I nod. “I’m good. Thank you.”
“I’ll be—” A tired smile twitches across her lips. “I’m going to bed, but if you need anything, just give a holler. Someone will come find you.”
* * *
Treto
My body is long past the point of exhaustion, and yet instead of giving in and getting some sleep, I dig my palms into my eye sockets. I’ve done this numerous times now, and my vision no longer clears but stays blurred with fatigue.
It’s only when a familiar and tantalizing scent hits me that I finally decide to give in. It’s not enough that I can’t keep Bela from my mind, but now her memory is making its way into my nose.
With a deep breath, I push myself away from the navigation console and spin the stool around, only to freeze because Bela is standing in the doorway. Perhaps I wasn’t imagining things. Unless I’ve conjured this vision of her, and what I’m seeing is only her apparition.
Our eyes meet, and when she steps from the doorway, I inhale in a sharp breath, drawing her scent deeper into my nose and sucking her into my lungs. When she starts toward me, the mating vibration starts in the back of my throat.
“Hey,” she says, coming to a stop a foot or so away from me.
She’s wearing one of my shirts, and my heart lifts in my chest. I like that she chose to wear something of mine instead of asking Anna for clothing that might fit her human body better. Saturating herself inmyscent, instead of a stranger’s.
“You let me sleep for two days.”
“I did,” I tell her softly. I woke at my usual morning time. But when it became obvious Bela was not going to wake anytime soon, I decided to let her rest.
“I missed you,” she tucks a strand of dark hair behind one of her small, rounded ears, “when I woke up alone.”
An ache settles into the center of my chest. “I am sorry.” What have I been doing? I should have been there when she woke. For hours I’ve been telling myself that I should check on her, go back and curl up around her, but I didn’t, and I can’t think of a reason why not. I’ve just been sitting here at my station… thinking.
“Anna said you were talking with Rovos most of the day.” Her eyes find mine again, and they are deep wells that I would love nothing more than to fall into and never climb out again. “How are you doing?”
How I’m coping, she means. “I’m…” I hitch one of my shoulders. “I’ll be alright.” Someday. I hope.
“Treto…” She takes a step toward me but then freezes when I scoot further back, trying to keep distance between us. She shakes her head sadly and whispers, “I know what you’re going through. I know because I’ve been through it too.”
My eyes lift up to hers, and I see the pain welling inside them. “Then I am even more sorry. I would not wish this pain on anyone, especially not you.”
“I want you to know that you can talk to me.” Stepping closer, she reaches out, curling her small pale fingers around my much larger hands. “And I’ll listen. Because I know what it’s like to lose someone you love.”
My heart is pounding in my chest as my fingers curl around hers.
She swallows, keeping her eyes on our linked hands as she begins to talk. “I found out my twin sister was dead,had been dead for a while, the same day I was abducted.”
I frown at the wordtwin.There is no equivalent in my own language; however, the universal tongue definessisteras a hatchling or someone who shares parentage.
“She—” Her face pales slightly, but I don’t stop her, because she asked to listen to me, so I will listen to her, even though my heart is already breaking for her. “She had an addiction. I’d been trying to help her get clean for years. Sometimes she would get herself under control, and I would thinkmaybe this time will be it!But she always went back to the drugs. This last time, she’d been missing for longer than usual. I mean, it wasn’t uncommon for her to disappear, but usually it was only for a few weeks, a month at the most, before she’d run out of money and come back to try to finance her next score.
“This time, she was gone for months. I even filed a missing person report on her, which is how the cops were able to find me and let me know…”
I watch as two fat tears roll down her cheeks. A lot of the words she’s saying don’t make any sense to me, but I understand the gist of what she’s telling me, and my heart aches for her. Her pain. Her loss. Because she’s correct, she does know what I’m feeling.
“A long time before, Jossi and I lost our mom too,” Bela’s voice is quiet, and the grip on my wrist has relaxed some. This time she looks up at me, but her eyes are unseeing as she tells me of her loss. “She’d been sick for—well, she was always sick. Ever since I can remember. I did my best to take care of her and Joss, but I was just a kid back then. I didn’t know what to do, but I did the best I could. It just wasn’t enough. No matter what I did, it was never enough.”
Tears pool along her lower lid, but they don’t fall as she tells me how her mother neglected herself as well as her offspring, leaving Bela to try to hold the household together. Forcing her to take on tasks far too advanced for someone so young.
“We were in high school when I got a frantic call at work. I was working two jobs after school just to keep the electricity on and food in the pantry, because Mom was always too depressed to keep a job for any length of time.” She shrugs and lets out a long sigh. “Jossi just, she struggled a lot with school, so adding a job to her workload wouldn’t have worked out real well, you know?”
I didn’t know, but I nodded anyway for her to go on.
“Joss never called me at work, so I knew right away something was terribly wrong. She said Mom wouldn’t wake up. You see, Mom was diabetic. That’s a disease that can make your blood sugar spike too high or drop too low. She had to take insulin to keep it under control, but when she was manic—which was a lot of the time—she would forget. When Jossi said she wasn’t waking up, I knew immediately she needed to go to the hospital. So I called an ambulance and then raced home, even though my boss told me if I left I couldn’t come back.
