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“It’s okay,” Kurt said quickly and then started walking them both across the threshold and out of the room. “I got him. He’s not leaving this body.”
The Cartel member lifted his gun, but he clutched it to his body more like a security blanket than a weapon. “He’s not supposed to leave the room.”
“I’m taking him to Hess.” Kurt didn’t stop walking as he explained, just calling over his shoulder to the bewildered guard as he kidnapped Maxwell in the full light of day.
Maxwell only considered for a moment calling for help. Aside from the knife that Maxwell didn’t doubt Kurt had the will to use, what would he say? Save me? Why would the guard save a pirate from a trusted Resistance colleague? Save me, it’s me, Maxwell, the doctor? Besides, whether or not he would even be believed, he didn’t even think that would save him.
He’d told Kurt that he believed Garrett could have loved him. And he did believe that. But he also believed he’d already sacrificed any chance of that when he’d made Garrett find out about him by watching him get shot in the head and then take over a pirate’s body.
Suddenly Kurt pressed the knife hard enough to slice open Maxwell’s skin. “Let’s pick up the pace a little, sweetheart. We don’t want to run into anyone else.”
“Where are we going?” Maxwell duly forced his new legs to walk faster, even though he was certain he’d trip and fall on his face. How did Sebastian manage to change bodies so frequently, so quickly?
“I told you.” Kurt pressed his palm to Maxwell’s lower back to keep them moving. “I’m getting you out of here.”
Maxwell bit his lip. “I don’t want to get out of here.”
“Yeah, you never have known what’s good for you.”
Within minutes, the long lines of the sky port hangers came into view, and Maxwell’s heart picked up. A ship already sat on the tarmac. A small, fast one, just a little bigger than the ones that Garrett or Sebastian took out on recon missions.
As soon as Maxwell’s feet hit the concrete, he stopped. “No.”
Kurt growled and reached around to grab Maxwell’s throat with his other hand. “Yes.”
“Please, Kurt, I’ll stay with you. I just—”
“You’re just a liar, and we both know it.” Kurt dragged the blade across the nape of Maxwell’s neck, and a new, visceral pain exploded behind Maxwell’s eyes.
He started to scream, but Kurt choked off his air supply and shoved him forward. Pain like Maxwell had never known blinded him and panicked him as Kurt kept pressing him forward with his knife.
That was his body.
That was his real body.
That was him Kurt dug his knife into, cutting open the soft plates of his shell, as he screamed breathlessly.
The pain didn’t stop until Maxwell’s feet suddenly left the ground. He slammed into something hard and misshapen, but the dull ache of the blunt force felt like nothing compared to the searing existential pain he’d endured only seconds ago.
“I wish you hadn’t made me do that to you, baby.” Kurt’s voice grew loud in the enclosed space as Maxwell heard the familiar hiss of a ship’s cockpit being sealed. He whimpered and curled in on himself at Kurt’s feet. He wrapped both hands around the back of his neck to protect himself. “I didn’t like doing that to you.”
Maybe he had, and maybe he hadn’t. But when Maxwell finally managed to open his eyes as the ship rumbled along the tarmac beneath him and looked up to see the satisfied smile that spread across Kurt’s face as they lifted off into the air, he knew that Kurt was capable of much worse.
Chapter Ten
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Garrett snapped his head up from the star chart just in time to see an unfamiliar man swing a fist toward his face. But despite the half-second of time he had to react, Garrett took it on the jaw.
He knew who this was.
Sebastian followed up with a two-handed shove that slammed Garrett’s back into the wall. “How could you just let them go? Why the fuck are you still here?”
“There weren’t any ships.” Garrett swallowed the wad of bloody spit in his mouth and kept his hands and eyes down. “He took the only one with any fuel.”
And Garrett had watched it sail off into the sky with no fucking clue where it was going and no way to follow it. He’d heard Maxwell’s screams, and he’d watched Kurt Buck throw Maxwell into the fighter ship, and he hadn’t been able to do a damn thing about it as he’d sprinted down the runway.
Sebastian slammed his palm against the wall beside Garrett’s head. “How could you let that bastard get to him?”
