Captivate (Manipulate, Book 2)

Chapter 18

When Basher found the empty cell, he was momentarily speechless. The door was left open, the tools they used to break open the lock were left on the floor. Hardly thinking, he entered and ran a hand over the closest bunk. They were gone.

He stooped and looked under that bunk, then the next, more frantically. Because surely – !

He stood and ran his hands through his hair. Because surely she was here. He’d not slept well last night, picturing Claire tossing and turning, perhaps becoming feverish, all alone with the Rik. He’d left his room twice to check on her, only to change his mind and stomp back, dreading to see her sleeping soundly.

Not until he’d seen the empty room did he realize which vision had won. He realized now that he’d fully expected to find Claire with a soaring fever. He’d expected to carry... er, escort her to a guest room, and then to get her everything he could to make the last half of her sickness more bearable.

She’d be angry with him, sure, but she would understand that he had to know. Legally and personally, he could never trust her if he didn’t know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was human. She would have understood and then she would have forgiven him. He would have introduced her to Sam and Nat, and privately requested Nat to let Claire share her room. If Claire’s story was true, the poor girl must be starved for human interaction, particularly with other women.

Basher had three younger sisters to base his guesses on, and he had been engaged, years ago. His fiancé had died in a car wreck, just weeks before the Large Hadron Collider exploded and the Spo invaded. In retrospect it seemed such a ridiculously mundane death. They’d already planned the wedding and bought the honeymoon tickets for a cruise up the east coast to Labrador.

But in the years since then, he’d almost been glad she hadn’t lived to see the rest of it. Would she have had a horror story to rival Claire’s if she had lived?

Certainly, if she hadn't died, he wouldn't have ended up here. He’d been angry and alone during the time after the invasion, even more than the average guy, and he'd accepted this Spo job offer cynically, half expecting that it was a suicide mission. What did he know of the galaxy or its dangers? It had seemed a worthwhile way to distance himself from a life he didn’t care to pursue.

His mother had begged him not to go, practically ordered, but he’d not listened. She had her daughters and grandchildren. She would recover from his loss.

But even as fey as he'd felt, he'd missed people that first year. He'd missed his fiancé, of course, still grieving for her despite being light years away. But he'd also missed going to a bar and watching a football game or going to a grocery store and chatting with the teller. He'd just missed people.

He'd spent the last few hours wondering how Claire had made it without people. He cursed silently. Clearly she was only a fake. A good one.

Why had she worked so hard to convince him? If she’d known they were going to escape that night, there was no point in her desperate, please-believe-me, please-protect-me act.

Basher turned and punched the wall. The pain made him grunt. The skin over his middle knuckle split and left a tiny patch of blood on the wall.

“Idiot," he told himself.

He swiped the blood off the wall with his other hand and rubbed it into his pants. They’d escaped, but he would find them before they got off Selta. They would stand trial like the criminals they were.

Basher searched the room methodically, making note of what they’d taken and what they’d left. Then he examined the door and the tools on the floor.