Dark Taste of Rapture (Alien Huntress 6)

“We’re going to make a difference, fight injustice, blah blah blah.”

“The blah blah blah part sounds familiar, but I’m still mostly drawing a blank.”

“Well, do you remember the part about getting to carry a weapon and hurt people legally?”

“Ah. Now it’s coming back to me.” But seriously. Starve her, beat her, sleep deprive her, but don’t take away her feather down comforter. Or her genuine wool rug. Or her servants. God, what she wouldn’t give to have a servant fetching and carrying for her this very second.

“How sweet is this?” Ava spun like a ballerina on crack, her arms splayed. “It’s perfect, just perfect.”

“Are you retarded? This place is a dump,” another agent-in-training said as she folded her shirts and jeans and placed them in the nightstand next to her bed.

The bed next to Noelle’s.

First, no one but Noelle was allowed to speak to Ava like that. Ever. She loved Ava more than she loved herself. Maybe because Ava was the one person in the world she trusted. The one person in the world who always told her the truth, straight up, nothing held back. The one person in the world who thought Noelle was perfect, just the way she was.

Second, it was important to establish a prison-like hierarchy right from the beginning. That way, no one would dare try to shank them.

A quick twist and kick on Noelle’s part and the girl’s nylon went skidding across the floor, panties flying in every direction. Another kick, and the girl followed. “Say something like that to her again, and your balls will take the same path as you and your underwear. Feel me?”

“Noelle, my love,” Ava said in a sing-song voice, balancing her bag on the now vacant bed. “I think the person in question is female.”

“Oh, my bad. I’m so sorry,” she told the girl with the same saccharine sweetness she’d used on the guys. Her hand fluttered up to her heart, baby bird delicate. “I thought you were a dude. It’s the mustache. That’ll fool me every time.”

Huffing and puffing, the “person in question” jumped to her feet. “Just what are you gonna cut my balls with, bitch? They frisked you same as they frisked me. You got nothin’.”

Question of the day: was now the time to reveal the switchblade she’d smuggled in?

Nah, she thought next. The girl was a crier. On the bus, the black and very gorgeous instructor, Ghost, had gotten in her face and called her a carbon-based waste of space, and her freaking bottom lip had quivered.

Talk about humiliating to watch. Noelle hadn’t cried since her father paid his medical staff to fry her nerve endings and destroy her pain receptors while she was still awake, and she sure as shit wasn’t going to cry when someone called her silly names.

And okay, her dad had done the unthinkable to safeguard her from ever being tortured by others, but that didn’t change the facts. At twelve, she’d been strapped to a gurney and cut open like a melon.

All because she’d been abducted a few weeks before, her captors wanting to cash in on her ransom. To prove how serious they were, they’d sent her parents video of her being beaten, screaming from the pain and begging for help. So, when her dad had gotten her back, he’d gone a little nutso.

That little receptor-frying procedure had taken endless, torture-filled days, with needles shoved into her tendons, muscles, and sometimes even drilled into her bones. Days of having what seemed to be acid and broken glass poured straight into her bloodstream.

Anytime she’d passed out, the doctors had woken her up with chemical injections to the heart. Adrenaline, and crap like that. She’d had to tell them when something hurt, after all, so they’d know where to concentrate their efforts.

Well, everything had hurt. Until the very end, when she’d stopped feeling anything at all.

“Just going to stand there, coward?” the girl huffed at her.

Coward? Oh, hell, no. Noelle was a lot of things—spoiled, sometimes cruel and clueless, always gorgeous—but never a coward. She had survived a hell most people would only ever have nightmares about.

If you flash metal, the first thing she’ll do is run. The second is tattle.

Was that enough to get Noelle kicked out?

Ava must have known she was thinking about risking it because her friend, who knew her better than anyone else in the world, whipped her cell phone from her pocket, pressed a few buttons, leaned over, and said, “Lookie, Noelle. Lookie at what Ava’s got,” to distract her.

“As if that’ll—ohhh, a pretty!” A holophoto of Noelle had crystallized above the small device.

Usually Ava only snapped her picture when she was at her worst. Black eye—boom, there was Ava. Hangover morning—Ava again. Nasty cold—hello, darling Ava. But in this one, Noelle was leaning against a doorjamb, hands stuffed in her pockets, her expression far away, as if she were lost in thought.

“When did you take this?” she asked, unable to find the memory herself.

“A few months ago.”

“And you’re just now showing me? Harsh, Ava. So harsh.”

“Hello, I’m talking to you,” Mustache Girl snarled. I’ll call her MG for short, she mused, before saying to Ava, “I look so smart. I bet I was pondering nuclear physics. Or maybe quantum mechanics. Oh, oh, I know. Paradox theory.”

“Nah. I’d just asked you if you’d eaten my granola bar.”

MG gave up waiting for a response and wandered away to find a new rollaway.

“Send it to me.” Noelle rubbed her hands together. “That’s gonna be my new screen saver. For reals.”

The photo disappeared, and Ava stashed the phone back in her pocket. “I’ll send it to you the day you share the butterscotch candies you’re having delivered here.”

Always the negotiator, her Ava. “Sorry, darling, but I’m not—ah, wait. I feel you, oh, devious one.” Butterscotch was Ava’s biggest weakness. “I’ll have them here by the end of the week, you just wait and see.” Making her friend happy was one of her top priorities in life. “Until then …” Where had their conversation left off before they were so rudely interrupted? Oh, yeah. “Are you retarded? This place is a dump.”

“Uh, you forget. I’ve lived in worse.”

True. They’d met in junior high, when Noelle had been acting out to prove her parents’ disapproval meant nothing to her and had (allegedly) burned her former boarding school to the ground. Ava had been desperate to lose her drunken mom’s attention, as well as the attention of the nasty men her mom had allowed to parade through their trailer.