Another fear settled deep inside her. After this mess, she wasn’t sure of his intentions anymore. “What do you mean?”
Clarion wagged his eyebrows as a smile split his face. “Think about it, Z. As the royal prick, Darling can give us details about security on the palace and all the government buildings. There’s no telling what all he’s been privy to that could prove invaluable to us. Do I have your permission to interrogate him?”
She mulled the idea over. Clarion could be on to something. If they had details about security and Arturo’s plans, it could save a lot of lives.
Still…
It’s only an interrogation. She’d done dozens of them herself over the years with various prisoners. It wasn’t like they were going to torture him or anything. A few questions before they released the prince.
What was the harm?
“If you must.”
Clarion’s smile widened. “Thank you.”
Inclining her head to him, Zarya left his office and pulled her link out again. She tried Kere one more time, but again all she got was his voicemail.
C’mon, baby, answer me soon.
Then, she tried calling the Sentella who refused to do anything more than take a message for him.
Why wasn’t he getting back to her? It wasn’t like him to go this long without at least texting her a note to say he’d call her when he had a chance.
By the time she returned to her office, the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach had bred babies. They were jumping up and down, until she was absolutely ill with nausea.
Kere was in trouble. She knew it. She could sense it with every part of her being.
But how could she find him when she didn’t know who he really was?
5
Darling hung from chains by his throbbing, bleeding wrists. Both of his legs had been broken repeatedly so that his wrists supported all his weight.
Unrelenting pain coursed through him with merciless knives that shredded every part of him…
It was unbearable. He kept drifting in and out of consciousness. The horror of his time here in Resistance custody blurred with his stints in mental institutions, and the times his uncle had punished him at home. They blended together into one unending nightmare of bitter agony.
I just want it to stop.
At this point, he wasn’t sure how long he’d been held. It seemed like eternity, but since he couldn’t see daylight, he had no way of gauging one day from another. Unless they were coming in to hurt him, which they did at random intervals, they kept the lights off. Something they thought added to his misery.
But it didn’t. Courtesy of his mother’s mutated genes, he saw as well in pitch-black darkness as he did in brightest sunlight.
Right now, his head swam and his empty stomach churned so much that he feared he might vomit again—something that made the muzzle tear into his throat and choke him with blood and bile. Worse, it produced a severe drowning sensation, like being waterboarded.
The pain and deprivation, as well as the fever he’d been burning, caused him to hallucinate. Sometimes he thought he saw his father. Or his uncle.
His friends.
But the two people who haunted him most were Maris and Zarya. They drifted in and out of the room like ghosts who tormented him with memories of better days. Of the happy future he’d thought to have.
Sometimes the loss of that dream was even harder to bear than the torture.
The only truth he knew for certain was that he was starving, aching, and woefully alone.
No one had come for him. Even though he had a tracking chip encoded in his body that Arturo had used to find him over and over again when Darling hadn’t wanted him to, no one came.
So what’s new?
Stop it. They were looking for him. They were. This wasn’t the same as when he was in a mental institution and his friends couldn’t get him out without a court order or his uncle’s permission. He was in a secure facility that would block his chip from transmitting to an outside source. That was the only reason they hadn’t found him.
It had to be.
Nykyrian had known that he would be bringing Lise to his home. The minute Nyk caught word of her death and of Darling’s kidnapping, he and the rest of the Sentella would be out scouring space for him.
So would Maris.
His friends wouldn’t betray him.
Only Zarya had done that. And what cut him deepest were the times when he heard her voice through the door as she walked past it. Especially when she was laughing with the very people who tortured him.
He’d been willing to give her the universe.
She couldn’t even give him the time of day. How could she, as the Resistance leader, not come in here and see what they were doing to their prisoner? Did she know or did she just not care what they did?
How could she not know? his mind kept asking. The rebels constantly bragged about it to others—another thing he’d heard outside his room at all hours. They thought his humiliation and torture were funny, and they mocked him for it. That was what ate at him constantly.
How could he have so misjudged the people he’d been willing to die for?