biofreeze container in her underwear. The two-piece snowsuit offered protection, but even that wasn’t enough to stop the cold from creeping into her fingers and toes. Dev had given her the thick, black clothing to wear. It matched the others, except for Jackson who was in white. She doubted they’d come by the Federation snowsuits honestly. The fact they still had patches on them proved they were not decommissioned uniforms.
Jackson’s white suit had the ESC emblem for the Exploratory Science Commission, as did the skintight jumpsuits they wore underneath. Thinking of it, she glanced at Dev. The elastic material had stretched to fit him, molding to his body to hide his flesh while showing every sexy detail of his frame. She could still picture the firm look of his ass in tight black without even closing her eyes.
“How are you?” Dev asked.
“Unconcerned.” She took a deep breath. The cold stung her cheeks and nose. “I’m not worried about what we’re going to find here. I have every confidence that what you think is going to be disproven by what we see here.”
It was a lie. She wasn’t confident of that fact. Doubts had started to creep into her thoughts ever since Josselyn had her say about family history.
Besides Dev and Jackson, Rick, Lucien, Viktor, Evan and Josselyn also joined them on the planet’s surface. Lochlann stayed on the ship where he could monitor them from the sky. The craft hovered in orbit after dropping them off.
“I can see why they chose this place,” Violette said. The moon revolved around an uninhabited planet. At one time it looked as if it had been cultivated to support life, but that would have been a long time ago. Now ice had claimed the surface. “It makes for a perfect prison. Isolated. They would be able to see unauthorized ships coming before they even flew into orbit. If anyone escaped, they wouldn’t survive long on the surface.”
Jackson gave a humorless laugh. “I don’t think escape is what they were concerned about.”
“No, they only cared about hiding what they had done,” Rick muttered.
“If we find proof of who is responsible, we’ll make sure it’s known,” Lucien said. “Secrets have a way of coming out eventually.”
“Be careful, some people don’t want their secrets known.” Violette saw the way that the crew looked at her. She was the outsider to be watched, tied to the evil Federation boogeyman.
Her gaze moved toward Josselyn. The sisters hadn’t spoken since the incident in the spaceship corridor. Even though Violette stopped saying she wanted to kill her sister that didn’t mean she’d given up on bringing her father’s killer to justice. She had to know the truth and then she would decide what justice meant.
For the women’s safety, the men had decided to keep the sisters separated as much as they could. On the ship, it had proven to be easy. Violette preferred spending her time in Dev’s tiny room to mingling with the crew. Now, they kept them apart by putting two crewmen between the sisters at all times. For a moment, her gaze locked with Josselyn’s. Evan leaned to his wife and whispered. Josselyn nodded and looked away first.
Violette shivered and found herself gravitating toward the heat of Dev’s body. The cloudless blue-gray sky seemed as dead as the frozen earth. When he glanced down in surprise at her sudden affection, she muttered, “I hate the cold.”
He lifted his arm around her shoulders and drew her closer.
Quietly, so the others couldn’t hear, she asked, “How are you doing with the temperatures? The cold is not hurting you is it?”
“I’m fine as long as I stay in the suit.” Dev showed her the device on his wrist. “Viktor rigged it so I can monitor my temperature.”
“You’ll say something if it becomes dangerous?” she insisted. “I remember what you told me about Bevlons and the cold.”
He nodded.
Violette needed to be here, to see the truth for herself—whatever truth there was left to see. But, that didn’t mean she wanted to be here. She wanted to be a child again, feeling trapped by the sands churning outside the windows for the military base, before her father gave her a scar and started this mystery she’d been tormented by.
“Someone blasted a hole in the weather shuttle. We saw it the first time we landed,” Rick said. “Whoever it was wanted this moon to stop thriving. It probably froze over in less than a day.”
Josselyn had said as much.
“If you need proof, we can