Warriors of Poseidon 04 - Atlantis Unmasked

belong in the courtyard, broken and destroyed.
    Atlantis Unmasked - Warriors of Poseidon 04
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    How had she thought she could handle this? She was no commander. Sam should be in charge. Alexios should be in charge, except he would have to leave them soon. Go back to Atlantis. Leave them. Abandon her.
     
    She‟d be alone again. Alone always.
     
    A sound in the corridor snapped her out of her miserable bout of self-pity. What right did she have to whine about loneliness when her failure had left two people dead on the ground?
     
    Suddenly, she realized she was standing, unarmed and half nude, in the middle of the kitchen, like a damned target. She pressed a catch on the bottom of the first-aid kit and a drawer—one of Quinn‟s special hidden compartments—slid open, displaying a sleek and deadly handgun. It was only a .22, but it could do some damage up close. She whirled around and crouched behind the edge of the table, propping her arms on its wooden top to aim the gun at the doorway.
     
    “It‟s Alexios,” he called out before he reached the doorway. “All clear, but we‟ve got company.”
     
    She stood up, lowering the gun but not fully relaxing. “What kind of company? How many of them? Do we need to call P Ops in on this, after all?”
     
    He stopped, framed in the doorway so the light from the corridor turned his hair to a golden halo of fire. “Don‟t shoot,” he said, nodding at the gun in her hand. “And I‟m sorry I wasn‟t more clear. It‟s the good guys this time. Somebody named Tiny. He said Sam sent him.”
     
    Her shoulders slumped with relief, and she placed the gun down on the table, careful to put the safety back on. “Are you sure it‟s him?”
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    “Well, he knew enough about Sam to make it pretty clear he was telling the truth. Not to mention that it seems exactly like Sam to have a friend named Tiny who‟s probably six and a half feet tall and weighs well over three hundred pounds.”
     
    “Are they—what are they—” Suddenly she remembered that she was still standing in the middle of the kitchen wearing nothing but her bra and a coat of Neosporin on the top half of her body. “Maybe you could help me with bandages?”
     
    He walked toward her and his gaze dropped to the newly cleansed tear in her side. His face hardened, and when he looked up again, his eyes had turned completely black, except for those tiny blue-green flames in the exact centers of his pupils.
     
    The air between them suddenly crackled with unreleased tension and sharp-edged, urgent emotion. But then he sighed, and the pressure in the air eased.
     
    “I think you‟re trying to hurt me, here,” he said ruefully. “I finally managed to get your shirt off, and it‟s only so I can bandage you up.”
     
    She appreciated his attempt to lighten the mood, and she might even have fallen for his casual banter if it hadn‟t been for the way his lips tightened and the muscle at the edge of his jaw clenched.
     
    “Bad timing. Story of my life.” She pasted a smile on her face, but it didn‟t seem to convince him.
     
    He turned toward the counter and began rummaging in the first-aid kit, yanking things out with barely suppressed violence and slamming them down on the table while continually keeping up the stream of muttering just far enough under his breath that she couldn‟t quite make it out. Finally, he held up a plastic-wrapped roll of new bandages and a pair of scissors.
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    “Success at last,” she said. But when he turned around, there were two of him, and both of them were holding bandages and scissors. Strange. Then little black dots started swirling around the edge of her vision, and she realized what was happening just before her knees buckled.
     
    “Going down,” she warned him, but he was way ahead of her. He caught her and gently sat her on the table again but stood so close that she was leaning forward in the circle of his arms, resting her head on his rock-hard shoulder. Wondering how it was that the steel bands of muscle he apparently wore under his skin could feel so comforting. So comfortable.
     
    So much like someplace she never wanted to leave.
     
    He patted her back and murmured lovely things that she couldn‟t understand, smoothing her hair back from her face and kissing her forehead and her temple. “Shh, mi amara ,