Yeah, okay in her exuberance, she’d overlooked a few small details. That was definitely one of them, and with the League, those prisons were impregnable.
And with that, came a whole new fear.
Instinctively, Zarya placed her hand on her stomach. It was also League policy that any child born to a female prisoner would to be taken away for assassin training. If it had any kind of abnormality, it was killed immediately after birth.
More than that, her child would have Trisani in its DNA. Would the League view that as a defect? Or worse, would they sell her baby into slavery or experiment on it?
And once they tested the child and found it was part Trisani, they’d test her. And when they found no trace in her genetics, they’d know that Darling and his family were partially Trisani…
Panic seized her. It would mean the death of them all.
They can never know I’m pregnant.
But that wouldn’t last. As of today, she’d officially missed her period. By now, she’d be far enough along that they’d be able to detect the pregnancy with either a scanner or blood test.
Panic rose inside her so strong that for a moment, it took her breath.
She refused to give in to it. Darling will find me. He will. As unlikely as it seemed, she had to hold on to that belief. He wouldn’t let her down…
The way she’d failed him.
Tears filled her eyes as she finally understood the true horror of his confinement at their hands. The one person who should have been hunting for him, who should have saved him from his torture, had walked by a thousand times outside the very room where he was imprisoned. And he’d heard her there over and over again.
Oh gods…
How would it feel to hear him on the other side of that locked door while she languished in here with no prospect of escaping?
It was one thing to be told something horrific.
It was another to experience it.
How could he ever really forgive me?
The fact that he’d spoken to her at all after his release was a miracle. How he could still love her was beyond her comprehension.
I’m so sorry, Darling. Her only hope was that she lived long enough to really make it up to him.
“What do you mean, you can’t find her?” Darling glared at Syn. “Her location has to be in their system. They make a record of every fart one of them takes.”
Screwing his face up at Darling’s crudity, Syn gestured toward his laptop. “I’m looking, but I’m telling you, it’s not there. For some reason, probably intelligence, they didn’t file a log on her. There is nothing in their system to let me, or anyone else, know where they’ve taken her. They’ve all but deleted any evidence of her ever having lived.”
And they all knew what that meant.
The League intended to execute her and since they had no real evidence to convict her on, they wanted no trace of it. If they didn’t find her soon, it would be too late.
Frustrated and terrified, Darling looked over to Nykyrian who was pacing in front of Darling’s desk. “Where do they normally take political prisoners?”
Nykyrian shrugged. “There are over two hundred and fifty prisons for political inmates. But the problem is, she might not be in one of those. While she is an aristo, she’s also a criminal in their eyes. With or without evidence.”
Which brought them back to square one. She could be in any prison on any planet.
Damn them!
It’d already been over two weeks that they’d been searching for her. Two. Full. Weeks.
Darling had paid out more than six million creds in bribes to any-and everyone who might have even a kernel of information about her or her location.
Nothing.
When Nero had heard about it just hours after she’d been captured, he’d tried to find her with his powers and had almost burned up his brain in the process. But for Syn, he’d have died. Poor bastard had gone into a coma while attempting it and had developed a vicious migraine that no amount of medication could cure. Fifteen days later, he was still unable to open his eyes in any kind of light.
At least he tried. For that, Darling owed him and he wouldn’t forget it.
Syn slapped at his keyboard. “They’re determined that no one is going to find any Caronese prisoner. It looks like they’ve scrubbed that word from their vocabulary. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
And Syn had been professionally hacking files since he was a small child. If Syn couldn’t find an e-trace, no one could.
What are they doing to her? That thought was never far from his mind. If he hadn’t been insane before all of this, fear for her life was quickly stealing what little sanity he had left.
“She’s on Brinear.”
He started at Maris’s deep voice as his old friend stepped through the door of his office. “What?”
Maris hesitated before he spoke again. “My source came through. It took him a few thousand creds, but he finally got the information, and he verified it. She’s definitely there, under extremely heavy security.”