its own scent, pungent and earthy. The landing dock would have been crawling with bugs without the fish, whose silver scales reflected the moonlight as they surfaced to catch mosquito larvae.
Arousal still simmered under his skin. So did guilt. Frustrated at himself and furious with his unraveling control, Knox spun and slammed his fist into the wall.
He didn’t pull the punch. The impact of it rattled up his arm as the brick cracked. Crumbled. Pain bloomed, bright and immediate, as his skin split, but he didn’t care. Pain was a distraction, a reminder, a lover he’d embraced for most of his life.
And, in the end, it was a warning he didn’t need anymore.
Knox pulled his hand back. His fist had driven deep, shattering the exterior wall. His blood smeared the brick in dark shadows. He wiped the debris from his knuckles and stared down into the open wound, where indestructible polymers had protected his joints from damage. Beneath that, where his bones had once been, a shiny titanium alloy glinted in the dim light.
The holding cells the TechCorps had locked them in had been built of materials far stronger than brick and mortar. But they hadn’t prevented his teammates from seeing each other. Hearing each other.
Knox imagined that was at least part of the point.
Mace had gone through the muscle cramps first. Through his agonizing pain, the medic had reassured the team. Mace had always been calm in a medical emergency, and he was calm during his own. Even when the cramps turned to seizures like the one that had struck Conall. Even when those seizures had intensified.
Mace had stayed calm as death wrapped dark, hungry hands around him.
His suffering was meant to be an abject lesson to his teammates, especially Knox, who hadn’t stayed calm at all. That last day, as the convulsions had claimed Mace and his weakened groans took on an edge of fear, Knox had tried to batter his way out of his cell. It was unthinkable to watch one of his men die, and intolerable to see him do it alone, afraid. Senselessly. Needlessly.
He’d beaten at the reinforced polycarbonate walls of the cell until his hands bled. Until his skin was scraped raw. Until his bones shattered.
Until he shattered.
And then he’d fallen to his knees, his mangled, bloody hands hanging uselessly at his sides, and begged for mercy. Not for himself. For Mace.
But mercy wasn’t a TechCorps directive.
They had broken something inside Knox that day, something that couldn’t be repaired. It didn’t matter that they’d taken him from the holding cell straight into surgery and replaced his shattered bones with the latest tech. He’d been numb as they rushed him through regeneration therapy. Dead inside.
They put him in the testing facility and exclaimed excitedly as he punched what they told him to punch, as he split the skin over his knuckles again and again, pulverizing everything they put in front of him. He endured the painful regeneration and imagined driving his newly indestructible fists through their chipper, triumphant faces.
He mouthed the promises they wanted him to make and gave them the loyalty oaths they wanted to hear. And he’d meant them. For the three weeks after Mace’s heart had finally stopped, nothing had mattered to Knox except perfect compliance. He’d valued his conscience too highly and had disobeyed an order. As a result, they’d tortured one of his men to death. So the rest of his squad’s lives had depended on his ability to acquiesce.
It wasn’t until the TechCorps reunited him with his team that the spark of defiance had kindled again. Not for himself—he couldn’t afford to have a conscience anymore—but for his men, because the safety you bought by selling off bigger bits of your soul every day was nothing but an illusion.
His team deserved a chance to break free before this life shattered them as completely as it had Knox. Their only chance—their only tiny, futile chance—lay at the rendezvous coordinates. In delivering three presumably innocent people, possibly to their deaths.
His crew was on board with the plan now, but Knox could already see the fractures forming. He’d chosen his men not because they were good at their jobs, but because they were good people. He’d seen his own simmering need to help reflected in each one. Maybe they didn’t aspire to be heroes—the Protectorate wouldn’t have tolerated that—but they absolutely wanted to minimize the hurt, to soften the cruelty.
Conall would break first. Rafe might hold out longer, what with Luna’s life