AN: I need to update this story pretty bad. I've done a huge amount of editing of the chapters on other sites, and I plan to get them updated here by the end of the week. Thanks so much to anyone who's still reading this. I do plan to get this thing finished this fall :-)
After Jack removed the kids from the war council in her living room, she spent some time in Cam's room. She busied her hands with making her son's bed and let her mind wander. She'd dedicated her life to understanding criminals, and up until then she'd thought she'd done a good job. She'd even prided herself on putting personal attachments aside and evaluating Riddick.
Jack had thought she knew him, but she'd gotten lost somewhere along the way and Riddick didn't seem interested in putting up road road signs to help her out. Ever since his initial outburst over her visit to Dom's ship, her husband had clammed up. The words they did share were civil, but painfully few. Maybe he didn't feel the same way she did. Emptied out, and tortured. So much like she felt after T2. Even at thirteen, she'd kept up a good tough-girl act. Then, like now, Riddick didn't seem to notice how badly she wanted him to take her into his arms and let her go boneless against him, crying out all her sorrow.
Maybe he never did change, and the kids going missing...
No. She didn't doubt he loved their kids. The part she wondered about, now, was if that's what had held them together all these years.
Once made, Cameron's bed seemed so alien. The eighteen-year-old no longer allowed his mother in his room uninvited, and his placating attempts to make his own bed were always haphazard at best.
After several long moments of staring down at it, she threw back the covers and gathered them up into a ball, dropping them back onto the bed in whatever shape they chose to land in. Who cared? Cam might never come home. Who gave a flying fuck if his bed was messy or not?
After Jack heard Dominic and his little helper take off to do inventory on their ship, she found herself wandering toward Kyle's room, finding the kids playing together on the floor. She thought she'd find Pace with them, but the young woman apparently hadn't come upstairs yet. Like Jack, she rarely let her only remaining child out of sight for long. Jack still felt obligated to tell Pace about Dom, and what went on between them so many years ago.
Leaning against the doorframe, Jack took a moment to soak up the kids' small smiles and the joy they found in each other's company. They seemed so resilient, so strong. Jack didn't know if she should be disturbed by Kyle's lack of reaction to the situation. He seemed to know what it meant to be kidnapped, yet he didn't cry or bemoan the loss of his siblings. His single-minded devotion to Cameron had defined him from an early age, and although he didn't get along with Rachel, he'd still cuddle with her when given the opportunity.
Jack just didn't know what to think of it. Shock? Early signs of mental illness?
The kids played with different colors of putty. The real stuff, not a children's modeling program on an interactive tablet. Ticey made a line of people, some taller and some shorter. Kyle made his usual monsters, but he seemed subdued compared to his usual energy. He wore a pair of Cam's ratty old cargo pants, cut down, tucked, and hemmed ten different ways to fit him. He only wore black t-shirts—again in imitation of his older brother—and the one he currently wore advertised a local college athletic team.
He'd worn those clothes for two days and they weren't even dirty. Maybe he was taking it harder than she knew.
"What'chya making, Ti?" Kyle asked after a while.
"My family," Ticey said. She had her putty-people laid out on their backs. "These two are my aunt Lasia and uncle Rhys," she told Kyle, pointing out two figures on her right. "That's my mom, and that's me."
"Who's that?" Kyle asked, pointing to the figure clutched forgotten in her hand.
Ticey looked down at the boy in her open palm. From the doorway, Jack could see Ti had made him with blond hair and black dots for eyes. After a long moment of staring at the figure of Dallas, a silent tear fell from one of Ticey's eyes and rolled down her small cheek.
Kyle reached out with putty-stained fingers to squeeze her other hand.
"It's okay, Ti. Dallas and Camy and Rachel are going to be okay."
Tice shook her head so slowly, so morosely, Jack felt her own eyes start to burn and tear up. The little girl pulled in a shuttering breath, and it nearly broke Jack's heart to hear it.
"I never got to say good-bye," Ticey said, her voice cracking at the end. She pulled her hand from Kyle's grip, and used the back of it to wipe at her face. "I told him to stop stealing cars! I told him if he loved me, he'd stop!"
Kyle dropped his putty monster and wrapped his arms around the older girl, letting his cheek rest against her shoulder while she sobbed.
"It's okay, Ticey. My daddy's going to bring them home. You'll see."
Suddenly it all became so clear—why Kyle didn't fear for Cam and Rachel. All the breath abruptly left Jack's lungs, like she'd gotten kicked in the chest. She'd once had the same blind faith in Riddick, and now even a five year old could see what she'd lost sight of. Yes, Rick was a man with flaws. He wasn't the same man who saved her on T2, but hell if he wouldn't become that man again to protect her, to protect their family. When Riddick was poisoned, given Seka in dangerous doses to control his behavior, she'd fought so hard to get him back. Even then she'd had more faith in him than she did now.
That's what he was doing. That's why he'd stopped speaking to her. He was preparing himself to go after the kids.
Jack turned away from her son's room, hardly able to breathe. Pace stood just behind her, and Jack gasped in surprise at finding her there, her hand rising to cover her mouth.
Dom's wife stood at eye-level. She was tall, but more thickly built than Jack. Her long honey-blonde hair was swept back in a messy pony-tail. Her cheeks were red, blotchy, and tear streaked.
"I never slept with Dom," Jack said, the words skipping out of her mouth without consulting her first.
Pace nodded. "I know," she said.
The answer seemed appropriate at such a somber moment, but not entirely plausible. If it had been her, and she'd met a woman Riddick knew before her...
"How? How could you possibly know?"
Pace moved the collar of her shirt so Jack could see the shoulder beneath. Two bright stars marred the pale skin just above her collar bone. "He marks what belongs to him. His kills, and women—at least, the ones he cares for," Pace said, her voice brittle. A tiny smile tried to turn up the corners of her mouth. "It seems to be instinct-driven. He bit his sister when he was seven, right after his retractable eye-teeth came in. I noticed you don't have one," Pace said, motioning to Jack's shoulders.
Sure enough, when she looked down, she found thin tank-top straps and no star-shaped scars.
"But, I met a woman he slept with and he didn't bite her," Jack said, kicking herself before the sentence finished leaving her mouth. She needed to get a handle on herself.
Pace pressed her lips together tighter and took a slow breath through her nose, perhaps to maintain control of her voice. "Before meeting you, I thought I would've been the only one." She sounded supremely confident in her words, and her expression conveyed an even deeper meaning. Fear? Pain?
A tear leaked from the corner of Pace's eye, and she wiped it away. "We fall in love with these men, Jack. Your husband—he's a predator, like Dom," she choked, biting her lower lip. It took her a solid moment to compose herself enough to speak again. "When you chose your Riddick over Dominic, you made the right decision." She attempted a smile, and failed, her lips twisting instead of turning up.
Something kept nagging at the back of his mind. Some piece of the puzzle that was missing.
Riddick stood in the kitchen, making a sandwich. His stomach had become too much of a civilian. It tried hard to twist up and prevent him from eating, but he wouldn't let it. Prison doled out hard lessons when his clarity slipped for even a moment—whether the cause be hunger, physical illness, or lack of sleep. There were plenty of big fish in the pen, but most of them rotted inside because they didn't have a brain like his.
Over the course of the past twenty-four hours he'd done a lot of thinking, and he wondered if part of him wanted Jack to be right. He had no idea if he could fix this mess in time to save their kids, and if they left it up to Conte, it would be Dom's failure—not his.
That part of him was the remains of the Riddick that died on T2. Don't put yourself out there for anyone. Let someone else take the fall.
But he wouldn't do it. Fail or succeed, he wouldn't let Conte ride into this without him. Rick mentally walked through the series of events that had led up to the present moment, including everything that happened the last time he'd run into Conte. If nothing else, he believed in things making sense. Some sort of logic stood behind every action and reaction that occurred in life—even if that logic involved insanity.
In the beginning, he'd lived with Jack and Imam on New Mecca. He got seduced by a woman named Shella with a little help from a drug Shella had procured from her brother, Michael. Michael may have had ties to the Task Force—a team created by the Empire to kill or capture non-human specimens.
Jack came to live with him three years later, and over a number of months while she was there, she met Conte, got involved with him, and somehow the two of them found a way to get Riddick off the drug Shella had been feeding him.
There was the first gap. Why the fuck would Dominic Conte help someone he expected to use as bait for an assassination? To gain Jack's trust? To convince her to come with him after he completed the mission?
Possibly.
It was a definite gap, but for the moment, one he had no choice but to pass over. To say the least, Conte had been unstable at that time, and hadn't operated on sane reasoning. He might not even know why he'd helped Jack.
Just when Rick started to recover from his drug stupor, Conte used Riddick and Jack to lure his target, Shella's brother, out into the open.
The second gap. Why the fuck had Shella's brother been after him in the first place? What had he wanted from Richard B. Riddick that didn't involve killing him?
This inconsistency he'd pondered for years. At best, Rick was a close subspecies human, just far enough from classical genes to warrant an extended lifespan and limited aging—and a slightly faster than average mind and body.
Fucking Conte had fangs, and some weird fucking eyes.
All right. So beyond the mystery of why he'd been sought by the Task Force, what else was missing? He'd met Dallas by chance at a race while the kid was on the run. Agents were after the boy—tracking him since an accident on his home planet where the officials reported him as a non-human.
Third gap. If the Task Force was supposedly disbanded, and working without the Empire's official consent, why kidnap Cam and Rachel? If the underground team was already working without official license, why risk being wiped out all together by taking children belonging to citizens of New Mecca? If he and Jack pleaded with their city representative, their case could potentially climb all the way to the top of New Mecca's government. If the Empire thought for one second they might lose their ability to bargain with an independent New Mecca for raw goods, whatever remained of the Task Force would immediately be erased from the living.
How could they have known he and Jack wouldn't go to the authorities? Were they too stupid to care, or did they know who he used to be? Was the Task Force still pursuing him? Could it possibly be anyone else?
Too many 'what-ifs' about the whole thing. He needed more information.
Riddick cut the sandwich into two triangles and then four with a butter knife—a habit left over from Cameron's childhood.
The information he needed might be in Conte's head, but Riddick didn't feel like going there. It never proved expedient to pick at a crazy man's brain. The kid—Cody Vale—probably knew something useful, but Rick would have a hard time stepping around Conte to interrogate him.
That left the wife. Pace Prize—former Resistance Force head of technology. He could only imagine what that implied. Did she do virtual theft for the Resistance, or just fix their systems when they broke down? Regardless of whether or not she knew anything useful, she'd be the easiest to approach. Conte had fucked up badly enough to ensure that.
Sitting down at the kitchen table, Riddick took a bite of sandwich and decided he'd put too much mustard on it. While chewing, he debated how he'd pose his questions, and what he'd do with the answers when he obtained them.