Page 51 of Light the Fire

I hadn’t even realized it, but I was naked from the waist up. I had been since I’d torn off my shirt and used it to help stanch the blood flowing from Zane’s leg.

“I’ll finish cleaning up the blood on the deck, then we’ll hoist the mainsail and get going. I know we don’t want to be traveling when it’s light out, but we need to get the fuck out of here.” Jorik peeled off his own shirt and handed it to me. “Don’t want to get a sunburn, Angel.” Then he wandered around to the bow.

I peered down at Zane. His face was a thundercloud.

So much for that tender moment of understanding where I thought I’d broken through his titanium shell and caught a glimpse of his soft underbelly.

“You never should have used an entire vial,” he said, his words sharp enough to draw blood.

“Would you have rather I let youdie?”I snapped back.

His gaze flicked to the door leading down to the cabin, then the movement of Jorik pulling the anchors. His expression softened briefly. “No.”

“Well, then,you’re welcomefor saving your life, Captain Sunshine.” I rolled my eyes and turned away from him to go and help Jorik pull the other anchor.

He knew damn well that I’d hear him, so then why did he mutter, “You just saved mine, but now yours is in jeopardy”?

It was midnight, and we’d caught the wind and tide perfectly to carry us far away from where chaos had stuck and Zane had nearly bled to death.

Rix did a thorough sweep of the boat and all our weapons, sure enough coming up with several tracking devices they had missed during their first sweep. We destroyed them all.

Besides finding mushrooms and herbs, the guys had killed a couple of rabbits while on shore, so we were sitting on the deck eating rabbit and groundcone stew, staring up at the cloud-filled sky.

“The more I think about it, the more I firmly believe that we’ve all got trackers on us,” Jorik said, using his own red-colored Yakku blade to slice off a rabbit’s leg and gnaw on it like a savage. Though, I’d admit, watching him bite into the crispy flesh and pull away meat with his teeth was doing all kinds of things to my pussy and lower belly. And when his lips were shiny and coated in grease, I couldn’t stop myself from licking my own lips and pretending they were his.

“So then we need to do a sweep of ourselves,” Rix said.

“And how do we do that?” I asked, taking a sip of water from the canteen. “Aren’t they like microscopic?”

The guys nodded but also shrugged.

“They’re probably the same size as the kill switches and team deactivation chips, and those are roughly the size of a black bean,” Rix said. “Kill switches are implanted temporarily at the top of our spines so that if we defect, the switch opens up and severs our spinal column. Team deactivation chip is similar, but they’re interconnected.”

“What’s ateamdeactivation chip?” I asked.

The guys all exchanged looks once again like I wasn’t there.

Zane had sunk back into his perpetual state of miserable, and I was in no mood to try to pry him out of it. The man was hot, cold, and everywhere in between.

“As an incentive tonotfuck up a mission and work as a team, as well as not mouth off to superiors or challenge authority, they implanted team deactivation chips in all of us,” Jorik said, his gaze shifting between his two friends.

“And what does that mean?” I asked.

“If one of us dies, we all die,” Rix replied softly. “So if Zane had died today, Jorik and I would have, too.”

My eyes nearly popped out of my head. “What? Do you likefeelwhat he’s feeling, too?”

Their heads shook.

“No. We literally would have just dropped dead the moment he died. We wouldn’t even see it coming or know it happened. At least … that’s what we’ve been told.”

“So let’s remove those things, too,” I said. “Dear God, how utterly stupid. Don’t they know how valuable you guys are?”

None of them said anything.

“So they’re willing to risk losing all of you just to incentivize you to work as a team?” I shook my head and growled. “If I didn’t already know this was a warped and sadistic system, I sure as hell do now.”

“Yeah, well … we really don’t know any different, do we?” Zane said dryly.

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