Now the floor was a glorified dungeon with large enclosures holding a number of Cooper’s family members within the walls. At my approach, Cooper’s father, the former king, looked up, his eyes widening.
“And here I thought you were too smart to get yourself caught.” His voice was rough, lower than it sounded on the videos I’d seen of him. I’d never met Cooper’s father in person.
I shook my head. “Apparently not.”
The guard shoved me forward and I stumbled, almost going down on top of the former king before I righted myself. Olivia shut the cage door behind me and one of her brothers groaned. I turned to look at him. His name was…Arnold. I’d seen him in photos and he’d always been bigger than Cooper. The last five years hadn’t been kind to him. Cooper had at least twenty pounds on him now. Arnold was practically emaciated.
“Now we’ll all wait for Cooper to get here.” Olivia squeaked. “Then we’ll have some fun.”
I leaned my head against the bar. “What do you want with Cooper? Are you planning on just shoving him down here with the rest of us?”
“What I want with Cooper is none of your business.”
She turned on her heel and with the guards on her tail, trotted back out of the basement.
“What the hell happened?” I spoke to the room although mostly to myself. How had I gotten from the shuttle with Tara—dead Tara, a fact I had to tuck away with wherever I’d put my mother’s passing, to explore later—to locked in Olivia’s basement with her very alive family?
Her father groaned. “We have been asking ourselves that question for years. What the hell happened? I had a daughter…and then I had a monster.”
“Try being her husband.” The whiny voice of Olivia’s husband called out from across the room.
This whole situation bordered on unreal. I walked toward the far wall and slid down to the floor, keeping myself facing the door where Olivia had left. “You’ve been down here this whole time? For the last five years?”
The former king nodded his head. “I guess we can’t expect some kind of rescue from the Nomads.”
“Why on earth would you have expected one? We’ve never been friends. And as far as anyone knows, you’re all dead and beyond needing rescue.”
“I thought maybe you would come because Cooper would send you to help.”
I closed my eyes and shook my head. He understood so little of my relationship with my husbands and it was better that way. Cooper would never send me anywhere. The fact that he’d spent the last eight years, for him anyway, in another part of the galaxy wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have.
When I felt steadier, I opened my lids. “So you’ve all been down here, living off her mercy, for years, and you don’t know what she wants from you. I’ve got some idea that she wants world domination, pushed on her from her mother. Why you’re all still alive is beyond me.”
No one answered, which at least let me know how little they’d been told. Had any of them tried to escape? How had they gotten taken? I had a million questions and I wasn’t going to ask any of them. I hated these people. I’d been born to dislike them and maybe that made me closed minded. I loved Cooper and he was as royal as the rest of them.
But he’d not conducted science experiments to kill portions of the population just to see what would happen. His father ordered those tests. They weren’t good people and I didn’t want to make friends. Of course, I didn’t exactly qualify for person of the year, either.
“Hey, what happens when we have to go to the bathroom?”
Cooper’s father raised his gaze to mine. From the look in his eyes, I wasn’t going to like the answer.
* * * *
I woke with a start. Nearby the Nobles snored from their various cages around the room. Other than the pee break the guards gave us, I hadn’t moved in hours. I stayed very still listening for whatever might have woken me to present itself but nothing happened. I leaned forward and touched the ground, drawing a smiley face with my fingertip.
I’d do anything to see one of Geoff’s smiley faces at this point. I’d not touched my wrist since I’d gotten to Olivia. Wes and C.J. would be able to track me, assuming Tara’s husbands hadn’t taken them out. My stomach clenched at the thought. I could push away my varying feelings about my mom and dwell on how I could have been so wrong about Tara and my grief for her son for other times. If my guys were dead, I was done. I’d already mourned them once. Or Diana? I shuddered. No, I couldn’t go there at all. She was with Nolan and somehow they were both fine.
I touched my wrist and drew a smiley face, sending it out to all six of their devices at once. It didn’t matter if the guards tracked me anymore. The worst case scenario was that someone would come down and take the chip out of my wrist. Other than killing me, I couldn’t get too much worse off. The psycho empress of the universe had me locked in her basement.
A noise caught my attention; it was a ruffling sound, and I turned to look out the window. Rain pelted it hard and I smiled at the memory of the last time I’d been trapped in a room listening to the weather outside. I’d had no idea who I was or what was about to happen.
It shouldn’t be a happy memory and yet it was. Simpler times, in some ways.
We only had the smallest window but as lightning struck, illuminating the outside, I saw something that made me want to stand up and dance. It was a smiley face. Had it been there before and I’d missed it? No way. Someone, probably Geoff, had painted it on the window. They were here. I looked at my wrist. No response, but that was okay—the painted face was better.
The scratching noise got my attention again and this time the door cracked open slightly. With so little light in the room, except for the occasional flashes from the weather outside, I couldn’t see who opened the door. Whoever it was walked down the stairs quietly. His scent hit me first—the clean, masculine, woodsiness that was C.J. hit me hard. If I hadn’t already been sitting, I might have hit the floor. He was alive.
I crawled toward the bars, trying not to wake anyone up when I did. I whispered as loud as I dared. “You’re alive.”
He knelt in front of my cage. “So are you.”
“How did you get in here?”
“Believe it or not, I walked through the front door. Everyone gets really drugged at night. I see the whole crew still lives and breathes.”
Cooper’s father snorted, waking up as he did. “Who’s there?”
I turned to look at him. “Help.”
C.J. shook the keys in front of him. “I took these off the guard upstairs. You want me to let them all out? Or should I wait until Cooper has had it out with Olivia?”
“Is that happening? Right now?” My heart kicked up. I wanted to be there for him. “I was so afraid that Tara’s husbands got to all of you.”
The king interrupted. “I hate to break up this fascinating conversation, but if you’re going to let us out, do it already.”
C.J. didn’t acknowledge him at all. “He’s gone upstairs. Come on, I’ll take you to him. We need to get out of here pretty quickly after he’s done. Geoff’s finger is getting twitchy on the bombs. You getting taken, Tara’s husbands turning out to be traitors—yeah, it’s not been a great time.”
He opened the cage and then moved on to the others. The king practically ran past me on his way out until I grabbed his arm. “Your son is upstairs confronting your daughter. It doesn’t take too much of a stretch of the mind to figure out you bear a huge responsibility in this. Millions of lives on your shoulders. Maybe you want to go make sure he’s okay?”
His father shoved me off. “Cooper can do as he likes. He always has. I’m getting out of here. Get out of my way, rebel trash.”
“Hey, don’t talk to her like that, asshole.” C.J. took a swing at him but the king ducked. If the others hadn’t already started waking up, they would have when he yelled. The guards would hear, too, and drugged or not I didn’t want to face them weaponless. C.J. always had more than one gun. I needed his second fi
rearm.
He anticipated me, handing me the gun before I even reached for it. “Fucking Nobles.”
I kissed his arm. “Come on, Cooper needs us.”
He nodded once and took my hand, pulling me up the stairs with him. I didn’t need him to hold my fingers in his embrace to run but I liked it just the same. They’d rescued me, I’d saved them, now they’d come for me again. We were in a loop I’d gotten tired of.
When we were done with Olivia, we were finished with this.
I heard the shouting before we made it to my princely husband. Olivia was in her pajamas; they were covered in kittens. Why did she still play the role of the little girl?
“But I always loved you, Cooper. You were the only one. The rest of them can rot downstairs. It’ll be you and me against the world. I can be kind. Melissa is alive because I saved her for you. You can fuck her and rule with me. The dolls have explained it all to me. Just like they used to with mom.”
I cringed at the coarseness in her description. The dolls. She heard voices telling her to do insane things and she’d had the capability to get them done because everyone thought she was simple. With no one around to check on the people in power, she’d been allowed to destroy everything.
Cooper laughed, a mirthless guttural sound. “The last thing I heard before I got sucked into a black hole and pulled away from the only woman I’m ever going to love was your voice proclaiming yourself empress of the universe. Seconds later you blew up a planet. That was the last thing I saw. If you think for even one second that I’m going to have anything to do with your sick plans, think again.” He lifted his gun and raised it toward her head. His hands were shaking.
I hissed in my breath. This was wrong. Cooper wasn’t a killer. He’d planned to end his life to avoid becoming one the day I met him. He was strong and tough—but he was more comfortable in the botany lab than with a firearm.
“Stop. Cooper.” I rushed forward and grabbed his hand, taking the gun from it. “Not you. It’ll kill you. I won’t lose you, not to her. If you kill her, it’ll be the end of you.”
“She has to die.” His voice was steady even if his hands hadn’t been. “I have to take care of you. I can save the universe. I can…”
“Enough.” The gun exploding behind me made me jump even as Olivia fell to the floor. C.J. didn’t even flinch as he stared at the fallen empress. His gaze met Cooper’s. “That’s my gift to you, brother. We all have our strengths. Shooting your sister is not yours. Your family escaped. You shouldn’t have to lead. They can take over.”
Pulling Cooper with me, I went to C.J. and took his hand in mine. They were both okay. “What now?”
Geoff’s voice took me by surprise as he entered the room. “Dane’s almost here with the doctors he recruited. I say we blow up the drug facilities, let these people start to withdraw with some medical help, free the women, and get the hell out of here.”
I nodded once. It sounded like a plan. “Nolan and Diana? They’re okay?”
“They’re fine.” C.J. answered. “Nolan, not surprisingly, figured out Tara and her husbands’ duplicity faster than the rest of us. He gave the ones on his shuttle a minute to get away with their kid and then they fled. He and Diana are in orbit nearby.”
“Come on.” Geoff rocked on his feet. “I’ve had enough of Ochoa to last me a lifetime.”
“Me too.” Cooper’s voice was low and I squeezed his hand tight. We were all going to have to heal from this. The question was where.
Chapter 16
Home
THE next weeks passed somehow both fast and slow for me. Each day seemed a blur. I could barely remember what I’d done from one moment to the next, and yet they dragged at the same time like I had to push through molasses to get through them. Each of the guys was dealing with a whole shuttle load of emotional shit and I couldn’t fix it for any of them.
I lay on the bed with Diana where she slept curled on her side, facing away from me. Little things with her had started to change. The fact that she’d roll away from me in dreamland showed just a small portion of the independence I’d started to see from her. Her time with Nolan hadn’t damaged my daughter but instead seemed to have woken her up. She’d been laughing more and stepping away from me to her father and uncles when she wanted to.
Nolan knocked lightly before he entered my quarters on Artemis. We’d been lucky Wes had found the ship so quickly or I’d have had nowhere to go to escape from the hell that was Ochoa. He stared at the scene in front of him for a second before he indicated with his chin I should follow him.
I scooted out of bed, leaving Di asleep and followed him into hallway. “When did you get back?”
I hadn’t gotten dinged that a shuttle had docked which meant that the whole thing might be broken, which didn’t instill me with a great deal of confidence. Wes had more important things he was doing than correcting small systems on Artemis. He was almost singlehandedly repairing the entire computer network for the hospitals on Ochoa.
First Ochoa, where all that remained of the female population recovered, and then maybe the rest of the universe…
The task was too daunting for me to think about at all.
“Couple minutes ago. No ding?”
I shook my head. We weren’t likely to be attacked. Cooper’s family was trying to regain control of Ochoa and were too busy to mount any kind of battle against Artemis—I hoped. Without the drugs to keep them out of it, the guards were all sick beyond belief.
“No ding.” I pushed into him for a hug and he didn’t let me down, wrapping his strong arms around me.
“I’ll look at it.”
“Can you actually do that?”
Nolan snickered. “I’m not Wes, but I can see why a bell is or isn’t working.”
“Great.” He smelled warm and I buried my face deeper into his chest.
He kissed the top of my head. “If I said to the guys tonight that I wanted to leave here, to go back in that cursed black hole and come out the other side where your father will piss me off for the rest of my existence but even that is better than what is left of here, would I have your support?”
I knew I should say no. Didn’t I have an obligation to help put things back together? Wasn’t it somehow my role in life?
“Yes.” I reached up to touch the side of his cheek, running my fingers down the stubble there. “Let’s go. Let’s find home.”
“I thought I was going to have to talk you into it.”
I leaned back. “Didn’t I do enough? Don’t I get to go home, to be with my loves, to raise my daughter? There isn’t a happy ending. I can’t blink and make things better for the universe.”
“Ooh, do I get to play?” Wes rounded the corner, apparently having arrived, once again without a ding. “What are we doing? Making out in the hall?”
Nolan groaned but raised his arm so Wes could come in and hug me on the other side of him. I giggled. It was such a strange moment. Nolan didn’t like the group sessions when it came to intimacy, but he didn’t rush away or insist Wes leave.
“Diana is asleep in the room. I wanted to talk.”
Wes nodded. “About what? Because if I got to be alone with Mel, I wouldn’t be talking. Well, maybe I wouldn’t only be talking.”
I pinched his side. “You were alone with me yesterday and you spent most of it snoring.”
“After I wore you out.”
Silence descended on the hallway, only the low buzz of the ship’s slow-moving engines made any noise. This time I heard the sound of a shuttle entering the loading dock. Dane and Geoff appeared a few second later.
Geoff dropped a bag and widened his arms to embrace all of us. “Oh, group hug. I love group hugs.”
Dane leaned against all of us. “I’m going to fall over. I was seeing double. I can’t dose patients if I can’t see anymore. I need to sleep for hours.”
He had been participating in the multitude of medical debates going on. What to do with the men who had been drugged
into behaving in heinous manners. Some of them wanted their minds erased so they could forget. Did they get to make that choice? I had no idea. I’d never wanted anything to do with ethical debates. The new leaders were going to have to decide.
“You can sleep soon. I want a vote. I want back in that black hole. I want to get the girls out of here. I want enough of this. The world is imploding. We can’t fix it. We’ve done what we can. Time to go,” Nolan announced, and Dane groaned.
“Okay. As long as I don’t have to do anything. The doctors down there have got this. I’m not even as well trained as most of them, having missed the last years learning how to do basic frontier medicine, since everywhere is decimated.” Dane spoke with his eyes closed. In another few seconds, he might actually be out cold on his feet.
“I’m in.” Cooper spoke from across the hall. “I’m totally useless here. I don’t want leadership. I’m not cut out for it. I want to get us all safe. No more pain caused by my family.”
C.J. rounded the corner. “You’re all in the hall, holding each other. Did someone die?”
“No. You two get over here. We’re talking about leaving, about going through that black hole again.” Every time Nolan suggested it he grunted the words black hole. He really must have hated it. “Do you object?”
No one answered, which either meant they had all fallen asleep or they were all in agreement. “Okay, come on, if we’re leaving let’s get to it. Does anyone have someone they need to say goodbye to or shall we get going?”
I was done. Everyone I loved in the world was on Artemis with me. There might be a future where others could matter, where there might be friends, or my father could play a bigger role in my life. My aunt was there, on the other side of the black hole. Our relationship was complicated at best, but she was family and she’d never tried to kill me. Maybe we’d visit sometimes. I could sort of imagine it. But not now. Everything I loved was on Artemis and that meant we needed to get Artemis out of harm’s way. Forever.
I had no idea what kind of leaders Cooper’s family would be this time around and I didn’t think I had it in me to worry about it. Not anymore. Other people were going to have to take over running things. I’d never wanted the job of protector of the universe. The only Jackson I wanted anything to do with was Cooper and he didn’t want to lead, either. I wasn’t going to make him. If things were going to get rougher before they got better, I didn’t have to stick around to watch it implode.