by Lili Zander
34
Lani
When I open my eyes, I’m lying on a soft mattress, high off the ground, covered with silky sheets and warm blankets. Sun pours into the room through the floor-to-ceiling window, filling it with the most delicious warmth. The view is magnificent. The slopes outside are covered with waves of purple and orange flowers, and in the distance, snow-capped mountains reach majestically for the sky.
Ruhan enters the room. “You’re awake,” he says, palpable relief in his voice. “Thank Caeron.”
I sit up, surprised to find that I’m strong enough to do so. “How am I not dead?”
“It was touch-and-go,” he says frankly. “The burns were a problem, but your body also reacted badly to a sedative. We weren’t sure if you’d make it.”
“Devnik stuck something in my neck.”
“Yeah. Whatever it was, it’s not safe for humans.” He takes a deep breath. “You’ve spent the last two days in a healing tank.” He smiles ruefully. “I’m afraid I growled at the healers and scared them to death. I should probably apologize. They predicted you’d wake today, and they were right.” He sits on the bed and takes my hand in his. “I thought I’d lost you, Lani.”
I swallow the lump in my throat. “How did you find me?”
“Blue.”
Oh shit, SpideyBot. Please let him be alive. “Is he okay?”
“He’s fine. He’d drained himself down to nothing, the idiot, but I was able to save his memories before he shut down. I rebuilt the broken parts. He’s as good as new.” He flashes me a grin. “While I was at it, I made some improvements too.”
I know that gleam in his eyes. “What kind of improvements?”
“He has wings now.”
What? “Are you telling me that the freaky dog-sized spider can now fly?”
“Among other things.” He grins. “Oh, come on, Lani. Admit it. You like Blue.”
“Fine,” I grumble. I can’t stop smiling. I’m alive, and so is Ruhan. “I admit, I might have grown somewhat fond of him. But Ruhan, honestly. A spider is scary enough, but a spider than can fly? Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”
He winks at me. Typical.
“Where are we?”
“Still on Nestri. These are the Ciegrax Mountains,” he says, gesturing to the snow-capped peaks. “And we are in the Valley of the Flowers. This is the Orne Corydale Inn. For more than two thousand years, it’s stood in this exact spot, and catered to travelers who are looking for peace and quiet.” He lifts my hand to his lips and brushes a kiss against my skin. “Fourth gets here tomorrow. Hungry?”
Now that I think about it, yes. “I could use some food.” I could snuggle here with him, but I need answers first. “What happened with First?”
Ruhan’s expression darkens. “He got away. His Blood Heart officers must have pulled him to safety. Ayani found the traitor. It turns out that the explosions inside Cintra were courtesy Gervil, not First.”
I frown in confusion. “Gervil? Why?”
“They were trying to get to you. You made allegations against him, remember? Gervil couldn’t let his crimes come to light, so he figured he’d kill the witness.” He shakes his head. “Next time, don’t go off-script.”
So, this mess was really my fault. I wince. “Umm, okay. Sorry about that.”
He shrugs easily. “There’s nothing to forgive, lovely Lani.” He kisses the back of my hand again, the merest whisper of a touch. It’s more than enough. Desire flares sharply to life.
“Mardex is here as well,” he continues. “His journey, unlike ours, was uneventful.”
“Oh, good.” I have one more question. “And the LoreLords? What’s going on with the war?”
A wicked light dances in his eyes. He flicks his fingers against a panel, and a screen drops from the ceiling. “Shall we watch?”
An image of the LoreLords fills the screen. The Younger LoreLord sneers. “Do you really think we’ve left it up to chance?” he says. “We’ve planned everything. In three days, Dranta will riot, the Okaki there revolting against their Zorahn neighbors. The day after that, it’ll be Gashire and Stivale. Then, Fiburn, Ifrore, and Holis. In a week, the entire planet will burn. Then we’ll move in. To protect the Zorahn residents, of course. For their own good.”
The view switches to a pair of shell-shocked reporters. “Eleven people died on Dranta,” one of them says. “Thirty-five in Gashire. Eighty-seven in Stivale. And to think it was all done deliberately…”
The view shifts again. Okaki soldiers line in front of the twin temples, guarding the doors. The streets are filled with thousands of protesters, Okaki and Zorahn. “Nestri Prime hasn’t seen a protest like this in more than two hundred years,” a disembodied voice says off-screen. “Unconfirmed reports are now coming in that the LoreLords have fled the Temples of Pharlon. At dawn, a shuttle took off from Nestri Prime. It’s believed that the three LoreLords were on it.”
Ruhan mutes the screen. “The Empire takes a dim view of attempts to secede,” he says. “Three Zorahn Class A destroyers landed this morning. The clean-up is in progress. And the LoreLords are about to find that there is no place to hide from the Spymaster of the Zorahn Empire. Ru’vi ab Crosu will find them, and she will make them pay.”
Sucks to be them. I can’t say I feel any sympathy for the LoreLords. They chose their path.
“Your plan worked. You saved everyone in Nestri. You’re a hero.”
“Don’t tell anyone,” he says with a grin. “It’s bad for my reputation.” His face turns serious. “I love you, Lani. You’re my mate, and I’m yours, if you’ll have me. When you’re not with me, I feel like there’s a very essential piece of my soul that’s missing.”
“I love you too.” Aggravating, charming Ruhan. I love him for his wit and his depth, for his happy-go-lucky nature and for his steadfast insistence to do the right thing. I love him because when he heard that First was going to target ten thousand innocent people, he immediately resolved to protect them. I love him because he was ready to sacrifice himself for Arax. He never even hesitated.
But it’s more than that. It’s deeper than that. We’ve only known each other for a short time, and we have plenty to learn about each other. Some of it will be good. Some of it, less so. But nothing will change the way I feel about him. I’m connected to Ruhan. I’ve been connected to him right from the start.
It’s primitive, and it’s primal, and it’s oh-so-right. Ruhan is my mate.
“Fourth is showing up tomorrow?”
He nods.
“And we have nothing to do until then?”
His lips quirk. “Well, I wouldn’t go so far as that,” he says. “I have plenty of suggestions about what we could do.” His gaze slides down my body, and he quirks an eyebrow. “What do you think, lovely Lani?”
I laugh in sheer giddy happiness. “I have suggestions too,” I tell him. “Let’s do all of them.”
35
Lani
Two weeks later…
There was a debrief at the Rebellion, of course. Everyone yelled a lot. Me included, when I found out that Tarish had poisoned Ruhan in some kind of misguided blackmail attempt. Seriously? Ruhan doesn’t seem fazed by it—all in a day’s work, lovely Lani, he’d said when I exploded—but I was, and still am, livid with rage.
Once the official debrief was done, I got to meet the other Draekons. Fourth, I’d already met on the ship. But I met Kadir, Fifth, and Sixth. I didn’t tell Fifth and Sixth they needed names—I have some tact—but they really do. They’re not the Crimson Force anymore. They aren’t tools of the Empire, and numbers are not names.
I really like them. You know the kind of families where the siblings give each other a hard time, but when push comes to shove, they’re there for each other? That’s the five of them.
And they’ve made me feel like one of them. My family never made me feel loved, but from the second Fourth landed on Nestri, hugged me, and welcomed me to the family, I’ve felt like I belong.<
br />
Alice is pretty great. She’s frank and funny, level-headed and down to earth. There are other human women in the rebellion. Olivia and Dor live on the base with their mates, and they’re nice too, but Alice feels like family.
Mandy wasn’t at the rebellion when I got there. She’s managed to talk her way onto a smuggler’s ship, and she’s making a documentary about the people who live on the fringes of the High Empire. I’ve talked to her by comm, though. I’d been nervous about our conversation. I was afraid that Mandy might blame me for the additional tortures she suffered after I was abducted by the Okaki pirates. But we’d had a perfectly lovely chat. There was laughter, and there were tears, and then laughter again. “How are you recovering?” I’d asked her. “I’m seeing a therapist here. It helps.”
“I’m keeping myself busy,” she’d replied. “There’s never a dull moment on Kelek’s ship.”
Kelek is Kelek ab Rahni, a smuggler who evidently has a way to evade the Triumvirate patrols and get to Earth. “Returning home is an option,” Tarish had said to me the first day.
I’d declined. Home isn’t Earth any longer; it’s wherever Ruhan is.
Is it weird that I had to travel to the other side of the galaxy to feel like I’ve truly come home?
Probably.
Two weeks have flown by. I guess it’s time to start figuring out what I want to do with my life.
Ruhan comes up behind me and wraps his arms around my waist, his lips nuzzling my neck. “You look preoccupied.”
“I’m just thinking about what happens next.” And trying hard not to be distracted by his mouth and his hands.
“What happens next?”
“I need to get a job of some kind,” I murmur. “I don’t want to join the rebellion. They have a nasty habit of poisoning people to get them to do what they want. But we need money.”
“We do?”
“Even shacks must cost something.”
He laughs and nips my earlobe. I start to turn around to kiss him back when our door beeps. I check the feed and see Fourth outside. Ruhan mutters something under his breath about terrible timing, and lets him in.
“Have you come to tell us you’ve picked a name,” I tease Fourth. “Or are you still working on it?”
“Still working on it,” he says easily. He turns to Ruhan. “The ship you’ve been waiting for just landed.”
“Ah, is it—?”
I look from Ruhan to Fourth. “Is it what?” I demand. “What’s going on?”
“Not what. Who?” Ruhan corrects. “You remember that story that Mardex told us about his bondmate, the one he was forced to leave behind when he had to flee?”
I clamp a hand over my mouth. “She’s coming to visit?”
“The situation is complicated,” he warns. “Mardex was gone a long time. Dani waited for him for many years, but earlier this year, she found another bondmate.”
Oh shit. That’s heartbreaking. “That’s awful. Does Mardex know?”
Ruhan nods. “They’ve talked. She still wanted to see him.”
“And you wanted Fourth to alert you when they got here?” I raise an eyebrow. “Weren’t you the one who was unmoved by his story? If I remember right, you called me a sentimental fool.”
“I did no such thing,” he replies. I give him a skeptical look, and his lips twitch. “I might, however, have thought it.”
Fourth shoots Ruhan an openly amused look. “Funny,” he says. “He paid for Dani to fly here. If you don’t care, why’d you do that, brother?”
Ruhan makes a rude hand gesture. I bite back my smile. “Mardex asked if you could be there,” Fourth continues.
Huh. I didn’t realize that Mardex and Ruhan were friends.
“Sure. Lani, want to join us?”
It feels voyeuristic, and if it’s all heartbreak, I don’t know if I want to go. But at the same time, I really want to meet Dani. Mardex’s story still has the power to make me sniffle. “Okay.”
We take a skimmer to the port. The ship’s just touching down. The ramp extends to the ground, and the first passengers start to disembark.
Then a petite dark-skinned woman emerges, dressed in a sleeveless orange tunic, her arms covered with blue bangles. A tall, bearded man follows her. “Shit,” I whisper. “She’s brought her new bondmate.”
I turn to look at Mardex to see how he’s taking it. But when Mardex’s gaze connects with Dani and her new bondmate, something unexpected happens.
Both Mardex and the bearded man shift to dragons.
Wait, what? My mouth falls open. At my side, Ruhan laughs under his breath. “That’s going to make for an interesting conversation between the three of them,” he murmurs.
“Does that mean… are they both her mates then?”
“It appears so.” He shakes his head. “Everyone’s going to have to learn how to share. It’s going to be quite a journey.”
I tilt my head up and give him a teasing smile. “You don’t like to share?”
He takes my elbow. “No,” he says. “Sorry, little human. You’re all mine.”
His possessive words send a thrill through me. I stab a finger in his chest. “And you’re mine,” I tell him. “Let’s not forget that.”
His gaze rests on me, hot and dark. “I have an idea of what we can do with the rest of the day,” he says, his voice silky.
Desire flares to life. I extinguish it with difficulty. We’ve spent most of the last two weeks in bed, but the impromptu honeymoon must end sometime. “Oh, no. I’m not falling for that. I need to get my act together.” They’ve got to have the equivalent of a career counselor here, right?
“Don’t have time for what?” Ruhan sounds amused. “I just thought we’d grab a shuttle and head into Malum.”
Ooh. That’s a really tempting offer. The rebellion is now based on Bestea, which is a populated planet with several major cities, Malum being the closest. I’ve been dying to go exploring, but I just haven’t found the time. It’s all that great sex I’ve been having.
Ruhan’s watching me; he knows I’m wavering. “It’ll just be a short trip,” he says persuasively. “Kadir’s having trouble with his new ship. I promised to help him out this evening. We’ll be back in time for that.”
I owe Kadir. He must have sensed that I’d had enough adventures for a while, so he volunteered to go to Hokatir to retrieve Ruhan’s ship, the Circada. It was a week’s journey. Poor guy.
“Okay,” I relent. Who am I kidding? I’m not particularly looking forward to finding out that I’m qualified for nothing, so it’s not hard to put off the job search for another day. Besides, I really want to go to Malum.
We borrow Fourth’s skimmer and head through the underground tunnels toward the city. Once we’re there, Ruhan maneuvers the skimmer to the surface. I press my face to the window. The buildings in Malum are all shiny and blue. They glitter like jewels, and I’m so entranced by them that I don’t notice the ocean until it’s practically in front of us.
Ruhan lands the skimmer on the roof of a building. The doors slide open, he jumps out, comes around my side, and holds his hand out to me. “Let’s go exploring.”
He’s up to something. I know it. I can tell from the twinkle in his eyes, from the way his lips keep twitching. “What are you planning?”
He laughs. “Do you know, before you came along, I was considered inscrutable, moody, and terrifying?”
“Are you sure you’re not talking about Kadir?”
He winks at me, swings me into his arms, sweeps open the nearest door, and carries me across the threshhold. “Lovely Lani, your shack awaits.”
For the second time in the same day, my mouth falls open. This isn’t a shack. It’s a fricking penthouse apartment that overlooks the ocean. It’s not huge, but it’s not tiny either. It’s just right.
“What do you think?” Ruhan asks.
“Did you buy this apartment?” I squeak. “How? When? With what money?” He was in stasis for a thousand years, and before th
at, he was considered the property of the scientists. This cannot be cheap. How can he afford this?
He grins. “Funny story, that,” he says. “It turns out that there were about a dozen bounties on Gervil. Another half-dozen on Devnik. Once the healers stabilized you, I remembered to scrape off their DNA for proof.” He puts his hands on my shoulders. “Come on. I want to show you something.”
He steers me into a sun-filled room, and I stop in the doorway, shocked. It’s a studio. There are easels. Paintbrushes. Paint.
I don’t understand.
“You said you used to paint,” he says. “Alice helped me figure out what painting is, and Olivia told me what equipment you’d need.”
I think I mentioned I painted in a conversation with him once. He remembered, and he’s outfitted a studio just for me. To make me happy. My eyes prickle with tears. He’s so perfect, and I’m so lucky.
“This is the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me,” I whisper. I step into the room and pick up a brush, running my fingers over the bristles. “Does the High Empire have easels?”
“Caeron, no. I had to program the syn to create pretty much everything here.” He pulls me close, his eyes gleaming. “It was very hard work. I’m not saying you have to sleep with me as thanks but—”
“But you wouldn’t be opposed to it,” I murmur, standing on tiptoe and brushing a kiss over his lips. “I agree. I should throw myself into your arms to show you how grateful I am.” I take a half-step back as a sudden thought strikes me. “I’m assuming you’re asking me to move in.”
“Of course I am. I haven’t finalized this purchase, so if you don’t like it, we’ll find somewhere else. Whatever will make you happy. Will you move in with me?”
I’d be thrilled to, Ruhan. “On one condition.” I give him a mock-frown. “Is Blue going to live with us?”
