It should have worked. But when we found him … he was in bad shape. Not the torture—they’d regenerated all the damage—but the strain. I think he’d had a stroke. Ava called it, said we should abort, but Zoey refused to leave him there.”
He knew all about hard calls, and he had no doubt what Nina would have chosen. “You still tried to get him out.”
“We almost succeeded. We were close to our extraction point when the fire teams caught up with us.” Nina’s gaze focused on a spot on the wall, and the words kept tumbling out, faster and faster, until they were almost running together. “We were pinned down, and they had all the advantages. High ground, home field, numbers. The scientist went down first, and then Zoey—” Her voice broke. “And then Zoey.”
He finally touched her, wrapping an arm around her shoulder to tug her against his chest. “I’m sorry.”
She didn’t seem to hear him. “Ava and I kept fighting. I don’t know when she got hit, but after I took down the last soldier, I turned around and—” Her eyes squeezed shut. “Zoey was gone, and Ava was bleeding out. I managed to get her back to the Center, at least, but … she didn’t make it.”
He pulled her closer, his heart raw from how deeply he understood. How many missions had almost gone sideways because of something as simple as a choice between brains and heart? He could imagine too easily how her sisters had responded to the fallen scientist. Ava would have been like Gray, ruthlessly pragmatic, always focused on the bigger picture. Willing to leave the man behind for the sake of the mission. And Zoey would have responded like Rafe, unwilling to give up on anyone, even if it meant gambling her life on a hopeless cause.
And Nina would have been caught in the middle, her idealism at war with the need to keep her sisters safe. A no-win scenario.
It was a miracle she’d gotten out alive.
Nina clung to him, breathing in slow, deep, deliberate measures. “Clusters only function as a unit, and two-thirds of mine was dead. I was officially decommissioned. The Center offered to find me a job, and they did—with a private security force just like the one that killed my sisters.”
Knox stroked her hair, the silken strands wild beneath his fingers. Fine shivers trembled through her body. He felt like he’d torn away her smiling, carefree mask and found a well of pain deep enough to drown in. “You didn’t take it.” He didn’t make it a question. He knew she couldn’t have.
“No. I used what Ava and Zoey had taught me, and I left. In the middle of the night, with the clothes on my back. And this.” She lifted the silver pendant she wore from the hollow of her throat.
He hooked a finger under the thin chain. It wasn’t so different from the one his dog tags hung from, but instead of cool steel and identification numbers, hers was threaded through three interlocking rings. “For your sisters?”
She nodded. “Zoey made them. A set of three for each of us.”
He rubbed his thumb over the delicate rings. They wove in and out of each other, distinct but intertwined. A more elegant memorial than the one he had.
Releasing her necklace, he twisted off the bed to snag his jeans. His Protectorate-issue dog tags were in the back pocket, three little rectangles of metal.
Two for him. One for Mace.
Silently, he held them out to her.
She shuffled through the tags, pausing at the third. The damning one. Then she looked up at him. “What happened?”
“Do you remember the strike at the microchip factory?”
Nina sucked in a breath. “A couple of months ago. Half a dozen people were killed, five times that injured. The Protectorate said the workers rioted, but that’s not what I’ve heard.”
“The Protectorate tasked me with inciting a riot and using it as cover to eliminate the ringleaders who were trying to force better working conditions.” If he closed his eyes, he’d see the orders, crisp text scrolling across his tablet. He’d feel the dread and rage all over again. “One of the perks of commanding the most elite squad in the Protectorate was that I usually had some … discretion with my orders. I’d done plenty of shit that was bad. Unforgivable, even. But nothing like that. Nothing that was just … evil.”
“What did you do?”
“I submitted a modified mission objective. With a little time for recon