by Roxie Ray
That still scared me a little. I’d fought too hard to make sure that when I did have a baby, it would be safe. I’d rather raise our child on my own than have it abused.
“He has the conflict with the Rutharians to worry about too, remember.” Adskow pulled the last piece of shrapnel from the warrior’s skin and plunked it into the little bowl I was holding. “Pulling our forces out of Jeorkanian space has emboldened them, and they do not accept the concept of retreat or surrender.”
My heart fell in my chest. “Oh. That’s my fault, too.”
“No. I can assure you it is not.” Adskow held his hand out again, and I placed a roll of bandages in it. “The Rutharians are called so for their ruthlessness. They target planets known to have highly trained breeding slaves because they cannot afford the price on their own. They have no concept of money on their planet, no industry. They only take.”
I cringed. I hadn’t asked Kloran for any details about the war. Talking about it only seemed to make him more tired and frustrated. But I’d seen the effects of Rutharian ruthlessness on the warriors who’d come onto our ward. My stomach churned at the memory of the men from that scouting ship that had come in with some of the worst internal injuries I’d ever seen. Adskow had told me it was the work of Rutharian chemical gasses, which had been banned throughout all the galaxies shortly after it had been invented. It was an intergalactic war crime to use it on even the worst of enemies—but the Rutharians didn’t care about laws, either.
“Will Jeorkana be okay without the Lunarian forces to defend them?”
Adskow sighed as he wrapped up the warrior’s shoulder. “Jeorkana has made its own fate. Queen Lieja has boasted too openly about the quality of the slaves her handlers produce for far too long now, and I have long suspected that she was giving us lower quality slaves in exchange for our forces. She should have known better—and she should not have insulted the mate of our General. Likely, she will strike some sort of deal with the Rutharians eventually. Exchanging slaves for protection from them instead.”
“That sounds like racketeering.” These Rutharians sounded like they weren’t any better than Earth pirates, or the mob.
“It is, yes.” He patted the warrior’s stretcher and pointed me toward the door. “But that is Queen Lieja’s problem, not yours. Now, take this one to the recovery ward, if you will?”
I nodded and wheeled the warrior we’d been working on out of the room. But my heart was still heavy. I knew Adskow’s words were supposed to make me feel better, they just didn’t. The recovery ward was already full of wounded warriors from the Rutharian attacks. And if this was what they did to retreating ships that weren’t trying to engage in battle with them, I didn’t even want to think about what the Rutharians would do with Queen Lieja’s slaves.
“Is that the serum?” I heard one of the other healers ask as I passed a group of them. They were all gathered around the recovery ward’s healer station in a cluster, looking at something just out of my sight. “Here—let me see it.”
“Heat amplifiers and extenders,” another of the healers said, puffing his chest out and grinning. “We will need to test it a little further still, but Lieutenant Leonix says it worked well enough on the human, so—”
As I rolled my warrior’s stretcher into place, I felt my heart screech to a halt.
Kloran had left the rest of the ship’s slaves on Jeorkana when he broke the treaty with Queen Lieja. And as far as I knew, I was the only human aboard the ship.
“Only a matter of time now,” a third healer said with a dark chuckle. “Once we all have human slaves of our own, we will be able to keep them in heat for as long as we like.”
“And we have seen how the general’s human looks at him when she is in heat…”
The group of healers all laughed at that, like it was some kind of joke. But I didn’t find it funny. Not even a little.
Not at all.
I’d never been given any heat amplifiers. Not to my knowledge. And if I had…
There was only one person aboard the ship who could have done it. The man I’d been sharing all my meals with. Sharing a bed with.
The only man aboard the ship who’d had any chance to give me anything like that was Kloran.
Which meant, if I had been given something…it had to have been by him.
19
Kloran
During my time in the Lunarian fighting pits and my tenure as general of the Lunarian people, I had been hit with many things. Bullets, bolts, laser beams and once, a grenade. Warhammers, axes, maces and clubs. The scars on my body, faint but ever present, proved my ability to take my knocks and to bear them with stride.
But in all my years, I had never been hit by a shoe before. I turned as it thumped to the floor after hitting me in the back of the head. The shoe was delicately small but had nonetheless been thrown with enough force and accuracy that I suspected it would leave a bruise at the base of my skull. I puzzled at it for a moment, thinking it strange that something like a shoe would be thrown at me at all.
At least, I supposed, it was unlikely that it would happen again.
Or that was what I thought—then, I glanced down the hall from where the shoe must have been tossed and saw the other one flying from Bree-ah’s hand, headed directly at my face this time.
“Bree-ah! What—” I swatted the second shoe away with the back of my hand. “What in the moon’s name did you do that for?”
Then I saw the look on Bree-ah’s face and the snake coiled in my stomach answered my question for me.
She knew.
“Baz-terd!” she howled at me, lips pulled back to bare her teeth. “You gave me a shot to prolong my ovulation? Without my knowledge? Without my consent?” Bree-ah stopped in her tracks several paces away from me. She looked as though she wished she had a third leg so she might have a final projectile to hurl my way. “Kloran, how could you?”
My mouth gaped open. I had no words to say. She was asking me these things as though they were questions, but I did not think she meant for me to answer any of them. Though I did not know how, she had already uncovered the truth.
My guilt slammed into me from all sides, and the snake in my stomach coiled up and around my windpipe from within.
“I…I made a mistake, Bree-ah,” I said finally. “I have no excuse.”
“Day-um right, you don’t have an excuse!” Bree-ah’s fists were clenched in fury at her sides. The spice of it radiated off of her in tsunami-like waves as her shoulders rose and fell with labored breaths. “I’m not asking for an excuse, Kloran. I’m asking why.”
I pushed the bridge of my nose down for a moment, searching for the right words and failing to find them.
My deception had been revealed to her. The truth was all I had now.
I had no choice but to speak it.
“I did it because I love you, Bree-ah. Because I was in love with you, and I had no idea if you would love me back.” When I had imagined telling her before this moment, I had envisioned those words sounding noble, tender, romantic even. But now that they had left my mouth, they sounded as cowardly and weak as my deception itself.
“This isn’t something you do to someone you love, Kloran!” She knew it too. I had acted like a craven. I had broken my promise.
All I could do now was speak as honestly as I could to try and make it right.
“I know that now. I regretted it almost as soon as I did it.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me? I thought my pregnancy was—well, not an accident, but at the very least, not something you were deliberately drugging me to ensure!”
“I wanted to.” I hung my head, unable to meet her gaze. “I did. But when I tried to, I only became even more afraid. I feared that you would leave me for violating you like that instead.”
“Well, you feared right, you bazterd.” She spat the word at me. By now I could recognize it as the worst swear word she knew. “I thought you were different. I thought I could trust you.” Tears
streamed down her face, but Bree-ah was not sad. She was furious, so furious with me that it had brought her to tears. “You’re no better than my piece of shit ex-husband, Kloran. I thought I’d chosen better this time, but as it turns out, you’re exactly like him. I might as well have never left him at all.”
This was meant to shame me, I knew. But instead, Bree-ah’s comparison of her ex-husband to myself only made a rage of my own roar up within my chest.
“I am not like him.” My voice raised in an instant as I thundered toward her, looming over her so I could shout directly in her face. “I am not an abuser, I am not a mate-beater, I am not him. How dare you even—”
The words died in my throat as the scent of Bree-ah’s rage was replaced with the sourness of fear. Her face, pink with fury only a moment before, was now white as sun-bleached bone.
The sight of the effect my voice had on her snapped my rage in two and tossed it to the wind.
“Bree-ah, I am sorry. I did not mean to yell. Please—” I reached for her, seeking to stroke her cheek and smooth her fear away from her eyes, but she flinched at my movement and cowered away from my touch.
Just like that, my heart shattered into so many pieces, I did not know how I could ever put it back together again. A moment ago, she had wanted to hurt me. Now, she was so terrified of me, she would not even allow me to comfort her.
Blood. In my anger, I had ruined things even more. Now, she was afraid of me all over again.
“I know I was wrong for what I did.” I took a step back, ensuring that my words came slow and steady, that my voice stayed soft and low. “The guilt has been killing me, precious thing. Deceiving you has hurt me more than you could know. At the time, I believed I was doing the right thing, but now—now I know that I was incorrect. I should have asked you first, should have told you, should have…”
My eyes sought Bree-ah’s out, but she would not meet my gaze now.
“It doesn’t matter.” Her voice was distant. Cold. “None of it matters now. You forced this pregnancy on me, then you hid it from me. How am I supposed to trust you now?” Finally, she raised her gaze to mine. I had never imagined that the warm brown of her irises could ever turn so chilled, but there they were, boring into me like blades made of ice. “I can’t trust you now. And now, I’m stuck. I can’t raise a half-alien baby on Earth. I can’t terminate this pregnancy either. I won’t.” She crossed her arms over her chest, smoothing her hands down her shoulders, self-soothing. “So I guess you got your wish.”
“I did not wish for this.” My chest ached with need to hold her, but my body would not move. I knew if I reached for her, she would only pull away from me again. “Please believe me, Bree-ah. I wanted to keep you here. But not like this.”
She held my gaze for only a moment more. I had taken reprimanding beatings from my father as a cub that had hurt less. Then she shook her head and turned away.
And as she left, I could not even go after her.
I could only watch her walk away.
At the end of my day, when I returned to our rooms, Bree-ah was not there. I searched the bedroom, the bathroom, even behind the curtains in a desperate, fruitless hope that perhaps she had just hidden herself from me, but she was nowhere to be found.
Some time later, Leonix knocked on my door. When she entered, she looked nearly as furious with me as Bree-ah had been.
“She has asked to be returned to her original room, Kloran.” Leonix slammed her shoulder into me as she stormed past. She sat down on the couch and hid her face in her hands. “It is not just you she is furious at, either. She will not speak to me now. She refuses to work in the ship’s ward anymore. Your actions have driven your mate away from you, cost the ship a healer, and lost me the friendship I shared with her as well.”
“This is my fault,” I said immediately. “I put you in this position, Leonix. If I had not forced you to bring me that serum—”
“Oh, I am well aware of that, Kloran.” Leonix’s eyes bored into me like she was trying to melt my head from my neck with her gaze. “This is all your fault.”
Slowly, I moved across the sitting room to place myself on the couch next to Leonix. I half-expected that she would turn and hit me. It would not have been unusual. I was not the only one between us with a temper. Leonix just usually hid hers better than I did.
But after a moment, she leaned back on the couch and stared at the wall in solidarity with me. It may have been my fault, but we were both in the same situation now.
“How do I make this right?” I finally asked after a silence that stretched on for what felt like an hour.
“I don’t know,” Leonix said softly. “I wish I did, Kloran. I wish I did.”
I checked my communicator. We were twelve hours from Lunaria. Twelve short hours away from the moment when I was supposed to present Bree-ah to our people as the future of our race—and as my future wife.
And she would not even speak to me now. If I married her like this, it would be another aspect of her life she would be dragged into by force.
“Call Haelian,” Leonix said, her voice tired as she nodded to my communicator. “Perhaps he will know what to do.”
Nodding, I pushed the button to ring Haelian’s communicator and placed it on the small table in front of the couch. As soon as Haelian answered, I explained to him what had happened.
Then he was furious with me too.
“Blood, Kloran! What did I tell you? Nine moons—why did you wait for her to find out for herself?”
“I was a coward, Haelian.” Admitting it made me feel even more like I had trapped myself in a cage of my own making. “But the damage is done. I need advice now, my friend. What do I do?”
There was a long pause, interrupted only by the soft crackling of the coms. Then, Haelian sighed.
“There is not much you can do, Kloran. You can only take this one day at a time. Work to earn her trust back in every way you can. Hope that she finds it in her heart to forgive.”
“I do not think she can forgive.” Speaking the truth now hurt more than I could have ever fathomed, but at least I was done with the lies. “What I have done is unforgivable. She threw her shoes at me—” I glanced at Leonix, who looked confused. “Some Earth custom of deep shaming, I believe. She will never trust me again now.”
“I have heard of this custom,” Haelian said sagely. “She wishes for you to walk a mile in her shoes.”
It was my turn to be confused now. “Haelian, you have seen her feet. They are tiny. Her shoes could not possibly fit me. They are too small. I would ruin them if I tried.”
“I do not believe it is a literal saying,” Haelian corrected me. “It means you should consider how she feels. She is still hurting now, Kloran. But perhaps if you gave her time to cool down—if you went to her then, and explained that you understand how your actions have hurt her…”
“And if she turns me away, even then? If she never wants to speak to me again?”
“Things will work out, Kloran. She loves you. She is bearing your cub. And you have already won her trust once. If you can make amends, perhaps you can win it again.” A shrill sound emanated from Haelian’s end of the communicator. “I am afraid I must depart now though, General. We are approaching the slavers’ ship even as I speak. We should have the ones who abducted your mate in custody soon. Perhaps when we do, you can present them to her as a sign of good faith.”
I nodded. “It is not much, but it could be enough. I wish you luck on your mission, Haelian.”
The light on my communicator flickered off as Haelian ended the call. There were words that were still unspoken between us, but they were words we both knew I did not need to speak.
Good luck—for this could be our only hope.
20
Bria
At least I hadn’t been lied to about one thing. As I stood on the viewing deck to watch the ship approach Lunaria, even I had to admit it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Deep blue waters, so dark in pla
ces it was almost black, filled the planet’s oceans. The only continent in view, a broad, narrow strip of land, was ridged with mountain ranges and ice caps to the north, with dense green jungles and red-sand deserts to the south. Before we entered the atmosphere, we flew past nine different moons in a rainbow of colors. All but one of them were too far out to seem like they even counted, but the last one, which was much closer, was the same orange color of Kloran’s own skin. As we flew past it, I gasped and brushed my fingers up against the window of the viewing deck, marveling at its beauty.
“When we land, you will be able to see it from the ground,” Leonix’s voice called out to me from behind. “It is just as beautiful from down there as it is from up here.”
I stiffened immediately and turned to face her. I hadn’t spoken to Leonix any more than I absolutely had to ever since I’d found out about the fertility serum. I still didn’t know what to say to her now.
“That’s…nice,” I finally told her dully. I guessed there wasn’t really anything left to say. I’d been manipulated by everyone on the ship ever since I’d arrived here. Even the first time Leonix had brought me here to the viewing deck, she’d just been trying to maneuver me into realizing how far away from home I was. Another stupid game.
And when it came to the Lunarians, I just didn’t want to play anymore.
“Come. We will land soon. You will need to be strapped in.”
I opened my mouth to tell her that I wasn’t about to let anyone strap me into anything, but Leonix held up a hand to stop me.