He nodded. “That’s how you ended up here. I remember.”
“After I ended up here, I was a new fish, fighting to survive, and it was doubly difficult because I’m a woman. Most don’t last long.”
“Females don’t seem to get sentenced here as often, but when the rare one arrives, the men probably react like predators with blood in the water.”
As if though a dark glass, she glimpsed a memory of the circling and the feeding frenzy before Artan claimed her. “That’s not far off the mark. So after being a new fish, then I belonged to Artan. He didn’t leave room for me to be a person, either.”
So much I’m not saying, there. There were horrors that dug into the throat like shards of glass wrapped in barbed wire, and speaking of them would end in a fountain of blood. Dred wasn’t sure she could survive it, even now. He was watching her from across the room, unmoving, with those blue eyes focused like twin lasers.
“Then you killed him . . . and Tam turned you into the Dread Queen.”
“Exactly. My point is, it never occurred to me how you’d feel about being left out of Tam’s scheming. I don’t consider you a weapon, though, Jael. To be honest, I’m not used to thinking of anyone else at all.”
“So it wasn’t a purposeful exclusion?”
She shook her head. “No more than Tam’s usual caution. Half the time he has plots percolating that I don’t know about until he unveils them.”
“And you’re all right with that?” In his quiet expression, she read reservations and skepticism, which echoed Ike’s warnings.
“Until recently. I’ve been advised that it might not be wise to put so much faith in him.”
“You probably shouldn’t put much in me, either.”
“Now there’s a novel approach. Get me to trust you by telling me not to, thereby making me assume you have nothing to hide.”
“Is it working?”
“I think I’ll leave your curiosity unsated.”
“I didn’t tell you this because I have any expectation of picking up where we left off earlier. I just wanted you to know that, though I was an arse, I had a reason. You might not agree it was a good one, but—”
She held up a hand to staunch his unexpected, nervous rambling. “Stop. I’d have been pissed, too. Don’t know that I’d have shagged someone else to make the point, but men are led by their pricks, or so I’m told.”
“I didn’t,” he told her. “What you saw in the hall, that’s all there was.”
“But you left with her.” And were gone for hours. But she didn’t say that part out loud because it would seem like she’d been watching for him.
“I was in the hydroponics garden, working with Vix and Zediah. You said I could take a shift in there, but so far, you haven’t assigned me any time. They didn’t mind the help.”
In the midst of all this chaos, she’d forgotten his request. “I’m sorry.”
“I can see you’re juggling land mines.”
Just then, the door chimed. Tam’s voice followed the sound. “What’s wrong, Dred? You never lock your door.”
True. Instead, she had trusted Tam and Einar to keep her safe; she’d known how easy it was to work around technical solutions. “I’m fine. Jael is with me. It’s best if you and Einar find other quarters for the night.”
“Are you sure?” the big man asked.
“I’m certain. There’s no coercion.”
Jael made a face at that, and he had a point. He wasn’t a cretin who required a shiv at a woman’s throat to secure her attention.
Tam only said, “Understood. We’ll be around if you need us.”
She felt guilty about dismissing them, but it was only one night. They could evaluate things after she squared things away with Jael. Though she wasn’t sure where it was going, this conversation wasn’t over.
“Will that cause you problems later?” Jael asked.
“I don’t think so. There’s plenty of space in the dormitories after the losses we’ve taken.”
He came over to her then, perched beside her on the bunk. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
Odd question, she thought, but for him, she answered.
“Two turns into my vigilante work, I ran into a man who had a thing for carving people up. He had a fetish for dismemberment . . . there’s a name for it. Anyway. I hunted him, learned his habits. That took weeks. I planned his execution down to the last second. I would make him suffer for the ghastly pleasures he craved.”
“Sounds like he deserved it.”
“Definitely,” she said. “But here’s the thing. My plan went wrong. That afternoon, he deviated from his routine. I found him in the park with two little girls, his daughters, instead of hunting his next victim.”
“What happened?” he asked quietly.
“I killed him anyway. I’d already booked my passage off world. I planned such things down to the second, and I wasn’t prepared to accommodate a change in his behavior. So I told myself they’d be better off. They were playing a few feet away when I shot him. They didn’t know anything about his dark side, or the awful things he’d done. To them, I was just the woman who murdered their father for no reason.”
That was the critical mistake that led to her capture. Those two fatherless girls created so much sympathy for her victims that the authorities started hunting her in earnest. A turn later, they caught her though she’d ended a lot more killers by then. They estimated her death toll was close to a hundred, but the number was close to twice that. There were articles in scientific journals about her, as she was one of the most famous female serial killers who ever lived. They’d interviewed her and picked apart her brain to figure out how a woman could go so wrong.
“Why did you tell me that?”
“Why did you ask me?”
“Because I wanted to know.”
“That’s why for me, too.” A cloud of puzzlement furrowed his brow, so she clarified, “I chose for you to have the answer. Now I’ll pose you the same question.”
Confusion shifted to quiet dread; she had seen that expression in her own eyes enough to recognize it. “I should be careful of asking you anything. It’s always an even exchange.”
“Clever of you to notice.”
He slid backward on the bunk as if to put some distance between them, but when he put his back to the wall, she realized he just wanted something solid behind him. The story shook him that much. For a few seconds, she was sorry she’d asked, but his recounting and reaction to it would tell her a great deal about the kind of man he was now, as well as the one he’d been. She already knew he had been a traitor, but with a history like his, she understood it. When people had sold you out enough, it became natural self-preservation to strike first.