by Calista Skye
His red-eyed glare communicated a ruthlessness she'd never seen in any species. His grin deepened reading her detection then he tilted his near-skeletal thin head, pale as death in a garish, bespoke suit, sizing her like he'd seen her face before but couldn't yet place it.
Her heart dropped to her stomach.
He saw Nineh in her because he knew her cousin.
“What a fetching beauty you have on your arm, Prince Tarik. The other doll to go with the first of the halfling pair I'll prize nightly in my quarters.”
He wore a cocky grin, the stringy strands of his hair, bone white and trailing down in oiled, gossamer strings that touched his elbows.
The prince's growl made Shala jump, and she protested to no avail when he stepped in front of her.
“Careful, boy, or she'll find out what you all really are. She doesn't know about your blood, yet, does she?"
Eyes narrowing, Shala looked from the dreaded scavenger to the prince, a gasp catching in her throat as they fell onto the prince's hands next. They were changing... into claws, beginning to break through the skin, and his fingers... They were misshapen now.
When he reached up to deliver a cutting slap to the scavenger's face, leaving several stripes on the bastard's pale cheek, Shala understood what she'd just seen. And the screams and commotion filling the room when the crowd called their attention, made it clear that the matter was far more perilous than just this one acquisitioner, indeed.
He hadn't come to talk or bargain. Not that she'd ever believe he might be interested in such a thing. He had come to claim.
Her eyes widened with horror looking into the crowd. There were scores of AIs entering the room from surrounding doors now, grabbing seemingly, random people and hoisting them close by their necks. Two more acquisitioners stepped in behind the fiend marred by the prince's... claws, and Shala cursed herself again that she'd brought no weapon. Foolishly.
“She's contained in the case,” one of them told the first of the fiends to interrupt the party, and he turned his eyes back to the prince with a fierce promise in his gaze.
“Then there's only the matter of finishing this thing.”
Growling again, the prince edged closer, making it clear he would incapacitate the red-eyed bastard. But there wasn't a trace of fear in the acquisitioner's eyes as he lifted his finger to his throat and dragged it in a straight line across when he flicked his eyes to his comrades.
Shala turned in horror to find the entire room in uproar, guards everywhere, attempting to reach the fiends as they worked their way from victim to victim. Shala made to run into the crowd, too, when one of the guards lifted her by the waist and pulled her back with a hard tug.
“Be still.”
Be still?
How could she possibly do that?
Watching with horror as the AIs dug their claws into the arms and legs and necks of the Telerans gathered to celebrate their holiday, her food threatened to burst up from her stomach and breach her lips as a dark, sludge poured out from their wounds, like something living itself.
She watched helplessly as the Telerans were ravaged and cast aside like rag dolls while the guard held her, and as she turned to meet the eyes of the prince, she saw that the red-eyed fiend was felled, but... not by the prince himself exactly. Biting into the acquisitioner's neck, with the maw of a fierce wild cat, the beast atop him tossed him aside bloodlessly when the crackle of wires singed the air, and it became clear that every one of the invaders were AI versions of the actual acquisitioners. Memotics, perhaps. The acquisitioners had not dared enter the ship in their own bodies. They'd sent “representations.”
Whooping as the guard hoisted her past them, Shala cried out with rage in her lament. This was her battle, too. How dare he take that from her?
By the time the black cat was done with the red-eyed things by the doors, Shala was rushed out and down the corridors at the guard's prompting. And to her surprise when she looked back, she found the prince nowhere. Struggling against the restraint of the guards to go back was useless.
She did not possess the strength.
12
Lifting her head to the sound of a woosh, Shala grit her jaw at the sight of the disheveled prince.
“How dare you lock me up in here?!”
“Quite easily,” he gruffed as he settled to the lounger beside her in what appeared to be his personal chambers. He had the look of someone rode hard, the shifting of his shape obviously having taken a great deal out of him.
Shala hadn't been exactly sure when the guards brought her there, and there was no way to hail her captain to get herself out. His chambers were paneled in alien wood, not a switch or intercom in sight.
For the first time in a long time, she'd felt helpless, and she hated it. She couldn't even stand the sight of the prince right now.
His arrogant bullshit had prevented her from rising to duty. How many more people might have been safeguarded if he'd just trusted her training? Trusted she could handle at least some of the load?
Gritting her teeth, she spoke with a low tone.
“How many are injured?”
The prince gruffed, and he rested his elbows on his knees, his mouth setting in a firm line. When Shala spotted a glaze taking his eyes, she swallowed against the number he might be about to quote.
“Are there any dead?”
“Whatever happened back there is worse than death.”
Shala could have thrown something.
Could he be more cryptic?
“I have to go.”
“You'll go in the morning. It's been arranged with your captain.”
Heat burning her cheeks, Shala shot up.
She'd had about enough of this shit.
“Who in the hells do you think you are?”
Meeting her eyes with a stillness that made his might clear, Tarik spoke low and powerfully.
“My father is the King. I know who I am, and so do you. ”
Oh, that was about enough of his arrogant nonsense.
Right now, she didn't care if his father was the god of the universe. She was not his prisoner. Or his plaything.
“Of Telera! Not of me. Let me out.”
“Not tonight.”
“Sick bay will need my help. And the memotic is obviously loose.”
“Already gone.”
Fuck.
The prince would need to get off the ship, too. Quickly. Maybe someone could pilot a pod and turn off the 2nd nav system that tapped into headquarters manually. He'd be a sitting duck staying aboard.
“Damn it! I can't sit by and just... do nothing.”
Frustration heated her cheeks, and Shala moved toward the doors, exhaling relief when they wooshed open, then frowning when a guard moved to block her path from exiting.
“Move,” she told him, her voice low and beyond patience.
“I cannot.”
Pursing her mouth, Shala pushed at him, fuming when he barely budged. A flurry of fists assaulted his chest next, but he wouldn't leave the exit. She launched another series of blows, screaming out when she felt herself grabbed and lifted by the waist.
“Secure the manual locks,” she heard the prince advise as she kicked and flailed.
When he finally lowered her to her feet, she pushed against him, finding he quickly bound her wrists. He spoke to her next in a gentle tone, like someone calming a wild animal.
“It is not for you to save the world, Shala. Whatever sickness these fiends have given my people will have its cure. Take the night to rest. You can return to your duty tomorrow.”
“Damn it, you can't-”
Mumbling against the soft lips he pressed to hers, she quickly felt his hands loose her wrists, as if daring her to fight his kiss. As if daring her to think of a way to deny the molten fire burning between them.
It wasn't possible. Even as anger raged through her veins, the passion heating her skin won out, her heart beating a million miles a minute. Her mind blocking out all thoughts of ho
w forbidden this was. How dangerous. How could it be so wrong when it felt like exactly where she was meant to be? Lip-locked, tongue dancing with tongue?
Pulling her closer, the prince deepened their kiss, his hands quickly finding the hidden buttons in her gown that restricted their want to roam. Shivering against him when they slid it down to her waist, baring her rose-tipped peaks to his mouth, she bit back a cry of pent-up desire.
Oh how she wanted him. So badly she couldn't believe she'd fought it for this long. His hands felt like they were meant to be there, exploring the soft of her skin, rising up to cup the back of her head and press her further into his kiss.
He rippled with power, so profoundly it took her breath away, and when he drew the last of her dress down over her hips, the wet of her desire glazed her thigh wantonly. She'd never known the touch of a man. Had always resisted it, but her very body was rebelling against that directive now. Telling her it was his to take. To claim.
Fumbling with the ties holding his pants closed, her fingers headed the rebellion, covering the impossible girth and length of his desire rock hard against her palm. Assisting her with the rest, he drew off his coat, pulling her close, his tongue flirting the tip of her own as he pulled her to the lounge and utterly covered her.
Their bodies writhed against one another, hot and feverish and... one. She didn't know how to explain it. He was alien to her, and she to him, but they were one with each other even still. Already connected. It explained everything: her willingness to defend him despite her duty to the ship, his desire to parade her around at Eiowa. All of it had been unspoken until now, where words took the form of hard and wet, as he split her wide and dripping, and took her.
Nipping her lip, Shala braced herself against the pinching confusion of pain mingled with pleasure as she stretched to accommodate his slow thrust. Gazing into her eyes as they swam with usually hidden nebulae in the their sea of inky black adoringly, his own suffered a slight glowing as he silenced her with his mouth when she winced.
Grunting, he drove himself deeper, his thrusts taking on a rhythm her body understood as the pain subsided.
“You are mine, Shala. And I am yours. Nothing else matters,” he whispered.
Indeed, nothing else mattered.
She repeated it like a mantra in her mind as her moans plumed the air to mix with his own, his breaths jagged as they danced against one another, actualized as one, just as deeply as it had begun to take root in them before such a touch was even considered.
Opening to him, her hips pressed harder to his as the pressure of her pleasure built to bursting, and he clung to her just as intensely as his body jerked, and he succumbed to the seed that answered her bucking hips and the neverending wet that flooded her to greet him.
And their kiss deepened, neither of them parting from the other when their passion was finally spent.
13
It was worse than she imagined when she reached the medical bay the next morning, but she found that the prince had been true to his word. The captain had ordered her to stay away, even charged the prince with her safekeeping.
Shala's cheeks flushed, unsure if the captain might be able to read the prince's touch on her, that maybe he knew much more had gone on between them than was even galactically legal.
Wisely, she kept her quiet, knowing she'd need time to decide how she would handle her confession. She'd have to come forward, after all. There'd be no hiding it. The prince had no intentions of ending what he'd started, and she was not at all sure she wanted him to for that matter.
Drawing close to the captain, her heartbeats flooded her hearing.
“We don't know what this is,” the captain told her, exhaustion lacing his tone as he stared down at the fitfully sleeping forms of over 60 Teleran bodies dripping with black sludge.
Shala swallowed around her urge to be sick as she looked over the misshapen forms of the victims, quiet until she found her voice.
“Will they be quarantined?”
“We've ordered two small transport ships and a royal pod.”
Shala's brow cricked.
A royal pod?
"Is-”
“These people need to be observed before they're allowed to be deposited planetside. And the prince... He will have to go, as well. Our intel tells us, the acquisitioners came for him, specifically. For his royal blood, in particular. It has... properties. They underestimated his strength, but they'll be back. The enforcer is on his way to the city ship, as well.”
Shala bristled.
When the enforcer learned of his child...
And what of Tarik's blood? The acquisitioner... AI or whatever he was, had mentioned it, too.
She'd seen some evidence of its... properties.
“It's best the prince be well on his way to the settlement until we get a handle on matters. The King is in agreement. Everyone is on board. The Teleran diplomatic problem is no longer an issue.”
But the prince's dawning legal problems surely were.
And he was... leaving.
“You've been assigned to his detail.”
Shala swore her heart stopped a moment.
The captain didn't meet her eyes, but she couldn't help but wonder why he'd be okay with such a thing. Surely, he suspected...
“I-”
“Please, Shala. Just... Pack your things. You're leaving at Star Set when the pod arrives.”
Tears glazing her eyes that she couldn't entirely comprehend, Shala gave him a brisk nod.
“Captain.”
Making an about face, she swiftly left the medical bay, returning to her room to pack. Overwhelmed beyond words by the conflict brewing inside of her. None it made sense. None of it.
~
“You're not happy.”
It was a statement of fact, not a question.
And the prince's eyes burned her skin with the intensity of it. He'd sought her in her own quarters, seeming concerned that she might defy the captain's orders. That she might not come and join him at his side.
“It's not... that.”
Shala averted her gaze to the visi-panels, not altogether ready to have the conversation he'd come to have. There was so much to make sense of, and her mind had made it quite clear that she wasn't at all up to it.
Lifting her eyes to him after a stretching minute, she sighed. His own gaze had softened, and it made his affection all the more clear. She was no mere conquest. He was already invested quite deeply in her. Neither his or her body had lied when they'd lain together.
“What is it then?”
“It's all happening... so fast. And... It's illegal.”
He grinned.
“Is the matter of legality what's truly troubling you?”
“Somewhat, yes.”
Crossing the room to sit on the lounge across from her, Tarik took her hands.
“I'm sure you've noticed that your own captain has turned a blind eye. Surely, he is quite aware of my interest in you.”
“But does he know that I acted on my interest in you?”
“Does it matter?”
Shala was struck quiet. Her heart had an answer for that: No. It didn't matter at all. Even the commendation seemed far less important than it had just two days before. She both loved and hated the fact that she couldn't resist the amused glint in his eyes. Like he knew she'd arrive at a conclusion he himself had already arrived at.
“The royal pod has arrived, Shala. Tell me you are coming. Not because you have been ordered to, but because you want to. Need to as I need you to because you know you are my forever, and I am yours.”
His words laced her, curving around her, permeating her until they settled in her gut.
Staring off into the inky black space beyond the visi-panels, feeling the distinct thrum of destiny calling to her from a future she was sure she wasn't imagining now, Shala drew a stilling breath as she felt the prince's fingers interlace her own.
“Yes, Tarik. I will come.”
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