Filipe’s deep voice shattered the fragile daydream. “Hugo’s a charmer, as my ma used to say. That boy can make Bebe herself laugh, and when he was younger, he could make anyone, even my Carly, forgive him his sins.” Reaching out an age-spotted hand, he closed it over his mate’s.

She turned hers upside down, wove her fingers through his. “Black-haired, with skin as dark as Filipe’s and a smile like the sun, he’s got the devil in him—but it’s a charming, likable devil. There’s no meanness in Hugo.”

Bowen had never been called charming. “What’s he like as a friend?”

“He can be fickle,” Carlotta said with a smile. “But he’s so joyously dismayed about being late or forgetting an appointment or not paying back a loan that you forgive him instantly.” A glance at her mate. “He was careful with Kaia, though, always there when she needed him.”

“She’s special to him,” Filipe confirmed. “He’d do anything for her, I think. They laughed together a lot.”

Bo’s shoulders knotted, his thoughts snapping back once again to the exchange in the lab and to Kaia stepping away, putting distance between them. “Did he have curiosity?” he asked past the rock that sat in his stomach. “Like Kaia.” For the sake of the investigation, he needed to get a handle on why a poker-playing charmer would suddenly turn detective, but it was the man who adored Kaia who wanted to get to the core of this stranger who lived in her heart.

“Curious?” Carlotta pondered the question. “Not a word I’d choose to describe Hugo. He can find out information, yes. But it’s usually because he’s been told to find that information or because he needs it for a reason of his own.”

The hairs stirred on the back of Bowen’s neck.

Was it possible someone else had asked Hugo to look into the movements of the Alliance Fleet? It couldn’t have been Malachai—it was obvious the news had come as a shock to both him and Miane. So either Hugo had been so struck by what he’d heard from his drunk friend that he’d begun digging, or someone else in BlackSea had pushed him to it after Hugo shared what he knew.

But if that was true, why had that unknown individual left Miane and Malachai out of the loop, not even coming forward after Hugo vanished? It wasn’t as if Hugo and his hypothetical partner had been acting against BlackSea. They’d been doing the direct opposite.

The questions lingering on his mind, Bo took his leave from Carlotta and Filipe ten minutes later, then continued on in his attempts to understand Hugo. He was careful who he spoke to, and he didn’t turn all conversations to the missing man. That would leave too wide a trail if clanmates got together and began talking.

“I love Hugo, don’t get me wrong,” Tansy said when he tracked her down to the large growing area in habitat three where she was pruning plants using a sharp pair of shears. “But I never saw him as Kaia’s mate. I’ve always thought she needed someone stronger, someone who’d be her shield and her rock.” She put her cuttings in a basket by her feet. “With Hugo, Kaia was the rock and the shield and the one who got him out of scrapes. Been that way since they were kids.”

Bo still had more questions than answers by the time he called off the hunt, but he had begun to form a real picture of Hugo Sorensen. A charming and feckless friend, but one on whom Kaia could rely when it mattered. The man had a weakness for poker but was gifted with the comms, seeming to coax a signal from thin air sometimes.

He was also an accomplished hacker who’d once made every comm screen across BlackSea’s entire network display a fight scene featuring two samurai cats.

He’d been fourteen at the time.

Bowen had to like the guy for his balls and ingenuity.

However, before the dossier—and his childhood pranks aside—Hugo didn’t appear to have proactively done anything beyond the necessary that didn’t relate either to Kaia or to himself. He’d once spent eight days sourcing a rare food item for Kaia, and he’d learned how to tile because he didn’t like the tiles in his bathroom, but in general he seemed happy to grin and coast along.

Bo stopped on a connecting bridge, staring out into the black where nothing seemed to swim, the world beyond the lights of the habitat an endless darkness. Like the dark places in his soul, the scars on his psyche that meant no one would ever describe him as having a “smile like the sun.”

Despite Hugo’s faults, he was widely liked—and badly missed. Nearly all his clanmates had smiled when talking about Hugo. Others had frantically blinked back tears at the loss of him. Hugo could be careless, but he had the ability to make people love him.

Had their positions been reversed, Hugo would’ve already been a station favorite.

Bo didn’t have that gift. It took him time to earn people’s trust, time to build friendships . . . time to win a woman’s heart.

“You keep your promises,” he said quietly, even while knowing it was foolish to compare himself to a man who wasn’t here and who might never return. “You don’t forget to do the things you say you’ll do.”

Kaia, however, was the one person for whom Hugo had kept his promises.

Hugo had also made Kaia laugh. He hadn’t hurt her.

Again and again, Bo saw the smile fading from her face, the playful mischief replaced by shock and pain. The anger had come later. First had come the terrible hurt.

Why hadn’t she told him, he’d asked.

The real question was: why hadn’t he told her the one thing she needed to know to understand who and what he was?

Because his reaction had nothing to do with fear that she’d violate his mind. “You’re a fucking asshole, Bo.” Kaia would never go where she wasn’t invited. It wasn’t in her nature to act in a mercenary and cruel way. She had a wild gentleness inside her that was all about caring for others.

A hard object poked him in the thigh. He jerked his gaze to the left, to find himself confronted by a woman with night-dark skin who stood under five feet tall and was so heavily wrinkled that her wrinkles had wrinkles. But her eyes were bright and hard and sharp, and though she held a cane, it didn’t really look like she needed it. “What did you do to Kaia?” A querulous demand.

Bowen flinched inwardly at the wording of her question. “What business is that of yours?” He’d go to Kaia and he’d lay his worthless heart at her feet, and maybe she’d decide she didn’t want it, but that was between him and his siren.

The wrinkled little woman poked him again with her cane.

Bo could’ve easily grabbed the cane from her, but if she did actually need it, he’d be consigning her to a painful tumble to the floor. He decided to simply move out of the way of her next salvo—she was spry but he’d surely regained enough muscle mass to have the edge over a woman who looked three hundred years old.

“It’s my business because I say it’s my business,” she said, her beady eyes reminding him of—

“You’re the turtle,” he blurted.

She just snorted. “Well, whatever you did, you’d better fix it. Or I’ll throw you out an exit pool myself.” Lifting the cane, she shook it at him. “No one gets away with bruising a heart that soft—all that girl knows how to do is love. And she’s not one to betray her pain, so whatever you did, it must’ve been awful. Go fix it.” Pushing him out of the way on that command, the tiny turtle woman stomped off down the bridge.

Chapter 42

“He hasn’t cried once.”

“He’s a tough kid.”

“But holding all that pain and horror inside . . . I want him to cry. I want our boy to cry and I want to hold him and rock him and promise him nothing will ever hurt him again.”

“That’s not the world he has to live in.”

—Leah and Jerard Knight (2065)

DR. KAHANANUI BLOCKED Bo’s plan to go straight to Kaia and attempt to mend what he was afraid he’d broken; the doctor summoned him to the lab by flashing up his name on the public comm panels around the station. Spotting him after passing by a panel, Oleanna pointed him in the direction of the lab. “Attie’s looking for you, handsome.”

“I have to take another set of scans,” Dr. Kahananui told him crisply when he entered. “Everything is balanced on a knife edge. I must have continuous data to check if I need to recalibrate the third dosage and the only choices are multiple scans or to ask you to stay in the monitoring bed all day.”

“This is definitely the better option.” Bo took position in the scanning chair, but this time, it wasn’t Kaia’s competent hands strapping down his arms, it wasn’t the scent of coconut and tiare flowers in his nose. Dr. Kahananui made no small talk, their interaction strictly subject and doctor.

Bo didn’t attempt to bridge the cool divide. He’d hurt Kaia and he had to try to fix his fuckup first. Unfortunately, Dr. Kahananui told him she had to inject him with a sleeping agent as part of this round of scans. His muscles bunched in rebellion, but this was why he was here. This was a promise he’d made.

So he walked with her to his room and lay down in the bed. “How long will I be out?”

“Until about eleven thirty,” the doctor told him. “I should be able to take all the readings I need during that time.” She pushed up his sleeve and touched something cold and hard to his biceps.

Bo didn’t remember falling asleep, but sometime later, he was aware of a presence in the room. A presence that was fiddling with the machines that surrounded him. George. He mumbled a groggy greeting and had the sense of Dr. Kahananui’s assistant going preternaturally still.

The door swooshed shut only seconds later, leaving behind only a faint scent of something familiar. He frowned, tried to capture it . . . and fell into sleep once more.

* * *

• • •

THE time on the machine closest to his bed glowed a soft blue: 23:23.

Twenty-three minutes past eleven p.m.