by Maven, Ella
“I was taking it slow. Getting you used to me, showing you how I’d treat you and respect you. I gave you space to come to me. But that’s over now. No more slow. No more space.”
“You were … what?” Her mouth hung open as she rubbed her palms on her thighs.
I tapped my temple. “Work it out up here. You have until sundown tomorrow. But then I make my move.”
“You make your…” she sputtered. “What the hell, Nero?”
I rose to my feet and she only gawked at me as she remained sitting. “You’re my mate. I’ve known it since the rotation I saw you. I knew you weren’t ready then, but you’re ready now.”
She leapt to her feet. “I thought I made it pretty clear that I didn’t want a mate.”
I stepped closer to her until my stomach brushed the front of her chest. She sucked in a breath as her eyelashes fluttered, and a slight tremor shook her limbs. “It’s not clear by the way you react to my touch.” I cupped my neck and rubbed my thumb along her jawline.
“Nero,” she whispered as she leaned into my hold with half-closed eyes. This small surrender told me I was making the right decision.
“One rotation, Justine,” I murmured. Her eyes shot open and she jerked away. I held up a finger. “One.” I gestured to the screens lining my wall. “Now let’s get to it.”
I left her standing in the middle of the floor to process my words. When she joined me a moment later, her posture stiff and her lips set in a thin line, I smiled to myself. I was going to enjoy every minute of this.
* * *
Justine
Nero’s words had left me reeling. At first, I’d been stunned, but that emotion had quickly shifted to indignation. How dare he? I wished I had time to go sit in my room by myself and stew. I needed a plan to thwart his advances, and I couldn’t work on that while also listening to him teach me how we planned to infiltrate the Uldani fortress.
We had five rotations. I had to get my shit together and focus. Nero on the other hand, seemed totally fine, pleased even, sitting beside me with a secret smile I wanted to kiss off his face. No, slap! I wanted to slap it off his face. Yeah, that was it.
Shit, he was talking. I switched mental gears and clued in. Now wasn’t the time. I could think about it when I lay in my furs at night. Alone. Which was how I liked it.
The dozen screens in front of us all showed different areas of the Night Kings boundaries. The dashboard, or mainframe, looked similar to something I’d see in the cockpit of a 747. There was no keyboard, only a series of small touchpads, switches, and joysticks. The Drixonians had a written language, but it looked like a bunch of slashes, X’s, and O’s to me, like some foreign binary code. The Uldani language was a whole other beast with lots of curls that reminded me of filigree.
Nero explained that he was fluent in most written languages in the Rinian galaxy. Because of course since he was basically a genius. While I could understand the Uldani with my updated translator implant, that only worked for oral languages.
“It doesn’t matter you haven’t learned to read their language, or ours,” he explained. “The symbols are going to be the same. Most of what the Uldani use is universal.”
I nodded since that made sense, just like the power signal—a circle with a line through the bottom—was recognizable all over Earth.
“Thanks to the controller Gar stole off the cruiser, I was able to tap into the system before the Uldani realized it and threw up a firewall.” He tapped on a track pad until what looked like a drone aerial shot appeared on the screen in front of us. I leaned closer to see that Alazar looked every much like a massive walled city. There were neighborhoods of varying sized homes, a section of several-story buildings that seemed like a business district or high-rise apartments, as well as one large low-level structure that appeared to be a hub. But what was most interesting were the many floating pods that hung in the air above the city like small blimps.
“That’s where the royals live,” Nero said, pointing to the blimp homes.
“They live in those things?”
“Their elite live in these buildings,” he pointed to the skyscraper-type apartments. “And their middle-class lives on the city grounds.” He gestured to several of the neighborhoods. “The lowest class is…” he pointed to a large set of stairs, as wide as a house, which descended below the surface. “Underground.” he finished. “Most of them are miners.”
I wrinkled my nose. “They live down there?”
“Conditions are not good. Air quality is terrible.”
“And the rich bastards live above it all.”
“That’s right.”
“I didn’t think I could hate the Uldani more.”
Nero tapped the trackpad, and the aerial shot changed to a black and white set of blueprints. “The Kaluma will get us inside the walls. We then need to access the mainframe which is in an underground network of tunnels. Sax and Val were kept down there.” The image shifted to a side view of a leveled underground base which made me think of a complicated bunny burrow. He pointed to the lowest level. “This is it. Their signal tower emerges from here. That’s where we have to go.”
“Underground?” I shuddered. “That leaves us vulnerable with no real escape.”
He nodded, somberly. “I know.”
That … sounded not good. “Well shit.”
He snorted. “Your curse is right. So now you know what we’re working with. Today, I’m going to teach you the basic skills you’ll need. Tomorrow, I’ll go over the specific plan. The next three rotations, we practice.”
I had … half a day to learn the basics. I had a feeling we weren’t getting much sleep tonight. “Call Xavy on your comm,” I said.
“Why?”
“Tell him to have Tab bring us some pula. And snacks. Lots of snacks.” I rubbed my hands together. “Let’s do this.”
When Nero smiled at me, I ignored how his visible pride lit up a glow within in me.
* * *
That night, with blurry, dry eyes and a headache that felt nuclear, I didn’t even have the energy to walk to my room. I considered calling one of the girls and asking them to cart my ass to bed, but Nero gently took a hold of my shoulders and steered me toward his furs.
I dug in my heels when I realized what he was doing, but he gave me a quick squeeze with his fingers before letting me go. “I’m not sleeping with you, Justine. You can have my furs all to yourself. But you’re too tired to make it to your room, and we’ll be up early anyway. Just rest.” He pointed to his chair. “I’ll be right there. I sleep in front of my screens most nights anyway.”
For some reason, that news sent a pang of sorrow in my chest. I imagined Nero in his hut alone with the responsibility of the whole clavas on his shoulders as he surveyed his screens. “Doesn’t anyone ever take over that duty for you?”
“What duty?”
“Watching for threats.”
“I don’t have to watch them all the time. I have alerts, but lately I’ve felt it necessary to keep an eye on them too.”
“And no one helps you?”
He stared at me as if that thought never occurred to him. “It’s my duty.”
“Yeah, but when do you sleep? When do you get to just relax?”
He let out a dry laugh. “I don’t relax well.”
“I noticed,” I admitted.
He cocked his head at me in question.
I shrugged. “You’re the calmest of all the warriors, but you’re always alert, always thinking. I think you deserve to be let off the hook every now and then.”
“Are you worried about me?” He didn’t ask in a patronizing way. He sounded genuinely curious.
“Sure,” I answered around the lump in my throat. Today was full of admissions.
“I found happiness every time I was in your presence.” His words sent a piercing arrow right through my boundaries. How did he manage to do that with so few words?
On top of that, all I felt was guilt, because I’d ra
rely even given him the time of day. “But we never spent a lot of time together.”
“I know,” he said in a low murmur. “But I believed one day that would change.”
I clutched at my shirt over my heart with a groan. “You’re killing me here, Nero.”
He frowned and reached for me. “Are you in pain?”
“No, I—it’s an expression. But why can’t you be a dick? Why do you have to be so nice to me? I haven’t done anything to deserve your kindness.”
Those all-seeing eyes pierced me as he spoke in a careful voice, as if speaking to a scared deer. “I don’t think being mates is about a checklist of what we do for each other.”
He slayed me. How did I tell him that was all I knew? That love in my life was always conditional on how I acted, the words I said, the food I cooked, how often I put out… I shuddered. I didn’t want to think about that life. Not here in the safety of Nero’s hut with his warm purple eyes radiating a feeling I’d never felt before. I swallowed and turned away before crawling into his bed. His furs smelled like him, and I snuggled into the bedding with the thickest fur pulled up to my chin.
I didn’t look at Nero, and he didn’t move for a long time until I heard him toe off his boots before padding over to his chair in his bare feet.
I expected my anxiety to skyrocket since bedtime was when my brain worked overtime replaying everything that had happened during the day. My anxiety loved nothing more than dwelling on the events of the day, rolling them over and over in my mind until they snowballed to exaggerated proportions until it was three in the morning and I’d gotten no sleep. Especially on a day like today, when a lot had happened I hadn’t process yet, I waited for my brain to take off like a hamster on a wheel.
Except it didn’t. From my cocoon in the furs, I could hear Nero’s steady breathing, and his presence stilled the rat race of my mind. He’d warned me and let me know what was to come. He hadn’t pushed yet, and even though he planned to, he’d given me a pretty large window of time to raise my defenses.
But to be fully prepared, I needed to know exactly what he meant about not waiting. What would happen tomorrow at sundown? Was he planning something minor like a kiss or something zero to sixty like butt plugs? Ah, there was that snowball working itself into a frenzy in my head.
“Nero?” My voice sounded loud in the darkness.
His chair squeaked as he turned to me, but his face was in shadow, backlit by his screens. I could just barely make out the glow of his eyes.
I swallowed. “How do you plan to make your move?”
His chair creaked again as he leaned back and propped his elbow on the armrest of his chair, then cradled his chin in his palm. “Are you working on a defense?”
“Um, no.” I snorted with a little too much indignation. “Not at all. No way. Why would I do that?” I scoffed loudly.
His chuckle sounded sexy, and I hated that I felt the deep rumble in my belly. “Well first you’ll move in here permanently. We’ll eat all our meals together. When you’re upset about something, you’ll tell me, and we’ll talk it out so you’re no longer filling with anger. We can talk about the family members we miss and plan some activities together for when we win this war. Mate stuff.”
I gaped at him. This was… no. Kisses and groping—while they scared me—were something I could compartmentalize, but this… sharing of feelings? This couple shit? Oh, hell no, that was just a low blow. “Excuse me?”
“What were you expecting?”
“I was expecting you to throw me on the dashboard and ravage me. Give me hickeys.”
“What’s a hickey?”
“Don’t you want to … do cock things?”
He was not successful in suppressing a laugh. “Cock things?”
“You know what I mean!”
“Sure, I want to stuff you full of cock, but that’s not what’s important. Not to you. Not to me. I know you’ll be able to give me your body but shy away from giving me the rest of you. That’s not what I want. We’ll be mates, Justine. Inside and out.”
I began to tremble. This was an absolute nightmare. Why couldn’t I have gotten ass slapping Xavy for a mate? He wouldn’t have wanted to have intellectual discussions about our feelings. “Nero, that’s… you don’t want that.” I hated how weak my voice sounded.
When he spoke, his voice held an undercurrent of a warning. “I warned you, Justine. Don’t tell me how I feel.”
The growl his in his voice made me shiver, sending confusing flickers of attraction to mingle with my nerves. “I don’t mean it that way. I mean that you don’t want to get to know me. I’m not sure who you think I am, but I’m not that woman. You deserve someone who’s going to be what you want. I’m not what anyone wants.” I winced as soon as the last few word left my mouth. I hadn’t mean to confess that. From the outside, I was a confident bitch, but on the inside, I was terrified of everyone finding out I was really a fraud.
He was quiet for so long I thought he’d given up on the conversation when he spoke again. “I want to know who made you feel like you’re not what anyone wants. You’re what I want. I know it. I’ll prove it, Justine. That’s how I plan to make my move.”
He turned around, so all I could see was the back of his chair. I swallowed as my heart raced. I scrambled, trying to throw up mental walls but only got about half of one slapped with mortar before my eyes drifted shut and I was out.
Six
Nero
I opened my eyes to the sound of wet slurping. I jolted in my chair to find Justine sitting beside me with her hair pulled back into a short ponytail at the crown of her head while loudly sipping on a steaming mug of pula. “Good morning, sleepyhead,” she smiled at me.
I rubbed my eyes and eyed the shadows on the ground, noting the sun had just began to creep over the horizon. “You’re up early.”
“I’ve always been an early riser,” she shrugged as she handed me my own mug.
I eyed her curiously. She seemed in a good mood this morning, which I didn’t expect would be the case based on our conversation last night. She’d been terrified. I had heard her harsh breaths from across my hut. But this morning, her eyes were clear and her hands steady. She didn’t shy away from me.
I took a sip of my pula. “What were your mornings like back on Earth?”
“I thought I had until sundown before the grilling?” she smirked.
“Grilling?”
She chuckled as she blew on the surface of her pula. “Never mind. So, my mornings…” She tapped her lips in thought.
“Yes.”
“Well, I was self-employed, so I worked from home. I had my own graphic design business, so I worked with clients on business logos, brochures, campaigns, things like that.”
Almost none of those words made sense to me, but I was fascinated to hear her talk about her business. “What does self-employed mean?”
“Uh, it means I worked for myself. Or rather, I was my own boss. My own … drexel, I guess. The drexel of my household which consisted of me and a beta fish.”
Pride filled my chest. “Of course, you were a drexel on your planet. I would expect nothing less from you.”
“I wasn’t…” she grimaced. “Never mind, that works. So anyway, I would wake up and immediately drink coffee, which is a bit like pula. It has a natural drug in it that boosts your energy levels. I’d eat a meal while checking my email, which was how we communicated wirelessly through our networks. They are written letters.”
I nodded, that part I understood.
“Sometimes I’d take a walk in my neighborhood. I lived in an apartment in Philadelphia, and one of my favorite things to do in my free time was to visit graveyards.”
“Graveyards?”
“Yeah, it’s where we bury our dead.” She eyed me with a defiant look, like she expected me to be disgusted.
“Why did you enjoy visiting graveyards?” I asked neutrally.
Her shoulders relaxed. “There’s something peaceful and
reverent about a cemetery. We carve their names in stone plaques, as well as the years they were alive, and sometimes a little bit about them. Like, beloved brother or something like that. I often would make up stories in my head about the lives of those people in the graves. Sometimes…” she shrugged as she picked at her nails. “Sometimes the dead people were a hell of a lot nicer than anyone living.”
I wanted to give that back to her. I loved the way her eyes went soft and her expression lost some of its harshness. “On Corin, we honor our dead with devas shrines.”
Her eyes went round, and her full lips parted as she leaned toward me. “Really?” There was so much childlike hope in her voice that I nearly melted. She tucked a leg under her, attention focused on me as she propped her chin on her hand. “I haven’t heard of these. Tell me about them.”
“We burn our dead and mix their ashes with a clay. After forming it into the chosen shape of the devas—often a large spike—we let it dry and harden. Villages had their own, but our main city of Granit had a large, elaborate devas shrine honoring our most important dead.”
Her eyes were huge and full of wonder. “Wow. I’m sure that’s incredible to see, and a great way to remember your loved ones. How come you don’t have devas shrines here on Torin?”
“The clay we used was specific to Corin. During the Uprising, we weren’t able to recover all the bodies of our dead, but those we did, we have kept their ashes, intending to honor them properly…” I swallowed as the familiar guilt and anger returned. “Upon our return home.”
Her hand settled on my arm, warm and soothing, as if she could sense my inner turmoil. “You’ll get home one day, Nero. I know it.”
I didn’t know it, although I’d spend my last breath in an effort to see my brothers return home. And maybe that was why I opened my mouth and made another promise I wasn’t sure I could keep. “One day I will take you to our devas shrines on Corin, where we honor our dead.”