by Presley Hall
I reach behind my head, fingers grazing the nape of my neck. All I feel is a thin raised line, barely even noticeable. In time, I imagine it will fade until I can’t even feel that it’s there at all.
Brele is watching me closely. I try to speak through a mouth gone dry with nerves, licking my lips anxiously.
“Brele?” I say his name slowly, feeling it roll over my tongue. “You can understand me too?”
Of course he can. He just answered my question a second ago. But I need confirmation of it—need to hear him say the words. I need to convince my reeling mind that this is all real.
“Yes, Jade,” he whispers, stepping toward me. His gaze is fixed on mine, his expression one of pure awe. “I can understand you.” He sounds almost reverent as he adds, “Say something else. Please.”
“Um…” I say the only thing I can think of, because it’s what’s currently screaming through my mind at top volume. “What the hell is going on?”
His smile falters for only a second. “What do you mean?”
“Why do you look so… so thrilled to talk to me?” I shake my head, trying to laugh, but the way he’s looking at me makes it difficult. My heart is beating too hard for me to take a full breath. “I mean, I’m sure you probably don’t get a lot of company way out here, but still. Why go to so much effort to save me? To talk to me? It’s not like I’m anything that special.”
“But you are.” He speaks softly, and I feel that strange pull inside of me again, the one that makes me want to cross the inches of space between us and mold my body against his. “You’re my Irisa,” he continues, his storm-grey eye lightening as it holds my gaze. “My fated mate.”
13
Brele
I can hardly breathe as I watch Jade process what I’ve just said. I’ve thought of a dozen different ways to tell her, especially after I came up with the idea to salvage the implants, but in the moment, I couldn’t think of anything other than to say it plainly. No dissembling, no dressing it up to be anything other than the simple truth that I’ve known since she woke up in that pod.
She was meant to be mine, and I hers.
I wait for her reaction, but she just looks stunned, frozen in place as she stares at me.
“What… what the hell does that mean?” she asks finally, tension in her voice. I can almost feel her fighting the pull of the bond, trying to distance herself from me.
I scramble for a way to explain it. To put it into words she will understand.
“We have a saying,” I tell her slowly. “My soul has recognized yours. This is how we choose a partner, here on Kalix. The bond chooses our other half for us, the perfect match. From the moment you woke up, I knew you were my Irisa, Jade. We are each other’s perfect match.”
As I speak, I move closer to her—I can’t help myself. Every part of me is aching for her to understand, begging for her to accept what I already know to be true. Now that I can speak to her and explain, I can’t keep myself from touching her any longer.
I reach out as I say the last words—we are each other’s perfect match—my fingers grazing along her ear, down the column of her throat.
She shudders, her breath coming in a small, quick gasp as she sways toward me. She takes a step forward, her body arching toward mine, and her head moves to the side, leaning into my touch as her eyelids flutter closed.
“You feel it too, don’t you?” I ask softly, my voice low and husky as I breathe her in, moving that last step closer that almost brings our bodies near enough to touch.
Her head snaps up, her eyes opening wide.
For one long moment that seems to stretch out into forever, she stares at me without saying anything. Her gaze is fixed on mine, searching as if she’s trying to decide something, trying to win some battle she’s fighting within herself.
I want to kiss her so badly that it feels as if I might die if I don’t. My entire world has narrowed down to the space between her mouth and mine. Desire pulses through me, wave after wave of it, a pull I feel all the way down to my soul.
Unable to stop myself, I lean down, breathing in her sweet scent as I reach down to touch her waist. Her body sways forward again so that her breasts brush against my chest.
She tilts her head up a little, and I feel the faintest touch of her lips, the softness of them beginning to give under mine…
Then she stiffens, shoving me backward hard.
I stagger back, caught off-guard by the force of it and how lost I was in the moment. She glares at me, her hands in fists at her sides, her eyes wild with confusion and fury.
“No!” she blurts, her jaw set as she stares me down. “I don’t believe any of that shit. Why are you lying to me? Fated mates? Soulmates? What kind of idiot do you take me for? That kind of thing doesn’t happen in real life, Brele. I don’t know what the hell kind of game you’re playing, but I don’t want any part of it.”
And then, as I try to find the words to fix this, she turns on her heel and sprints for the door.
Krax. I curse under my breath as it slams behind her, scrubbing a hand down my face. That’s the second time my Irisa has run from me.
And still, I can’t let her go.
For one thing, I’m not sure I can bear to let my fated mate slip away. I thought I’d resigned myself to the fact that she might not accept the connection between us, that she might want to leave and return to her homeworld regardless of what I told her about the bond.
I reasoned it all out with myself. I reminded myself that she’s Terran, that she has her own life that she’s been snatched away from, that the mating customs of Terrans might be very different from what ours are here on Kalix. I thought I was ready for the possibility of her rejection.
But now that I can speak to her, now that I’ve said the words out loud—everything in me rebels at the idea of losing her.
You don’t deserve this, I think. But by all the gods, I want it.
I’ve gone fifteen years believing that my chance at a mate bond was gone. And now she’s here. My Irisa is here, and I’m not sure I can bear to spend the rest of my life imagining what might have been.
But the bigger reason I can’t let her run away like this is that the woods outside—and the swamps and jungle beyond—are dangerous. Incredibly so. She seemed to realize that yesterday, since she came back home with me, but after learning the truth about our bond, it appears she’d rather face another krauk than spend one more minute here with me.
Deshing wonderful.
I curse under my breath as I gather up my weapons again resignedly, knowing I’ll lose any chance of finding her if I don’t head out soon. There are still hours of daylight left, but the dangers will become considerably worse after dark.
Jade knows this—she’s clearly intelligent. It’s one of the things that draws me to her so strongly, outside of the mere fact of our mate bond. But her good sense seems to have been overridden for now.
Muttering to myself, I head outside, firmly closing the door behind me.
As I start down the trail after her, I can’t help but wonder—was finding my fated mate a blessing, after all?
Or a curse?
14
Jade
Panic rises up in me as I run out the door and into the woods, choking me until I almost feel as if I can’t breathe. I run blindly through the forest, tripping over rocks and logs and swatting away branches as I plunge deeper and deeper into the underbrush, not caring where I’m going or where I end up as long as it’s as far away from him as I can get.
The things I feel with Brele are things I’ve never felt before… and never expected to feel.
I can’t trust them.
For some unexplainable reason, I feel safe with him, and nothing about that makes sense. He’s an alien on a strange planet, a huge barbarian of a man who should terrify me, and yet all I seem to want to do is get as close to him as physically possible.
I can’t let myself feel safe with him. If I do, I’ll let my guard down. I’ve s
pent my whole life fighting, making sure I can protect myself against anything that threatens me or anyone I love, and I’ve never lost that battle. But no matter what I seem to do, I can’t fight Brele. Physically, I can’t win, and even if I could, my body seems to betray me every time I’m around him, making me want to fall into his arms and let him devour me all over again.
So if fighting is out of the question, all that’s left is to flee.
I know risking the wild terrain outside Brele’s cabin is stupid, but I’m beyond the point of being able to think rationally.
Rational thought told me to go back to the relative safety of the house with Brele yesterday—and that ended with a language chip in my head and him telling me I’m bound to him by some mystical force that makes me his mate, a word that somehow makes me feel both furious and incredibly aroused all at once.
Mate sounds so… so barbaric.
Like we’re animals.
Like he’s going to ravish me in some savage way.
But at the same time, even that thought makes me feel so turned on that my whole body flushes with heat. It sounds primal, passionate, wild—all the things that I suddenly feel like I’ve secretly craved my entire life without even knowing it.
And how would I? Men on Earth don’t mate with you. They don’t take you in a barbaric fashion, pinning you down on the floor and sniffing you, tasting you as if they want to claim you in every sense of the word.
No. I huff a breath as I stumble deeper into the woods, picking up my pace when I find a more even path. Men on Earth get drunk and go home with you, and if they can keep it up, they fuck you for five minutes until they’re done, then tell you how good it was and fall asleep.
But no matter how good the things Brele has done to me felt, no matter how much my body craves them again, that’s exactly why I need to get out. It might be dangerous out here in the wilderness, but it’s more dangerous to stay, to let him seduce me into thinking I’m safe there. I can’t let my better judgement be overridden like that.
I just want to fucking go home.
The thought ricochets through my head, banging against the inside of my skull.
Things might’ve been shitty back on Earth—I was broke a lot of the time, and Emma was all I really had—but at least everything made sense there. I knew what was right and wrong there, who I was and what I was supposed to be doing. I was never confused. I never felt lost, and if I ever did, I’d just lose myself in another fight until the world felt right again.
I hear noises behind me and whirl around, my heart in my throat. My hand pauses on the tangle of vines I was about to pull apart. I realize suddenly where I am—back near the swamp where the bear-creature attacked us. The terrain here changes from thick trees and brush to soft mud and tangled vines and murky water that could hide all manner of things.
I brace myself, fear tightening my muscles as I wonder what kind of monster is going to try to kill me this time.
And then I see Brele come crashing through the trees. He’s followed me. For whatever reason, he’s not giving up on me that easily.
Well, I think with dogged determination, I’m not that easily caught.
I yank the vines apart, crawling through them as I try to find my footing in the soft mud, and just as I tumble through, I hear a yell from behind me.
Against my better judgement, I stop, turning to see what the noise is all about. My heart lurches into my throat as I see Brele falling, the ground crumbling away beneath him as if he’s stepped into quicksand.
His reflexes are incredible. Even as he’s losing his footing, he grabs onto a cluster of nearby vines, but I can already tell the plants aren’t going to hold his weight for long. They’ll prolong the inevitable… but that’s all they’ll do.
One vine snaps, and my hand goes to my mouth, stifling a scream. As another breaks, I find myself retracing my steps as if in a daze, unable to keep myself from running to him—from helping him. I don’t understand why. I could get away free and clear right now, put enough distance between us that it wouldn’t matter how good of a tracker he is or how well he knows this terrain, he wouldn’t find me.
But I can’t leave him.
I sprint toward where he’s hanging from the vines, my feet eating up the distance between us faster than I would have thought possible. All I can think about is getting to him before he falls.
Brele looks up as I lurch forward, grabbing on to his upper arms and trying to haul him upward. Shock registers on his face as he realizes I’ve come back for him, his mouth dropping open slightly. For a brief second, we’re both frozen in place, staring into each other’s eyes as that magnetic connection flares between us again, the force of it nearly taking my breath away.
He kicks at the mud and sand, trying to find some footing, but there’s none. There are only the breaking vines and my grip to help keep him out of the pit that’s threatening to swallow him up, and although I’m strong, Brele outweighs me by a lot—and every bit of it is solid, heavy muscle.
I rear back, my fingers digging into his muscled flesh as I try to haul him upward, but in that same instant, the last of the vines give way. My feet slide out from under me as the ground beneath me starts to crumble away as well.
With a terrified shriek, I feel myself falling with him, down into the blackness of whatever waits beneath us.
For a moment, I’m completely weightless. My stomach drops like I’m on the beginning of a rollercoaster, and fear floods my veins with ice. Brele’s arms are around me for a half second—trying to keep me safe?—but the drop is too abrupt and the dirt and mud falling around us is too thick and heavy, dragging us apart as we free-fall into the darkness.
When we hit, it feels so solid at first that all of the air rushes out of my lungs, cold pain arcing through every inch of me. And then I realize, as I start to sink, that the cold feeling is water closing in around me. We’ve landed in some kind of lake—thank goodness, or we’d probably be dead.
If we’d hit the ground with that kind of force, I’m not sure we would have survived it—at least not with all of our bones intact.
Kicking my feet, I swim frantically toward the surface. Brele and I both break through at the same time, sputtering for air. Shoving my wet hair out of my eyes, I look wildly around to try to get some idea of our surroundings.
Water splashes around us as clumps of mud and dirt keep falling into the lake, loose earth pouring down from the hole that we created, but I can see in the dim light filtering down from above that we’re in some kind of massive underground cave. The walls rise wetly up on either side of us, gleaming and black, but I can see veins of something else—some kind of shimmering white stone—winding through them.
I remember the pieces of white stone inlaid in Brele’s bathing room and gasp softly.
He must have come to a place like this and carved out those pieces.
For some reason, that realization stuns me a little. It opens up a different facet of him that I never stopped to think about before. He’s a warrior, a fighter, a fierce alien, a man who draws baths and cooks meals and gives a strange woman his bed to sleep in… and now he’s a man who takes the time to find and carve decorative tiles for his floor.
Whatever else I might think about him, it’s clear that he’s far from one-dimensional. And a part of me almost wishes I didn’t know that.
It would be so much easier to convince myself I don’t have feelings for a one-dimensional barbarian.
15
Brele
Once I’m certain that Jade has resurfaced, I turn and swim for the shore. She follows me, moving quickly through the water just behind me.
The cave around us is massive—I didn’t realize they reached so far into the swamp—and there’s enough light coming down from the hole we fell through to give me a decent idea of our surroundings.
As we crawl up onto the gravelly sand of the shore, I see that Jade is having trouble finding her footing. At first, I think she’s just a little unstead
y from the fall and the shock of the water, but as she steps forward, I can see that she’s limping a little. A wave of protectiveness washes over me, and I reach out, wrapping an arm around her waist.
She stiffens slightly in response but lets me lead her over to a large nearby boulder.
“Sit down,” I request as gently as I can manage, very glad that I can speak to her and be understood now, rather than having to make up some crude sign language.
She hesitates for a second, and although I hate to admit it, it’s that tiny bit of defiance that makes me glad she’s my Irisa. Jade isn’t a woman who will ever let me run roughshod over her—not that I would ever do so. And I have a strong feeling that she’ll never fail to give me her opinion or balk at something that she doesn’t think is right.
Which means if she ever lets me claim her, if she ever gives in to the bond, it will be because she’s truly certain. It will be because she wants it.
That thought sends a bolt of hunger through me, so strong that my cock goes half hard despite the lingering coldness from the water.
I manage to ignore it—something I’m becoming more practiced at than I ever imagined I would—and kneel in front of Jade, touching her ankle softly to test how badly she’s hurt.
“This might be a little painful,” I tell her, looking up as I probe the joint. “But I’ll try not to hurt you.”
She doesn’t say anything, so I focus on my task as best as I can, trying to ignore the softness of her damp skin under my fingertips and the way the scent of her seems to light my entire being on fire. I want her so badly that I can hardly stand it—although that feeling is, at the moment, at war with the fact that I’m more than a little angry she ignored my warnings about how dangerous the wilderness of Kalix is and ran off on her own again.
