Page 204 of Gladiators of the Vagabond Boxset

Luka

A doctor saw to my injuries after I’d been locked up in my old room in the Nerizana mansion.

I was one big bruise from their manhandling, and my jaw had been dislocated.

Those were all easy fixes with a tissue regenerator.

I was back to being my mother’s pretty boy in no time at all, yet they still wouldn’t let me out, and nobody was willing to give me any information on Noa.

I was going crazy from the not-knowing, pacing the room and pounding on the door.

I wasn’t just biding my time like on Jihari, I wasn’t going to just make this easy for them.

I’d already managed to break a window on three occasions, despite the increased security measures each time.

I’d almost made it down onto the lawn once.

I had required a dozen stitches and several more rounds of treatments to fix up the jagged tear across my arm that I’d caused another time when the glass shattered.

Their answer was always the same: a smug Kertinal whose name I never got to know declaring that I’d have to wait until Madam Nerizana returned.

Any request about Noa was met with a smug grin, his emotional landscape filling with all kinds of perverted, sadistic feelings.

I feared the absolute worst, that this bastard had laid hands on my Noa.

The Kertinal underestimated my ability to fight.

I’d knocked him on his ass and pounded his head into the hard wooden flooring.

If not for the two other guards, I would have killed that bastard then and there.

As it was, they needed to stun me before they could finally pull me off him.

After that, the asshole never entered my room without at least six more guards with him.

It wasn’t helping my odds of escaping, but it sure felt validating to know that he was scared of me now.

Thank you, Sunder, for being such a hard-ass when training.

On day five, my mother finally arrived, sweeping into my room in a cloud of perfume and expensive clothing. “What is wrong with you?” she demanded as soon as she saw me. “Why would you embarrass me like this? Can’t you just behave for once in your life?”

I stared at her as she continued to rage at me, her emotions truly those of a parent whose kid had just done something incredibly stupid.

She couldn’t fathom that I didn’t want to do the horrible things she did.

But my skin prickled, my body dropping from apathy at her arrival into a sudden rage when she said, “You and your gladiator friends ruined my animal breeding facility, that cost me so much money! You should have just taken your lesson at Drameil’s hands, but no, you’ve got to be stubborn. ”

My mother’s accident had turned her into the vilest of monsters.

She would abhor what she’d become if she had any shred left of her old self.

Slavery, animal cruelty, in cahoots with Drameil enslaving me…

Oh, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if she was one of the twelve crimelords that governed the seedy layer of the Zeta Quadrant. No, at this point, it was all but fact.

“I’m talking to you, son!” she demanded when she realized I wasn’t listening to her angry rant.

How could a woman this angry, this mean, look so beautiful still?

How could she look just like the woman who had once lovingly sung me to sleep and kissed my hurts away?

I struggled to reconcile the two images.

“You are not my mother,” I said to her. “You’re nothing but a viperous, evil bitch.” My words seemed to flip a switch in her. One moment, she was still spitting mad; the next, she turned calm and placid, almost gleeful.

“Very well,” she said. “Then you leave me no choice.” Her hand flicked toward the gloating Kertinal guard just inside the door, and he turned and opened the panel.

Beyond it was Noa, laid out on a floating stretcher, her colorful skin on display in nothing but a thin white gown.

She was out cold, so deeply out that, for a brief moment, I feared she was dead. They had sedated her.

Greedily, I took her in, searching her for any injuries or marks.

There was the hated lace collar around her pale throat, a pain collar that would be used to keep her in check or possibly to harm her if I didn’t do as my mother wanted.

It was a more effective shackle than putting one around my own neck.

“What did you do to her?” I demanded, anxious at seeing her laid out like that, even if she did appear to be in good health.

There were no markings on her, no obvious injuries.

She didn’t look thin yet, and there were no shadows beneath her eyes.

Had they kept her sedated like this all this time?

Was that why I hadn’t been able to sense her, no matter how hard I tried?

And I tried, tried filtering emotional profiles so hard that I feared my head would explode.

“Nothing yet,” my mother drawled. “Though I’ve had plenty of interesting suggestions,” she said, and her eyes flicked to the sadistic Kertinal. My blood froze in my veins, though I felt relief at the admission that the bastard hadn’t touched her yet.

“Here’s how it’s going to be,” she said, and then she listed her demands. I could only agree with them, a sick feeling in my stomach. Anything to keep Noa from harm.

*

Noa

I had lost time—a lot of it—because my head no longer hurt.

My jaw had healed while I’d been out, and my clothing had changed.

I shivered at the thought of some stranger touching my body while I’d been completely vulnerable.

My last memory was of the small room, the Rummicaron guard who had unlocked my cuffs and brought me a meal.

Shit, something had been in that stuff. No wonder it had tasted funny. Now I was in what could only be described as a broom closet, wearing a skimpy white dress. It was cold, and my body was shivering from it, all my heat seeping out at any point of contact with the stone floor.

Was Luka okay? Where was he? And where was Pato?

I didn’t know anything. I didn’t even know how much time I had lost—hours?

Days? I was hungry and thirsty, but that didn’t mean anything.

My jaw was fully healed, so that meant more than a few hours.

With my human constitution, even with a tissue generator, it would take a few days to fully heal that massive bruise.

Sick to my stomach at what could have been done to me in that time, I felt all over my body, searching for new bumps or scars—any indication that I’d been violated while out or had a new tracker implanted.

I couldn’t find anything, but that didn’t mean much; they might have been really good at covering their tracks.

I hadn’t known about the first tracker either.

The sound of approaching footsteps had me scrambling to my feet, searching the near darkness that filled this tiny broom closet for anything to wield as a weapon. It had been emptied; there were just bare walls and stone floors, so I balled my fists, ready to swing at whoever came in.

A clunk sounded, and then the door swung open, bright light spilling inside and piercing my eyes.

Two dark silhouettes filled the doorway, one big and bulky, the other taller.

I froze, the feeling of unease crawling over my skin all too familiar.

Dumb and Dumber. Just my luck that those two had to be here.

A horrible thought struck me: this probably meant Luka’s mother had arrived as well.

“Well, well,” Dumb drawled. “Look who we’ve got here.

How did you like it? Locked up in the dark?

Not so fun, is it?” His voice was filled with malice as he spoke.

Clearly, he remembered that it was me who had gotten him tossed down the laundry chute.

Or maybe he was pissed about that hot glue, he still had pale, almost white skin in spots across his face.

I’d gotten him good with that glue gun. Made me wish I had another one like it.

Whatever, I hoped he still remembered all the bumps and bruises, the pain I’d given him.

As long as neither of them remembered Aradne’s involvement.

“What are you complaining about?” I said to them. “I made sure you landed in a nice, soft pile of dirty laundry, didn’t I?” The oldest, ugliest of the two growled, raising his fist as if he were about to hit me. It was Dumber who held him back, grabbing his fist with an angry noise.

“I want her to pay too, but we can’t mess her up right now.

Jo’qaul will have our hides,” he said, and I could tell that Dumber was actually scared of this Jo’qaul, whoever he was.

I could hazard a guess: the Kertinal with the yellow eyes.

Yeah, I was pretty scared of him too, not that I was going to let him know that.

I was good with it if it kept these two idiots in line right now; maybe I could use it against them later.

They escorted me down the dimly lit corridor, probably a basement.

I was seeing a pattern here. The Dragon liked to keep her dirty secrets out of sight and out of the minds of her possibly empathic guests, where they couldn’t sense our misery or try to investigate.

Knowing the Leaper’s crew, I now understood much better what the Aderians were all about.

What these two and the Dragon did, that wasn’t it.

I was brought to a room at the end of the corridor, where two young women in maid uniforms waited for me.

Both were of the same pale blue species as Moira, my shy friend from Jihari.

These two were also quiet and shy, with the same kind of collar around their slender necks as I wore.

The all-too-familiar maid uniform was laid out on a nearby table, so I got the picture, back to work, it seemed.