Free The Cross (Alliance Book 2) by Inna Hardison

secluded spot he scouted with his crew a while ago. It was about a six-hour walk from here, if they didn’t slack off. So he punched in the time-stamp of tomorrow at six in the evening. It should give her plenty of time to find a private flier and get Trina.

    He told her that she wasn’t going anywhere with the girl until he had Trina, and that if she were smart, she’d come alone, as he’d have most of his well trained crew on standby, and she didn’t want him to have to reach out to his crew for this. He signed off, and for the first time felt hungry enough to eat. He joined the others at the fire, ignoring the angry looks from Drake and Ams, just listening to them talk, and he hoped Riley didn’t kill him tomorrow morning when he’d have to tell him what he just did.

    One way or the other, tomorrow all of this will be over. He needed for this to be over, before he completely lost himself to his anger, to the relentless chase for Trina and to the guilt he went to sleep with every night for his parents, and guilt for what he had done to Riley. He just had to make it through the night now. That much he could manage.

S EVEN S TEPS

    Trina
    [ Crylo, May 16, 2233 ]

    She expected someone to come and ask her questions or at least tell her what they wanted from her, but nobody came. She’d been locked up in this box for two days and nobody came to tell her anything. When she woke up the first morning after they brought her here, there was a small plastic tray with a cup and a small thermos of some dark brown liquid. It wasn’t tea, she could smell that much. She poured out a small sip and tasted it, spitting it out. It was thick and bitter. There was a silver box next to the strange liquid that she couldn’t open at first, couldn’t figure it out, and then finally she did. She didn’t know what she was looking at. Didn’t have names for any of it.

    There was a round orange thing, cut up into four pieces. She liked the way it smelled, but after the stuff in the thermos, she was going to have to be more careful. She ran the tip of her index finger against one of the slices and licked it. It was the strangest thing she’d ever tasted. Sweet and tart and perfumy, the smell mingling with the taste. This she could eat, and she did, juice running down her chin and dripping onto the tray. The only other thing in the box was a white square bar. She tasted it first, in the same way she did with the round orange thing, and it tasted like sweetened milk and something else she couldn’t quite place, but it was decent enough, so she ate that too, and then walked over to the sink and washed her face and hands under cold water. She rinsed out the thermos and filled it up with water at the sink and drank that.

    She slept again after that, thinking of Brody, making his face show up in her head, his eyes looking at her in a way that made her insides feel warm. She knew she did the right thing, sending him away like that, but it didn’t help her not miss him. She must have slept most of the day, because when she woke up, her old tray was gone and there was a new one on the floor next to her bed. This one was red. She was paying attention to all these clues now, as there was no way for her to see what time it was, not even if it was day or night. So this would be dinner. And she couldn’t eat any of it. She couldn’t even bring herself to smell it. She moved the tray away from her, not that it helped in this small space, and went back to her cot. She wasn’t that hungry yet anyway. At worst, she knew she wouldn’t starve if she just ate the stuff on the white trays from now on.

    She needed something to do to occupy herself, something that would make the time stop moving so slowly. She got up and started taking mental notes of everything she saw through the walls and the floor of this box. It still made her feel a bit uneasy when she looked through the floor, but only when she was thinking about it. She didn’t notice feeling