The Claiming

by Imogen Keeper

  She flexed her knuckles. “A specialty of mine.”

  “You know how to move so you blend in.”

  “What are they?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Just be careful with them. Take them out, keep them in separate pockets. Don’t bandy them about.”

  “Separate pockets.” She tapped one finger. “No bandying.” Tapped a second with a twisting grin. “Many trips.” Tapped a third. “Sounds like fun.”

  “When you’re done, I won’t need you here anymore. You should go with them. Help them get to Didgermmion safely. I have…” He swallowed, tried to think of the right word to describe what he had there. Tor and Klym. The household. “I have family there. They’d help you get set up.”

  She dragged her teeth back and forth over one another. “You got family there. I got family here.” Her fingers danced on the surface of the table like she was flicking away imaginary droplets of blood.

  “You don’t need to fight when it comes down to it, Freysa.”

  “Come on now, Boss.” Something faded behind her eyes. “I like to fight.”

  “I know you do. But you don’t have to.”

  The unhappy grin slid off her face entirely. “Because I’m a woman.”

  “Because you’re decent.”

  “Would you tell Shane he didn’t need to fight, send him off someplace safe.”

  “Shane’s not decent.”

  “Yeah well, neither am I. I’ll fight by your side until that fuck Manivietto’s corpse is liquid and his eyeballs rot. Then, I might take you up on that offer.”

  She’d never mentioned her family before, and he couldn’t help but wonder who they were. She seemed too young to have kids of her own, but it was possible. He opened his mouth to ask, but thought better of it.

  “That family of yours, make sure you’ve got someone in place you trust in case shit goes south.”

  Her jaw hardened, but she leaned back and crossed her arms manfully. “You too, Boss. Whoever the chick is, she’s all over you.” Her eyes gleamed. “You see her safe too. Not enough felanas in a world that’s far from kind to them.”

  He slid a stack of bills across the table to her and stood up. “I’ll look after you and yours.” He held her gaze. “I’ll see them safe if I can.”

  He’d half expected her to throw it in his face, swear she’d take care of her own. But she didn’t. Freysa was fiercely proud, but she was no fool. She’d never come down to the tunnels yet, preferring to keep some degree of separation between her and his army. That needed to end now.

  She jerked a nod his way. “See you, Boss.”

  He hesitated one more time. “Get the cubes in place today, and then don’t go back to that house…or yours. Move your people to the tunnels. Manivietto is getting desperate.”

  28

  a sickening snap

  TESSA STOOD OUTSIDE the garden wall of her brother’s home, looking inward.

  She’d come straight here from Sanger’s, with a single detour to drop off the explosive cube in one of Jonan’s old hidey-holes. She’d climbed up the long hill where she tiptoed past the sensors, stayed out of view of the guards in their towers, to this place.

  The Garden of the Wives. A sacred space in the seraglio. For the wives of Manivietto only. Daring to look inside was illegal, and yet it had been designed with cut-out quatrefoils, as if whoever had designed it wanted to tempt people. It was the grown man’s equivalent of a child whispering I have a secret. It’s really good. And I’m not going to tell you.

  An old woman had been working inside it since before Tessa had been born, and there she was, when Tessa cupped her eyes to a cut-out and peered through.

  The old lady stooped over a pathway, her iron-gray hair in a bun. Flaria was her name. She kept the pathways tidy, the fountain clean of moss and mold. She weeded and dead-headed and mulched and planted and fertilized endlessly.

  Shinyassa birds strutted along tree branches, belting out their music with bravado, smaller tiaka birds hovered in the air, buzzing around flowers. Butterflies with wings larger than her hands, iridescent blue on one side and electric yellow on the other fluttered along bushes, spreading nectar.

  And everywhere, flowers. It was high summer. Everything was in bloom, and for all the hate in her heart with Manivietto’s name on it, there was no denying this place was beautiful.

  She’d asked her father about it once. Why can’t anyone go inside?

  He’d stopped just for a moment, his fingers hesitating at his screen as he drafted whatever it was—probably something that would end someone’s life or ruin someone else’s. Because it’s mine.

  “But your wives can go inside. Mama can.”

  “They belong to me too.”

  That had been a weird concept to her then. Still was now. Belonging to someone meant different things to different people. To her father, to Manivietto it was like owning a house, a hover, a useless, pretty bauble. To Sanger, for just a moment, she’d believed maybe it meant something else.

  “But why not let anyone else see it? It’s so pretty.”

  He’d toyed with her hair, letting the strands slide through his fingers. “When a man holds power, Tessa, it’s important that he keeps a few things just for himself. That he won’t let anyone else even see.”

  That summed up Manivietto in a nutshell. Have great power, show it off for all to see, but never let them touch it.

  All his power. All his strength, and what did he do with it? He harbored all his treasures close, traded people as slaves, and reaped misery wherever he went.

  If she’d been born Prime…She couldn’t even imagine it. The height, the strength, the speed. If she had all of that, she’d have killed her brother long ago, taken what was his after their father died, and burned it to the fucking ground. She’d have stormed the city and burned that too. She’d have stood in the ashes with the felanas, the humanis, and any Primes who wanted to join her, and then she’d look to the Alliance, the government that ruled every country on this planet, and she’d make them pay.

  She’d be like Sanger; the Sanger she’d thought she’d seen. The one she’d fallen for. Proud, strong, powerful, but also kind.

  Except that was a lie. Sanger was no more the man she’d thought he was than she was a Prime.

  Something in her chest imploded. Separating from a Prime post-heat was always hard, but this was more than that. He’d invaded his way past all her defenses somehow, slapped and pushed and shoved his way inside every recess of her body, taken over her heart, and then he’d broken it.

  Shoulders sagging, she braced her hand against the wall of the seraglio.

  She just needed to find Leyla.

  So here she was, ready to beg her mother.

  Pretty much the last thing she wanted to do.

  Her brother had twelve wives, plus her father’s widows, eight of them left. They came in pairs or in groups of three, some of them alone. One after another, but never her mother.

  Tessa stayed until the sun was past its zenith.

  Right around then, a woman who shouldn’t exist entered the garden. Everyone on Vesta had black hair, but this woman, she had white hair. It trailed behind her like a waterfall of moonlight, as she came on hands and knees.

  Why was she crawling? And wearing nothing but an old rag tied at the shoulder for a dress.

  She crept down the path, straight toward Tessa.

  No, not toward Tessa. Toward the fountain closest to her, where, like an animal, she lowered her face and lapped at the water.

  What the fuck?

  Evidentially sated, the light-haired woman lifted her face, and Tessa gasped.

  The gaze snapped to Tessa.

  She was Argenti. The eyes, pale and white all around.

  They both froze.

  Tessa outside the fence. The alien woman on the inside. The woman started shaking, the frayed edges of her ratty makeshift dress fluttering as if in a breeze. Her lips parted, her gaze taking in the people all around, but she sta
yed quiet, didn’t give Tessa away.

  And then Tessa’s mother came up, holding her body pulled away as if she was afraid the Argenti woman would contaminate her.

  “Mani has forbidden you from drinking from the garden ponds. You know that.”

  Tessa was still puzzling over why in the world a woman would have to be forbidden from the ponds, when she got distracted, staring at the woman who’d brought her into this world.

  Her mother had aged, the lines thicker around her eyes and mouth, but her back was still straight, and if her hair had more gray in it, it was no less thick. It trailed down her back in a wiry braid as fat as her wrist. She wore loose indigo harem pants with a drapey sweater over it, as if she were somehow immune to the heat up here. And that disapproving face was exactly as it had always been.

  “Mama,” Tessa called softly.

  Her mother’s whole body went still, the light-haired Argenti woman on her knees, forgotten.

  It had been so long since they’d seen one another, but in classic Mama-fashion, her face showed no shock. No reaction beyond the merest slackening of her mouth as she took in Tessa. “You’re sick.”

  Tessa almost laughed. She must look like hell. “Grand, Mama. I’m grand.”

  Her mother cast a covert look around the garden.

  “Are you okay?” She sent a wary glance at the crawling woman, and found she’d slunk away down the path like she was trying to shrink herself into nonexistence.

  “I’m alive. It’s more than I can say for Jonah.”

  Her mother’s her whole body rocked as if she’d been physically hit. “Don’t make light of him. He was my second son.”

  “Is that something special then? More so than a first daughter? Than a second daughter?”

  Her mother stared down at the fish in the pond that lay between them, their pale bodies wriggling beneath the surface. No reaction. It was how it always was. Tessa searched for a resemblance, something anything she’d gotten from her mother, but as always, there was nothing. Tessa and Manivietto were pure father. His fire burned in her veins, his face looked back at her from the mirror. His sharp, angled eyes, his long, narrow nose, his slashing brows. Her mother’s face was all soft and wan, the perfect felana, composed and unflappable.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Tessa whispered. “I just always figured if I had a child, I’d love them, no matter what they were. Prime. Humani. Felana. I figured I’d keep them safe no matter what.”

  Her mother sighed, and when she looked up again, Tessa saw herself as her mother must see her. Dirty, desperate and difficult. “What do you want, Tessa? I can give you some food, some water, but I have no money.”

  Tessa let her hand fall away from the garden wall. It was always the same. This was how her whole childhood had been, the arguments, the discord. Sit still. Walk slowly. Think before you speak. Braid your hair this way. Dress that way. Don’t climb trees. You’ll get dirty. Learn to dance instead, so you may entice your Prime.

  She rested her face against the garden wall.

  “I don’t want your food or your water or your money. I just want Leyla.” Her throat closed. “She’s here isn’t she?”

  A part of her was desperate to learn that Sanger hadn’t lied. That some part of their time together had been real despite everything.

  Her mother stayed stubbornly silent.

  “Where is she?”

  A glimmer of distaste crossed her mother’s cheeks. “Like you, she went into heat. Guards found her in the bathhouse and thanks be to Vaniiya, neither was Prime, nor was the heat far gone enough for them to lose control.”

  Tessa’s blood roared so loud in her ears, she could barely think.

  “They brought her here. Your brother arranged for an ideal mate. One of his own business partners.” She shook her head at Tessa’s grimy clothes. “As he would do for you.”

  “He gave her to an old man. And you let him?”

  “Let him? Your brother does as he pleases. It’s not for me to disagree.”

  It all made sense suddenly. Finally. Her mother didn’t love her or Leyla. She didn’t love anyone. She’d probably been broken long ago, as a girl.

  Throat dry, too sad to even be angry, Tessa backed away from the wall.

  “Please, Tessa, we can help you.”

  Help. This was her mother’s brand of help? Siding with Manivietto, with the Primes. Well fuck that.

  “Who?” she said in a voice that was low and flat and dead-empty.

  “Who what?”

  “Which businessman took Leyla?”

  “Vinderro. He’s coming for her in a few days. She’s been given to a temporary Prime, just for now.”

  “She’s here?”

  Her mother stepped up against the edge, her own fingers now, pressing against her cage from the inside. “Please, Tessa. Stay here.”

  “When?” she demanded. “When?”

  Her mother’s head tilted. “When what?”

  “When?” It came out too loud. A couple of the other wives glanced over at her mother, and her mother’s face paled.

  “When are they coming to take my sister—your daughter—away.”

  Her mother’s eyes went liquid and soft. “A couple days. She’ll be happy there. The head wife is a good woman. And without your influence, Leyla is a good girl.”

  The rage boiled up inside of her, the injustice, the anger, the hate, boiling and storming away.

  She did what she always did. She ran. Downhill. Toward…something.

  And of course, because fuck, you luck.

  She hit a bush, a low scrubby one. As if time slowed down, she saw the details, each one in hyper reality.

  The way her arm whipped out to catch herself, but there was nothing there. The way her feet dug in, struggling to find purchase, but skidding, slipping, her ankle wobbling sideways. The way the backpack lurched over her back, the weight of all the pilfered water and food, shifting her trajectory.

  She toppled forward. Face first, her arms outstretched. Her feet left the ground.

  She caught herself on one wrist with a sickening snap. Her face rammed into another bush.

  And then she was rolling, cradling the hurt arm against her body, rolling faster and faster down the hill.

  Prickly bushes tore at her skin, ripped at her clothes, tugged at her limbs as she tumbled.

  None of them slowed her down.

  29

  she belongs to the

  mother-fucking boss

  SANGER KNEW she was gone the second he walked in the door. Something about the stillness of the air, as if no one had moved or breathed inside the space, hadn’t for some time. The way the scent felt old instead of fresh. There was no hum just for him.

  Just vacant space.

  She’d bathed, the shampoo-and-soap scent lingered in the air. And the click as the lock engaged when he shut the door behind him echoed wrong, flat and hollow.

  He’d walked home before, opened the door, found…the absence of life.

  That time, it wasn’t just emptiness and silence that greeted him. It was stink. The unique death-stink of a body gone cold, of spilled blood, long since dried, of loosened bowels left for days. Plaia and their girls. Dead in the farmhouse, surrounded by hills, and blue skies, and farm land.

  And then later, when he’d regained his composure, when she was buried, her babies all around her, when he could think again and plan, he’d gone to his main house, and been greeted with more blood. Children he’d loved. Women he’d cared for. The servants too. His responsibility—all of them slaughtered by his own father and Manivietto.

  Now, in another city, in a whole different country, separated by miles and years, he forced himself to slow down, to settle down his breathing, to remember that it wasn’t Plaia. There were no dead children here.

  There was no blood.

  No death-stink.

  He pushed the memories aside, or tried. It was like pushing at smoke, thick and overpowering. They slid through his fingers, clingin
g and dragging as he climbed the stairs and checked anyway.

  Tessa wasn’t there. Nor in any other room. Why? He’d have sworn she was starting to feel safe with him, starting to believe that he wouldn’t hurt her.

  He figured out what happened when he walked through the yard, down to his basement, and found a pair of panties lying in the center of the coffee table.

  Felana’s panties. Not hers. The other one. Her sister.

  She must have thought he’d known all along. Maybe had her taken himself. Or colluded with the Boss. Fuck her stupid obsession with someone who’d never existed.

  He contacted Shane first. “A felana is out there. She’s just coming out of a heat. Find her.”

  There was a pause on the line. “Manivietto’s missing felana?”

  Sanger’s nostrils flared, his whole body reacting with possessive rage. “My missing felana.”

  “Can I tell people that?”

  Sanger stood, boots braced hard on the wood floor under his feet, every muscle in his body flexing and tightening.

  It had all been coming to this, from the first time he chased her down in the streets and trapped her against a wall, tasted her sweet lying felana lips. The moment she came for him at the Yellow Palm, and he followed her home, saw her skinny bulging ribs. The moment she ran through the Night Market and pumped out pheromones made just for him.

  You.

  Me.

  “You can tell everyone in the entire fucking city that there is a felana missing. Her name is Tessa. She is tall and thin and most likely to be out there somewhere running in circles. And she belongs to the motherfucking Boss.”

  There was a pause on the line.

  “You realize this is war between you and Manivietto?”

  Before Manivietto only had rumors. Now he’d have truth, straight from the mouth of the Boss.

  “Right on time. And if anyone says that to you, you can tell them when it’s over I’ll be standing on top of the ashes, and if they aren’t with me, they’ll be ashes too. Find her. Bring her to me. Pay whatever you need.”