She’d brought me to the Nexus unit for me to kill it. To finish it, like I’d wanted to when we’d captured it on Latiri 4. She’d refused to give in then, had stood her ground when not one, but several fighters had wanted to kill the Nexus, in direct opposition of her orders. She hadn’t given in then. Why was she giving in now?
Because I had. Because I had surrendered to her just as completely as she’d surrendered to me. Not during sex, but in life. In choosing her and the Coalition over my freedom as an Elite Hunter.
I felt cut open. Flayed wide. My heart beating outside of my chest. For this female. How had I been so lucky to be matched to her? She didn’t need me. Gods, she was smart, skilled, ruthless, cunning, in control of herself and everything around her. She was brave and had balls bigger than most males.
And she was mine.
I wanted to grab my mate, pull her into my arms and hug her. Kiss the hell out of her. Push her against the wall and fuck her long and hard. She was giving me what I’d wanted. What I thought I’d needed all along. Vengeance for my dead friends. Closure.
“Five minutes,” she repeated, glancing at the comm on her wrist.
Time I wouldn’t waste. I turned, stepped into the room. The door slid closed behind me. Without looking, I knew Niobe was not within. She waited in the corridor for me to have my time alone with the Nexus unit. To kill him, if that’s what I wished.
The Nexus unit was chained as I had been. He could not reach me if he tried.
We stared at one another and I felt the buzzing in my mind, the effect of his nearness on the microscopic integrations that remained in my body. I would never be completely free of him. Not even if I killed him. But he no longer had any influence over me. None.
Our gazes met, and although I felt a strange pull, one thought of Niobe and I had no trouble resisting his psychic influence.
“Nothing to say, Hunter?”
“I’m sorry.”
I’d never seen a Nexus unit before this one, and had never seen any emotion on his face during my captivity. But now, I saw surprise. “You apologize? Why?”
Taking a quick inventory of his shackles, his bruises and his lost weight, I knew he’d been through hell, just as I had been. “Because I’m not like you. I am not evil. I do not enjoy watching others suffer, even when they are an enemy.”
He blinked, the slow movement of his eyelids over the large, opaque disks strange to witness. “I am not evil. Evil does not exist. Good does not exist. Good. Evil. They are both nothing more than concepts for small minds.”
What the fuck was this thing talking about? And why was I talking to him at all?
No. I knew the answer to that question. Curiosity. A need to understand the enemy. “Then why fight this war? Why kill so many of our people?”
The Nexus tilted his head, as if confused. “War? We are not at war. We wish to learn and you resist.”
Learn? Was that what he called it? Taking good fighters and turning them into robots? Controlling their minds? Forcing them to kill their friends? Their families? Sometimes their own children?
“Why do you resist?”
“Because we choose to be individuals. We choose freedom.”
“Freedom is an illusion. Individuality is an illusion. This body, your body, both an illusion. You are already part of us.”
“No. We’re not. And we never will be.” He would never understand. My head understood that, even though my heart did not. How many buzzing minds did he share? How many integrated fighters’ thoughts did he hear? Was he ever alone in his own head? Had he ever been alone?
“The future is inevitable, Hunter. You will see. In the end, we are all one.”
Fuck that nonsense. As I waited to feel the urge to rip the head from his body, to set my ion pistol to the highest setting and finish him, I realized I didn’t want to. Not anymore.
My need to kill it had been so great I’d been blinded, even when Niobe had explained, spoken the truth. The Nexus unit was needed alive. My moment of justice for what he’d done to me was not important enough to supersede the victory that would be achieved by learning from the study of our enemy. Many lives could be saved if the Coalition could gain an understanding of how the Nexus unit worked. How it functioned. How it thought. By killing it, that data, that insight, would be lost.
And for what? My personal, petty need to destroy the one small piece of the Hive that had harmed me.
This was war, a war that had been going on for hundreds of years. I’d survived. Others had not. Even more wouldn’t if we didn’t make deliberate choices and study that which we hated.
If I hadn’t been captured, then Niobe wouldn’t have transported to me on Latiri 4. She wouldn’t have saved me or locked down the underground base. We would not have been able to save all the others or deliver a fucking Nexus unit to the I.C. Alive.
Because I’d been a prisoner, my integrations, my sacrifice, had allowed everything else to fall into place. Had my ultimate purpose as an Elite Hunter been to be captured? To be tortured and matched and saved and brought to this moment so that many millions more could be kept from a similar fate?