by I. T. Lucas
She shook her head. “The way this child was conceived was not his fault. He is innocent, and he is mine. I’m not going to get rid of him.”
“It’s not a him yet. I’m not a doctor, but even I know that the fetus is the size of a bean at this stage. Don’t think of it as a child, and it won’t be as difficult to do.”
“I can’t, Richard.” She pulled her hand out of his and placed it on her belly. “You should leave. You can just walk out of here and disappear. Start a new life. Find someone else to love.”
The defeat in her eyes was killing him. Didn’t she know that he could never leave her, no matter what?
“I love you, and I’m not leaving without you. Do you still love me?”
“Of course, I do.”
“Then come with me. We will find a way to make it work.”
“How? I’m carrying what you think of as an abomination.”
“I don’t think that. Elton is a halfling, and he seems like a decent fellow.”
“What about everyone else? And where would we go? The Krall would hunt us down.”
“I’ve planned for everything. We are getting out of the Krall territories.”
Her eyes widened. “That’s insane. Do you know what they would do to my child out in the human world? They’d love to get their hands on a Krall, or even half a Krall. They would dissect him like a lab rat.”
“They wouldn’t know. Elton can pass for a human, and so will our son.”
48
Cilia
Our son.
Richard called her baby ‘our son.’
“Do you really mean it? You hate the Krall.”
“But I love you. They say that people’s characters are determined equally by their genetics and their upbringing. Our son will have half of your genetics, and all of our joined nurturing. That leaves a very small portion that’s Krall, and not all of it is bad. He will be stronger and faster than a human, and we will make sure that he retains none of the Krall coldness and cruelty. We will raise him to be compassionate and loving.”
Tears stinging the back of her eyes, Cilia threw her arms around Richard. “I love you so much.”
He held her to him tightly. “Does that mean you will come with me?”
“Yes, a thousand yeses.” She drew back. “But we will have to keep our son’s parentage a secret. No one can know that he is half Krall.”
“We will do our best, but it depends on how he will look. The fangs are not all that noticeable when they are retracted, but it will be difficult to hide the black-on-black eyes or the forked tongue. We might have to live in seclusion.”
Cilia’s heart squeezed painfully.
Richard was a people person. He wasn’t built for living as a recluse.
“I can’t ask you to do that for me.”
“You’re not asking, and I’m not doing this for you. I’m doing it for us. I love you, and I can’t imagine life without you.”
“But you would prefer that I abort him.”
“Not if that causes you anguish, which it obviously would. You’ve been through enough.” He lowered his head. “Not to mention that your capture was my fault. I screwed up. None of that would have happened to you if I didn’t send you with a written missive to our cell in Brivell. I should have made you memorize it.”
As his words sank in, bile rose in Cilia’s throat. Richard wasn’t doing this out of love for her. He was doing it out of guilt.
Leaving the comfort of his arm was heart-wrenchingly hard, but she wasn’t going to spend her life with a man who married her and adopted her son out of a misplaced sense of guilt.
“It was my fault, not yours, and you shouldn’t suffer for the rest of your life because you think that you owe me.”
His answer was to grip the back of her neck and smash his lips over hers.
Cilia didn’t resist, couldn’t even if she wanted to. She’d dreamt about kissing Richard every night, missing the closeness, the intimacy, and now that his lips were on hers, all she could do was open for him and moan into his mouth.
Her hands slid down his chest, stopping over the hard muscles that shielded his heart. It was thundering in his rib cage as loudly as hers was.
Too soon, he pulled back. “Living without kissing you, holding you in my arms, making love to you, that would be suffering. Going to bed with you every night and waking up next to you every morning would be bliss, and more than I deserve, but I want to claim my piece of heaven nonetheless. If you refuse to come with me, I’ll stay here. I’d rather be a slave with you than a free man without you.”
“Oh, Richard.” The tears flowing freely down her cheeks, she threw her arms around him. “I’ll come. And if you need to knock me out to get me going, that’s fine.”
He smiled. “Do you love me?”
“I adore you.”
“Then your love will be enough to break the compulsion.” He smirked. “And I know just the way to make it even stronger.”
49
Richard
Richard started to pull his tunic over his head, but then the smell of it hit him, and he stopped. “I forgot that I stink of horse manure and sweat.” He pulled it back down. “Perhaps we should wait until we’re out of here.”
“I don’t mind. I missed you too much.” Cilia pulled it up the rest of the way and leaned to kiss his chest. “Your skin smells just fine.” She dipped her head and kissed his belly. “I need that.”
He’d missed her too much to argue. Curling his fingers under the hem of her shirt, he lifted it over her head and tossed it aside.
His breath hitched at the sight of her bare breasts. “I thought that I remembered how beautiful you were, but I was wrong. You are breathtaking.”
Cilia blushed. “My breasts are bigger because of the pregnancy.”
“Are they tender?” He brushed his fingers around both areolas.
She shuddered. “A little.”
“I’ll be gentle.” He dipped his head and took one straining nipple between his lips.
“Oh, God. I missed this.” Cilia arched into his mouth.
Circling his arms around her waist, he lifted her into his lap without letting go of the delicacy in his mouth.
She rolled her hips, and he followed, lifting up and rubbing against her center.
They were still wearing too many clothes, which Richard remedied quickly if not elegantly. Some seams might have ripped, but neither of them was paying attention. They were starved for each other.
One hand roaming over his back, Cilia cupped his chin with the other and brought his head up so she could kiss him.
He lifted her just enough to position his shaft at her entrance and then let her do the rest.
With a groan, Cilia lowered herself onto his length, enveloping him in her familiar heat.
“I missed this so much,” he murmured into her mouth. “I will never be apart from you again.”
Clamping one hand on the back of her neck and the other on her waist, Richard helped her lift up and then sink back down, but soon that wasn’t enough, and he took over. Pumping up into her, he was moving faster and harder, but it was still not enough to satisfy the hunger that had built up over the two-month-long longing for her.
He just couldn’t get enough.
Flipping them over, he surged in and out of her in a frenzy of need.
Cilia was with him all the way, digging her fingers into his butt muscles and arching up to meet his thrusts.
When her sheath tightened around him, he smothered her scream with his mouth and erupted inside her. For two months, he hadn’t had a release, not even with his own hand, and all that pent up essence was now flowing into her. If Cilia weren’t already pregnant, he would have for sure planted a baby in her womb.
Stifling the sudden flare of anger that thought brought about, he buried his face in the crook of her neck. “I love you.”
He wanted to kill each and every male Krall in the princess’s household for what they had stolen from him and
Cilia, but avenging her would have to wait. First, he had to get her out of the Krall controlled territories and put her up somewhere safe. After that was done, he would need to find a balance between dedicating his life to making it up to her for the suffering his negligence had caused her, and to the Krall’s demise.
50
Cilia
At five in the morning, Cilia and Richard got dressed and went to the kitchen.
No one was there that early. Preferring the night hours, the Krall weren’t early risers, even though it didn’t make much sense in the Arctic Circle. It was either light most of the day or dark, depending on the season. But then, a lot about them seemed strange to humans.
They were just different.
The kitchen staff usually started working on breakfast around eight in the morning, and aside from the guards, the rest of the household slaves wouldn’t begin to wake up until then either.
Hopefully, once the commotion created by the resistance started, the guards would be more interested in preventing anyone from coming in than keeping those inside from leaving. After all, all the human slaves were under compulsion to stay inside the house’s perimeter unless given explicit permission to run an errand, so there was no reason to be vigilant about monitoring those exiting.
Still, without the distraction the Krall guards would stop them and ask where they were going, and since Cilia wasn’t immune to their mind tricks, they would be able to sense her fear and figure out her intentions.
“Maybe you should knock me out and put me inside the trash cart. They can’t sense my intentions if I’m unconscious, and my legs refusing to obey me would not be a problem.”
Richard shook his head. “They check the carts to make sure nothing gets stolen.” He put his arm around her. “Trust me, you walking out of here is the best option.”
He’d convinced her that love was stronger than compulsion, and if she just focused on that, she would be able to walk out of there. The question was whether her love for Richard was also strong enough to overcome fear. It would be difficult to focus on her feelings for him while in the grips of paralyzing terror.
“I’m scared. What if one of the guards decides to question me? He will know that I’m lying.”
“We have two archers on the roofs. They will take him down.”
She hadn’t known that was part of the plan. “It’s crazy. The other guards will catch them. You know how fast the Krall are. My life is not worth the lives of the archers. They would be killed on the spot.”
“They know the risks involved. Let’s hope that everything goes according to plan.” He leaned and kissed her lips softly. “Just remember how much you love me. Keep repeating it in your head until we are in the clear.”
She took in a deep breath. “I’ll do my best.”
As the shouting started, Richard took her hand, and they walked out using the kitchen’s side door. It opened to the alley where trash containers lined the brick walls. That was still inside the allowed area, and the question was whether she would be able to go over the invisible line defining the house’s perimeter.
As the guard turned to look at them, Cilia’s heart dropped into the pit of her stomach, but then he turned back to look at the fistfight going on at the northern mouth of the alley.
“Come on.” Richard tugged on her hand, leading her in the opposite direction.
Her steps faltered, her legs refusing to obey, and she stopped.
“Look at me.” Richard pointed to his face. “You know what you have to do.”
Cilia nodded. I love you, she said in her head. I love you now even more than I loved you before I was taken. You came for me, and you accepted me despite what has been done to me. As her legs got moving again, she kept talking to him in her head. Your love for me is setting me free. I shall not be afraid, and I shall not succumb, and I shall keep going as fast as my legs will carry me. I love you, and I trust you.
Not daring to run and attract attention, they walked briskly until they reached the outskirts of town, where Richard’s second-in-command was waiting for them with two horses.
From there it was a short ride to the riverbank, and as they entered the fishing boat, the guy motioned for them to get under the tarp.
The smell was horrendous, but they were together, and they were free.
Resting her head on Richard’s chest, she whispered, “Are we going to sail in this fishing boat all the way to the mainland?”
“We are going to disembark on the next island and take another fishing boat to the next one, and so on until we reach the mainland.”
Their absence would soon be discovered, but by then they would have put a decent distance between them and Greenland.
They weren’t home free yet, and they could still get caught, but this time of year, there were hundreds of fishing boats sailing between the islands.
Hopefully, the Krall wouldn’t bother searching them all.
She was carrying precious cargo in her womb, and if they knew that her child had been allowed to live, they would put much more effort into capturing her. But the Krall would assume that she’d gotten rid of what humans considered an abomination.
51
Richard
“Welcome back, Richard.”
He tensed. What did the voice mean by that? Had he been captured and was he back in the clutches of the Krall?
“Relax, buddy. Your adventure is over, and you can open your eyes. I told you that using your own name for your avatar was a mistake.”
As memories of his real life came rushing in, Richard let out a breath and opened his eyes. “That wasn’t at all what I expected.”
Morris frowned. “Given your readouts, you had plenty of excitement. What didn’t you like about it?”
“It’s not that I didn’t like it, but it was nothing like the promotional videos. At times it was heart-wrenching, and there were some really rough patches. I wouldn’t call huddling with my mate under a fishy-smelling tarp fun, and neither was throwing up over the side of the boat or freezing my ass off in the Arctic Ocean. If I were a masochist, that might have been a swell adventure.”
“You chose the Krall environment for your experience, and it takes place in Greenland. What did you expect? California sunshine?”
“No, but I didn’t expect to suffer through what was supposed to be a fun, romantic adventure.”
Morris lifted a brow. “Wasn’t there anything that you enjoyed?”
“I enjoyed plenty. I rescued the woman I love from slavery, and I got her to safety. We got married, bought a house, and made plans for overthrowing the evil Krall. All that was super fun. I just didn’t like the escape part with the fish smell, the nausea, and the freezing temperature.”
He also didn’t understand why the program decided to include the strange pregnancy part. There hadn’t been anything in the questionnaire or the comments he’d added that would indicate that this was something he wanted to experience.
Who in his right mind would?
Finding out that the woman you loved had been violated and impregnated by alien monsters wasn’t on anyone’s fun list.
“Richard, buddy, you can’t have an adventure that feels real without going through some rough times.” Morris started removing the sticky pads from Richard’s chest. “Otherwise, it’s like watching a boring movie where nothing exciting happens. To appreciate the fun, you have to endure the misery.”
“I guess you are right. In that regard, the fantasy mimicked real life.”
“Bingo.”
Perhaps that was the answer? Maybe Stella had included the pregnancy scenario to test his devotion to her?
Richard smiled. If that was so, he’d passed her test with flying colors.
He couldn’t wait to see her. Would she jump on him and tell him how great of a guy he was? Would she tell him that she was the luckiest woman on earth and that she loved him?
As the curtain parted, Richard expected Stella. Instead, William walked in. Hiding his disa
ppointment, Richard kept smiling.
“Given your happy expression, I assume that you enjoyed your adventure?”
“It wasn’t what I expected, but it was good. How is Stella doing?”
“I came to see you first. You are my first human test subject.”
“I feel perfectly fine.”
“Would you care to fill out the post-test questionnaire?”
“Maybe later.”
Carefully lifting the blanket that Morris had draped over him, Richard glanced at his sweatpants to make sure they weren’t soiled. The guy had warned him about that being a possible side effect, but everything seemed to be fine.
“I want to see Stella.” He flung the blanket all the way off. “Can I come back in the afternoon to do that?”
His lips twitching with a suppressed smile, William nodded. “Of course. I’m sure the two of you have a lot to talk about.”
52
Stella
“Good. You are smiling.” Beverly’s face hovered a couple of inches over Stella’s. “What’s your name?”
She rolled her eyes. “Stella.”
“Excellent. You know who you are.” Beverly lifted the thing that looked like a helmet off her head. “We were told by the Perfect Match people that some clients wake up confused. They still think that they are their avatars.”
“I’m fine. It felt like a very realistic dream, and when you woke me up, I knew right away who I was, and that what I experienced was a fantasy.”
“Did it meet your expectations?”
“Not at all.”
Beverly frowned. “You were smiling when I woke you up.”
“It wasn’t what I expected, but the result was very satisfying, so I’m not complaining. I just don’t understand why the program designed my adventure like that.”