The Ugly Dukeling

by Bex McLynn

  She knew why Trone avoided his dying father. Trone’s core personality was driven by the urge to repair and nurture. If he saw the duke, he’d grant the man forgiveness for turning him into a bully as a child. For mercilessly forging him into a privileged young man who had spat on the Otar and foreigners and homosexuals. And Trone didn’t want to forgive, therefore he stayed away.

  Atrates, though… Cisnetta could see him looking upon the duke with an empty gaze. If the duke would rally his strength and rail at his hybrid son, Atrates would silently stand there. He would not flinch as the duke tossed insults. He would not rant back. Would not leave the room. No, he would stand his ground with his back straight and his shoulders square and his eyes empty and cold. He would show the duke that he couldn’t give a fuck.

  To Cisnetta, the Andrake family situation was pointless torment. Once her father’s illness took him to his bed, they made it a point to tell tales and laugh together. At the very end, she’d held his hand and pressed kisses to the paper-thin skin of his cheek as she witnessed his gentle passing.

  While she’d gotten lost in her thoughts, Naosim had continued talking. His words had faded to a buzz until one pulled her back into the moment.

  With a renewed chill trailing down her spine, she interjected, “What about the lake?”

  Naosim jutted his chin toward the dying flames. “The lake, Cissy. The vandals had only gotten as far as the lake before Atty was on them. They tossed fire starters and ran.”

  “The lake?” Her skin chilled as her fine hairs prickled. “The fire started at the lake?”

  “Yes, I—” Naosim’s eyes went wide. “Oh god, Cobbs.”

  Hearing Cobbs’s name shot her off like a starting pistol. She tore off the veranda. Naosim shouted her name as she ran toward the dying flames.

  She’d left Cobbs at the lake, with other ducks and swans, because she was immensely pleased to finally give him a home. To give him a place to be a bird, rather than be hidden in a dorm room, shuffled about with her from town to country, because she couldn’t bear to be without him.

  Naosim, wiry and quick on his feet, matched her stride, but each time he tried to pull her back, she shrugged him off and kept running toward the burning field.

  She only stumbled to a stop when she heard her name bellowed, a rumbling roar that thrummed her skin and jostled her bones.

  Atrates.

  A shadowy figure emerged from the smoke. Tall. Broad. Straight back. Square shoulders. Determined stride.

  “Bloody hell, woman!” Atrates raged at her. “The field’s carpeted in embers and you’re barefoot.”

  She glanced down in confusion at her unshod feet. She had slippers on earlier, hadn’t she?

  With her chest heaving, she shook her head. Who cared about blistered feet while Cobbs could be burning alive?

  “Cobbs—” she gasped in fear and desperation.

  “Got ‘em,” Atrates snapped as he continued to stomp toward her.

  Her eyes adjusted to his figure being backlit by the flames and saw that he had a burden tucked under each arm.

  Cobbs. Oh, thank god, he had Cobbs.

  She cried out and her swan began to struggle. Atrates released him with a low curse and Cobbs flew into her arms, his hefty weight knocking her back.

  She dropped to her knees as she crushed the squawking cob to her chest. “Oh, you found him!”

  Atrates huffed overhead. “I never lost him. I tagged this fucker from day one.”

  “Tagged?” Cisnetta looked up.

  Atrates loomed over her, holding a smaller white swan.

  Well, fine. She’d ask about the white swan later.

  Shaking her head, she ran her hands over Cobbs, searching for a telltale tag on his wing or a band around his leg. Nothing. “He’s not tagged.”

  “Microchipped.”

  She knew what that was, a device that the Otar could insert under the skin. “You microchipped my pet?”

  There must have been something in her tone, because Atrates took a small step back. “Of course. I always know where he is.” Then he mumbled, “Vicious git.”

  “You microchipped my pet,” Cisnetta batted her attention between a ruffled but unsinged Cobbs, and the adorably fidgeting man who stood over her, “and saved his life!”

  Atrates exhaled a shaky breath. “That’s not quite—”

  She rose to her feet and walked over to him, gazing up at him in gratitude. “Oh, thank you, Atrates! How thoughtful.”

  He frowned down at her. “You think it was thoughtful?”

  “Of course it was thoughtful.” She gave Cobbs a squeeze, reassuring herself that he was truly there. “Atrates, I don’t think anyone has ever done anything so wonderful for me!”

  All around them, the Otar moved about the field. The licking reflection of orange flames danced across their black armatura battlesuits. It was an incredibly rare sight, to see the Otar gathered in such numbers outside of OMC, yet none stole her attention from the beautiful man before her.

  Fire didn’t dance on his skin, but hesitation and guarded hopefulness shone in his eyes.

  He needed reassurance, didn’t he?

  The squawking of the white swan broke the tension.

  Cobbs flailed in her arms, forcing her to release him. He wobbled about Atrates’s feet, grumbling and nipping at Atrates’s arm that had remained tucked about the white swan.

  “Fine, you ruddy cutlet, take her.” Atrates gently placed the white swan down.

  Cisnetta watched, amazed, as Cobbs cuddled up to her. “You got me another swan?”

  “What?” Atrates shot back, grumpy as always. “I got the pen for Cobbs.”

  Cisnetta stood a moment, as her heart tumbled over. “You got a swan for my swan?”

  Atrates flicked his hand at the entwined swans. “I got him a distraction.”

  Her heart swelled as she looked up at Atrates in wonder. “You got Cobbs a mate!”

  Atrates grumbled. “I got him out of the way.”

  Oh, he could have removed Cobbs in a variety of ways, most of which involved the cook and the kitchen. Cisnetta knew Cobbs had bonded to her and had become overly possessive of her. Both her swan and—well, she supposed Atrates qualified as her current lover didn’t rub along together well. They rubbed each other raw.

  She reached for Atrates, cupping his cheek and feeling the grit on his skin from being out in the burning field and amongst the ash. “You’re courting me through my swan.”

  “Ciss,” he growled at her with endearing frustration as he wrapped his arms around her. “It’s just a damn bird.”

  “He’s important to me.”

  Atrates looked away from her. “Yes. I know.”

  “So are you, Atrates.” She gently guided him to look at her again. “You mean the world to me.”

  He squeezed her, but she felt his arms trembling and knew that he restrained his true strength. “My world is a fucking mess, Ciss. It’s filled with ridicule, scorn, and never a kind welcome.”

  She shrugged. “The world is full of arses. I’ve spent my whole life being looked down upon for things that happened to me, rather than for things that I had done.”

  “Wasn’t talking about other people being arses, Ciss. I’m talking about me being an arse.”

  Oh, well then. At least he was honest with himself.

  “I’m the damn cob,” he grumbled.

  “What now?”

  “I’m Cobbs. He’s an ill-mannered, undignified brawler.” Atrates huffed. “Even you think that of me. When you told your tale about finding Cobbs—”

  Of all the things to get bloody ass-backwards.

  “No, Atrates!” She went to step back, but he held her tightly in his arms. “Me! I’m Cobbs. They tried to snuff me out, but I’m still here.”

  “If anyone tries to hurt you, Ciss,” he said ferociously, “they’ve got to go through me first.”

  God, he could be such a darling. “I know, Atrates. I know.”

  “I
’ve got an ugliness to my character. I’m vicious, spiteful, untrusting—”

  She rose onto her toes and kissed him. She would not change his view overnight, but there was no reason to delay starting her efforts. To show Atrates that he was loved because he was lovable.

  He gave her a confounded look. “Cisnetta?”

  She warmed her gaze with intensity and injected her tone with sincerity. “I love you, Atrates.”

  “Love me?” The poor man looked frightened.

  “I love you.” She held his gaze, making sure he heard it all. “You’re crass and defensive, but you’re also determined and honorable. I love you because you’re doing your best.”

  His confusion persisted as he frowned. “I don’t deserve you, Cisnetta.”

  His reply weighed on her heart, but she could bear it. Again, he would not change overnight. But in time, he would understand that he didn’t have to deserve her; he only had to accept her.

  “But will you take me anyway, Atrates?”

  With a possessive growl, he kissed her. He devoured her lips as he crushed her to his chest.

  As desire began to warm her belly, she admitted that Atrates passionately taking her offer, rather than blandly accepting it, tantalized her.

  Why, look at her! She was already enchanted by how the Otar engaged in an exchange.

  Chapter 12

  Atrates walked briskly down the hall, scrubbing his damp hair with a towel, determined to slide back into bed with Cisnetta posthaste.

  As he’d been cleaning himself up in the remodeled Otaric-style bathroom, he’d stared in the mirror a moment and taken in his appearance. The dark soot and ash that had almost been indistinguishable on his skin were gone. His clothes, pungent with smoke, had been discarded. Yet his reflection had remained unchanged to his eyes. Matte black skin. Magone-blue eyes. Shoulders and chest stacked with muscle that came to him naturally, rather than Trone who trained hard for his physique.

  The Otar had grafted all the hybrids, a good five dozen men and women, to be distinctive amongst the Mayreni. To stand apart like swans at a duck pond. He used to resent their tampering. Their deliberate or perhaps misunderstood assumption that these features would ease the way of the hybrids amongst the natives.

  But now he embraced his strange nature. He would sincerely look an Otaric geneticist in the eye and express his gratitude. Because he was other, he had the unbelievable fortune of meeting a woman who was other as well. They’d met on the edges as loners. They had been set apart and miraculously came together.

  Because Cisnetta accepted his faults, she gave him a reason to bloody try. He wasn’t referring to the bon ton-weighed trivialities—the status of his birth or his physical appearance—but that she embraced his damaged character. She didn’t fantasize about the perfect man that he could be, but fell in love with a man who refused to be the worst of himself each and every day.

  Although she said that she neither demanded nor expected him to change, she did spark a difference in him. Yearning now bloomed in his chest, making him eager and hopeful. And right now, he eagerly hoped that he would find her in bed, waiting to receive him with open arms.

  As he strode down the corridor, noting that Trone had set Cisnetta up in the former duchess’s suite, he saw a man waiting outside the door.

  Trone glanced up from his farsimi, the device’s light illuminating his face, as he smiled at him. The man was dressed as he always was. Pressed pants and shirt. Polished shoes. Not a hair out of place.

  For all the fucks. It was four in the bloody morning.

  “Atty!” his brother called out.

  Of course Trone would be booming, in the middle of the night, immediately after the entire household had eventually settled from a security breach.

  Atrates swore under his breath as he snagged his brother’s elbow and hauled him away from Cisnetta’s door. “Bloody smother yourself, Trone.”

  God, Cisnetta had been flagging when he’d eventually gotten her to bed down the swans in the study. He then tucked her into bed, and would have joined her right after, if he hadn’t seen how his sooty hands transferred black fingerprints to the linens.

  “Speaking of smothering,” Trone said as Atrates dragged him toward the stairs, “the duke is dead.”

  He halted and rounded on his brother. “What did you—”

  Trone snorted. “The old bastard belched his last breath yesterday, then emptied his bowels. Trust me, you missed nothing but watching his solicitor toss up his accounts on the fine Otaric carpet.”

  His brother’s irreverent announcement overtook him, leaving him floating like drifting in the zero-g environment of the Otar Ark.

  Finally. Fucking finally.

  He was a callous soul, though, to muster up no sorrow. Only relief and echoes of anger thrummed within him because he’d never gotten a chance to pay the duke in kind. Because he would never get to strike a blow that would reverberate through the duke’s lifetime.

  Trone tsked. “Come, Atty. Let’s not make a scene in the hall.”

  His brother, in a solemn reversal of roles, hauled Atrates along, ushering him down the steps and into the study.

  Cobbs, who was snuggled close to his mate in a crate filled with blankets, simply raised his head and then settled back down.

  Well, it seemed that he and the demon fowl had reached an accord.

  Thank-fucking-finally for that as well.

  If only the same could be said for he and his brother, the new Duke of Andrake.

  Trone turned to face him, his hands open before him like a Mayreni who wanted to convey sincerity. “You know, he used to take me aside and say, ‘Better a swapling than an abomination.’”

  Atrates shook his head as he gaped. “What?”

  Trone cocked a brow and shrugged. “Huh. I thought you always knew.”

  “Knew what, Trone?”

  “He wasn’t my father.”

  Atrates found himself reeling. Lack of sleep and lack of grief—and still pining for Cisnetta—left him unprepared for yet another continental shifting of his world.

  “You know, once you were in the duchess’s womb—well, the former first duchess’s womb—and the contracts with the Otar were signed, he divorced her. Married his pregnant mistress.”

  Atrates, in stunned silence, absorbed Trone’s brief retelling of that bon ton rousing scandal. When it all started, he hadn’t yet been born, but the ripples of the duke’s maliciousness continued to impact him like an earthquake’s aftershocks. The duke had followed the Otars’ contract to the letter, which meant that the dukedom had received preferential installment of advanced Otaric tech. But, by divorcing his duchess, he’d followed the old social precept, that a child born outside of wedlock could not inherit.

  The bastard duke had gotten to have his cake and eat it too.

  Trone must have misread Atrates disgusted look, because his brother snorted and gestured to himself. “Look at me, Atty. I’m three hands taller and a dozen stones heavier than that fucking codger ever was, even in his prime. I’m labor stock born in a bed of silk rather than hay. And he never let me forget it.” Trone dropped his gaze, then rounded his shoulders, deliberately bulging his muscles to strain the seams of his fine, silken shirt. “So I never let him forget it, either.”

  Ah, Trone’s physique. His brother transformed himself into a mountainous brute who was the dichotomic epitome of the duke. Like Atrates, Trone was the antithesis of the perfect dukeling.

  As Atrates absorbed this new perspective of his brother, a dark thought whispered to him. Trone was claiming that everything he did was spiteful revenge against the duke.

  He focused on his brother’s face, wanting to catch a flicker of Trone’s unguarded response. “And Naosim? Was he a thumbing as well?”

  Within a tumultuous second, Atrates had his answer. Trone’s expression changed from shock, to comprehension, to brutally possessive outrage.

  Atrates had known about Naosim from day one, when Trone brought the m
edical student home under the pretense of hosting a classmate over holiday. Because of Atrates’s Otaric senses, he could smell them on one another. And since Naosim’s scent had never been tinged with fear around Trone, Atrates knew it was consensual.

  What a shame, way back then, he hadn’t recognized true love.

  With a harsh exhale, Trone shook his head, wiping away his reactions. Then he gave Atrates a pitying look. Trone’s unmasked regret had Atrates wanting to bolt from the room.

  “Fuck, Atty,” Trone said in sympathy. “Sometimes I forgot that harsh bastard truly was one of your fathers.”

  The comparison whipped Atrates like the lick of a switch, but he stood and bore it. Hell, he deserved the reminder. Trone proclaimed his love for Naosim though his dedication and sacrifice. His brother had spent the past decade and a half playing an asinine sycophant to shield his lover from the duke’s wrath.

  “I’ve always known about you and Naosim,” Atrates said as gently as he could, by way of an apology.

  Trone simply snorted and shook his head. “Of course, you did. You were rarely seen nor heard, yet you managed to see and hear everything. Didn’t you, Atty?”

  Then his brother made a disgusted sound and gestured with his arm, wiping away his biting retort. “That’s bloody unfair of me. You’d none of the advantages, Atty. The duke made sure of it.”

  The duke, being a fiendish mastermind, had successfully hidden Trone’s parentage well. In regards to his brother’s goings-on, though, Atrates had observed more than Trone assumed.

  “But you and Valment did your best to make up for those disadvantages. Didn’t you?”

  Trone shot him a surprised look. “What, now?”

  “You and Valment are not as sneaky as you think. I found that comms case in your rooms ages ago, when we were children.”

  Atrates knew Trone used that black case to communicate with Valment, but he would not share the bit about him sobbing over that comms case when he crushingly realized that it had been keyed to Trone’s biosignature alone.

  He waited until recognition bloomed on Trone’s face. With a nod, his brother indicated that he knew exactly what Atrates was referring to: the black case that held a contraband Otaric comms. A case that only a handpicked number of Mayreni received after thorough screening and constant random security checks.