by V. K. Ludwig
Disgust rolled up my spine. “Do not touch me.”
“Huh… a Vetusian who prefers the company of other males. How lucky.”
I grabbed the nub of her horn and shoved her away from me, with the other hand, I pulled an IC from my pocket and dangled it right in front of her. “I’m bonded to my mate. And now you will tell me where he is. If you bring me to him, you shall receive another.”
She let go of me and laughed. “Whoever is asking for him surely has more to offer than two IC’s. I’ll let you fuck me from behind and pull my tail for that, but that’s about it.”
My ears pricked at the guards closing in on us, approaching slowly, trying to read the situation.
“How much?” I snarled. “How much for you to bring me to him right now?”
“Twenty, and I’ll suck your kerjke while you speak to him.”
I rummaged through my pocket and shoved the credits into her hand. “That was thirty for you to take me to him right now and not address or touch me ever again.”
She pulled her nub from my clasp and reapplied a bought smile, then gestured the guards to back up with a wave of her hand.
With nothing else spoken, I followed her behind the bar and along a narrow hallway. It twisted and parted several times until we eventually stepped into one of the private backrooms.
Dim light painted prostitutes in hues of smoky purple and dark red, their bare skin glowing as they danced on cubical pedestals. Not that anybody paid them any attention. Three Vetusian males sat at a table at the center of the room and stacked holographic chips.
“The day the honorable Torin da taigh L’naghal steps into a brothel must be a desperate one,” Zavis said, raking his dark strands out of his face. “Perhaps you have parted with your fortune, and now you come to claim the credits placed on my head?”
“My fortune is well, thank you for your concern.” I walked around the table and sat down on the upholstered bench behind him. “I require your help.”
“Impossible!” He let out a snort, crossed his legs on the table, and balanced on the hind legs of his chair. “What happened, golden child? You’ve always been so… sensible. So much better than the fucking decrepit rest of us. But something must have spun out of control if you’re desperate enough to seek help from a wanted cropmate.”
“Tell them to get out.”
“I don’t think so.” He tossed another chip on the pile, giving a wink to the Vetusian across. “Do you remember how they told us gambling is beneath our standing? As it turns out, it’s now the only fucking thing keeping me alive. I have assassins to pay who show up here trying to finish me off. I keep more souldust on me than the dealers, handing it out like candy to all the sgu’dal’s trying to make quick credits off me.” He slapped his hand onto the table with a chuckle. “I burn through that stuff so quickly; I never even get a chance to snort it myself.”
His deep laugh vibrated through my bones, making everyone around him chime in. Everyone but me.
“You will return with me to Earth,” I said. “I called in a public assembly for tomorrow, demanding a vote to abandon the current function of the strati so we may reconstruct it in a way that serves our changed circumstances.”
“Oh, so you’re not seeking my help, you’re ordering it? I might be a wanted Vetusian, but you still don’t outrank me.”
I tapped my boot against his chair leg.
His arms flailed; his legs kicked.
Crash!
The chair shattered into pieces underneath his weight.
But he only laughed and rolled himself onto all fours.
“Out!” He pulled himself up by the table, then grabbed underneath the edge and tossed it across the room, leaving the other two players wide-eyed. “You two fucking get out while I talk business with my cropmate here.”
Everybody scurried away, but his next shout stopped all those slender limbs mid-air. “You two females stay. My friend here doesn’t believe in interspecies fun. Show him what he’s missing out on.”
I did not like where this was going at all.
“I took a mate,” I said. “And she’s carrying my child.”
“So I’ve heard.”
Zavis walked to one of the shelves lining the wall and popped the cork from a bottle. He poured two glasses of dark-orange liquid. One in each hand, he walked back over and sat beside me.
“Congratulations.” He handed me a glass, gulping his down before my fingers touched mine. “Now pray to the Three Suns that you won’t accidentally kill her.” He shrugged. “Or purposely. Haha!”
He smashed his glass against the wall across and waved a Jal’zar female over. “Sit on my lap, baby. Let’s make my friend here uncomfortable.”
The female hissed but complied, sitting on his lap and grinding herself against him. Zavis grabbed a fistful of her hair and peeled her lips over her teeth with his other hand.
“See this?” he asked. “I had them filed down three times, and still, I cannot get this female to suck my dick without trying to bite me.”
“You’re drunk.”
He slammed his palm against the female’s chest, making her roll over the ground before he swung his arms up. “Of course I’m drunk. This is the life of a male wanted for murder. Are you not jealous? I drink and I fuck. I fuck and I drink. And sometimes, I take a shit in between.”
No reaction came from the other female, which continued dancing, telling me they were accustomed to this kind of behavior from Zavis.
I got up and reached my hand out to the female, helping her back onto her feet. In Jal’zar fashion, she hissed, snarled, then spit on my boot and walked away.
“War slaves make poor whores,” Zavis mumbled. “Does your mate try to bite your dick as well?”
“My mate is neither a slave nor a whore.”
“Are you saying she came to you willingly? Received you with her legs spread, revealing that mating cleft I’ve heard so much about?” He looked me up and down, the male himself as insolent as ever. “Rumors are telling me you had over one million human casualties during phase one. Males, females… children. Never would I have voted in favor of this.”
“You had an opportunity to vote against it.”
“I had the opportunity to be arrested, tried, and executed.” He ripped the glass from my hands and gulped that one down as well. It shattered against the wall but a breath later. “I feel pity for the humans, but not enough to walk into my own death. And yet you’re here, asking me to sacrifice myself for something that didn’t benefit me? Who will wail for me once they disable my brain?”
“I’ll wail for you, Zavis,” the other Jal’zar female cooed.
“Yes, you will,” he said and got up, dragging his tongue over her hip bone while he rubbed his palm over her sex. “And I know exactly which hole you’ll be wailing from when I’m no longer around to comfort it.”
He slapped her rear with a grin. When he walked back over to me, he held his fingers underneath my nose, the stench of Jal’zar breeding fluid nauseating me. “Tell me what it feels like to mate your bonded female.”
“I will tell you no such thing.”
“Hmm…” He grabbed a chair and sat down across from me. “And here I thought you wanted something of me.”
I didn’t want to reveal such personal details, but one glimpse of that tilted sneer on his mouth, and I knew I was running out of options. Fast.
Zavis had no reason to help me. He hadn’t had any involvement in Empire business for at least a decade. But how to explain light to someone who had only known darkness?
“Even before the profiling confirmed it, I felt connected to Eden beyond anything that we can measure,” I said, my voice growing heavier at each additional word. “I share in her joy as much as I share in her pain. There are millions of females on Earth, and yet I gladly pledge my fealty only to her. I have never known a greater pleasure than when we mate, except for the time she rests in my arms after. When the universe is quiet, and all that remains is the
gentle hum of our spirits vibrating in unison. It’s not the mating cleft that makes them so special, or their ability to avoid our extinction. They’re beautiful, fascinating beings.”
Zavis’ gaze went adrift on the wall behind me and remained unfocused for an overlong moment. Then he shook his head and clicked his tongue, rubbing his hand over his crotch. “Come on, tell me more about your female mate.”
“Fucking pig!” I jumped up and grabbed his throat, only to find him laughing from a quickly reddening face, arms held up.
“Still no humor in you, is there?” He brushed my fingers off his neck, letting out a few more chuckles before he turned earnest once more. “The other Wardens must be very unhappy about her carrying your child.”
“Very.”
“Ah, Torin… you and I are a dying breed.” He ran a hand through his hair, resting it atop his head. “Our houses always shared the power and burden of ruling. Now that we’re no more, corruption is quickly spreading across planets, making filth grow from the soils across galaxies. It’s everywhere, and I’m sitting right at the center of it.”
“If you don’t cast your rightful vote in place of Mares’, Garrison Earth will fail in four years from now at the latest.” That next breath of mine hitched somewhere in my chest, bringing back a familiar ache. “And I’ll lose my mate. My children. Because I won’t be able to protect them from what was wrong the moment we stepped onto their planet. All my life I thought I knew darkness… but not one like this.”
“Darkness…” he repeated with a scoff. “So you’re asking me to come to Earth with you. Cast my vote. Then kneel before the Wardens to be arrested? They will kill me, Torin. And one day they will set you up like they have with me. And then they’ll kill you too.”
“One day, perhaps. But not anytime soon.”
For an eternity, nothing happened. Zavis only sat there, eyes gleaming a grayish-blue framed by regal features, his body unmoving. I counted each beat of my heart. Each pulse in my veins. Until he said it.
“I will vote.” A curt nod accentuated his words. “No reason to hold on to a life worth shit. But how are you going to ensure they won’t arrest me before?”
“You’ll travel in a trading vessel with me as incoming cargo, which we currently don’t search. I’ll hide you at the Imperial Assembly an hour before the vote, and make sure the first brigade is guarding the building. They’re loyal to me and will stand down if I ask them to.”
“And the Warden's personal guards?”
“We allow nobody else inside the chamber but us Wardens. By the time they called in their guards, you’ll have completed the DNA scan to cast your vote.” I leaned over, having my eyes lock with his. “If I can, then I’ll do everything in my power to return you to Odheim. Do you still have your nano armor?”
“I sold all my nanites to pay for… necessities.”
“An armor pad then,” I said. “I will equip you with one after you cast your vote, helping you to escape unharmed.”
“If not…” He tapped two fingers against his temple. “That’ll make you the only survivor of our cursed crop. What is it about you that made you so different from the rest of us?”
“Did you kill him? Did you kill the healer that day almost a decade ago?”
He wet his lips, a twitch running along his temples. “So… incoming cargo isn’t currently searched, huh? Much to Mares’ benefit, I assume?”
“Much to his benefit, yes.”
And who would have thought that lack of budget would once work in my favor?
Chapter 32
Eden
Melek stood in the door of the cabin, oblivious to how the snow blew in around his feet. “She told you three times she knows how to use the synthesizer.”
“Stop rushing me.” I slipped into my shoes and grabbed my coat, which lay draped over the counter next to Anna. “Diapers are in the bathroom. Make sure his neuroplate doesn’t get wet or dirty.”
She tugged on Gabriel’s romper and lifted a brow. “If all else fails, I’ll just refer to the two pages of instructions you left by the coffeemaker. Just go!”
“Right.”
I followed Melek into the freezing cold, the fat snowflakes quickly camouflaging the outline of his white uniform. We stomped through the knee-high snow over to the skycar. The tip of my nose tingled the moment I slipped inside, blasting heat wafting around us.
Melek brushed the snow off his sweater. “Imperial Assembly. Fast!”
“Yes, good sir.”
The skycar lifted high over our neighborhood, and the buildings soon disappeared behind a curtain of white flurry.
“Officer Kael is outside assembly,” he said. “From what he told me, Commander Torin called in the vote to change the current structure of the strati.”
My heart elevated physically inside my chest right along with the vehicle.
“He said the Vetusian public is in pure chaos.”
Then it plummeted. “Why?”
“Many fear we won’t be able to survive another confrontation with the Jal’zar if we don’t replenish our forces quickly and adequately. We’ve only been at peace for three years now, and the political climate is still… tense.”
“Things were a lot simpler when I just sat in my room all day.” My sigh fogged the window, which squeaked the moment I wiped it with my sleeve. “But the Wardens still make the decision, right?”
“Uh-huh. It’s only public whenever it would bring a major change to the Empire. The Wardens might be the ones voting, but there’s such a thing as public pressure. It doesn’t seem to be working in his favor, though. Many Vetusians are still unmatched since we’re so behind and have no reason to care about anything else but the immediate threat.”
Aside from the hum of the fusion panel, the cabin remained silent for a while. If Torin wanted to change the strati for me or because he’d realized it was wrong to rip toddlers from their families, I couldn’t say. Either way, I shouldn’t have kicked him out. This was my life now, and I had to stop pretending it wasn’t whenever things got tough.
He was a great dad, trying so hard to learn things he’d never been exposed to all his life. And I dare say he was a fantastic mate. Every single fiber in my body tingled, desperate to press themselves against him again.
“How’s the situation with Katy?”
Melek scrunched up his face, quickly bringing his thumb between his teeth to chomp down on it. “Not going to lie. It’s a race against time. I get you’ve got your own troubles, but I need you to ask him right away. They said they’d hold back until noon to hear from the Commander. After that, the department will match her to fucking D’gal.”
“You know him?”
“Well enough to say I don’t want my mate in his hands.” He turned his head, nail scratching over his teeth. “She’s my anam ghail, Eden. I’d be so good to her.”
I nodded, ignoring the way my stomach clenched at the unquestioned devotion he held in his eyes for a woman he’d never even met. Anam ghail. An ancient expression strong enough to guide an entire Empire that stretched over galaxies, all built into the acids of our genetic code.
The drive probably took less than twenty minutes, yet it seemed like an eternity later when the skycar finally lowered down. Below, an ocean of heads changed from blond to brown to black and everything in-between, the Vetusians standing shoulder to shoulder. They gaped at the massive holographic columns spearing from the ground, questions chiseled in their features.
Melek let his door retreat, the mumbles and bellows coming from outside, spiking my adrenaline. “You stay close to me, okay?”
I scooted over to his side and climbed out right behind, gluing myself to him. He shoved through the crowd of Vetusians rising all around me like a dense.
Although we were out in the open, the air quickly turned stagnant and depleted down at my height. Sweat mixed into it, along with those carbony traces of what Torin’s uniform smelled like after a long day.
At every other step, M
elek glanced over his shoulder, checking for me, then jutted his chin toward the stone stairs. The crowd frayed out from there. I clung to the handrail on my way up to the Imperial Assembly, a massive building where concave columns melted into the stone walls, the only window the dome-shaped glass structure crowning the rounded ziggurat.
Torin was somewhere behind that door, fighting my battles for me.
But no more. I took a strong step toward it. Reached my hand out for the handle.
“No humans.” The voice of the guard came with deep authority, immobilizing my muscles.
Panic rose from my throat.
I stared at him and how his eyes remained straight, his fingers swatting me off from underneath his crossed arms like a pesky insect. “Excuse me?”
Melek pointed at the door. “We need to speak to Commander Torin right away. This female here is his mate.”
The guard eyed Melek up and down, his pupils efficiently tracking everything a Vetusian uniform gave away: stratum, rank, standing.
He smacked his tongue, his eyes staring straight once more. “No humans. And most definitely no sgu’ dal of a rank two healer.”
I turned and stared at Melek, but his features held no solution. Only squinted eyes, each furrow between his brows running deep with concern and self-pity.
That panic clinging to my esophagus? It swelled upward, tingling along my tongue in nauseating bitterness. I needed to get into that building. Not only to help Melek but to be where I was supposed to be. Hell, was perhaps even fated to be. Next to Torin.
I ignored that mounting helplessness and how it wanted to penetrate me to the bone. I didn’t do helpless. Not in the past, and certainly not in this new life.
Slumped shoulders squared, I straightened my spine until my five feet seven reached all the way to the guard’s nipples. “My name is Eden da taigh L’naghal, and you will step aside and let me enter, along with my healer friend here.”
With the strength of my barked order, I forced his eyes to catch with mine. He stared at me. And while his gaze didn’t break, mine didn’t either.