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“Bronc, is that you? Who was that outside?”
Torus stalked to the back of the house and found an open door. Inside, the room looked like a vast, expensive library. Leather-bound books lined the walls, which were three stories high at least. There was a fireplace and a comfortable and expensive-looking leather couch with a fur throw over the back of it.
On the floor were several animal pelts that had been turned into carpets—Torus recognized a lion and a rare white rhinoceros hide as he walked into the room.
Sitting at a desk filled with human computer equipment was the man Torus had seen over and over in his dreams. His dark brown hair was expensively styled and his eyes went wide when he looked up and saw Torus standing there.
“Hey, who the hell are you?” he demanded.
“Your retribution.” Torus was beside him in a heartbeat.
Zachary Wyndham fumbled in his desk drawer and suddenly he was holding a human weapon—a gun, Torus thought it was called. He pointed it shakily at Torus’s chest.
“Get back, man! I know how to use this!”
Before Torus could answer, he fired. There was a loud bang! and a piercing pain went through his upper arm.
It didn’t stop him.
Contemptuously, he plucked the gun from Zachary Wyndham’s trembling hand and threw it across the room.
“Only someone with extremely poor aim could have missed hitting a vital organ at this distance,” he remarked, as the gun landed on an expensive looking carpet with a thunk!
“What the fuck, man? I shot you!” Wyndham exclaimed querulously, as though they were playing a game and Torus was cheating.
“Not very well,” Torus told him. He was barely holding onto his temper—the Rage was telling him to kill, maim, and rend this bastard limb-from-limb, but that wouldn’t solve Molly’s problems. So instead, he reached out with his right arm—the one that wasn’t currently bleeding—and picked Zach Wyndham up by his throat.
“What…the…fuck?” the human male gurgled, kicking helplessly as Torus raised him high in the air. “What…do…you want?” he gasped out.
“I want every file you have of Molly, your ex-wife,” Torus told him. He squeezed, his fingers digging into the human male’s windpipe. “Now.”
6
MOLLY
“So he said he was going hunting? What does that even mean?” Lana asked for the fifth time as they sat on Molly’s couch in her small, single suite.
There weren’t many single suites available aboard the Mother Ship—most of the women who lived there were married or mated to Kindred warriors. But there were a few unmarried women—almost all of them housed along a small hallway not far from the rolling parklands around the Sacred Grove at the center of the ship. Karen Geners lived just down the hall from Molly, but the two of them weren’t friends—they just nodded when they saw each other and almost never spoke.
“I don’t know what it means,” she said to Lana. She’d used the Think-me, as Commander Torus had suggested, and called her friend away from work. The thin golden wire that fit around the wearer’s temples was a thought-conduction device invented by the Kindred. Molly had never been so glad for the alien technology as she was when she was able to call her friend to come meet her without having to face the entire Kindred Information Department.
Lana had come at once without question. She and Molly had gone back to Molly’s place and she had sat and listened without judgment to the whole story.
“That bastard!” she’d exclaimed indignantly, when Molly explained what her ex had done. “And I bought one of his games for my boys for Christmas—I’m going straight home and I’m going to stomp on the damn thing and then erase it from our home computer unit!”
Molly had laughed a little—she was feeling less depressed now that she knew she wasn’t losing her job or her place aboard the Mother Ship.
“No—don’t do that,” she told her friend. “Don’t ruin your husbands’ fun just because of me.”
“I’d like to ruin that Zach Wyndham’s face!” Lana had said fiercely. “I swear, just let me be alone with him for five minutes and he’ll be wearing his balls for a bowtie!”
Molly had laughed again and it felt like a part of her healed, just a little. It was so nice to have a friend who actually listened to her instead of accusing her or making it seem like everything was somehow her fault.
“Thank you,” she said now, leaning over to give Lana a brief hug.
“For what, hon?” Lala looked at her with wide eyes.
“For believing me. For not blaming me,” Molly told her.
