Claimed by the Warlord: A Sci-Fi Alien Warrior Romance (Ash Planet Warriors Book 2)

by V. K. Ludwig

A thick gulp struggled down my throat as I looked at him. “Why?”

  “Just like there is shadow because of light, there is pain because of love,” he rasped as he carefully stroked his palm up along my hip, my waist, then circled the wound with his fingertips. “They belong together, as do our souls. We were good without zovazay. But with it, we’re complete.”

  Something between a laugh and a sob rolled from my throat. “I love you.”

  “And I love you, kunazay.” His hand slipped to my belly, resting there for long moments as he stared at me, chewing down a grin but I sensed it bright and taunting in my chest. “Ami a adem kachan.”

  Ami a adem kachan.

  Ami was mother.

  Kachan. Child.

  “Mother something child.” I grinned back at him. “What’s a adem?”

  “A means of.” His fingers orbited around my bellybutton, shifting the soft fabric around my skin. “Adem. My.”

  “Mother of…” My heart gave a single wham against my ribs, violent enough there was no more hiding his grin. “Mother of my child.”

  “Yeki.” A pat against my belly. “Like I said… very fruitful. Even more than I’d first assumed.”

  Everything rushed through me at once: happiness, fear, wonder, joy. And questions. So many questions. Was it possible this happened the night of the sun feast?

  “Are you sure?”

  He let his finger play with my curls, twirling them around a knuckle before he pulled them straight. “Absolutely sure, and incredibly happy about it.”

  His words eased the fear, but the joy became nearly overwhelming. “I always wanted children.”

  “Then I’ll give you as many as you’ll let me,” he whispered, and carefully pulled me against him. “What a chaos that’ll be. A meddling mother, a son who can’t stop bouncing, and many hybrids.”

  “A family.”

  “And all over a broken injector insert,” he said on a low chuckle. “What an unexpected blessing.”

  Twenty-Six

  Katedo

  Sevja pointed at the holographic map hovering between us, tsking or rolling her eyes whenever Feoni tried to toddle off into the evening. With how she’d wrapped her tail around her daughter’s, each escape attempt pulled her slightly off-balance. That girl had gone from scooting straight to running, causing havoc across camp.

  “A disease claimed this patch of wild grains,” Sevja said, finger circling an area an argos ride toward north-west. “Warlord Razgar had samples taken, and sent them to Noja for evaluation. A fungus, most likely.”

  Tugging the ushti fur higher around my neck, I escaped the chill of the cold season, the air around us thick with the scents of dry grasses and fermenting berries. “Burn them on a sun when the wind carries smoke and ashes toward the mountains. The plateau is rich enough we don’t need those grains, but we need to make certain the disease won’t spread to other plants or Noja’s grain stores will run empty.”

  “Yes, my uri—”

  With a high-pitched squeal, Feoni wrenched herself loose, running straight toward a small, dark yuleshi enclosure. “Yushi! Ada kash yushi!”

  “Yu-le-shi.” Utesh swooped Feoni up and propped her against his hip as he carried her back to us, lowering his head the moment the girl reached for the shaved sides beneath his braid. “If you’re anything like your mother, you’ll ride your own yuleshi before your fifth cold season.”

  Blotches of dark purple streaked Sevja’s cheeks as she took Feoni from him, intensified by the flicker of flames beside us. “She keeps running away, and you keep bringing her back.”

  His smile was as subtle as the way he courted Sevja, not through hums or gifts, but the child. “Something I look forward to each sun.”

  He said no more, excusing himself with a dip of his head as he meandered off, though he never strayed far. Utesh orbited around them all sun long, respecting Sevja’s time of grieving while offering help the second she needed it.

  When our females had come into heat, Sevja had taken those not wanting to be claimed away from the camp. Utesh had remained here, not once showing an attempt at chasing her down while he’d ignored those females who’d remained, many of them with child now.

  Sevja stared behind him, but only until she cleared her throat, her voice higher than usual when she said, “He’s a poor warrior, but the quality of his leatherwork is beyond compare. Beautiful tooling. He worked many argos on the urizaya’s reins.”

  And twice that on Jessica’s kacharek, a sling of softened leather that allowed us to carry babies on our backs while we tended to all sorts of tasks. “He has a great deal of patience.”

  “Yes.” She nodded as if to herself, then shut down the hologram and hinted a bow. “My urizayo, this one needs to sleep.”

  “Of course.”

  When she walked off toward the tree, I returned to the fire. Mother sat with several shavings of uri rods resting on her thighs. Mug sitting in the ash beside her, she took a sip whenever she finished a knot on the nabu: a gift for Jessica she’d been working on for suns, large enough to hold the both of us comfortably — and Keyja, our daughter.

  I lowered myself down beside Jessica, where she sat behind Kam and braided his hair for the night, and let my palm round the thick cotton that hid her beautiful belly. “How is she tonight?”

  “Tumbling between guts and bladder, as always, hard enough I’m sure you felt her.” Jessica placed a kiss onto Kam’s braid, then tied a leather around the end. “All done.”

  Stroking his fingertips along the pattern, Kam turned and gave an approving smile. “Thanks… Jessica.”

  I suckled on my lips to hide my own smile.

  Twice, Kam had called her ami, immediately blushing, sinking his head, and correcting it to Jessica. And she’d pressed her forehead against his, letting him know that it was okay if her called her ami. It was okay if he called her Jessica, too.

  In time, he would settle on a name. Until then, Jessica would braid his hair each night, wake him when I was already out patrolling the borders, and read to him when I didn’t make it back to our tree before he went to sleep. She was so many things to us: ami, urizaya, kunazay.

  A blessing.

  “There, this will bring you much relief.” Mother held up the center part of the nabu, where she’d added shallow netting to the oval cutout. “Your belly will rest in here, and the fibers will support it as she grows beneath your heart.”

  And once she was born, Keyja would sleep between us in this depression. Jessica would feed her from her breast and I would, for the first time in so long, change the soiled sandweed leaves. Something I’d always enjoyed, not for the smell but this uninterrupted time of bonding.

  Kam pressed his ear against Jessica’s belly unabashed, as he did almost every night. “I think I can hear her humming.”

  “Then she is content,” Mother said. “Already her scent permeates our home, smelling of the rich soil Mekara blessed us with.”

  “And I smelled like the rain?”

  Mother nodded and fixed her eyes on a new knot. “Yeki. Like a downpour after a long drought.”

  “I’ll teach her how to tame a yuleshi. How to climb on a tree, how to sneak up on them, and how to drop—” He spun in the air and let himself slump to the ground, sending a puff of dust into the air. “—onto their backs, holding on until they submit.”

  Jessica giggled. “Yeah, discuss that with adi once it’s time.” A mischievous glint came to her eyes as they found mine. “He might not let her near a yuleshi until she’s seventeen.”

  I plucked her from the ground and pulled her over my leg as she squealed, positioning her right in front of me before I whispered into her ear. “Kunazay, if you didn’t carry our child already, I would rut you right here by the fire.” A kiss to her temple. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  The way she grinned over her shoulder was answer enough. My female loved each time I stopped when we rode the plains: at a tree, by a yoni, on a hillside covered in gh
ost grass. I mated her every chance I got, thoroughly, sometimes allowing myself to slip into a rut even though her entire scent screamed that she was mine. Mine to love, mine to protect… just mine.

  She gave a tug on Kam’s tail. “Time to sleep?”

  He nodded without complaint because he’d patrolled the tree together with Sevja for the last three nights, not letting the exhaustion show but he couldn’t hide those heavy eyelids from me. Kam’s demeanor had once more sweetened, showing the loving boy behind the fight as he kissed Mother and Jessica on the head.

  I received a kiss, too.

  “Remember, next sun we will ride out to see what devastated those tendetu nests,” I called behind him as he walked to the tree, pride swelling in my chest over his determined nod. “He’ll make a fine warlord one sun.”

  Mother sighed and grabbed another uri shaving. “He has much to learn still.”

  Because I’d been overprotective, depriving him of those dangers he needed to face and study if he wanted to come out of the trial a warlord. “Once Keyja is a moon old, I’ll take him to the White Sea when the solar flares ravage the basin like Father did with me.”

  Jessica leaned into my chest, placed my hands to each side of her belly, and put hers atop. “Do all future warlords train for the trial?”

  “If they’re smart. But even if they do, many have died trying.” When I sensed her unease, I brushed my chin over her unruly nest of hair. “My bloodline goes back many generations of warlords, and it will continue with Kamenji. What he needs the most is determination, and he has plenty of that. Warlord Razgar came from nothing when he won his tribe, all because he set out to succeed.”

  When Jessica yawned, I rose and helped her to her feet. We wished Mother a good night and walked to the tree, its trunk so thick it took me nearly two-thousand steps to round it. I walked behind her on those stairs I had installed, each step attached to the tree on one side, and suspended by uri ropes from the other. A system Toagi had come up with, fastened together in a way that didn’t sway, allowing our pregnant females to climb it with ease.

  Our people greeted us as we passed their nabus, all of them equally fond of their urizaya. Approachable, they called her, coming to her with smaller issues without fear of being turned away. And she listened to them all, almost always announcing that it was “no biggie”, and that she would take care of it. She also spent two argos each sun administering the new combo vaccine, driving respect into the warriors as she wielded her needles in much the same way I wielded my kerek.

  “We might have to string the new nabu somewhere lower,” she said, because pregnant females slept high up in the tree, which was quick to climb but took several circles around the trunk on the stairs. “I swear these stairs are killing me.”

  Holding her hand, I helped her climb into our nabu, which I’d strung between two branches thickly covered with leaves. “I’d rather carry you than have you sleep closer to the ground. There’s a reason warriors have their nabus at the bottom.”

  She rolled onto her side, and an adorable little moan resonated her throat when I positioned myself behind her. “I can’t believe I still have so much longer to go. Just how much bigger can I get?”

  “You’re not that big, kunazay.” I tugged on the rolled-up ushti fur beside me until it covered us well enough, then let my arm dive underneath so I could stroke her belly. “Besides, I like it. You’ve always been beautiful, but now you’re radiating it while you hold your belly and waddle across camp.”

  The moment my palm ran along her waist, she gave it a swat. “Because waddling is so sexy, hmm?”

  “Very.” Underneath the fur, I pushed the cotton of her dress up, then circled the fabric of her panties with my thumb. “Seeing you grow our child is fascinating, and I might want to repeat this once your body is ready.”

  “By the Three Suns, she isn’t even out yet and you… mmh...” Another moan with how I tugged her panties aside and rubbed my tail along her cunt, letting the muscles vibrate around her clit. “You can’t go a night without, can you?”

  “Says the woman who jumped me in the yoni last night, nearly drowning me with how ferociously she rode my cock,” I said on a scoff, taking my loincloth off which I placed behind me.

  She arched her back, rolling her hips as she pushed backward in search of my shaft. “Hormones.”

  “I like your hormones.” I pulsed my hips, wetting my crown on her lust while slowly parting her labia, inching my way into her cunt. “And I can go many nights without, but I don’t want to. I warned you, didn’t I? I give nothing at all or everything I have, everything I am. And I am so deeply connected with you, every inch, every argos, every sun I have to spend away from you aches my chest.” Palming her belly, I pushed inside her on a groan, then let my fingers climb to her sternum. “Aches me right here.”

  “But it’s humming right now, kunozay.” She placed her hand atop mine, guiding them to her breast, where some milk had dampened the cotton. “Do you feel this?”

  “I do.”

  Felt how her breasts tightened and tingled, how our daughter grew bigger each sun, and how Jessica’s core had gone from restless searching to calm belonging over the past couple of moons. Zovazay gifted me all these things, along with her exhaustion at the end of a sun, her fear when she heard ushtis at night, and her sadness when Rogon had fallen to sleep without waking again.

  It was sad.

  It was happy.

  It was life.

  Our souls braved it together.

  The curses and the blessings.

  This concludes Claimed by the Warlord. If you have a spare minute, please leave a review. Are you ready for Zerim, the shunned hybrid who walked out on Lia a few years ago? You can order his book here.

  Also by V. K. Ludwig

  I accidentally bought myself an alien concubine.

  Order here.

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