Book five in The Borders War series
Merq’s always known there’s only one way Armise and he can end.
The Opposition is losing—both the war and the fight for citizen support—and the Revolution’s victory appears certain. Despite that success, Merq knows his leaders won’t let two of their greatest assets simply walk away. But with Armise fighting for his life, getting out becomes Merq’s primary objective.
Almost two decades of selfishness can’t be alleviated with one right decision, and Merq is faced with the reality of how deeply he has wounded Armise in ways that cannot be seen from the outside. Merq’s world has been upended more times than he can count and he’s always survived, but life without Armise is no longer an option. He just has to prove that to Armise.
Merq believes there are few who are strong enough to challenge them when they stand together. But when the secret Armise has been protecting Merq from is revealed, the truth has consequences neither of them can prepare for.
Reader Advisory: This book contains graphic violence, mention of torture and genetic experimentation.
General Release Date: 26th January 2016
Armise was dying and there was nothing I could do but wait.
I’d been in enough battlefield situations to know that the urgency with which the wounded were treated said more about their chances for survival than their outward injuries. In Armise’s case, both indicators were bad. I could understand enough of the Singaporean dialect the people around me spoke to glean answers to some of my questions about his status. Enough to know there was nothing I could do to help Armise live.
A knife, I told them when asked what had taken off his arm.
A man, I answered when someone asked who had done it. Even though Dr. Blanc had mentioned his son at the door and that was what had gotten us entrance, I didn’t think anyone else needed to know Armise was Ahriman’s victim.
Because of his association with me, Armise was now a victim. Guilt slashed inside me, responsibility cutting at me every time I glimpsed his marred body.
How the fuck had I allowed that to be done to him?
They tied him down with rope and long strips of cloth when he tried to roll off the bed and to his feet after they stuck a syringe of something into his veins. His blood had to have been heavy with the weight of intravenous nanos. Dr. Blanc pushed aside certain solutions in favor of others and I hoped that he knew enough about what Ahriman had been feeding us that he could avoid a toxic combination of competing nano-laced cocktails. Armise didn’t wake and yet his body reacted.
That gave me hope and it shouldn’t have.
I looked at the stump where his arm had been and my stomach rolled, threatened to purge what little was in there. His arm was gone and there was nothing I could do to fix him, to change this, to make a different decision and never leave that first camp in the steppe. We should have forced Ahriman to us and killed him on sight. I should have felled everyone in my path and emptied the land around us so no one would dare to come close.
I should have protected Armise.
There was so much I’d misjudged—so many incorrect decisions and outcomes I’d drawn—that I didn’t know where to start cataloging my errors and offenses. I had brought harm to the one person I didn’t want to live without. The only person I valued more than myself.
And there was a chance Armise wouldn’t live for me to tell him that.
The color was draining from Armise’s face and he was fever hot, sweat rolling off him. There was no part of him that was consciously aware. He was deep into the pain, lost to it. I couldn’t lose him like this.
I can’t lose him. I just can’t. That thought repeated in my head as I watched over him, crowding all other thought out and ramping up the anxiety building in my veins.
I couldn’t…
I—
‘Not everything is about you, Merq,’ I remembered Ahriman saying, the memory of his accusation slamming into me. I didn’t want to admit that anything Ahriman had ever said made sense, let alone that I believed it and took it to heart. But this critique was pointed at the correct target. What Armise was enduring right now wasn’t about me.
Armise didn’t deserve to die like this.
“He’s getting worse,” I barked at Dr. Calum Blanc, Ahriman’s father, who was at Armise’s side checking his vitals with a scanner.
Dr. Blanc finished what he was doing then turned to face me. “We know. Now get out.” He went back to work over Armise and I took a step away from the bed, stumbling as I lost my equilibrium.
“Don’t fucking touch that!” I heard Dr. Blanc yell at a man who stood by Armise’s head and my vision started to white out as I realized that someone had tried to touch the chip implanted at the base of Armise’s neck.
“Get out of here, Merq,” he chastised me again.
I staggered from the room, deeper into the house, into a glass-encased space where the ceiling soared high above. The sky outside was swaths of gray, undulating clouds. When I looked down again my neck cracked from the movement and I clenched my hands only to find that they were sticky, tacky from being drenched in Armise’s blood. I sucked in a breath and peered down at my clothes, realizing just how much blood I was covered in.
My stomach rolled again, surged, and I was swallowing down an acidic bite of bile. I had no way to reach out to the people I knew could help. Shit, I had no idea if any of them were still alive since it had been four months…
I didn’t know if I wanted to reach out to anyone in the States who was part of the Revolution. Armise didn’t deserve to lose his life to a cause that wasn’t his own.
To a cause that wasn’t mine anymore.
When he woke up, and we could find our way out of Singapore, I was done. I’d given enough of myself to a movement that had never given me anything back. When I had a man at my side who’d willingly given me everything.
* * * *
It was hours before Dr. Blanc came to find me, and the only reason I knew that was because of the darkness settling in above the atrium ceiling.
“He may not live,” was the first thing he said to me.
I choked on a dark laugh. Hours later and Armise’s prognosis hadn’t changed, but my view of my world had irreparably shifted.
“He will or you won’t.”
Dr. Blanc turned on his heel and plopped down next to me, resting his head on the wall and closing his eyes. “You’re not the worst threat I face by treating him.”
Ahriman. The unknowns from Anubis. War. Strife. There were so many threats I couldn’t maintain a count or catalog of their severity anymore. Dr. Blanc was right though, I wasn’t on that list.
“Then why are you doing it?”
He pulled off a pair of gloves, chucking them into a waste bin, and swiped his bare hands on his pants. “I believe medicine can still do good.”
I huffed and took to my feet. I couldn’t sit. As I paced back and forth in front of the door leading to Armise’s room, I ached to get inside there and evaluate every inch of him. I needed to see some indication that Armise was fighting this, or that his genetmods were.
“Do you have the stitch mod? Did you try it?”
Dr. Blanc faced me. “Since he’s the son of a shaman, you may want to retrieve his beads.”
I stopped pacing in favor of staring at him slack-jawed. “What?”
He scrunched his brows together. “Which part?”
“All of it.”
“His mother was a shaman—a spiritual leader. The bracelets he wears are a northern nomadic tribal tradition. One set for the left and one for the right, for balance. He’s obviously missing the set for the right. I don’t know if they work or not but if he believes enough to wear them…” Dr. Blanc shrugged.
I hadn’t thought of Armise’s bracelets—why the fuck would I when whether or not he continued to breathe was the most important thing to me? But those bracelets, they meant something to him. I should have thought of that first. I furrowed my brow.
“How do you know that?”
Dr. Blanc stood. “I know too much about both of you. Yet I still want him to live.”
Unease grabbed hold of me, as if my skin were tightening, making me claustrophobic in my own body.
“We can’t be here,” I said and made a move to get past Dr. Blanc and into Armise’s room.
Dr. Blanc put his hand up. He was a thin man, weak, who had relied on me to face Ahriman when he couldn’t do it. But I stopped regardless, because maybe I was being too rash. I couldn’t afford to make the wrong decision when it came to Armise’s life.
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