Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(71)
They worked in tandem, wordlessly, like they could read each other’s minds. In his case at least, the wordlessness, the waiting for her to descend, the patient comfort he offered at the ready in case she needed it, the stalwart resistance to his own near-overwhelming need to take her in his arms and kiss the fuck out of her the moment the seal engaged—all that was a function of who he was and what he did. He was a caregiver. And he loved her.
He didn’t want to speculate on her motivations.
In any given sub, the control room was generally under the sail, so it should have been close, visible from the stark, airtight room they found themselves in. Kellen peered forward down the narrow corridor but didn’t see anything looking remotely like a control room ought. Didn’t hear anything either, other than the soothing hum of a machine underway.
Big fucker, too. Sub like this ought to have a crew in the dozens, even with a remote rig. But Yoink’s relay insisted there was only one person on board, other than Angela and him.
The atmosphere was creepy in here. And too, too quiet.
As if the silence weren’t bad enough, the surfaces on this boat were strange, not like any sub he’d ever seen, not even the ones he’d only experienced on VR tours. Space was typically a premium on a submarine, so controls and monitors and storage compartments honeycombed the walls, making every available centimeter also a useful centimeter. This thing, in contrast, was built more like a commercial jet. It did not intend for its inhabitants to make themselves useful. It intended for them to be docile. To passively soak in information or entertainment.
Sleek molded wall coverings in bright institutional white shielded who-knew-what. Instead of amine from the CO2 scrubbers, the treated air in here smelled like a hotel: plastic and cool and lemon with just a faint underwhiff of industrial cleansers. He half expected a chatbot to appear on one of those white-molded panels and offer him a bath towel or a virtual daytrip to some exotic locale.
“Well, this is unexpected,” Angela said, echoing Kellen’s thoughts.
“Try freaky,” he agreed. Neither of them gave breath to the phrase they both were likely thinking: ghost ship. If nothing on board was breathing, that didn’t necessarily mean it never had. “Stick close to me?”
“Oh yeah. I got your six, cowboy,” she said, but her voice was light.
He turned and looked, only to find her smiling.
“Sorry, I know, mixed metaphor. But there’s no reason you can’t be a cowboy and a special ops hero. It’s my imagination, and we’re trapped underwater in a titanium death can, so shut up and let a girl play.”
It was on the tip of his tongue to say this wasn’t a good time to play, that nothing about this mission was fun. Except it was. Being with her, bickering or bantering or whatever they did as a regular habit, that shit was fun. Not as fun as fucking, but fun. And he had missed it.
He had missed her. Even though he doubted he’d be able to keep her.
She had started a ball rolling with Dead Fester. Coming back from the dead. That’s what she wanted, what she was planning: her life before. The life without him. He wouldn’t stop her from grabbing what she needed, but he needed to keep his own brain zoomed in on the right now.
He had, what, maybe a day left with her wanting to be with him, pressing up against him, stripping down before his eyes and letting his gaze lick her like a hot candypop? And all he needed to do was make this time count, store up memories.
He would need them later, when she left.
The corridor bent like a serpent and led not to a control room but to a lounge. Weird sucker, too. An oval arrangement of low, cushioned benches and matching glass-topped end tables was sunk into the center of the floor, and dark wood paneling and back-lit cabinetry with curved glass doors ringed the chamber.
Was that…were there liquor bottles behind one cabinet door? And old leather-bound books, their spines stamped in gilt, behind another? Soothing recessed lighting made it sort of difficult to pick out details, but the combined effect was like a teak-paneled Victorian gentlemen’s club and a twentieth-century Japanese sake bar got together and procreated. On a submarine.
All along one curved side was a giant picture window, plastene and thick, like the multistory glass wall at the Pentarc. Stark lights speared through the murky ocean beyond, picking out ghosts.
And atop a cushion in the lounge’s rim, a lone figure perched primly, one dark-clad knee hooked over the other. He faced away from Kellen and didn’t speak when they entered, even though he had to have heard the ruckus they made in boarding. He had fluffy, coiffed black hair and was wearing some kind of neo-chinoiserie sateen smoking jacket.
No shit, a smoking jacket.
And that hair? Could belong to only one man. Damon Vallejo. All alone, no witnesses.
If somebody else had come on this mission with Angela, somebody like that hellcat Mari or even Fan, that shiny, dark beacon of a head would surely present a temptation. Blowing it to red, wet pieces wouldn’t take good aim nor even a particularly steady hand. Point and shoot. End of a whole lot of menace in a matter of seconds.
Probably it was a damn shame for the rest of the world and human history that Kellen wasn’t a person who could murder on impulse like that. Or that he’d deliberately not fetched the gun earlier when he retrieved his equipment from the car.
“Damon Vallejo?” he said, though he didn’t really need the confirmation. That hair was justifiably famous.