“I had reason to believe it wouldn’t be pretty.”
“Based on personal experience?”
Finally, the merest flash of a smile. Although it may have been a grimace, hard to tell for sure. “Yeah. My first attempts weren’t pretty. Good thing I heal fast.”
“Maybe I’ll leave the flying to the professionals.”
She hesitated and stared up at the stars. “Might be for the best.”
The dream came back to him in a rush that sent his body straight to where it had begun. Grateful for the cloak, Lucas pulled his knees up and wrapped his arms around them.
“So,” He cleared his throat. “What now?”
She stopped petting Mai and leaned back on her hands. “I don’t know. I want to know what they’ve done to Nikolai.”
Nikolai. Lucas sighed, but to be truthful, the big guy was on his mind too. Although now that he would like to know Nikolai was okay, he hadn’t received any flashes of the mystifying remote viewing. Not since the Watchers had taken him away.
Maybe they blocked it? Or, more likely, it had only been Lucas’s overactive imagination.
Aria glanced back down at the shrew stretched out in her lap like a tiny pointy-nosed cat. “I need to get back to Cara’s.”
She’d used the singular. Lucas grimaced. “That might not be easy. I can get us close, but the Watcher’s place is wrapped in energy designed to confuse. I can’t take us directly there, not without an invitation.”
Aria shot him a look, her eyes gleaming in the darkness. “Mai is connected to Cara. Can she take me to her?”
Lucas swallowed and looked down at the shrew. “Maybe.” His arms tightened around his legs. “My trader contact can help us, likely. He is good friends with Cara, so he visits her a lot.”
She shot him a long look. “You want to help me? Why?”
Lucas’s heart thumped. She’d hinted of her attraction to him, but he wasn’t ready to meet her halfway, not with her obvious bond to Nikolai. And he was pretty sure it was reciprocated.
He wasn’t going to be anyone’s third wheel.
So instead, he said, “I owe the big guy. And I don’t like the thought of him being confined any more than you do.”
Her hands returned to stroking Mai. “So we can ask your trader friend to take us to Cara?”
“We can. Not sure he will. He usually has his own agenda.”
She shot him a look. “Can we trust him?”
Lucas grimaced. “With some things, yes.”
Aria returned to staring at the sky. For a while, they sat and admired the stars, before Lucas got the courage to ask what had been bothering him.
“What will you do if Nikolai’s okay, but can’t leave the Liberi realm?”
Her fingers had been stroking Mai into a sublime dream state, but now they stilled. “I don’t know,” she admitted.
“You were a mercenary. You could return to that.”
“You were a thief,” she countered. “Are you going to return to stealing?”
His gut twisted at the note in her voice. Condemnation? He couldn’t tell for sure, but it provided a good reason to reassess his choices. She might find him attractive, but she would never see him as anyone worthy of her attention.
Heart aching, he managed a shrug. “I don’t know how to be anything else. I’ve been stealing to live since I was a child.”
He sensed her shock. “You were stealing as a child?”
