Page 58 of Vindicated

It was only then that I became aware of the others crowded around me. Hal stood wringing his hands while Vallia blinked at me with luminous eyes. Lettie knelt at my side, her painted face uncharacteristically grim.

"You need to stop fussing and hold still," she said, in a tone that brooked no argument, "or you're going to lose that arm before we get you somewhere it can be tended."

I opened my mouth to argue, but she was already unwinding the bright, patterned scarf from around her waist. She looped it beneath my forearm and started to tug it snug behind my neck to form a makeshift sling, when her gaze snagged on my bare chest.

"Well, would you look at that," she murmured, her fingers hovering just above my skin without touching it.

Hal rolled his eyes at her. “You’ve seen plenty of bare Vandar chests by now, haven’t you?”

She shot him a look over her shoulder. “Not with marks that are spreading."

I glanced down, expecting to see my usual marks, but the black swirling lines that had always traced my chest in familiar swirls were indeed spreading. They now curled toward my collarbone and across my shoulders in delicate, looping threads.

Dawz leaned in close, and I watched his jaw drop. "You have mating marks, Raas."

I lifted my good hand and touched the burning skin I'd assumed was hot because I’d been shot. For one dizzying moment I forgot the pain in my arm. I even forgot the smoke and chaos of the warbird.

Mating marks. I had mating marks. Which meant, somewhere on this ship, Athena’s skin bore the mirror of them.

She was my true mate. My heart had known it since the moment I'd seen her image, but now my body knew it too, and had marked it into my very flesh. I could never let her go. Not to her father. Not to anyone.

"Raas?" Dawz's voice cut through the roaring of blood in my ears. "Are you?—"

“I am fine,” I said, my voice rough. “I need to find Athena.”

Lettie finished knotting the scarf behind my neck, tugging it snug enough to make me grunt, though I barely registered the pain in my arm. Whatever fire had burned in me before to find Athena was nothing compared to what roared through my veins now.

"There." Lettie sat back on her heels, surveying her work with something like satisfaction, though her eyes still darted uncertainly to the marks spreading across my chest. "That'll hold you together for now. You can thank all my years fixing costumes.”

“Thank you,” I said, as I forced myself to my feet.

My legs held, though my head spun and my vision pulsed black at the edges before sharpening again. Nothing mattered but finding Athena. Nothing had ever mattered more.

I lurched toward the mouth of the transport, mymajakclose at my heels, ready to catch me if my legs betrayed me again. But when I emerged into the hangar bay, there was no sign of her.

Bile rose thick and bitter in my throat. Every instinct screaming through the marks now blooming across my skin drove me forward. I broke into a run, ignoring the fresh shriek of pain from my wounded arm and tearing through the chaos of the hangar bay and storming desperately through the ship.

She was mine to protect, and I would tear the warbird apart plate by plate before I let anyone, even her own father, take her from me.

Chapter 50

Athena

Itwisted in my father's grip, digging my heels into the deck plating as he hauled me down a narrow side corridor away from the roar of the hangar bay. "Let go of me!"

"Stop fighting me," he growled, his fingers biting into my arm hard enough to bruise, "or I will knock you unconscious and carry you over my shoulder like sacked grain. Your choice."

Something in the flat, matter-of-fact way he said it told me he meant every word. I stopped struggling, though my heart did not stop hammering.

"No wonder my mother was always terrified you'd find us," I spat, once he'd pulled me into a shadowed alcove between two bulkheads. "I finally understand it. I used to think she was being paranoid. Now I think she wasn't paranoid enough."

His eyes narrowed, something cold and satisfied flickering behind them. "It took me longer than I would have liked to find you. Your mother was clever. I'll give her that. She even changed your name.”

I flinched at this, and he let out a cold bark of a laugh. “You thought Athena was your given name? No, you were given a sensible Zagrath name at birth, and that’s what you’ll be called again, Hester.”

Hester? I fought the urge to scoff out loud. I knew for certain I wouldn’t be answering to that name, no matter what he said.

"Why do you even care about finding me now?” The words tore from me, raw with a lifetime of questions I'd never been able to ask. “I’m an adult, not a child."