Page 23 of Consume
Chapter Seven
Mase, always my anchor, caught me.
We crashed to the floor inside the door of the new room, Mase taking the brunt of the fall to his side. He grunted in pain as his hands splayed protectively around my back. Behind me, I expected a great crash from the BioWaves colliding, but there was only silence. I kicked the door closed, though that wouldn’t keep them out for long if they were programmed to crash into our reunion. We’d better keep it short.
“Absidy?”
“Mase?” It came out choked with panic. I squirmed out of his arms and then climbed on top of him, my knees bracketing his hips. The possibility that we were actually alive and together again didn’t seem quite real. But if it wasn’t, I would revolt.
“It’s about time I saved you.” He swallowed, one eye cloudy, the other iron-colored, both filled with questions as they scoured my face. I ignored all of them.
I cupped his face in my hands, reveling in the scrape of his facial hair against my palms, and examined his eyes where She or He or any combination of the two might lurk instead of his love for me. Faint sparks lit up his long eyelashes here and there, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been a month ago. Being away from Parker was the only good thing about his capture. The rest of him looked pale and gaunt. The old scars cutting down his face crisscrossed with new, fresher ones that trailed into his too-short hair. It looked like the same person who’d come at Ellison’s hair with a hacksaw had also come for Mase’s. He wore the same light blue pants and shirt that she did.
“Are you all right, Mase? What did they do to you? Are you hurt?” I blurted. But the question I wanted to ask lay heavy on my tongue—do you forgive me for leaving you with Parker on theVicious?
He reached up tentatively to brush a tear from my cheek, and his fingertips snagged on my rough scales. “I feel...like I may have missed some important details about your life.”
He had no idea.
I sighed and leaned into his touch, but those details would have to wait. “I’ll explain everything.”
His eyes stayed glued to me, a hint of the devious smile I’d missed so much curling his mouth. “I saw you while in my cell, but I didn’t immediately know you. There was something so familiar about you, though, something I loved. I should’ve known my college girl would cross an entire galaxy to bust me out of here.”
“Yes. You should’ve.” Another deluge of tears threatened, but I bit them back.
He was here, my Mase, and his presence washed calm through me to every empty corner of my body. He hadn’t recoiled, either, because he knewme. How had I gotten so damn lucky?
With a glance at the wall behind us, I helped him to his feet, still grasping both his hands with no intention of ever letting go. We stood in a heavily draped room with high-backed chairs surrounding a large circular table. A slender pole connected the ceiling to the center of the table. Maybe it was because it was next to the cell room or maybe it was just my warped mind, but I immediately jumped to stripper pole for the purpose of torture/amusement while whoever sat in the high-backed chairs watched. If I were right, I hated to think what might be hidden behind all the maroon drapes.
“Where’s Ellison?” I demanded.
At the sound of a click from across the room, Mase and I looked up. One of the Byrians’ guards had a gun leveled at our heads as she strode forward.
“Well,” she said, her steely gaze dropping to our clasped hands, “isn’t that sweet.”
We stiffened. Even if I had my ice pick, she’d shoot before I could uselessly chuck it at her. I’d have better luck flinging obscenities.
Movement snaked up behind her. A gun lifted over her head, and the butt of it crushed down onto the back of her skull. She dropped hard.
Ellison stood behind the guard, her face twisted in a sneer that shivered fear even through me. She turned the gun around in her hands and pointed it at the guard, her whole arm quaking. “Yes, it is fucking sweet, youmonster.”
