Page 61 of Radiant Exception
“If it matters, I don’t want it to be any of them either.” She looked up at me through her lashes, an apology etched in her gaze.
“It does. Thank you.” I tore the end of the tape, reinforcing the last corner with one final swipe. I returned the tape to its drawer and opened the program on my comm that was able to sense electromagnetic and other electronic disturbances, which could indicate a listening device or camera.
Moving through the room in a grid pattern, Lark watched me curiously, a hopeful gleam in her eyes. The program only noted irregularities around where the known camera was stationed, but the rest of the room seemed to be clear, which I relayed to Lark.
Lark toed her boots off at the edge of the bed. “C’mon.” She beckoned.
I nodded and followed suit, leaving my own boots just beside hers.
She looped her arm through mine and lifted a side of the curtain, pulling me inside with her.
Lark took a moment to get comfortable with her knees tucked under her, while I crossed mine in front of me. The space was dim, with only the reading lights in the headboard engaged. If I hadn’tbeen on tenterhooks waiting for her to tell me what the hell was going on, it would have almost seemed romantic.
“Now what?” I gestured to our new fort.
“Now I tell you about how I found a giant cache of Elysian, which is now conveniently missing, in the panel downstairs, which is supposed to contain an electrical console, according to the schematics. Oh, and I’m pretty sure my ex is responsible for my kidnapping and likely in league with Meridian.”
“Wait.” My head was already spinning. “What!?”
It only took me a few minutes to get Vaughn up to speed on the drugs I’d discovered on the lower level.
“So that’s what you were looking for in the schematics?” He leaned back against the headboard.
“I didn’t know what I was looking for. I could just tell something was wrong, but they’re so intricate, I couldn’t figure out what. Let me see your comm.” I wiggled my fingers at him for the device.
He unlocked it first, then handed it over.
I pulled up the digital schematics and zoomed in on the lower deck hallway. “The digital files show the ship as is, with the empty niche on the left of the door to the engineering bay and the electrical panel on the right side. But the day the thermal regulator component went out, I went to the spot where the panel should have been, because I’d studied the original schematics that were filed with IA and Starlane prior to boarding the ship.
“Everything happened so fast. I found the panel on the opposite side, which was empty then, and at the time, I figured I’d made a mistake and almost immediately forgot about it. But the next day,I couldn’t remember what it was; I just knew something about the schematics was wrong,” I recalled.
“Wait—let me look at something.” He extended his hand to take the comm back.
I couldn’t see what he was doing from where I was sitting, but the moment he found what he was looking for was obvious. “That piece of shit.”
“What?”
He handed me the comm. “Press play,” Vaughn instructed. “Ethan told me he thought he saw Chadwick leaving with a big case when we realized he was missing too. I assumed it was his personal things and he was abandoning the ship.”
I watched the security footage Vaughn had pulled up from the hallway, and although the cameras at the far end of one side were at an odd angle, it was clear that Chadwick was loading the bricks into a black cargo container. “Fucking Starlane nepo scum,” I sneered.
“And now it makes sense why his tracker showed him on the other side of the port.” Vaughn shook his head, taking the comm back from me.
“Tracker?” I was confused.
Vaughn’s gaze lowered to my collar. He reached out and ran his fingertip over the pin that signified I was a crew member of theRadiant. “Embedded in everyone’s pins. Learned how helpful they can be while working black ops.” His eyes rose to meet mine. “It’s how I found you.”
The tension in our little fort surged. I couldn’t break eye contact with Vaughn. I saw the hunger simmering beneath the surface, a mirror to my own.
But Vaughn was the one who faltered, getting back to the task at hand. “You—ahh—mentioned something about your ex working with Meridian,” he stuttered.
“We need to get Darren on the line for this part.”
It took a couple minutes of explaining my thought process and what dots connected where, for Vaughn and Darren to understand why I thought Simon was connected to Meridian and my abduction.
They were rightfully skeptical. The situation sounded like a strange set of coincidences than something intentional. What were the odds of us being at the same port at the same time, let alone running into each other after having not seen each other in three years? Weird, right?
But the more I thought about the interaction, the more peculiar the whole thing became. Hell, I realized while retelling the story that Simon didn’t even seem surprised to see me, and given how he’d left things, what would have possessed him to pursue me to say hello?
