He was silent for some time before he spoke again. “There must be much hostility and resistance to the custom of sending condemned criminals to Erebus, and guilt is a very powerful human emotion,” he said. “Would your government dare remain indifferent to a few dozen human deaths, even if the dead were merely cast-off criminals?”
Pulling back a clenched fist, Alexia swung at Damon’s face. He caught her hand with his own good one and held her still, breathing as hard as if they had just finished a knockdown, drag-out fight.
“What is it?” he taunted, leaning toward her. “Is the hypocrisy of your own people too difficult to bear?”
Alexia squeezed her eyes shut. Oh, Garret. “You son of a bitch,” she hissed, hating him even as the feel of his skin on hers sent a spike of desire through her body.
He tightened his fingers around her fist. “What were your orders coming into the Zone, Alexia? Were you only to observe? Or were you perhaps sent to find a way to get the humans out of the colony before Erebus’s factions tore it apart?”
“Where in hell did you get that idea?” she spat, struggling to free herself.
“It would be a way for your government to avoid open warfare and still retain the goodwill of those citizens who reject their method of holding the Opiri at bay with condemned prisoners,” he said, keeping his iron grip on her wrist. “If they made the case that the Council could not keep the Treaty by protecting its serfs from destruction, they could avoid hostilities completely.”
“That’s insane. You’re assuming Aegis already knew what was going on here!”
“You never denied they might have sent another agent ahead of you and Michael.”
“I never said—” A muscle flexed in his cheek. “And the Council’s first agent investigating the colony was killed by an Enclave weapon.”
“I don’t know anything about that!” Her chest grew tight as it occurred to her just how much she might not have known. “I was never told about any previous mission to investigate the settlement.”
“Then consider that Aegis might already have been well-informed about the situation in the Zone and has already planned its response. You would want Aegis to save the colony’s serfs, would you not?”
“You don’t know a damned thing about it!”
Abruptly he let her go. “I, too, have my secrets, Alexia.” He sighed and backed away.
“The current situation makes it impossible to keep them any longer.”
Alexia rubbed at her cramped fingers, her stomach rolling over and over like a trained circus dog. “What?” she said.
“You should know the real reason why I was sent to meet you and your partner.”
“You didn’t come to help us observe the colony?” she asked, anger fading to a formless sense of dread.
“No. I was sent to prevent you from getting near it.”
Chapter 13
All the nerves in Alexia’s body seemed to jump at once, lifting her like an express elevator and then sending her plummeting all the way to the bottom of the shaft.
“Then I was right after all,” she whispered. “The Council is involved in this, up to its eyeballs.”
“No, Alexia. My orders were to keep you away until the Council could complete its own investigation of the colony, without Enclave involvement, so that they might resolve the situation internally. I knew no more until we met Lysander.”
“You didn’t know about any double agents running loose?”
“Until I spoke to Lysander, I wasn’t aware that the Council had employed such an agent.”
“But you weren’t even aware there were enemies out here. You denied the possibility.”
She took several deep breaths to calm herself. “You suggested that Aegis might be working with the Council. Was that to trick me into admitting something you might find useful?”
“I said it was possible, not that I knew it to be a fact.”
“What other little white lies have you been telling me, Damon?”
He hesitated, and then met her gaze. “Those other hypothetical Council operatives I told you about when we met,” he said, “were sent to fire on us so that we would remain together.”
Now that the first shock was past, Alexia found that she felt very little, not even anger.
“Those people out there?” she said numbly, the faces of the slain Council agents still vivid in her mind.
“I don’t know. I was not told their names. But it seems...” He trailed off, bowing his head.
“Whoever did it,” Alexia said, “it worked.” Oh, how well it had worked. She swallowed, searching for words that could find their way through the vise clamping her throat. “I take it they weren’t supposed to actually kill us?”
Damon crouched to pick up the knife, testing the fingers connected to his broken wrist.
“I considered the possibility that the first shooter we encountered might be one of them.
Then, when we were attacked again, I initially thought it could be the same agent or agents. Until they nearly killed us and removed your patch. That was not in the plan.”
“I guess something went a little wrong.”
He continued to gaze at the knife, carefully brushing dirt off the blade with the pad of his fingertip. “Yes,” he said. “Very wrong.”
She knew then that he had no idea his confession had revealed much more to her than the mere facts of his orders. Oh, it must have been inconvenient for Damon when Michael had “refused” to join him and Alexia on their trek to the colony.
Had Damon been amused when he’d “saved her life” from the first shooter, whom he’d presumed to be one of his own? And what about the second attack? If he’d thought, even for a moment, that the ones who had tried to kill him and Alexia might be on his side, why hadn’t he warned her then?
“We are partners, Agent Fox,” he had said. “That makes us equals, does it not?”
How could they be? He had kept too much from her, vital information that could have helped her make the right decisions, might even have saved Michael somehow. She had believed Damon when she should have been most suspicious.
“Either the Colonists or the Expansionists attacked us to get the patch,” Damon continued, oblivious to her inner turmoil. “As you said, I made an unforgivable mistake in assuming that the Expansionists would not have their own covert agents and risk firefights between Opiri in the Zone. I fear they have already done incalculable damage.”
He feared, did he? Were any of his emotions real? Had all the feelings Damon had expressed for her since the theft of her patch, the intensity and sincerity of his lovemaking, been lies, as well?
“Yet you still have such utter faith that the Council didn’t decide it was more convenient to deter me and Michael by eliminating us outright...and blame it on somebody else?”
“You must trust me, Alexia—” She laughed. “Trust you?”
“Why would they send me if their purpose was to kill you and Michael?”
“Why did the Council send only one agent to stay with us? How could they not know that Expansionists agents weren’t loose in the Zone?” She shot him a withering look.
“None of this says much for your Council’s ability to gather intelligence and deal with unexpected contingencies. Or for yours.”