Page 32 of Kai (Alpha Heroes #13)

Kai

“What is it?” Cece asked, even as she rolled off me, leaving my dick dripping with her juices.

I grabbed my Tak and punched the alarm icon.

“Fuck.” I pushed off the ground. “It’s down.”

“What’s down?”

“The shield,” I explained as I rushed to collect our beach gear. “As long as the shield is not working, we’re vulnerable to air traffic and satellite imaging.”

“Can you fix it?” Cece threw on a coverall while I packed our stuff.

“I can try.” I carried my surfboard to the shallows, dropped it in the water, and offered her the leash. “Hold on to this. Life jacket.”

Cece took the leash from me, grabbed the life jacket, and threw it on. “Can you elaborate on the ‘try’ part?”

“It means we’re the first ones to use this prototype.” I loaded our beach gear onto the board and secured it with a bungee cord. “No one has had to fix it just yet.”

“Oh, shit.” She winced as I raked the sand, erasing our tracks from the beach.

“Oh, shit is right.” I handed her the little rake, hooked my harness to the board, and motioned for her to mount the board. “Let’s go.”

It was the fastest swim of my life. It also felt like the longest, given that it gave me a few minutes to contemplate every-fucking-thing that could go wrong.

My body’s automated response to the swim got me into my battle Zen.

I pumped my arms and legs non-stop until we reached Serenity . By then, I had a plan in mind.

After I helped Cece off the board, I unloaded quickly, lugged my surfboard to the toy deck, then rushed to my navigation station and stood there, clicking the keys.

Cece came up behind me and offered me my board shorts. “Here.”

“I’ve got work to do,” I grumbled as I ran a diagnostic.

“I know,” she said. “But you’re very distracting when you’re gorgeously naked.”

“Am I?” I didn’t take my eyes off the monitors, but I cracked a smile. “In the middle of this shitshow, you’ve given me good news.”

“Good news would’ve been finishing what we started.” A grin brightened her voice, despite our dire circumstances. She knelt and dropped my damp shorts on the deck. “Here, lift your foot. Now the other.”

I reached down and yanked the shorts up my legs, keeping my full attention on the screen. “I’m not complaining, but your priorities astound me.”

“Believe me, they astound me, too,” she said, standing next to me. “But I need to focus if I’m going to help.”

My system beeped, and I scanned the results. “We’ve got a power source failure.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we need to restore power to the shield ASAP or risk detection.” I tapped my fingers on a series of indicators that glared red on one of my monitors. “Stay here. Let me know if any of these turn green.”

“Got it,” she said.

I stalked to the stern, opened the hatch to the port side engine room, and after deploying the ladder, slid down the side handles and landed inside the engine room.

It housed one of the engines, a generator, pumps, and the special equipment installed to power the shield.

The black screen I faced confirmed that the prototype batteries had failed. The shield was dead.

I clicked open the casing, fiddled with the wires, and called out. “Anything?”

“Nothing,” Cece yelled back. “We’ve got red all the way.”

I unscrewed and reattached the main wires. “And now?”

“No change.”

“Dammit.” It would take me some time to figure out why the damn batteries had failed. It would take me even longer to replace the state-of-the-art batteries with the backups I’d brought along. If they worked at all. Meanwhile, we were naked to the eyes of our enemies and vulnerable to attack.

Okay, all right. Think K-man . The longer we remained unshielded, the higher the probability of detection.

Sweating buckets in the oven-like compartment, I flipped the switches, disengaging the power for all areas of Serenity except the fridge and the surveillance systems. I hated to do this.

It left us dead in the water. But restoring the shield took precedence.

I rerouted the power into the batteries and switched them on.

The batteries flickered on and off. This was a no-go. With the batteries shot, the shield’s energy requirement surpassed Serenity’s capabilities.

“The power has gone off,” Cece announced, standing above the hatch. “We got some green there for a few, but now we’re back to red.”

“I’m gonna add the backup generator to the mix.” I met her worried gaze and wiped the sweat off my brow. “Tell me if something changes up there.”

It took me a few tries, not to mention some consultation with the manuals stored down there, but in the end, I rerouted all power to the shield’s systems.

“Green!” Cece shouted from above, piercing the generator’s racket and reappearing on the ladder’s highest rung. “We’ve got green! You did it, Kai!”

“It’s a workaround,” I explained, climbing up the stairs and taking a fresh breath of air at the top.

“Now comes the real work. We need to power the shield and the catamaran. Right now, all power is going to the shield.” I opened a nearby storage hatch and extracted a case.

“I’m gonna need to replace the batteries. ”

“And if you can’t?”

“I’ll get it done.” It was the only way to get us operational again, the only way to keep Cece safe.

“What can I do?” she asked, brave as always.

“I’m gonna need you to monitor the surveillance systems. Watch them like a hawk.

” Dropping the case on the deck, I rushed to the navigation station and pulled up the radars, cameras, and infrareds on the screens.

I showed her how to adjust the controls and zoom in and out.

“Let me know if any of these alarms go off. Keep an eye on these.” I pointed at the mercs’ boats, the ones I was tracking, and then tapped on Booming Voice’s vessel.

“Especially this one. If any of these change course and come our way, I need to know.” I grabbed the case and made my way back to the engine room. “This is gonna take a while.”

It took the rest of the afternoon and half the night to replace the damn batteries.

The current design was cumbersome and didn’t play well with other energy sources in the vessel.

Cece came down several times with cold water bottles, ice wraps for my neck, a towel to wipe the sweat drenching my body, and even a couple of sandwiches, which I devoured in minutes, sitting at the top of the ladder.

Somewhere around midnight, I noticed how exhausted she looked. Between the swimming lessons and the stress, she seemed depleted. I was used to going without sleep during my missions, but she’d been staying late working on her laptop for too many nights, and now her energy sagged.

“You need to go to bed, Sorceress,” I suggested the next time I came topside.

“Who is going to stay on watch?”

“I am.” I tapped on my Tak and headed down the steps again. “It’s been hours since the shield went down, and we have detected no changes in the mercs’ search patterns. They seem stationary so far. I can bring my Tak down here and multitask. I can take it from here.”

“Wait.” She stopped me halfway down the ladder, then softened her voice. “You need to rest, too.”

“I’ll go to bed as soon as I’m done here.”

She cocked her pretty eyebrows at me. “You promise?”

“I promise.”

She looked around me as if trying to figure out if I was telling her the truth.

“I won’t rest easy unless I know that you, too, are getting some rest,” she ventured. “How about you come to my cabin for a sleepover when you’re done?”

“It’s gonna be really late—”

“I’m talking about sleep, Kai,” she clarified. “I want to know you’re following your own advice. Bring your Tak along. We can have a threesome if you’d like.”

I laughed at that. “Okay.” I planted a quick kiss on her lips. “Now please get some Zs?”

Her gaze alight, she disappeared into the cabin. By then, I’d restored the system partially and had already returned power to critical areas of the vessel, including the engines, the sails, and the pumps. This gave me some peace of mind. If they came after us, we could run.

***

Cece

I lay in my bed, exhausted and yet unable to fall asleep.

It had been a long day that included many personal triumphs, but also terror when the shield went down and stayed down until Kai rigged something together.

After hours of working in the engine room, Kai had called me out for being tired.

He wasn’t wrong, but he needed to rest, too.

The man was stubborn with a capital “S.” He was also capable, resourceful, kind, sweet, and a feast of sexy.

Memories of our time at the beach drifted through my mind. I’d managed to swim some, to float, even. After all this time, I’d actually made progress. At swimming, for fuck’s sake! Kai wasn’t wrong. He was an amazing instructor, and maybe I could learn to swim after all.

He was also a gifted lover. I could tell, even if we hadn’t yet given free rein to our lust. I understood the mission’s risks, but the shield had gone down at the wrong time. We’d been almost there. Almost, and then… not.

Okay, sure, so I’d been mad at him for two long days.

Looking back, those days felt like a waste of time.

I’d fought my lust and lost. But even if I didn’t like losing, when he’d barged into my room with hot chocolate and warm banana bread, he’d broken down my barriers and melted my heart.

He’d made me feel cared for, like a flower blooming beneath the sun. He’d made me feel… pampered.

The contrast between my anger and his patience had made all the difference.

He’d weathered my temper with grace and perseverance.

Perhaps most importantly, he’d admitted to having his own hangups.

Okay, so we hadn’t talked about it, but those shadows I’d spotted lurking behind a man who came across as perfect—too perfect sometimes—had been real.