Page 39 of Challenged

“You’re assuming they won’t want to stay,” Liv bites.

“You’re assuming they will!”

“You aren’t summoning Mercenia back here.”

She doesn’t say ‘over my dead body’, but it’s very much clear in her tone.

A cold sort of rage pours into me.

“What happened to ‘you have a choice’? Or is this just another thing I actually have no choice in that you neglected to mention?”

Some of the fight goes out of her at that, and she gestures to Brooks. Brooks gets up out of her chair, but hovers next to us like she’s Liv’s bodyguard. I guess the old military tier habits die hard. Or maybe she’s just waiting to dive for the mouse again. I keep my arms folded, so she knows I’m not going to touch anything I’ve been told not to.

They can’t watch me twenty-four seven. I’ll just come back later.

“I’m sorry we didn’t tell you about the dreamspace,” Liv says. “We should have. It wasn’t fair that you had to face all that without being forewarned.”

She still has a hard sort of look in her eye, but there’s nothing about her tone that makes it sound like she’s forcing an apology she doesn’t want to give. She doesn’t like me, but she knows she fucked up.

Except she didn’t. Not really. If she can acknowledge that she should have tried to tell me, I can acknowledge that I definitely wouldn’t have listened.

“I don’t think there was any way you could have made me hear what you had to say about it yesterday.”

Liv nods, her countenance softening some at my admission. “Probably not. You already had enough going on without dream mates to add to the picture.”

There’s a regretful note to her voice, as if she wishes it could have been some other way. The tight coil of rage loosens in my chest.

“I already apologised to Brooks for my behaviour yesterday, but I need to apologise to you and Lorna as well.”

Something flickers in her eyes, but after a moment, she nods.

“It’s fine,” she says. “Forgive me for my oversight, and I’ll forgive you for your outbursts. We can have a do over.”

There’s a hint of a smile curling up the corners of her lips, and she holds out a hand towards me, a single brow arching as if in challenge. I dip my head in acknowledgement, then take her hand. Shake it.

“Liv,” she says. “Chieftess of the tribe and known to be a little sharp-edged a lot of the time.”

“Angie. Data analyst and possessed of an attitude problem before I ever came here.”

That makes her laugh and her expression softens more, my outrage also fast unravelling.

“I don’t know how much you took in of what we were telling you yesterday,” she says. “But I said we could go through everything going on here step by step, and that offer still stands. I don’t have time to do it right now. We’ve got friends arriving from the village today with supplies to help us wake up all the other frozen girls, and I want to get on to that as soon aspossible. But I can explain to you why we don’t want Mercenia back here.”

“I can’t promise it will change my mind about wanting to contact them.”

Liv nods. “That’s fair. But I hope when you see what’s at stake, you’ll see things a little more from my point of view.”

She leans back in her chair, pushing her hair out of her face with a hand. Her features are puffy, her body swelling up from the heat and her advancing pregnancy, but it’s obvious that she’s beautiful. The sort of striking beauty that was never well favoured on my white collar tier. They preferred their women docile. It’s far too obvious that Liv has the same tendency to bite as I do.

Back home, we’d have been rivals, vying for the same scraps the career path sometimes threw at us. But there’s no corporate job here, no better role I might move into if I kiss enough of the right asses. Maybe, if we can avoid arguing with each other, we might be something like friends.

It surprises me how much I like the thought of that.

“I told you that Mercenia was trying to run a breeding program here. Trying to create half human, half raskarran super soldiers.”

And I had dismissed it outright as impossible.

“That’s really what they were doing?” Some of my disbelief must creep into my tone, because Brooks is firmer than she has been with me when she answers.

---