Page 150 of Light the Fire

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Haina

It’d been seven days since the three pieces of my heart had returned to me. Seven glorious days and seven orgasm-filled nights.

As much as I was loath to leave our haven of respite and rapture, we knew we needed to get sailing again. Even if there was no organization hell-bent on a revolution waiting for us in Sector Six, we would build one. After seeing my men nearly lose their minds from that serum, I knew more than ever that those in charge needed to be stopped. Nobody deserved to have their power or choice stripped from them like that simply because they were born a certain way.

We spent our days repairing the boat and training and our nights wrapped up in each other’s bodies, making the most of what little time we might have left on this earth.

Even without the serum, the guys were very skilled in hand-to-hand combat. But they’d lost muscle mass and were weaker in their unenhanced form, so they needed to learn how to fight like regular humans. We spent several hours a day sparring with blades, daggers, hands and feet, and then I spent the last two days sneaking up on each guy several times, catching them unaware and having them fight me until they were free or tapped out. So far, they’d all had to tap out—or in Zane’s case, he tapped out by passing out, the stubborn ass.

I made sure that we had plenty of food, and they ate like bears preparing for hibernation. It was amazing how quickly they regained the weight they lost.

By day seven, Rix woke up saying he’d never felt stronger, then he picked me up and did thirty press-ups using my body as his weights. Zane teased him, saying he needed to use Zane as his weight if he wanted any of them to be impressed.

I didn’t care.

I had my boys back. They were healthy. We were happy. That was all that mattered.

We planned to set sail in two days’ time. That gave us ample time to wash laundry and stock up on supplies. I had snares set within a two mile-radius hoping to catch squirrels, rabbits, and whatever else skittered into my trap. I’d already shot four grouse with my bow and had the meat cooked and preserved in cold storage, ready to go on the boat.

It was a gorgeous afternoon, with a blistering sun, a cool breeze, and the melodic chirp of birds in the trees. I’d just come back from checking my traps when a ripple of vibration whirled through me, setting every hair on my body standing straight up.

I caught the scent and the heartbeat just as the raven-haired assassin dressed all in black came leaping out of her perch high in the trees, her dagger out, eyes gleaming murderously.

I never went into the woods without an arsenal of weapons, so of course, I reached for my Yakku blade with my right hand and the dagger on my thigh strap with my left. I deflected her first few swings.

Clearly, she was just a straight-up Kappa psycho, so although crazy-strong and able to heal, she lacked the Sigma intelligence or the Theta reflexes, enhanced senses or agility that I possessed. All things I would use to my advantage.

She bared her teeth, smiling, but in an all too savage and sinister way. “I’ve been looking forward to fighting thetriple threat,”she said, her eyes wandering my body and her lips curling up into a sneer. “Don’t seem that special to me.”

“Appearances can be deceiving,” I said, kicking her arm away when she swung her dagger out at me again. She recovered quickly, and we started to circle each other in the ankle-high foliage covering the forest floor.

My teeth ground together hard, and I forced deep breaths into my lungs. The guys had regained most of their strength and stamina, and although they were no longer enhanced, they weren’t weak, either.

My gut told me that this Hellcat was a distraction to keep me from getting to the guys. Which meant they were being attacked, too.

“Come on,Haina,”she mocked, “Show me what you’ve got.”

My eyes darted in the direction of the cabin, and a demonic grin twisted her lips before a harsh peal of laughter edged with madness bubbled up from her throat, causing a sick feeling to pool in my gut. “Yes, you are correct,” was all she said, since she knew I was worried about my guys. “They’re being dealt with as we speak.”

Anger whipped into a thick froth inside of me, but I couldn’t let it cloud my judgment or my abilities. I had to come at this bitch the same way I would if I didn’t have the three pieces of my heart in mortal danger.

She was clearly growing bored with our wilderness standoff and lunged at me with a battle cry. I cleared my head, swallowed down the lump of fear in my throat, and met her strike for strike. Weaving, blocking, and dodging this psycho bitch, I danced a deathly box-step made of fatal consequences and sharp steel across the forest floor, kicking up dirt and dry pine needles.

Much like it had on the boat when I fought those four guys at once, my brain nearly shut down and my skills and enhancements took over. I was in a battle fog. I anticipated her strikes before they happened based on the way the air shifted and her body vibrated against the ground. I could feel her raging heartbeat almost as if it was my own, and I could tell that she was fatiguing, which was showed by increasingly sloppy strike attempts.

She’d never fought someone like me before, so foolishly, she came at me with bravado and gusto, throwing all of her energy into the first moments of the battle, depleting herself so her skills became sloppy and even more predictable.

Even so, no fear lurked in the black depths of her eyes. She accepted death, hers and others, as necessary and inconsequential. It was something that had been drilled into us since birth. And one of the many ways to distinguish a Kappa with the atrophied ventromedial prefrontal cortex, aka psycho-bitch Hellcat, and someone like me who still had empathy and a conscience.

Kappas with the psychopath diagnosis were unaffected by violence, murder and torture and accepted things with little more than an eye blink. Those without such a diagnosis—like me—argued that their death and the deaths of others were unnecessary and consequential. They argued for life, freedom, and when shown images of people being violently tortured and killed, they wept.

It was what I had done and what had disappointed Moord to the point where he beat me so hard, he broke my jaw, then held the bottoms of my feet to the top of a woodstove until all the skin burned off.

I had been nine.

But this Hellcat in front of me had escaped her commander’s disappointment, since clearly her prefrontal cortex was a shriveled mess and she had nary a grain of empathy rattling around in all that mushy gray matter she called a brain.

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