Beyond the Red

by Ava Jae

  The man doesn’t move. His dark eyes are glued to my gaze, and a tremor has developed in his hand.

  “Be careful, Kel,” a man calls out behind me. “You saw what she did to Rodin.”

  But another off to my right laughs. “Please, Rodin wasn’t paying attention and he let the whore grab his phaser. She had a moment of fortune—nothing more.”

  “Just kill her and get it over with.”

  “Don’t kill her—Rodin will want to restore his honor when he wakes. Let him decide what to do with her.”

  Someone laughs. “Restore his honor or have his way with her?”

  “Same thing, is it not?”

  They snicker, but Kel doesn’t seem amused by the conversation. “Quiet!” he snaps, glaring at them. “Don’t you see I’m trying to—”

  I dive toward Rodin’s leg, grab the dagger, and twist hard as I let the knife fly. The blade slams home at the base of Kel’s throat and he drops, choking on metal and blood. Curses batter the air as I lunge over the new corpse, rip the knife through his jugular, and scramble to my feet in front of a third man. My footwork is terrible and I stumble. It nearly costs me, but the man’s shot races over my shoulder. I throw sand in his eyes and hammer the blade into his wrist. He screams—I duck—a red phaser burst rams his chest and silences him, but when I sit up, a crimson phaser glows breaths away from my nose.

  My gaze darts around to find the other men standing—I can’t lose track of them, not now—but they’re gone. Did they run? Why would they run?

  “That’s enough,” my attacker hisses through crooked yellow teeth, his finger ready on the trigger. “Did you enjoy yourself? Because it’s the last—”

  “Where are your friends?” I frown. “I thought there were six of you?”

  His eyes narrow, but he keeps his gaze on me. “There were. Until you killed three of them.”

  “Two. The third is unconscious. And there should be two others, standing at your side.”

  He hesitates, then glances back just as two hands grab either side of his head and twist sharply to the left. I gasp—a loud crack twists my stomach as he collapses into the sand.

  Eros wipes his palms on his white pants and offers me a grim smile. “Maybe you do need me, after all.”

  I slam into him, throwing my arms around his neck and crushing him to me. He gasps and stumbles into place as my lips press into his, parting slightly as our tongues meet and my fingers slide into his bristly hair. His shoulders relax and his hands slide around my waist, pulling me tight against him. I deepen the kiss, pressing against him until my lips hurt. His breath is my breath and he smells like sweat and endless oceans of sand. We press closer—we are not close enough.

  We break for just a moment, but he pulls me in again, sliding his hands under my thighs and lifting me against him. My legs wrap around his waist and he takes several steps forward until my back hits a rough wall. His calloused fingers slide up the sides of my stomach, tracing fiery paths on my skin. The kiss becomes desperate, hungry, like he’s dying and I am his final drink, his final breath, his final thought. His fingers are in my hair, his taste is on my tongue, and I want more. I want his lips to taste every part of my skin, I want to trace the hills and valleys of his body. Heat blossoms in my stomach, tingles at the base of my spine, and spreads across my torso.

  Eros pulls away, his face flushed and his voice breathy as he speaks, “Tell me if you want me to stop.”

  I bring my lips to his collarbone and taste his skin, running my tongue over the light line of Kala’s mark. He shudders as I trace the path up his neck, kissing the underside of his chin, the stubble on his jaw, the corner of his mouth.

  My lips are on his when I whisper, “Don’t stop.”

  His mouth closes hard over mine, and our tongues slide together. My hands slip down his neck, down his back, and over his sculpted abs. I trace the angled cuts of muscle until my fingers find the hem of his pants. The air is sweltering and he breaks away and grabs my hands, pressing them against the wall over my head as he buries his head against my neck, sucking on my skin, setting me on fire. The stubble on his cheeks scratches against the underside of my jaw—I gasp and arch against him as he presses into me—our fingers twined tightly together. He works his way across my neck and up my jaw and a soft groan escapes my lips. His hips grind against me and my whole body shudders, my every breath desperate. There’s no hiding his body’s response, twisted together like this. He rubs hard against me and I grip tighter with my legs.

  I’ve wanted this for so long. I just didn’t realize it until now.

  Our mouths meet and I’m floating. He releases my hands and I pull him closer, brushing my fingers through his hair, then pressing his head harder against me. His fingers find a rip in the right side of my dress at the top of my ribcage and his hand slides inside, working its way up to my breast, massaging it gently. I am fire. I am the suns. I want to rip my cursed dress off so there’s nothing between us and we can become one, because his skin on mine, his taste on my tongue, the salty scent of his body making me dizzy—everything is perfect. Everything is so much better than anything I’d ever imagined.

  He’s perfect.

  He takes my lower lip into his mouth and gently sucks on it. My fingers dig into his back and his moan sets the base of my spine tingling. Closer. We need to be closer and I don’t know where this desperation is coming from—when this need to have him, all of him, began. I’ve never felt this way before—not for Midos, not for Serek—but this feels right.

  His left hand slides down to my shoulders.

  His fingers slip beneath the wrap on my arm.

  My blood is frozen—everyone is screaming—ash fills my lungs—I can’t see, I can’t breathe; my arm is a beacon of exquisite, burning pain. Where is everyone?

  I’m on my bed and Midos is caressing my shoulder and his long dark hair tickles my cheek and there’s a dagger in his hand.

  I gasp and break away, pushing him back. I gulp in the cool night air and catch my breath. My heart is racing, my mind is on fire, and I’m not in the temple, I’m not in my bedroom, I’m in Enjos, pressed against a wall of an abandoned building and my legs are wrapped around Eros’s waist.

  Eros. Eros, the half-blood. Eros, my servant. What in Kala’s name am I doing?

  “Put me down,” I breathe. “Now. Please.”

  He stares at me, wide-eyed, his face flushed, his lips swollen, and his breaths coming in loud, heavy pulls. But he lowers me, gently, so gently, and my toes touch the sand and he doesn’t move. So I move. I step around him and swallow the night and press my palms against my eyes until the phantom images are long gone.

  Eros touches my shoulder and my body goes rigid. He pulls away quickly, and I wait a breath before turning around to face him.

  His gaze slides over me in a way I never would have allowed not so long ago, but there’s something behind his eyes—hurt? He takes a step forward, then back. “I—” he begins, but I shake my head.

  “I shouldn’t have done that. I apologize. I don’t know what I …” I take a breath, straighten the tatters of my dress, and pull my shoulders back. “Thank you. For helping me.”

  He frowns, then looks at my lips, my breasts, my eyes. After a pause, he closes his mouth and nods. “You’re welcome …”

  I close my eyes for just a moment, just long enough to focus, calm my racing heart, and smother the part of me that wants to pull him close again. I can’t do this. I can’t allow myself, even for a moment, to entertain thoughts of what can never be.

  Even if I wasn’t royalty, even if Eros wasn’t a slave, even if my life wasn’t forever a public display, I could never risk a relationship with a half-blood. I couldn’t live knowing that, at any moment, soldiers may come knocking on my door to take any forbidden children we had away—to execute him for spreading his tainted mixed blood. For living.

  I won’t do that to myself—naï, I won’t do that to either of us. The law is the law, and I am no longer in the po
sition to try to change it. There is no chance of a future with Eros.

  When I open my eyes, he is watching me, and I steel my expression. “I’m assuming you didn’t walk here.” I step over the corpse with the broken neck and walk past him and the building we just defiled. It has a low, sharply peaked roof and the stone has a faded metallic shine to it, like it was painted to be reflective.

  It was a temple. We just did that against a temple in Enjos, of all places.

  I’m going to the Void.

  I dare a glance back at Eros, but he hasn’t moved from his spot several measures back, turned away from me.

  I sigh and bite the corner of my lip. “Eros, we shouldn’t stay here.”

  He turns, frowning, and shakes his head. His mouth is painted with wet sand, which almost looks like rebel blood, and his hands are stained purple—from actual blood. I’m covered in both—from the fight, and from … well.

  “Sorry,” he says. “I thought I saw—never mind. What did you say?”

  “That I’m assuming you didn’t walk here.”

  Eros moves into place at my side and wipes his mouth with the back of his arm, smearing wet sand over his skin. “Serek gave me a bike. I’ve been told to activate the tracking unit once I find you.”

  I stop. “Serek sent you after me? You’re working with them?”

  “He knows you’re innocent. He thinks Dima’s behind the attack.”

  Something inside me sinks, pulling the air from my lungs and crushing the latent flutter in my stomach. I’d suspected as much all along—seen it even, when Dima ordered my arrest and turned away from me as the guards came forward—but hearing it hurts all the same.

  My brother has always wanted the throne, but part of me wanted to believe he would never hurt me to get it.

  “Serek said that?” I whisper.

  Eros nods. “He said Dima is the only one who would have benefited from what happened—it wouldn’t make sense for you to kill Serek because you’d get nothing out of it.”

  Relief washes over me like a much-needed rain. “And you trust him?”

  He glances down and digs his toes into the sand, his bloodstained hands hanging loosely at his sides. “For now.”

  “Good enough.” I climb onto a dead man’s bike and start the engine. Eros does the same to a black and gold bike discarded between two lopsided buildings leaning precariously against each other several steps away. “We’ll stop a couple leagues from this mess and turn on the unit there.” I don’t wait for a response—Eros will follow me. I slam down the accelerator and drive as quickly as I can away from the blood and bodies.

  Away from the memory of a kiss I can never repeat.

  Kora refuses to look at me after she activates the tracker and we wait for Serek to find us. Sitting beside the stolen bike, she keeps her eyes low and sifts sand through her fingers, then turns to the stars or stares off across the desert waves. When I sit next to her, she gets up and moves away, careful to keep her gaze off me, as if I’ve got some infectious disease and she’s afraid of catching it with a single glance.

  I don’t bother trying to fight for her attention. If she wants to kiss me and run her hands all over me while obviously enjoying it, then fucken pretend I don’t exist, that’s her choice. It doesn’t matter. It never mattered—she never mattered. I should be used to this. Stars above, it’s not even the first time it’s happened—Aryana never spoke to me again after we had that night together. Apparently I’m good enough to fuck around with, but too disgusting to stick with afterward.

  It doesn’t matter. None of this matters. I’ve been alone since the moment of my birth—my own mother didn’t even want me. I’ll never have a future with anyone—I won’t have a mate and I’ll definitely never have kids because I’m a half-blood. And half-bloods are worth less than dirt.

  I know that. I just wish this didn’t hurt. I wish I didn’t let myself hope, even for just a mo, that this time might be different. Because I never expected anything from Aryana—that was just sex and we were both drunk and I knew even then that it didn’t mean a blazing thing.

  But this didn’t feel like a meaningless kiss. This didn’t feel like trading tongues for the sake of it. This felt real. This felt like the moons had aligned and the stars were shining in our favor and every breath was ours, every touch was right. This felt like eternity in a blink, like our lives unraveled and spun together, like the convergence of always and never and every step I’ve ever taken and every pain I’ve ever endured lead to that moment. So how can something that felt so perfect be worth nothing at all?

  Stupid. I was stupid and now I have to deal with the fallout. Now I have to deal with the cold pain festering deep between my lungs, freezing me over from the inside out.

  I sit in the sand and open up the pack Serek gave me. There’s an extra bottle of water still unopened, and I toss it beside Kora. She doesn’t look at me, but she takes it and downs half the bottle without pausing to breathe. I finish off my bottle and find two strips of dried meat wrapped in foil. Again, I throw one to Kora before chewing on one myself. Again, she takes it without acknowledging me.

  Girls.

  I chew absently on the salty meat and pull out the remaining contents of the bag—a switchblade I used to cut the first thug’s throat, a dozen more packs of dried meat, and some sortuv powder that I think you’re supposed to mix with the water to replenish nutrients or something. I throw that at Kora, too. It smacks her arm and slides to the sand—she still doesn’t look at me as she takes it.

  Then there’s the pouch Gray gave me, from Nol. To be honest, I’d been so focused on finding Kora that I’d forgotten about it altogether, but here it is. It doesn’t look all that special—the pouch is made of some kinduv thick, rough black fabric tied with a leather drawstring and engraved with a large gold Sephari letter that looks like the sliver of a moon. When I open it up and dump the contents into my palm, a black ring rolls out. It’s hard to see in the darkness, but I hold it up and catch the light of the moons and stars. It’s a simple ring made of some kinduv smooth, near-black metal, with a semi-translucent gold band running through the center. Some kinduv polished gem, it looks like, cut into a circle and embedded into the ring.

  I slide it onto my ring finger—it fits perfectly.

  “Eros.”

  My eyes snap up at my name. Kora still isn’t looking at me, but she’s standing and pointing to a small group of headlights on the horizon. Serek’s procession. “That’s him,” I confirm, closing my pack again. And so we wait in silence until they arrive.

  The doctor hovers around Kora like a child clinging to his mother. He takes blood samples, cleans every tiny little scratch, and gives her all sorts of nutrients in the form of stick-on gel patches. He gives her about a half-dozen bottles of freshly chilled water and bowls of fruit before Serek dismisses him and he joins another car in the caravan. But none of that compares to the way Serek looks at her—to the warmth in his face and eyes every time she glances at him, to the way he gently touches her hand and caresses her palm and smiles at the smallest thing.

  He’s in love with her. Completely and utterly.

  I thought she shared his feelings—at least, I was convinced of it at the party before everything went to the Void. But now I’m not so sure—now her responses seem hesitant, like she’s forgotten how to smile or share his secret glances. And even now, as he holds her hand and kisses her knuckles, she watches him with this stiff little smile.

  But she doesn’t look at me. Not once. And the cold in my chest spreads a little farther.

  It doesn’t matter, I remind myself. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.

  Maybe if I think it enough, it’ll be true.

  I stare out the window as the sand races by. We can’t return to Vejla, so we’re headed to the capital of Safara, Asheron, but I’m not sure why I’m still here. I’d expected Serek to leave me to fend for myself in the desert after returning Kora, but instead his guards demande
d I get in the port beside him, and so here I sit, the observer of this awkward courting. If you can call it that.

  I tap my fingers against the door, then finally lean back on the seat and close my eyes. It doesn’t take long before exhaustion washes over me and I start to drift …

  Someone is holding my wrist in the air. I startle awake and try to rip my hand away, but Serek’s grip is firm. His glare slides from my hand to my face, and I blink the sleep from my eyes and yawn. “I’m assuming there’s a reason you’re cutting off the circulation in my wrist.”

  His grip shifts and he squeezes my ring finger with his thumb and forefinger. “What is this?”

  “A finger,” I say.

  “Don’t play games with me, Eros. You know very well I’m not referring to your finger.”

  I glance at my hand. Back to Serek. “A ring.”

  He scowls. “I know what it is, boy. What I don’t know is how you came to acquire it.”

  His insistence on calling me boy sends a twinge of irritation through my gut. “I can’t feel my fingers.”

  “Answer the question.”

  “Release me, and I will.”

  His glare is sharp enough to shred bone, but he throws my hand back at me. I rub my wrist and sit up. Glance at Kora. She shifts her eyes to the blurry divider with the digital map cutting off the front seat from the passenger’s cabin. My chest throbs.

  “It was a gift,” I finally say. “From my father.” Kora’s eyes snap to mine—oh, she must think I mean—“My adoptive father,” I correct. “The man who raised me, Nol.”

  She nods once and glances at Serek. But he doesn’t look satisfied—his glare deepens and a hint of a snarl wrinkles his nose. “And where did this ‘Nol’ acquire it?”

  “I don’t know. I just got this the other set. I was told he asked someone to make sure I got it if anything happened to him.” Serek is fuming and I don’t know why. I don’t get what’s wrong—what does the ring mean? I hesitate. Raise my hand to the light. “Does it mean something?”

  “You truly don’t recognize it?” he snaps.