didn’t scare her as much as the consequences of her actions—or lack thereof—on the innocents in all this. Or on the guilty. How many lives would be saved based on her decision to help the Voice achieve its goals? How many would be lost? Would it all be worth it in the end—if there was indeed ever an end?

She often wondered if this was the kind of torture world leaders and their generals went through when contemplating whether to involve their countries in conflicts. And if it haunted them as much as it did her, not knowing what would be the outcome of those decisions.

“Bree . . .” Ty brushed a warm, work-roughened finger down her cheek, making her aware of the jaw she hadn’t realized she’d clenched. “You okay?”

The speedboat bobbed on the choppy seas. She held on to the wheel to keep her balance. “Peachy.”

“Peachy, my ass.” Her slang often threw him, but it never fooled him; he saw inside her head as no man ever had. But hell if letting him inside her heart wasn’t scarier than hand-to-hand combat.

“Am I going to have to wrestle it out of you?” The edges of his wide mouth twitched. “I’m certain you remember what happened the last time.”

To her surprise, a laugh burst out of her. Ty had a way about him that undercut all her defenses. “Vividly.”

She glimpsed Ty’s private and very male satisfied smile as he bent his head to taste her lips with each word: “If we were still at sea, I’d take you right here on the deck. You’d be wearing a different expression when I was done with you. In fact, you’d be wearing nothing at all. . . .”

She could almost feel the images his words left in her mind, because she’d lived them these past few weeks. They had been the only high points of the flight to freedom: the unexpected, easy playfulness between her and Ty; the way he kissed; bare, sun-warmed skin; the shocking heat of their passion, and afterward, always afterward, a sea breeze cooling the dampness left on their bodies. They’d passed many an hour that way, making love to forget the rest of the world was out there, hunting them.

Relentlessly hunting them.

If you let fear rule you, girl, they’ve won.
She’d never let the bastards claim victory. Never. She was in too deep. No turning back. She’d come too far.

Now that you have won your liberty, Banzai Maguire, you must win freedom for us all!
She winced at the remembered words of the Shadow Voice.

“Bree . . .”

She glanced up sheepishly.

Ty’s thumbs circled over her upper arms, a small movement that was nothing short of miraculous in the way it soothed her. But then he was good with his hands. Very good. “I lost you again,” he said.

“I can’t help it.” Wearily, she sighed. “Any chance I can trade this job for what’s behind door number two?”

“I’ve got you covered, Bree. I’ll keep you safe.”

But what if he can’t? What if I can’t promise the same?
A thread of ice coiled up her spine, raising the hair on the back of her neck.

Ty felt her tremble, a frisson of fear she tried to hide. “Help me out here, Bree. What’s eating you?”

“It’s nothing concrete. Just a hunch.”

“If I’m going to protect you properly, I need to know what’s going on in your head. Gut feelings included.”

She swallowed. “I’ve had them before. These hunches.”

“Yeah, and they’ve been damn accurate.”

For a moment the only sound was the wind whistling through the nooks and crannies on the speedboat.

“I think we’ve been followed,” she admitted finally.

Ty didn’t say anything at first. His eyes narrowed slightly, freezing into chips of blue ice. Whenever she saw that glacial look of his, she considered herself lucky that she’d never ended up on the business end of his rifle; his coldness was that scary. Yet that expression was all Ty. The man never showed fear, though she knew he often felt it. Instead, he revealed his apprehension with subzero aloofness. “By whom, Bree?” he asked. “Who’s on our tail?”

Your father.
She thought about vocalizing her opinion but changed her mind. He knew. And family, she decided, was best left out of this. “Does it make a difference? If the UCE finds us, I’ll likely be killed. And if it’s Kyber, probably you will. Now that we’ve involved Ahmed, your pirate friend, he’s fair game, too.”

“We sailed here under the radar, Bree. Total radio silence until making contact with Ahmed. Even with satellite surveillance looking down at us, we would have
been but one boat out of millions. It’s unlikely that anyone knows we’re here.”

“Unlikely. But still possible. We left a string of dead bodies behind us that stretches all the way back to the Han Empire. Bread crumbs on the trail.”

“Those are some grisly bread crumbs.”

“Even so, it’s a trail for anyone able to spot it.”

Ty shook his head. “If someone wanted us, why wait until we came under a third party’s protection before striking?”

“Because they haven’t caught up to us yet?”

“Bree . . .” He sighed. “Sweetheart.”

“You asked what I thought, and I gave it to you. Hey, how about this? It’ll be the best of both worlds. We’ll board as planned, restock our supplies, stretch our legs a little, but that’s it. We could launch again by midnight.”

Ty folded his arms over his chest. “And go where?”

“Someplace . . . less populated. I don’t know. What’s to the south?”

“Antarctica.” His expression didn’t change.

She rolled her eyes. “I mean between here and there.”

“Not Australia. It’s back to its eighteenth-century colonial roots as a dumping ground for criminals—Earth’s human refuse. The country lies in the hands of an opiateaddicted parliament run by a group of self-indulgent dandies who model themselves on nineteenth-century Regency England society.”

“You never know . . . it may not be as bad as it sounds.”

He made a clipped, strangled sound. “Newgate? Not as bad as it sounds?” He rubbed his forehead, a sign of irritation. “Bree, the longer we run in the open, the more likely someone will spot us. Ahmed’s raft is our best shot
at making contact with the Voice of Freedom without calling attention to ourselves. We’re safer here than anywhere else. Look at the guns, the warning systems—and those are only the ones we can see. What about the rest of the arsenal? It’s considerable, let me tell you. I’ve seen it. It’s going to take more than a simple knock on the door to get inside. Even if that were to happen—I won’t rule it out—we’ll have warning, something we didn’t have the last time an assassin found us.”

In that hotel bedroom in New Seoul. They’d almost died that night. Assassins, assassins everywhere. Again, unease filtered through her.

“This raft is a fortress. We’ll be no safer anywhere else. Trust me on this. Is that possible?” He smoothed a hand over her hair tenderly, as if she were the most important thing in the world to him. Her chest squeezed tight. “You always want to be the one to take the fire,” he murmured. “But you don’t need to prove anything, Bree. Not with me.”

Her desire to act flippant was crumbling. She wiped sweat off her brow and tried to act more laid-back than she felt. Ty took hold of her chin between his thumb and the crook of his index finger. Dipping his head, he looked her straight in the eye. “Would this have anything to do with your aversion to putting others in dangerous situations?” He held tight to her chin so that she couldn’t turn away from his scrutiny. “Well? Does it?”

She was overprotective. She knew it. It was why losing Cam cut so deep. But she sidestepped Ty’s question with one of her own. “Does it matter? Is it fair to force ourselves on Ahmed without telling him the whole story?”

“That you’re a soldier from the past? Or that you inca
pacitated the most powerful dictator on Earth with a neuron fryer?”

“After I got you out of his jail.”

“Dungeon,” Ty put in with deadpan humor. “It was definitely a dungeon.”

“Sure, laugh about it now. It wasn’t so funny then.” For most of her stay in Prince Kyber’s palace, she hadn’t known the truth about the deplorable conditions Ty had endured. When she did find out, she had been shocked. The emperor of Asia had been so kind to her. Well, while she had agreed to be his guest. “I don’t know if Kyber ever intended to let you go.”

“Or you, for that matter,” Ty said woodenly. Prince Kyber was a touchy subject for him. He probably still wondered what sort of feelings she’d developed for the prince over the course of her stay at the palace. She wasn’t sure herself sometimes, but it absolutely wasn’t what she felt for Ty. More, she doubted Kyber was capable of feeling anything resembling adult love for her. Even if she had accepted his numerous invitations to be his lover, his doting affection would have made her feel more like a special house pet than a real woman.

“Look Ty, by now my face has been on every monitor—personal and public—all over the world, from the Mars station to Newgate, along with a handy downloadable catalog of my crimes against humanity—too many offenses to count, the last time I checked—but if I remember right, ‘armed and dangerous’ and ‘guilty of inciting rebellion’ are on the list.”
Dangerous,
she thought with a snort.
Get real.
The only thing she’d ever considered treacherous about herself was her mood when she went too long between chocolate fixes.

Suddenly she was battling a bone-shaking craving for M&M’s. Of all the things she missed about her old life, junk food was nearly tops. She used to think nothing of downing a Coke and candy bar for breakfast. Ever since she’d woken up in this world, however, her snacking had been pitifully nonexistent. Some of the old goodies were still available in the UCE, Ty told her, but life as Public Enemy Number One had a way of putting a damper on her hopes of getting any.

“It makes no difference, Bree. Ahmed won’t turn us away. Not with an open blood debt.” An obligation on which she knew he would never have tried to collect if it weren’t for his desire to keep her safe. “He already knows everything you just mentioned.”

“How?”

“The Interweb. Even in this far-flung region, they have access to it. They would have learned about you, the Voice of Freedom—all of it. If they’re inviting us aboard, it’s because they want to. And we have nowhere else to go.”

His expression was so to-the-point, so frank and penetrating, that it emptied the air from her argument in one fell swoop. Frowning, she turned away, reaching for her travel pack. Ty snatched her back. “Wait a second, Sleeping Beauty. What about our promise?”

Sleeping Beauty—it was his nickname for her, and the very first thing he’d said to her, ever, when he woke her in the cave. Caught off guard by the sudden shift in atmosphere, she would have smiled if she were a little bit more confident about his question. “I don’t recall any promise.”

“ ‘No more secrets.’ Does that ring a bell?”

“Oh.” She wrinkled her nose. “That one.”

“Yeah, that one.” His mouth twitched with exasperation and amusement. “Something was eating you, and I had to spend the last twenty minutes digging it out of you.”

Blushing, she regarded him with a caught-with-her-hand-in-the-cookie-jar feeling.

“I can’t believe you didn’t remember that conversation.”

“I did remember.”

“I had to remind you.”

“I just . . . well, I forgot. Damn it, Ty. You know I’m better at flying than I am at long-term relationships.”

Instantly the curve of his mouth softened. “Ah. So you admit this is a long-term relationship.”

Her cheeks grew hotter. “Isn’t it?”

“I asked you first, Maguire.” A mix of amusement and emotional intensity glowed in his eyes.

“Yes.”

“Yes
what?
”

She pushed her fists against his solid chest. He grabbed her hands and held them there. His heart thumped powerfully under the heels of her palms. “Yes, Ty, we’re in a relationship. Me and you. A big, fat relationship with a capital R. How’s that? Clear enough?”

Ty threw his head back and laughed. Then he swept her close. “Long-term?” he asked against her mouth.

“Long-term,” she mumbled back.

Ty made a gruff, satisfied sound, teasing her with small, nipping kisses until she wound her arms around his neck and pulled his head down. His lips were warm, his mouth moist and hot as his tongue found hers. Her knees went weak with a rush of desire. Ty’s kiss was fierce and
possessive, tender and loving at the same time. No one made her respond like Ty did. He’d spoiled her for anyone else.

“A relationship,” he murmured, lifting his head. “Heaven help us.”

“It had better,” she whispered back. “We’re going to need all the help we can get.”

They shared a look that in its tenderness bared all they’d been through together.

“Just think,” she said in a lighter tone, “tonight we’re going to have a real bed to sleep in.” After weeks on a small boat, fleeing their attackers across the southern reaches of Asia and the Indian Ocean—a grueling journey by anyone’s standards—having Ty between the sheets on a real mattress was what she looked forward to the most.