Dom grabbed Pace's elbow the second she walked in the Riddicks' front door.
"Put her down," he said, meaning Ticey. The girl was supported on Pace's hip, and Tice glanced curiously between Dom and her mother.
"No," Pace said, eyes narrowing. He'd begun walking her toward the kitchen, and she dug her heels in, stopping. Pace shrugged off his hand. "Hands off, Dominic," she hissed coldly.
Spotting a chance to impress her, Robert tried to step between the two, but his attempted intrusion snapped Dom's attention onto him, and Pace watched her 'friend' turn a sickly color of gray when Dom's most murderous glare pinned him to the spot, stealing his voice.
Robert's mouth moved, attempting to form words, but he choked on his own fear.
Pace felt a small turn of revulsion in her stomach. Robert was a nice guy, but he didn't have a prayer. He was subservient, quiet, and easily slapped down. Dom was two hundred and forty pounds of solid alpha male. He took what he wanted, left no prisoners, and he'd probably ruined all other men for her.
Pace could count on one hand the men she'd met who had a natural presence that could rival Dom's, and Riddick was one of those precious few.
The muscle in Dom's jaw flexed, but he finally returned his gaze to her. A little of the fire died out of his black eyes. "Come on, Pace," he said, exasperated. "My arm's about to fall the fuck off."
For the first time, Pace realized he held his arm close to his chest, his hand clenched in a fist that wouldn't relax. Every muscle in his forearm and bicep stood out; she could've easily traced every vein in his arm from beginning to end.
Decision time. Did she help him, or leave him to suffer?
"Okay," she finally said, relenting in letting Tice slide to the ground. Reaching around Robert, she took her husband's good arm, and led him toward the kitchen, making him sit down on a chair at the table.
"Your little boyfriend can't do this for you?" she deadpanned, tugging at the bottom hem of his shirt.
Dom attempted to raise his arms, and groaned. "Cut it off," he grunted, turning away from her.
It couldn't be easy for him, letting people see him like this.
Pace held out a hand in Riddick's direction. "Knife?" she requested. She couldn't tell how she knew he had one. Something about the way he stood reminded her of knife fighters she'd known during her time in the guilds, and the Resistance.
Richard Riddick was sleek with muscle, but not a single fiber so much as twitched at her request.
"I'm not going to be gentle, if it makes you feel better," she told him, not fooled by his lack of reaction.
A knife appeared in her hand, a straight blade perhaps six inches long with a simple black composite handle, and she returned her attention to cutting Dom's shirt off. Two minutes later, she stood behind him, examining a bruise darkening an area extending from Dom's right rotator cuff to his lower back. A nasty, surgically-straight scar encircled his entire shoulder, but that part she'd expected.
"Well," she said. "That's definitely not good."
"Can you fix it?" Dom asked.
Pace sighed, lightly running her fingers over the damaged area. "I don't know, Dom. There'll be a lot of swelling in there. I'm not a doctor. Cody's military trained; he might have a better chance...where is Cody, anyway?"
Dom's mouth firmed and his eyes flickered toward the floor. Was that guilt she saw in his eyes? Anyone else would've missed it.
"It's your system, Pace. You made the original adjustments. I want you working on it," he insisted, his voice already fading out as he struggled to bite back against the pain.
She sighed, brushing her hair back from her eyes. This wouldn't be easy. When she turned, she saw Mrs. Riddick gazing at her curiously, Kyle at her side.
"Mrs. Riddick," she began.
"Jack," the woman interrupted.
"Jack," Pace corrected softly. "I'm going to need to do an improvised surgery on your kitchen table, if that's all right with you."
"What's wrong with him?" Riddick asked, his deep voice throwing menace into the question.
Pace let her head drop a little. She had a hard time making eye-contact with strangers, even though her days of being a young girl on the run were many years behind her.
"I don't know when you originally met Dom, but in his early twenties he was captured by the Empire. During the struggle, one of the men shot Dom in the shoulder with a scatter gun, nearly severing his right arm from his body.
"They reattached the arm, but most of the nerves and muscles had deteriorated, or been damaged beyond repair, and had to be replaced by engineered tissues. Unfortunately, the engineered muscles in his arm don't contract with the same strength as the rest of Dom's body, so a fiber optic nerve center was placed in his shoulder and attached to his central nervous system.
"When the synapses in his brain fire, they send instructions for those muscles to contract. The fiber optic nerve center translates the firings and contracts his arm muscles at the proper speed and intensity. It's an ingenious system, but whoever programmed the original firmware got sloppy, and it made him lopsided."
Dom shot a sardonic glare in Riddick's direction. "When you hit me with that rock, Dick, you fucked up the system. Try tensing some part of your body for an hour or two, and see how much you like it," Dom added, ladling on the sarcasm.
Pace instinctively reached out to touch her husband's uninjured shoulder, effectively silencing his childish remarks. "If I'm going to attempt to fix the damage, I'll need to sanitize everything to prevent infection. The nerve center isn't deep, but I don't want him out of commission for weeks so it can heal."
Jack nodded. "Whatever you need, just let us know," she said, her eyes catching on the injury to Dom's back. The bruising was quite impressive. "What the hell happened to you, anyway?"
Dom glanced back at Riddick. "Let's just say we ran into some flying masonry," he said cryptically.
Jack's eyes narrowed, and she took a breath, as if to probe further.
Letting her intuition guide her, Pace decided it was a good time to interrupt Jack's train of thought. "Ticey, could you take Kyle upstairs?" Pace asked. "I have to lower the risk of contamination. Besides, Dom's going to be screaming things I don't want you kids to hear."
"Why would he be screaming?" Kyle asked, having appeared at her elbow. The boy intently studied Dom's injury, and before Pace could reply, he reached out to poke the colorful bruise covering a forth of Dom's backside.
Pace had never heard her husband yelp in pain. Without thinking, she stepped between him and Kyle when he whipped around, his fangs bared, a growl threatening from deep in his chest.
"He's a child," she reminded firmly. It shocked her that she still had the guts to try to rein him in. She'd tamed him once for a short time, but he'd had plenty of opportunity to regain his feral nature during their years of separation. Yet he submitted almost immediately to the hardness in her gaze.
Dom's eyes narrowed in her direction, but his fangs retracted. He growled to himself, stiffly turning back around in his chair.
"I wasn't scared," Kyle protested, even though by then his back was pressed against his father's large form.
Riddick gave his son a gentle push in Ticey's direction. "Think it's time you went upstairs, kid."
Kyle turned a pleading look on him. "Can't I stay here?"
Ticey walked over and took the boy's hand. "Come on, Kyle. We don't want to make Dom sick. If he gets sick, he won't be able to find Cam and Rachel, or Dallas."
Kyle relented, and a moment later the kids disappeared upstairs, Jack trailing not far behind, on her way to collect the supplies they would need.
Jack cast one last suspicious glance in her husband's direction on her way up the stairwell.
Again Pace surveyed the damage to Dom's backside, and shook her head. "We're going to have to get that swelling down," she commented to herself, looking around for a likely place to find ice.
"Over here," Riddick said, leaving the counter he'd been leaning against to lead her over to the refrigeration unit.
He showed her where to get ice cubes, and a bag to put them in.
"I don't know if I can do it," she confided while scooping ice into a bag.
Riddick shrugged. "He said you were good. Besides, you've done it before, haven't you?" he asked, noting that Conte had turned his head, subtly watching the two of them out of the very corner of his eye. Rick wondered how well Dom could hear.
Pace shook her head. "No. Not by myself. He's never gotten hit there, to my knowledge. If we're lucky, there won't be actual damage to the nerve center—just an aborted attempt by the system to reset itself. If there's damage, I won't be able to do anything but shut it down so the muscles relax. He'll have a mostly bum arm, but at least it won't be entirely useless. The other thing I'm worried about is if I'll have to slice him open like a fish. I don't know if I'll be able to find the switch for the wireless interface without proper lab equipment to locate it for me."
Riddick shrugged. He honestly didn't care one way or another. Maybe with the boy criminal wonder out of commission, he'd get a chance to do things his way.
Sitting in a chair across the room, Riddick watched while Pace and Jack laid Dom face-down on a sheet on the kitchen table, and carefully stretched pieces of thread across his bare back and shoulder.
Conte had a number of tattoos around the general area of his shoulder blade and lower back. Apparently when lines were drawn between various points on the tattoo markings, their combined intersection occurred directly over the interface's switch.
Jack added her hands to keeping the strings taut so Pace could determine the exact location of where she would cut, and mark it.
At last Pace had a good marking, and she proceeded to sanitize the area and make a tiny slice through the skin. Riddick watched carefully for Conte to brace for it; and wasn't entirely disappointed. No sound escaped—no groan or hissed breath, but the Con-X did blink rapidly once or twice, his head turned so he could see Riddick at all times. The look in his eyes bordered on accusatory. 'You put me on this fucking table. Nice job, asshole.'
'Any time,' Riddick's steady gaze said in reply.
The victory was fleeting. So he showed Conte up? How did that compare to the shit storm Jack had thrown him into? With every passing hour, Riddick felt less attached to his sense of self. Like a wolf waking up one morning amongst the sheep, eating grass and wearing their clothes and wondering how he got there. Wondering more and more why he stayed with them. Did he owe them loyalty? When he and Dom returned home that evening, Riddick had sensed a change in Jack. She eyed him warily, when she thought he didn't see it. How much did she know about what had happened to him? Did she know how to stop it? Did she allow it to continue in order to keep him?
Did he care?
Riddick watched Jack dab blood from Conte's back in the wake of the knife. She'd been so helpful, running here and there for supplies, trying to please Pace and help put Conte out of his misery.
So in other words, yes, he did fucking care. Enough for jealousy to sear his insides, anyway. That felt real enough—but how could he know for sure? Before T2 he'd never trusted anyone, but he could always trust himself—his physical abilities, his mental faculties, and his perceptions. All three of those had been taken from him, and for what? He didn't even know.
Innately, Riddick sensed Conte had known the answer once. But did he know now? Somewhere along the line someone had reached into Conte's skull with an industrial grade brain whisk and scrambled the shit between his ears. Maybe the son-of-a-bitch deserved it, but that didn't leave Riddick any less up a creek.
Pace sighed with relief when after a few deeper and deeper cuts, the switch came into view. She switched it off, softly counted off half a minute, and then switched it back on. An access screen appeared on the virtual view screen in front of her left eye. Riddick could see the reverse reflection on the other side of her glasses.
"Request verification for access," the system said through her visor's visual interface.
"Pace Conte," she said slowly.
A second or two later the system responded. "Identity confirmed. Access granted pending confirmation."
"Dom," Pace prodded.
"Confirm," he said weakly.
"Access granted," the system responded, after taking a second to process.
Pace's gaze became detached, focused on the data readout scrolling down in front of her vision. "I think we're in luck. All the connections test positive for connectivity. Get ready to hold him down. Computer, download file 'beta-center executable,' password 'Dallas-Prize-362' to EPROM. Request system reboot on file."
The second the reboot began, Dom's arm went limp, twitching involuntarily. His entire back convulsed in a spasm that nearly upset the table, and he cursed a blue streak, the convulsions causing him to stutter. Pace and Jack had some trouble holding him down at first, but soon the muscle seizures ended, and he laid completely still, his breathing ragged.
"I think I'll take a drink now," Dom groaned, rolling to his side and pulling his arm in toward his chest. Blood streamed down his back, and Pace had to force him to lie back down on his stomach.
"Not yet. Let me put you back together," she chided, using a clean towel to mop up the blood from the shallow wound.
Jack stood back, her part momentarily completed. Their eyes caught for just a second, and then she looked away, watching Pace Conte fuss over her husband.
What did she feel when she looked at him? Fear he'd leave? Likely. Fear he'd turn on her? Perhaps.
Maybe he didn't know himself very well at the moment, but he knew Jack—knew she couldn't stand a mystery. Too many unknowns got the wheels turning in her head, and soon she'd start driving herself crazy with possible scenarios of what might happen. It was only a matter of time before she asked.
Riddick turned to leave the room. He felt confident his former self would've laughed at this situation. Two kids kidnapped? A hot woman who worshipped him agonizing over whether or not he'd stay, when in reality she'd probably leave him if the kids weren't saved? Hilarious, Dickey.
You know what the Boss man said in slam, Pre-T2 Riddick informed him. If you're not having fun, lower your standards.
It'd be fun to see just how low his standards dipped before this klusterfuck was over.