Ruthless Read online

  Paranormal Romance

  Marked

  Bear in Mind

  Alpha’s Mercy

  Gemma’s Mate

  The Mate Bundle

  The Alpha Heist*

  Entangled with the Thief*

  In the Alpha’s Bed*

  Find more by Kate Rudolph at www.katerudolph.net

  Heartless Chapter One

  BEER BEAT THERAPY, that was for sure. Five women sat around the table in the beat up little bar that CJ had summoned them to. It was the first official meeting of the survivors’ club, not that they had agreed on the name. But it beat victims or abductees so Quinn didn’t think that she was going to get a lot of pushback on it.

  CJ lifted her mug and proposed a toast. “To two months back, I can’t believe we all survived.”

  Quinn winced and Muir scowled. “Not all of us survived,” said the senator’s niece. She was the youngest among them and the only reason that they had been rescued in the first place.

  “We don’t know if she’s dead,” Davy tried to reason.

  At the same moment, Valerie said, “Good riddance, she was a traitor.”

  They were all survivors, but none of them were unscathed. “Maybe we don’t talk about Laurel right now,” said Quinn, trying to keep the peace. It reminded her of her childhood, when she had been the oldest of four rambunctious foster siblings. She had learned at a young age that peace was better than agreement, if only because agreement was usually a pipe dream.

  Muir didn’t share Quinn’s philosophy. “I’m not the one—”

  “She would’ve killed us all,” Valerie doubled down on her earlier statement. “We did what we had to do.”

  “You did what you thought you should do,” Muir corrected. She had come a long way from the fragile blonde waif who Sierra Alvarez and her crew had rescued from slavers on Fenryr 1. Quinn was glad to see the girl recovering, but the headache brewing behind her eye made her wish that the younger woman was a bit more timid.

  “Who wants another round?” Quinn asked before they could descend into further argument. “It’s our two month anniversary, let’s celebrate.” That distracted the women, and she took their orders before pushing up from her seat and heading for the bar, where an android waited to serve her.

  The five of them: Muir, CJ, Valerie, Davy, and herself weren’t a natural group of friends. They weren’t any kind of friends, but all of them shared the same horrifying experience that bound them together through trauma and perseverance. Along with a handful of other women who had left Washington in the two months since they were safely returned, the survivors club represented the women who had been abducted by slavers from Earth and recovered on a faraway planet called Fenryr 1. They’d endured horrible, unspeakable things at the hands of those monsters, but they were all alive now and only the memories and the nightmares could hurt anymore.

  Eleven women had been held captive on Fenryr 2 at the time of their recovery. Ten had been returned to Earth. One of the slavers’ victims, Laurel, wasn’t so lucky. She had been implanted with a control chip and had led the slavers to their location after they’d escaped. It led to a vicious attack on their allies and in that final fight, some of the survivors, Valerie included, had taken it upon themselves to ensure that Laurel didn’t make it to the ship that was going to take them home. Valerie insisted that they hadn’t killed her, but Quinn wasn’t sure if her fellow survivor was telling the truth. One thing she had learned in the last two months was that she couldn’t think of some things too hard, and what happened to Laurel was one of them. If she started thinking about what could be happening to Laurel right now, if she was still alive, then she started to remember everything that had been done to her.

  Those were the nights where she woke up screaming.

  The hairs on the back of her neck prickled, distracting her from the dark road her mind was trying to venture down. She looked away from the bar, and cast her gaze around the room. Her companions had settled into a more sedate discussion, two human men played billiards in the corner, two aliens cheered them on near the jukebox, and a few more groups of humans clustered around the tables. Nothing weird, nothing wrong, but she was still almost certain that she was being watched.

  You only needed to be snatched from the planet by nefarious forces once to develop a healthy sense of observation and paranoia. But by the time the android placed her drinks in front of her, Quinn hadn’t seen anything out of place. Okay, she conceded, sometimes her paranoia edged into the unhealthy category.

  It was a careful balancing act to get five drinks back to the table and she realized that she should’ve asked for a tray, but by the time that thought crossed her mind, she was already halfway across the room. She made it back to the table without spilling a drop to the cheers of everyone around her. The women grabbed their glasses, and everyone sat back, drinking quickly, like they’d been lost in the desert for years.

  Muir was the first one to set her beverage down. She looked over at Quinn and said, “I was just telling the others. My uncle is introducing legislation to combat the slavers who’ve been preying on people. He really thinks they could make a difference.”

  Quinn couldn’t stop her scoff. “Kidnapping is already illegal. I don’t think that’s been any deterrent.”

  “He’s allocating funds—”

  “Please,” CJ interrupted. “If we have to talk politics, I’m going to get myself abducted again to escape it.”

  Muir sat back, chastened.

  “I want to know what’s going on with those aliens who rescued us,” said Valerie. “Especially that one, you know, the sexy one. With those eyes.” She shivered.

  “They all had eyes,” said Muir. “Do you mean Toran?” she asked casually, but Quinn already knew the girl would be disappointed when she learned that Toran was newly mated.

  “Ew, no!” Valerie was shaking her head and scowling. “He seems like one of those by the book guys. All rules, all the time. No thank you. I mean the other single one, the intense one.”

  Quinn got very still. Of the four aliens who had come to Earth with them, there was only one that Valerie could be talking about. “You mean Kayde.” Intense was one way to describe him, or cold, or heartless. She’d been around him several times already and there was something about that man that made her feel weird. Off in a way she couldn’t quite wrap her mind around.

  This time it was Davey who saved her from this unpleasant turn of conversation. “I want to know what’s been happening with them. And I don’t mean like Valerie does. I wasn’t into men, human or otherwise before we left the planet, and nothing about the experience has changed my mind.”

  Quinn latched onto the subject change. “They’ve been on the lookout for this guy. Ambassador Yormas of Wreet. They think he had something to do with the destruction of their planet like a hundred years ago.”

  “Destruction?” asked Muir, leaning closer, intrigued.

  Quinn nodded. Dryce, the playboy Detyen and youngest of the group, had told her the story weeks ago. “The place was called Detya. It was peaceful, or so they say. But apparently someone had a problem with them. A hundred years ago the entire planet was destroyed with a weapon that hasn’t been seen before or since. The only people who survived had easy access to space ships, or were already off planet at the time. Kayde and the rest of them are descendants of the survivors. Their mission, I guess, is to find out who destroyed the planet and get revenge.”

  “And they think the same guy who attacked them a hundred years ago is still alive?” Davy was skeptical.

  Quinn shrugged. “Aliens,” she said by way of explanation, waving her hands like she could make a point. “Anyway, the ambassador disappeared a couple of weeks ago. We’ve been following up on leads, but it’s slow going.”

  “Why are you helping them?” asked Valerie, her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “How did you get involved in all that?”

  “It’s not like I have anything else to do right now.” She didn’t hav
e a job to go back to, and there was no real family to miss her. Those foster siblings that she had looked out for when she was young had all scattered as they aged out of the system, just like her. Before Sierra and her crew had shown up on Fenryr 1, Quinn had been certain that no one was coming for her. Her only way out of that hopeless situation was to rely on herself. But now she was home, and safe, and until she had started working with the Detyens she’d been at a loss. The only way to keep sane, to keep from screaming in horror from all that had been done to her, was to keep moving.

  That prickle of awareness was back. Quinn looked around the room but didn’t see anything out of place.

  “Excuse me,” she said as she pushed up from her seat. She made her way back to the small hallway that led to the bathrooms near the rear exit. The door slammed shut just as she turned down the dimly lit hall. Without pausing to think, Quinn followed outside. The back door led to a short alley behind the bar which ended at a busy street. A figure in black, whose exposed skin glinted bluish green under the single yellow light of the alley way, moved quickly, not bothering to look behind him. “Kayde?” Quinn called before she could think better of it. But the figure didn’t stop, didn’t even pause. If it was him he didn’t want to talk.

  She stood frozen for a minute, unsure if she should pursue or go back to her friends. But in the end Quinn turned around and headed back inside. If that was Kayde, he could handle himself. She had no reason to follow him, no reason to talk to him at all. But that didn’t mean she felt any better about the decision.

  This wasn’t the first time she’d seen Kayde out in the city. She didn’t want to accuse him of following her, but it was getting to the point where she didn’t know what else to call it. It seemed like she had an alien stalker, and given her history that should’ve made fear run cold in her veins. But when it came to Kayde, all she felt was a bit of curiosity.

  What the hell was he doing?

  WHAT IN ALL THE HELLS was he doing? Kayde knew that he should be back in his quarters preparing for sleep. His schedule would be insistent on that point. And a man like him lived and died by his routine. It was all he had left. Until two months ago, when this obsession started to blossom. He hadn’t said anything to Toran, or Raze, or Dryce. They were all wrapped up in the quest to find Yormas of Wreet and bring him to justice for the destruction of Detya, if he had been the one to destroy it. The evidence pointed towards him, but they had yet to find definitive proof.

  He knew his companions were excited and getting a bit impatient, the longer the ambassador was absent from his post. Kayde could almost remember what those things felt like, but all he had left now were echoes, hollow memories of the emotions that used to beat hard and fast throughout his system.

  Like Raze, he had let the Detyen Legion remove his soul, and with it all of his emotions, to lengthen his life. Unlike Raze, he hadn’t been handed a miracle. Soullessness was the final step before death. The average life expectancy of a soulless warrior was thirty-five years. They traded away everything for five cold, heartless, empty years that personally meant nothing, but could mean everything to the Legion. There weren’t enough soldiers to go around, and the Denya Price meant that there were fewer and fewer every year. Kayde had never questioned whether or not he would surrender his soul for his people. That was his duty.

  If the planet had still existed, he would have owed his life to them anyway. As a descendent of one of three royal families who had reigned over their kingdoms, Kayde knew the cost of existence. Some people were born to lives that weren’t their own, and his fate had been decided long before the planet was destroyed. He had a duty, and that duty had kept him strong in the years since he gave up everything else.

  The memory of that duty was growing faint, replaced by something he didn’t understand. Some compulsion that led him out into the night to follow a path he never knew he was on until it ended with her. Quinn. His companions might accuse him of fixating, an unfortunate side effect that appeared for some of the soulless. They grew obsessed with a person or place, until that obsession lead to destruction and death.

  Kayde wasn’t going to hurt Quinn. Everything left within him rebelled at the idea. Then again, it would not be difficult to believe that other fixating soulless warriors held that same thought close until it was too late.

  The streets were dark, and many might have feared walking alone at this late hour. It would be wise to catch a taxi back to his quarters, but restlessness pounded in Kayde’s veins. If he stopped moving now, he wouldn’t sleep this night, and he could not come up with a good excuse to explain tomorrow’s exhaustion to Toran. So he would beat the energy out of himself, walking darkened streets and long roads back to home.

  No, not home. No Detyen had a home, not any more. He and his brothers in arms had the Detyen HQ, or they had before the attack a little more than two months ago. None of them knew the outcome of that battle, and though it was difficult for Kayde to discern emotion, he could tell that Toran, Dryce, and Raze feared the worst. They feared that the Oscavian warship that had attacked their people was successful in destroying everything the Legion had managed to cobble together in the last hundred years. They feared the decimation of the remaining members of the Detyen race.

  Maybe if he had a soul, Kayde would fear these things as well. And perhaps if he had a soul, he’d be grateful that he couldn’t feel that desolation.

  Time and distance got away from him, and before he knew it he was placing his palm on the bio lock of the Sol Defense Agency building that housed the Detyen quarters. They’d been given these rooms when they arrived on the planet, and had been forced to stay in them while they were under investigation. At first, the forces of Earth’s defense had believed that he and his companions were a threat to the planet. The SDA no longer believed that, and they were free to leave the planet at will. Unfortunately, they had no idea where Ambassador Yormas of Wreet had gotten to, and until they had information of his location, leaving the planet would surrender their last connection to their only lead.

  No, Kayde realized. Not their only lead.

  He took the stairs up to the suite of apartments they were staying in and noted the silence when he opened the door. Unsurprisingly, Raze was gone. These rooms had never been his home. As soon as they landed on the planet, he had moved in with his denya, Sierra Alvarez, in the apartment she kept in the city. Since his mating, Toran had tried to split his time between Iris Mason’s home and here, but tonight it appeared he’d chosen to stay with his mate. Dryce would be back sometime before sunrise, Kayde was certain. The younger Detyen was wasting no time soaking up all of the experiences and pleasures that Earth had to offer. With his looks and cheery attitude he could find a new lover every night, and when he wasn’t on duty he made a point of doing so.

  That left Kayde alone with the silence. Of course, it didn’t bother him. Nothing bothered him. He entered his room and showered quickly, but took a few extra seconds to let the near scalding heat of the water pounding against him soak into his skin. It loosened the tight muscles in his back and if he had a little less control, he might have groaned from the sensation.

  The counselors back at Detyen HQ warned that the soulless should not revel in physical sensation. It could hasten the path to destabilization, but Kayde had learned that some warnings were better to ignore. He compromised with himself, experiencing the heat of the water and its physical effects for only a short time. When he climbed out of the shower stall, he wiped himself down efficiently and changed into a pair of sleep pants and a loose shirt. He kept his blaster on top of the small shelf beside his bed, in easy reach in case of a threat came upon him in the night.

  But with his walk concluded and a shower over, Kayde found himself at loose ends, and his thoughts began to travel back to the one person he knew he shouldn’t be thinking about. He couldn’t be fixating on Quinn, of that he was certain. Counselors and other high ranking members in the Legion spoke of fixation as something terrible, some dangerous obsessio
n that destroyed not only the warrior but the focus of his desire. Kayde wasn’t obsessed, not like that.

  There was just something about Quinn that posed a question he didn’t know how to ask. He saw her strength, her resilience, and knew that she would become a powerful ally to his fellow warriors and their mates. She had shown herself to be a leader from the moment she and her fellow survivors had been rescued, and now she threw herself into helping in the hunt for Yormas with little regard for her own safety.

  He respected her, admired her.

  And he knew that those instincts were dangerous. A soulless warrior could not respect, could not admire. He only had the memory of what he’d felt before to keep him going—if he said he admired other members of the Legion, it was because he had known them before. He could not develop those feelings anymore, and he couldn’t explain why he felt that way for Quinn.

  The safest thing for all of them would be to remove him from the equation. Toran needed to evaluate his stability and decide whether he could continue to function or if he needed to be put down like the rabid animal a soulless warrior could become. Though he was not sure if the leader of their team would be willing to take that action. Before they had come to Earth, he would have had no doubt. But in the time since then, Toran had softened. His mate had brought out a new side of him, one that smiled more, one that laughed, and one that might care too much to kill a man he thought of as his friend.

  But Kayde had to trust him to do his duty, and he had to report any concerns that he had about himself. Perhaps there was another way, one that would remove him from dark temptations of fixation and obsession and save his former friend from staining his hands with the blood of a man whose only crime was wanting to save his people for as long as he could.

  Yormas of Wreet was not the only lead they had when it came to the destruction of Detya. He had been working with the people who had attacked the Detyen HQ. Now that Kayde and his companions had been cleared to leave the planet, someone could take their ship back home and find out what happened. And if Toran could not kill Kayde for failing as a soulless warrior, as long as the HQ had not been destroyed by the Oscavians, someone back home would. Kayde could save Toran that pain. He just had to convince his leader to let him go.