She stared at him in horrified silence. He sank back down and closed his eyes.
“Why do you fight like that?” she asked.
“There’s no single reason. Sometimes he doesn’t like something I’ve done. Sometimes I do it because he annoys me.”
“What about today?”
Lucas sighed. She wouldn’t let him be. “Today we fought because Daniel argued with Arthur. Daniel wants to evacuate. Arthur doesn’t. Daniel insisted and Arthur bruised his pride. I took Arthur’s side. Evacuating the base is costly. One scout isn’t reason enough to do it. It’s a bad sign—we had seen scouts before in the neighboring fragments, but never this close. But we can’t just run at the first hint of trouble.”
She frowned. “So twisting bones out of your sockets is the way he demonstrates his displeasure at being pushed around?”
“Pretty much. Daniel wants to be taken seriously. So I treated him as a serious threat and made a big production of it. I was a substitute fight. What he really wanted was a shot at Arthur, which I can’t let him take, because Arthur will kill him.” Lucas thought of leaving it at that, but something nagged him to explain. “It’s complicated. We live by different rules. In your other life, people undergo strict social conditioning that evolved over hundreds of years. They grow up in relative safety and under constant supervision. Parents, schools, peers—all of their interactions fine-tune their behavior until they are . . .”
“Safe?” she suggested.
“Socialized. But Daniel and I grew up as outcasts, with only the extremes of our behavior corrected—so we don’t murder someone whenever the urge strikes us. Our interactions are simpler than yours, less layered and closer to . . .” Lucas grappled for the right word. When it came to him, he didn’t like it. “Animals. Both of us reached sexual maturity a while ago. We have a strong urge to mate and have our own territory, our own families, and separate lives. Instead we’re stuck with each other, in this house, with an illusion of privacy and an excess of aggression. And now there is you. Daniel doesn’t really want you for your own sake. He wants you because he views me as competition and now I have something he doesn’t. I am the only consequence he fears. He’s hostile and defensive, and Arthur made him sit down and shut up today. Daniel had to vent and I’m the only one who would put up with it.”
“Why?” she asked softly.
“Because he is my brother.”
There was a tiny pause. “But he is not a Demon like you.”
“Different fathers,” he told her. “All of us within the House of Daryon carry genes from many different subspecies. Our mother was a Demon. My father was a normal human. Daniel’s father was a powerful Acoustic. We both played the genetic lottery and got different prizes.”
He left out rape, imprisonment, and murder. It sounded much better this way.
“Did Daniel hoard food as a child?”
She was perceptive. He would have to remember that. “Yes.”
“And you took care of him?”
“Yes.” Because nobody else would.
“Why doesn’t he just leave?” she asked. “Why don’t you? You don’t seem to like living here.”
“Because we have a job to do. We guard you from genocide.” The mission overrode everything. A logical part of him assured Lucas that life outside of the original mandate existed. He just couldn’t picture himself living it. “As long as we exist, you survive.”
“I don’t understand.”
He sighed. This was another long explanation and he had no energy for it today. Nor did he want to shock her again. She’d been through enough. “Monsters exist. They call themselves Ordinators. They want to kill people like you. Normal ordinary people. We exist to keep them from succeeding. That’s all there is to it.”
“But what do they want?”
“They want you to die.”
“Why do they hate us so much?”
He sighed. “They don’t hate you. They simply want you not to be. It’s a genetic cleansing, a mass extermination. They view the current situation as a mistake, which they’re trying to correct. They feel that they are ordained to take your place. Subspecies 61, the ‘normal’ human, has no value to them, except maybe as an occasional food source in a pinch.”
“They’re cannibals?” Her voice spiked a little.
“Only some of them. I meant a food resource for their war animals. Do you know what a daeodon is?”
“No.”
“It’s a nasty breed of entelodon, a prehistoric boar. Picture a predatory pig, twelve feet long, seven feet tall at the shoulder, jaws like a crocodile. It eats anything, and once you mess with its genetics, it gets smart and breeds fast. They need a lot of meat.”
When he opened his eyes, he found her looking at him. Karina sat submerged so deeply, only her face floated above the water. Warm color had returned to her cheeks. Her hair, slicked by the shower, swirled in the roiling water.
Mmmmm. Mine.
Lucas could reach out and pull her to him and run his hands up and down her body, to feel the heavy fullness of her breasts, the curve of her ass . . . If it wasn’t for fatigue, and the fact that she trusted him, anchoring him to the spot, he might have done it.
His thoughts must’ve reflected on his face, because she pulled as far from him as the tub would allow. A haunted look claimed her face, sharpening her features. Like a stray dog, he thought, shivering, scared, and ready to bite. He held the key to her: turn it one way and break her; turn it the other and the pressure would ease. He’d been just like that a few years ago. The memory of being scared of everyone was still fresh.
“You know I can’t stop you. What consequences do you fear?” Karina asked.
“Right now I just don’t want to fight with you,” Lucas said. “I fight with Arthur, with Daniel, with Henry. I’m tired.” And he wanted her to stop jerking back every time he looked at her. It made him feel like he was a monster and he had enough help with that already.
“If you want peace, let me have Emily.”
“No.”
She clenched her teeth.
“Maybe later. Down the road.”
“Why not now?”
Irritation flared in him. “Because I can’t watch the two of you every moment of every day and you are stealing knives.”
“The knife was for protection. I won’t take another one. I won’t try to stab you again . . .”
“It’s not me I’m worried about.”
She became utterly still. “Oh, my God.” Her eyes widened. “You think I would hurt my own daughter?”
“You wouldn’t be the first one.” Not by a long shot. “Shock is a bitch. Especially when mixed with venom fucking with your hormones.”
“She is everything I have.”
She looked on the verge of tears. He forced himself to sound calmer. “And that’s why you could slit her throat the second I gave her to you. You’re both my responsibility. I said I would keep you safe. I don’t want you to hurt her or yourself.”
“I had the knife since breakfast,” she told him. “You sent me into the room with Emily. I didn’t kill her. If I’d tried, you couldn’t have stopped me . . .”
“Henry was monitoring your mind. Had your stress level spiked, he would’ve shut you down.”
“Then ask him if I tried to kill her or myself. I had the opportunity. I got the knife so I could hurt you. Not myself.”
Lucas rose and crossed the tub, pinning her between his body and the tub wall. The feel of her body against his shoved him right to the edge. In his mind all the leashes he put on himself were snapping one by one. Karina turned to the side, trying to hide from him.
“Look at me.”
Karina looked at him. Lucas peered into her eyes, looking for some sort of indicator of sanity. “If you had a loaded gun in your hand, would you shoot me?”
“No. If I killed you, I would be next. Either Daniel, Henry, or Arthur would murder me, and Emily would have nobody.”
An honest rational answer. “Do you want to die?” He wanted her. He wanted to crush her in his arms and see her want him.
“No.” She shook her head.
“What do you want?” He knew what he wanted. She was right there, caught against his chest. His heart was beating too fast.
“I want to escape,” she told him. “I want to go back to my life.”
She was sane and stable, or as sane as he could expect. Lucas released her and Karina scrambled away from him.
“What would you do if I let you have your daughter, Karina?”
She stopped. He read the answer on her face. Anything. She would do anything. She would let him do anything, and if he demanded, she would pretend to like it.
It was the answer his mother would’ve given.
“What do you want?” she asked hoarsely. He felt the tension hidden in her words, as if she stood on the edge of a chasm, waiting for him to push her in.
“Can you bake a chocolate cake?”
There was a tiny pause before she answered. “Yes.”
“Make one. For Daniel. It’s his favorite.”
She waited. When he didn’t say anything, she finally asked, “That’s it?”
“Yes.”
Lucas waited for relief on her face, but she just sat there, clenched up. Still looking for the catch, he realized.
“You’ll really let me have her?” He barely heard her voice. “No conditions?”
“Yes.” And the more fool he for it. Nothing good would come of it, not with the way they fought. Henry would think him insane. But Lucas felt weary. He didn’t have the strength to fight yet another war. And he didn’t want her to be miserable. “Make a list of what you both will need, and I’ll send it to the main house tomorrow. Last time I checked, you could buy Hello Kitty blankets in any department store . . .”
