Star Crossed

by Heather Guerre

  He didn’t doubt that she would. But if she was living on his home planet—Varan, the largest moon orbiting the gas giant Scaevos—then she could learn all she wanted about the Ljark. He would just be careful about bringing her round to any friends with Ljarken mates.

  “So I suppose Scaevens are patrilineal,” Lyra mused.

  “We are.” He arched one eyebrow. “Are you a pilot or a cultural researcher?”

  “Definitely a pilot. Sofie’s the cultural guru. She’s studying Intergalactic Affairs at university. She wants to work as an assimilator on first-contact missions. I’d rather she didn’t. First contact can be dicey.”

  “You have experience?”

  “Have you heard of the Kifs?”

  “Vicious, barely-sentient little murderers.”

  “Exactly. Meeting those bastards is how I got this.”

  He glanced down as she traced a finger over the long pink scar that ran from her left hip and down the inside of her thigh.

  “That could have killed you,” he observed, overcome by a wash of cold dread.

  “It nearly did. Sofie was aboardship, orbiting off-planet while I shuttled the researchers down for surface contact. The little monsters were waiting for us. Set up an ambush. When we fought the last of them off and made it back up to the ship, Sofie saw them carrying me to the medbay, drenched in blood. I thought it’d traumatize her. I thought I’d have to give up flying, and find some planetside job where she could live a quiet, normal life.”

  “Did you?”

  Lyra laughed. “Sofie was not so much frightened, as she was thrilled to her very bones. She thought I was the most impressive human in the galaxy, and she started aggressively petitioning to be brought down for any and all surface contacts.” Lyra laughed again, softly, remembering. “She was only eleven.”

  Asier lay still. His chest constricted until he almost couldn’t breathe. He needed Lyra. Needed her. More than air, more than food, more than his own heart. And yet… the thought of tearing her away from her life, from her family, gutted him.

  He thought of his mother—of the quiet misery with which she’d lived until she couldn’t take it anymore. He couldn’t bear to see the same thing happen to Lyra. He couldn’t take this bright, sharp, kind, passionate creature and snuff her out like a flame.

  What’s already done was out of his hands. But he resolved not to make love to her again. He’d had her tenderly, passionately, and fully present. That would have to be enough. If she was pregnant, then he’d do what had to be done—and if she could ever forgive him, then maybe he would know her body again. But if she wasn’t pregnant… he’d have to let her go.

  The pressure behind his eyes swelled to an unbearable level. If he opened them now, they’d glow like electron lamps.

  He hoped, desperately, that Lyra was pregnant. And he hoped that she wasn’t.

  And he tried to breathe.

  Because of the Scaeven ship’s ability to project a temporary bridge, Lyra and Asier had only a few days to be together before she had to say goodbye to him forever. She didn’t want to waste a single moment.

  In Asier’s company, in his arms, she felt better than she ever had. She felt lighter, safer, stronger. She felt cared-for in a way that was completely foreign. She was used to being the caretaker, the guardian, the planner. She was used to watching out for herself, and those in her care, relying on nobody. She’d never met someone that she trusted enough give over control.

  But Asier was different. She didn’t need to hover in his control cabin, checking coordinates and rates. She didn’t need to inspect the engine room. She didn’t need to walk a circuit of the ship before going to sleep. She didn’t need to ask for anything from him—he responded to her slightest tells. She didn’t need to enforce the strict boundaries she’d always observed with men in the past. She slept in his arms, and enjoyed the deepest, most peaceful rest she’d ever had.

  She woke in his arms, and instead of sliding out of bed and dressing, she twisted to face him, and curled into his big, hard, warm body.

  He kissed her hair.

  “How long til dock?” she asked. She didn’t want to know.

  “Thirty-five zeitraums.”

  Less than nine days. Lyra closed her eyes for a second. “I don’t want to leave you, Asier.”

  His arms tightened around her in a crushing embrace. “I don’t want you to leave.”

  “But I can’t abandon my sister. I’m her only family. She’s mine.” She pressed her face into the curve of his shoulder. A hot tear escaped her screwed-shut eyes. It slid down her cheek and onto his iron skin.

  “Lyra?” Asier pulled back. Lyra kept her eyes shut tight. She couldn’t look at him while she wept like a child. He said nothing, and only pulled her back into his arms.

  “If things were different…” she said raggedly.

  “They’re not.”

  But she had to say it. She had to at least tell him how she felt. So that when they parted ways, there would be nothing unsaid, undone between them. “If things were different, I would want to settle with you.”

  Settlement—an old-fashioned human ritual that was rarely observed among pair-bonded couples anymore. It was an oath of eternity. It was a solemn promise. When you settled with a person, you foreswore all others, and spent the rest of your life devoted to only that one lover.

  There was a word for it in the traders’ Creole, but Lyra wasn’t certain Asier would recognize it, having dealt little with humans. She blinked away her tears and looked up, searching his face.

  “Settle,” he said heavily. “It’s a human mate bond?”

  She nodded.

  “Ach, Lyra.” He dropped his head until his forehead touched hers. He spoke again, in his native language. It was a long string of deep, growling words, made heavy with the depth of emotion behind them.

  She didn’t need to speak his language. She understood. When his impassioned speech died away into fraught silence, she shifted up and kissed him. She wrapped her arms around his neck and put every bit of her heart into that kiss. She let her body say the things that words failed to convey.

  But when she worked her way down his broad torso to take him into her body, he stopped her.

  He gritted something out in his own language, breathing hard. “I—Lyra, I can’t do this to you.”

  “We only have a little time left together,” she said softly.

  He held fast to her hips, keeping her from wriggling her way down to the urgent thrust of his erection.

  “If you’re pregnant, I can’t let you return to human territory.”

  “Asier. There’s no way for me to get pregnant. The implant stops—”

  “Its not enough. The biological process of Scaeven insemination isn’t the same as human—”

  Lyra pressed her fingertips gently to his lips. He wouldn’t listen to her, so she wouldn’t bother trying to explain. “I don’t care.”

  His beautiful golden eyes searched hers. His thick silver brows drew together. “You’d have to give up your entire world.” His lips moved beneath her fingers. “You’d never see your home again. You’d never see your sister.”

  The last gave her pause. But she knew what she was doing. “I’m willing to take the risk,” she said softly. Because there was no risk. The implant essentially rendered her sterile until she chose to have it removed.

  Asier stared at her, still uncertain, still anguished.

  “You said Scaeven conception is rare.”

  “With other species. But humans are very fertile.”

  I’m not, she thought. Not with the implant.

  Lyra leaned forward and kissed him. “I don’t want to leave you, Asier. And I don’t want to give up my family. So let’s let fate decide which one it will be.”

  “Lyra…”

  She kissed him again. His big body remained rigid beneath hers. He was fighting himself, fighting the pull between them. But this time, it wasn’t toxin or pheromones. It was his conscience. />
  “Please, Asier. We only have a little time left together.” She pressed her palm over his heart.

  His resistance melted beneath the touch of her hand. His grasp eased on her hips, and his hands slid reverently over her body. She leaned down to meet his kiss. They moved together slowly, softly. He handled her as gently as spun sugar, and when he entered her body, it was with the slowest, most sensuous care. They touched and tasted and savored one another, their joined bodies sliding together into sedate ecstasy.

  They spent the next days lost in each other. Lyra explored every inch of his body, mapping him, memorizing him. She took every moment of their time together and locked it deep in her mind—in her heart—so that in the future, on lonely nights, she could pull out those memories and savor them. So that she could relive her time with him as often and as vividly as she needed. And so that he would remember her, long, long after they parted ways.

  He’d tried. He’d tried to be honorable. He’d tried to the do the right thing. But it turned out he didn’t have half the integrity he’d once believed of himself. In all his time as an Enforcer, tracking down predators and meting out justice, Asier had considered himself above them. He’d never set a toe out of line, never even been tempted to break the laws that protected the rest of the universe from the instinctive cruelty of the Scaevens’ conquering nature.

  But when it came down to it, he was as low as the rest of them.

  He told himself that he’d tried. He’d tried to explain the circumstances to her, tried to warn her. He’d laid out the truth, and she’d accepted the risk.

  But he’d known she hadn’t really believed she was at risk. And he hadn’t tried very hard to convince her.

  And now he couldn’t stop. He couldn’t give up the pleasure of her body, and he couldn’t give up the possibility of keeping her.

  He knew he was destroying the goodness between them, and he couldn’t stop himself.

  Every time he left her—which was rare—he went to the medbay to examine the bioscans.

  With only twenty zeitraums left until they docked—less than five days by Lyra’s circadian cycle—Asier discovered the glitch in the ship’s biosystem. It was reading Lyra’s body as male. The scans highlighted excessive estrogen markers and extremely low androgens, but couldn’t assess her for pregnancy.

  Whether it was a flaw in the ship’s system, or a flaw in the original programming, Asier didn’t have the skillset to know. He knew Scaeven law inside and out, but tech programming was something he left to the experts.

  None of that mattered. What mattered, was that Lyra could very well be pregnant, and he had no way of knowing. The only way to be certain would be to get her to a health facility where she could be assessed by experts.

  It meant he couldn’t take her to the merchant station. He had to take her to Varan. He had to take her home.

  He went to the control cabin, and he plotted a new course.

  Chapter Thirteen

  With only four days left until they docked, Asier had finally succumbed to true sleep. She’d forgotten to ask him how often Scaevens slept—or for how long. She lay beside him for a long time, listening to his heartbeat through his ribs, feeling the rise and fall of his broad chest.

  After an hour or so, she couldn’t lay still any longer. She went to the lav and took an air shower—stripping away sweat and oil and other bodily emissions. When she returned to Asier’s berth, he was still asleep. She took one of his shirts from the closet and pulled it over her head. It dwarfed her. She gathered the extra material at the waist and knotted it so that she wouldn’t feel like she was swimming.

  She went to the medbay and poked her head into the open quarantine cell. All the remnants of her stay there were gone. The medbots had retreated back into the wall, the bed was smooth and clean and ready for another occupant. She looked up and glanced at the vent she’d noticed during her confinement in the cell. Without an occupant in the quarantine cell, it was inert.

  She got another nutritional packet from the dispensary in the medbay, tore it open, and squeezed an unappetizing gob into her mouth. She meandered back into the passageway, and made her way to the control cabin. She took a seat in the pilot’s chair, and gazed out at the infinite expanse of space.

  After some time, her gaze fell down to the instrument panel. The numbers were all Crurian, so reading them didn’t come naturally. For each display, she had to run a calculation in her mind.

  The other text was completely alien to her. She’d never seen such a writing system. In fact, she couldn’t even be certain it was a writing system. The symbols were runic in form, but for all she knew, they could be some sort of surface level circuitry. Except that she’d seen similar figures when she’d looked through Asier’s scope.

  She didn’t need to read them, though. Asier had explained the function of each display, and her mind had locked each one down in memory. Here was the flight trajectory. This one was speed. That one tracked x-orientation, y-orientation, and z-orientation in relation to an anchor point. And there, just next to it, were the coordinates of their destination.

  Lyra glanced away from the panel, and then immediately looked back. Those coordinates weren’t right. When they’d lifted off from Kiri, Asier had punched in different coordinates. Had the ship adjusted them for some reason? Had Asier changed them? Why hadn’t he told her?

  She pushed up from the chair and made her way back to Asier’s berth. His eyes were still closed, his lips softly parted. The tip of one fang gleamed in the dim light of his berth.

  She laid a hand on his arm. “Asier,” she said gently. “Something’s wrong.”

  He bolted awake, surging up before his eyes had even opened. He grabbed Lyra and shoved her behind his big body, so that he stood between her and the doorway. “What is it?” He demanded, dropping into a fighting stance.

  “No, relax,” she said quickly, wrapping her arms around him from behind. His body relaxed against hers. “It’s just that the flightpath’s coordinates are off.”

  He turned once again to steel beneath her touch, holding himself so rigidly he could have truly been a statue.

  “Asier?”

  “I’ve reset the coordinates for my home planet.” His voice was a deep growl. She felt it rumbling against her chest.

  Fighting a flash of paranoid suspicion, Lyra pulled away from him. “I thought we were headed for a Ravanoth merchant station.”

  He turned to face her. He had the same bleak expression on his face as when he’d watched her through the glass of the quarantine cell. “Circumstances have changed,” he said tensely.

  Lyra felt a strange gulf widening between them. When she spoke, she heard her own voice from afar, as if it were someone else asking, “How am I supposed to get back to human territory?”

  Asier regarded her solemnly. Lyra had the sensation of that invisible gulf widening even further. Beneath the silver of his beard, Asier’s great iron jaw clenched. “You’re not.”

  “What?”

  Asier didn’t look away from her, his golden eyes hollow. “You may be carrying my child.”

  Lyra shook her head, letting out a shaky sigh of relief. “No, I’m definitely not. How many times do I have to tell you that I have an implant. It prevents—”

  “It prevents the mechanisms of human reproduction. Not Scaeven.”

  “Well, you see,” Lyra said slowly, with pointed patience. “I happen to be a human. And so without my biological participation, there’s no way I’m pregnant.”

  “Scaeven semen contains more than just genetic information. There is a viral agent. It alters your body in ways that make you compatible for conception.”

  Lyra’s hand fell nervously to her stomach. She didn’t feel any different—except for a lingering soreness from the last few days’ marathon.

  “Asier. Please. I have a sister. I have to get back to her.”

  Asier watched her, bleakness settling heavily into his features. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”
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br />   She stared at him, incredulous. She refused to believe he would do this to her. Eventually, he’d come to his senses.

  She swallowed back the outrage and the arguments. “So, if I’m not pregnant? Then what?”

  Asier’s expression shifted, and Lyra realized he hadn’t thought beyond the possibility of a pregnancy. He wanted her to be pregnant.

  She retreated until she bumped into the bed. Asier watched her, grimly resigned. There was nowhere to go. She was trapped on this ship with him. Trapped in his berth. She climbed onto the bed, and turned her back on him.

  He left her and went to the control cabin. She didn’t want to speak to him, or to see him. He understood. He wasn’t much impressed with himself, either. But if she had his child inside of her—and the odds were good that she did, humans were always in estrus—there was no way he could let her go.

  He’d gotten what he wanted—her—but at what cost? By taking her hostage, he would kill any affection she’d ever felt for him. He might get a son by her, he might keep her physically in his company, but he might never again have her companionship.

  He slumped into the pilot’s chair and stared out at the blur of advancing space. There was little for him to do. He’d contacted the government, informed them of Lyra’s arrival, and the circumstances.

  There’d be a tribunal, but so long as she was pregnant, he’d be absolved of all charges. If she wasn’t pregnant, then he could only hope that the extenuating circumstances would shield him from full prosecution. He hadn’t entered human territory. He hadn’t purposely abducted her. He’d been acting from the start with only honorable intentions…mostly.

  He heard a small noise and turned to find Lyra standing in the passageway just outside the control cabin. They regarded each other without speaking. Her face was a blank mask, but something uncertain glimmered behind her eyes.

  “Will you unseal one of the other berths for me?” She asked quietly.

  Asier’s heart clenched. “Of course.”