“The Carelian’s gone,” she said, desperately trying to keep a grip on that feeling of rage.
“I heard.” His voice was flat, dead, and his face never changed.
“Wolf,” she cried out, unable to stop it, “what can I do? I swear, I’d buy you if it was allowed, but it’s against regulations.”
He never even blinked at her offer. “I don’t believe you could afford me.” The words came in that same indifferent voice. “I’m told I’m quite valuable.”
“Damn it, don’t do this.” Shivering, Shaylah sank down on the edge of the bed.
“I’m sorry. I’m not supposed to disturb the fantasy, am I?” In that flat, bland voice, the mocking words bit even deeper.
“You know that’s not what I meant!”
“Then why are you upset?” His tone changed then, turned goading. “Oh, I see. Your reputation is in ruins, is it not? The pious Graymist at last down here with the rest of us mortals was how it went, wasn’t it? With your love slave—”
“Stop it!” Shaylah leaped up and flew at him, fists raised. “Stop it!”
She struck at him, heedless of the tears that had broken through at last, pounding at his chest with fierce, sharp blows. He made no move to stop her, absorbing the not insubstantial blows with little more than a wince. She kept on, sobbing now, broken words of denial spilling out as rapidly as the tears.
At last, exhausted, she sagged against him, weeping blindly. His arms lifted then, coming around her and enveloping her in warmth and support. How could he hold her like this, she wondered, when he must hate her? He must hate her, if he thought that she would care what anyone thought of her when he’d just been reminded so brutally what awaited him after she was gone.
Of course he hated her, she told herself. She was an officer of the Coalition, the force that had taken his world from him, that had subjugated him, chained him, and turned him into something his Triotian soul must recoil from in abhorrence. Yet he was holding her, tightly, and she felt his hand move to stroke her hair. She didn’t understand.
“Let it out, Shaylah. It makes you no less strong.”
His words were soft, soothing, and so unexpected she wasn’t certain she’d heard them correctly. Then she realized she didn’t care. She wanted to have heard them, just as she wanted him to keep holding her, just as she felt impossibly comforted by the touch of his hand on her hair.
“I hate it,” she mumbled brokenly, “I hate it all.”
“I know. If I wasn’t certain of that, I wouldn’t be here.”
“I hate it,” she repeated, “but I can’t do anything about it. It feels horrible, like being crushed and torn apart at the same time.”
She heard him let out a short, compressed breath. “I know.”
Of course he did. Who knew better? She pulled back then to look up at him. “How do you stand it?” she whispered.
For a moment, just one flashing instant, she saw it all in his eyes, the pain, the anguish, the pure torture of his existence. Then he was back in control, looking down at her calmly. She was nowhere near calm herself, and she didn’t know if she ever would be again.
“Oh, Wolf,” she moaned, “there has to be something we can do! Maybe I can smuggle you out—”
“Don’t be foolish. You know every Coalition ship is inspected nose to tail before it clears local airspace. They’d execute both of us.”
“But I could—”
“Right now,” he interrupted softly, “you need rest, or that arm won’t heal for days.”
He moved as if to release her. A quick, instinctive protest broke from her, and she clung to him, burying her face against his chest. He hesitated, then swung her up into his arms and put her gently down on the bed. As he tried to straighten up, Shaylah again clung to him.
“Please,” she whispered, “just hold me for a while?”
Again he hesitated. Then he slowly lowered himself down beside her. He slipped one arm around her, and Shaylah burrowed close to his side. She knew he had to feel the little tremors rippling through her, but she couldn’t seem to stop them. The last of her Coalition pride deserted her.
“Why are you doing this? You must despise me.”
“I don’t despise you, Shaylah. It’s not your fault.”
“But I’m part of the Coalition—”
“But you’re an innocent in their true ways. At least, you were.”
“Because I refused to see the truth.” Her voice was harsh with self-disgust. She shuddered again, trying to bite back a fresh outbreak of weeping.
“It’s all right, you know,” Wolf said mildly. “If you don’t let it out, it will choke you.”
Something in his voice made her lift her head to meet his eyes. Realization dawned in her, and a rueful acknowledgment that she should have known by now.
“You did it on purpose,” she breathed. “You meant for me to blow up, didn’t you? That’s why you kept acting like that, kept prodding me . . .”
“I know how it feels to try and hold in something that won’t be held. Something that will claw its way out, somehow, and tear you apart in the process.”
Shaylah sagged back against him. “Dear Eos,” she breathed. “How can you . . . be like this? You have every right to be as cold and hard as . . . Triotian marble. Why aren’t you?”
“I am, Shaylah. Don’t ever doubt it.” His voice, harsh and implacable, changed suddenly, softened into bemusement. “Except with you, it seems.”
She didn’t know what to say to that. She didn’t know much of anything right now, she thought in weary frustration. Helplessness was a foreign emotion to her, and she wondered how anyone survived it, let alone a man as strong and proud as Wolf.
She couldn’t think about it anymore. It was too much, too horrible, and she couldn’t deal with it right now. Maybe Wolf was right. She needed rest; her arm was aching steadily. But she knew sleep was impossible. She was wound far too tightly.
“Wolf? Would you . . . talk to me?”
“About what?”
“Anything. Whatever you want.”
He was silent for what seemed like forever, although Shaylah knew it was only moments.
“Do you still not trust me, then?” she asked quietly.
“It’s not that. It is that . . . the only thing I can think to speak of is the one thing I’ve had to bury for so long . . .”
“Trios?” she guessed.
He nodded. “Home. As it was before, not . . .”
Shaylah slid one arm around him to hug him as best she could. “Was it really that beautiful? Like in the garden?”
“It was. All kinds of beauty. Wide, open plains, covered with grass. Tall, rugged mountains, fresh with the scent of the trees. Even the drylands had their own special beauty, especially at day’s end, when the light would paint it with all the colors of the spectrum.”
Shaylah snuggled closer as he went on, his quiet words made all the more eloquent by the knowledge that they hadn’t been spoken for five years. He told her of all the places he’d been, until she was amazed anyone so young could have seen it all. He told her also of the places he hadn’t seen, that he’d hoped to see. Places, she thought with acrid bitterness, that didn’t exist anymore.
“My family had a dwelling in the mountains,” he told her. “My father—” There was the slightest of pauses before he steadied himself and went on. “My father designed it. On a cliff, looking down across a green valley, and the deepest, bluest lake you’ve ever seen. It was a place of quiet, except for the cry of the birds and the howl of the wild things. It was the only place I ever found absolute peace.”
“It sounds . . . perfect.”
He laughed, a little roughly. “It was far from that, but it was as close as we could make it. As was Trios itself. We were like any other race, Sh
aylah. We had our skalworms, our bad ones, just as every place does. But we tried, and we came close.” She felt a little shiver run through him. “And we never appreciated what we had when we had it.”
She didn’t want to think about that; she wanted him to keep talking. His voice was doing oddly pleasant things to her, warming the places that had been so chilled by reality. Or perhaps it was being here like this, she thought, so close, her head resting on his shoulder, her hand on his naked chest . . .
“On Arellia,” she said hastily, aware of the sudden heat that had flooded her, “there’s a high place near my home. On it you can look out over the settlement for miles. At night, when the lights are on, it’s beautiful. I go up there when I need to know that . . . everything’s not rotten. I can stand up there, a part of it, yet above it, and tell myself that we’ve produced this, so we can’t be all bad . . . Do you have a place like that, Wolf?”
“I did. It was by the mountain house, near that lake I told you about. There was a small cove, where a stream fed into the lake from the tableland above. It formed a waterfall that ran the seasons round. The trees were thick there, and it was always cool and sheltered. I went there often as a boy, and later, Brielle and I—”
He broke off suddenly, and when Shaylah looked up at him his eyes were closed and his jaw set. Her mind warned her she did not want to hear this, but her foolish heart forced the question to her lips anyway.
“Who is Brielle?”
She thought he wasn’t going to answer. When at last he did, she wished he hadn’t.
“My mate.”
Her breath seemed to lodge in her throat. “You are . . . bonded?”
“I was.”
The meaning in those death-knell words hit Shaylah like a physical blow. “Her, too?” she whispered.
“She was the last. I almost saved her, almost got her into the hills, before they caught up with us.” He shuddered. “Beautiful, delicate Brielle. She was a tiny thing, so fragile. She trusted me to protect her . . .”
“Oh, Wolf . . . You’re sure? She wasn’t just . . . captured, as you were?”
He went rigid. “I’m sure. She’s dead.”
“But maybe—”
“I’m sure,” he interrupted her harshly, “because I killed her myself.”
Shaylah gasped.
“She begged me to. We’d seen what the brave men of the Coalition had done to other Triotian women. She would never have survived it. When we knew we were trapped, when they were closing in, she pled with me to save her from that.”
Shaylah moaned low in her throat. She felt him shiver again.
“Do you know what she told me? At the end? That it was better this way, that she knew I could never bear to watch what they would do to her. That it would drive me mad, and that couldn’t be, because I had to be strong enough to come back and—” He shuddered violently, the words ending in a strangled sound. For a long time, neither of them spoke.
“She must have loved you very much,” Shaylah said at last, shaken by his words in a way she’d never known.
“She was my mate,” he said simply.
“Is that . . . what it’s like? To be bonded?”
“It’s like nothing else in the universe,” he said softly. “To put another above all else in your life, and know that she does the same. To know that it is forever. To be so much a part of someone that you are only half alive when you are apart”—he took a ragged breath—”and to mate with your perfect match . . . is to reach a place others only dream of. It’s to know what glorious sensations your body is capable of, and then go beyond. And once you have, you are never the same again.”
Shaylah stared at him through the tears that were beginning again. She was one of those others, she thought, one of those who only dreamed of the kind of mating he spoke of, in which the physical act was nothing compared to the joining of mind, soul, and heart. He’d known it, that dream, he’d lived it. And had it brutally snatched away by the cruelest of fates, a fate that had forced him to destroy with his own hands the woman he loved above all else.
Shaylah’s heart ached into the night, long after Wolf, drained by his painful recounting, slipped into sleep. The pain stayed with her in the days that followed, although Wolf never mentioned that night again. On the surface they slipped back into their old ways, but the memory of his horrible story haunted Shaylah until she could think of nothing else.
After that night, he returned to sleeping on the floor. It was part of the new reserve she sensed in him, and she wondered if he regretted baring so much of his soul to her. She missed his warmth and wondered how she could have grown so used to it after only one night.
The message came three nights later, while Wolf was in the soaking pool. She’d had to work to convince him to use it instead of his usual washes in icy water; he had warned her that if it was ever found out she’d let a slave use it, even Califa would never forgive her.
“I’m not sure I care anymore,” she’d said, and meant it.
When she answered the door to find Cadet Brakely, she was startled. Until he handed her the coded message case.
“Looks like orders, Captain. Think you’re the next call-out for whatever it is?”
“I don’t know,” she said numbly, barely remembering to thank him before shutting the door.
She carried the case to her bag and dug into the side pocket to bring out her Coalition identification seal. When she realized her hands were shaking, she sucked in a deep breath and steadied herself. She’d known this would come eventually, but she’d tried desperately to put it out of her mind; she’d succeeded too well, it seemed.
With a sharp, forced movement, she inserted the seal in the lock of the case. The lid flipped open, and the small cinescreen lit up.
“Good day, Captain Graymist.” General Corling smiled at her benevolently. She nearly threw the case away from her in repulsion; he’d been the one in charge of the Trios campaign. “I’m sorry to advise you that due to”—he coughed—”a temporary crisis condition, your leave must be interrupted. You will report to your ship at first light and proceed out of the sector, where you will receive your orders. You will then pick up the rest of your crew and set a course for your assignment immediately.” The screen blanked out.
It was over. Shaylah felt an odd numbness overtake her. It stayed with her throughout the evening, deadening her every action until Wolf asked, with more than a little concern, if she was all right.
It stayed with her until she crawled into bed, and Wolf took his place on the floor. As if the sound of his quiet breathing was the key, the floodgates opened, and she was swamped with a pain unlike anything she’d ever experienced. A deep, clawing, wrenching pain that ripped at something vital inside her, leaving it torn and bleeding.
She would leave here tomorrow. She would leave here, and Wolf would return to his abyss of misery. She might never see him again. He would hate her for abandoning him to his fate, even though he had told her there was nothing she could do.
She would leave here, and there was a very real possibility she might never return. She could be killed in this “temporary crisis.” She could die, never having reached that dream, never knowing what it would be like to touch or be touched by someone who loved her enough to pledge the rest of his life to her.
An image came to her, vivid and ugly, of Wolf crushed into submission once more, of him turned over to another, of him driven into mindless lust by a machine, of him chained and taken like the lowliest of whores. This, for a man who had once experienced the most incredible of matings, who had once loved beyond anything the twisted minds of the Coalition could comprehend.
She couldn’t bear it. She hurt inside for both of them until she wanted to scream with it. She sat up in a rush, biting her lip until it bled to keep back the cry that rose from deep within her. She looked aroun
d the room wildly, as if there were something there that could ease her rising hysteria.
Her gaze fell on the controller, set aside and determinedly ignored since the day she’d struck it from Wolf’s hand. She leaned forward and picked it up, staring at it as if it held the answers she sought. She tried to rally all her arguments, all her reasons for not doing this, but they were nothing against the overwhelming weight of pending loss that threatened to crush her. She slid out of bed.
She knelt beside the sleeping Wolf. With a trembling finger she flicked the blue switch on the controller. The light blinked coolly in the darkness. Slowly, she moved the dial until she heard his breathing change, become deeper. She waited until the blue light glowed steadily, then, smothering the last of her qualms, bent over him.
She whispered soft words, gentle words, words meant to take him back to a happier time, back to the world and life he’d lost. She whispered of the place by the waterfall, of the woman he’d lost, and the love they’d shared. And at last, of the mating that was so extraordinary. When at last he stirred, when the vivid green eyes fluttered open, she knew from his first words that she’d succeeded.
“Brielle?” His slightly unfocused gaze fastened on her. “Bree,” he whispered, reaching for her. He pulled her down to him, a low groan escaping from his throat. “God, Bree, it’s been so long.”
At the last second Shaylah’s nerve shattered, and she tried to pull away. But he had a grip on her now, and he was too strong. His hand slipped behind her head, fingers threading through her hair as he pulled her mouth down to his.
At the first touch of his lips on hers, Shaylah lost any thought of resisting. All her reservations vanished in the instant flare of warmth and sensation. He was heat and light in her darkness, and she melted before his fire.
She’d never known, only dreamed of this, only hoped that it existed, and that she was capable of it. It was what she’d waited for, this inferno of pleasure; it was what had kept her from joining the rush to easy pleasure common in all the Coalition colonies.
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