The Lasaran (Aldebarian Alliance #1) - Dianne Duvall Page 0,9
mouth work. Darkness floated at the periphery of her vision, then rushed forward. The sensation of falling took her. A clatter arose. Pain pierced her when her head hit the floor.
She tried to move. Tried to call for help.
But everything went black.
Chapter Two
Taelon ground his teeth as pain assaulted him. Endless agony. Excruciating.
Every time he thought it couldn’t get worse, the butchers would find a new perverse torture to inflict upon him. Neither remorse nor empathy glittered in the eyes that followed the path of the knife as it cut away a piece of flesh here, another there. Instead, gleeful fascination lit the expressions partially obscured by masks, pleasure in the face of his pain. Needles pricked his skin, stealing more blood than he could afford to lose. One of the doctors injected a substance in a tube that ran into his vein. His head swam. His thoughts grew hazy.
He should have listened to Ari’k. The stoic Yona guard, whom Taelon considered a friend despite the latter’s emotional detachment, had urged caution and counseled patience. But so much time had passed since the Earthlings had gotten their hands on Amiriska that Taelon could find no patience. The information Janwar had unearthed was outdated. The Gathendiens knew where Amiriska had been taken—a military base in the province of Texas. But that base had been destroyed shortly thereafter.
Had Amiriska died there? The Gathendiens thought so but had no proof.
Sometimes, when whatever drug the Earthlings pumped into him plunged Taelon into near-unconsciousness, he imagined Amiriska escaping her ruthless captors, razing the building that had imprisoned her, and finding a safe haven nearby in which she could await rescue.
But Riska was sweet and delicate. Yes, she was a hard negotiator and could stand her ground in political battles. She could match anyone in a war of words. But she had never been trained to fight physically. They had never seen the need to drill her in methods of war and self-defense because unmarried females in his society were always chaperoned. Violent crimes were rarely committed on Lasara. And Amiriska had nevertheless always been well guarded as a member of the royal family that ruled their planet.
Until she snuck away from her guard on the way to a diplomatic meeting and flew to Earth with only a small crew. Taelon still couldn’t figure out how she had managed to do that.
Electricity shot through him, stiffening every muscle in his body.
Drekking Earthlings and their torture.
Tears threatened when he imagined these monsters doing the same to his little sister, but he blinked them back. The butchers would assume the pain they inflicted elicited them and would take pleasure in seeing them fall.
Ari’k, as lacking in emotion as the rest of the Yona people, had bluntly concluded that Amiriska had most likely either been killed in the fire or transferred to another facility. The closest they could find that met the same criteria of the first was this one. Most of the military bases on this continent were known publicly. This one, like the one that had originally incarcerated his sister, was secluded, hidden, and shrouded in mystery.
Taelon’s body continued to twitch involuntarily after the electrical current ceased. He ignored the chuckles and loathsome comments of his tormentors.
Ari’k had volunteered to teleport to Earth and perform reconnaissance. But his unusual skin coloring would have drawn too much attention. Taelon’s second-in-command had recommended sending a Lasaran soldier down instead to gather intel. But Taelon possessed a gift that gave him an edge neither the Yona nor any of the Lasaran soldiers had. He could make others see what he wanted them to. So he had pulled rank and come himself.
The room tilted and whirled as the dizziness increased.
It had been yet another miscalculation. But it had yielded clues.
These butchers knew about Riska. He had glimpsed it in their thoughts before they’d drugged him that first time.
Was she here? Was she close to him right now, being tortured like him?
If so, he should be able to feel her. Though he didn’t bear her gift of being able to recognize and trace any individual’s unique energy signature, on Lasara most family members could sense when a loved one was nearby.
Was the drug interfering with his ability to sense her? Or…
He swallowed hard.
Was she dead? Had the butchers taken their torture too far and killed her? Was her body frozen in stasis, a rare specimen preserved for these monsters to study?