by V. K. Ludwig
“I didn’t do it on purpose, he just happened to kneel the second I kicked myself free.”
Another sincere smile. “When I sedated you, I ordered that they bring you to Seneca instead of Ardev Five. And yet, sixteen suns later, I caught you once more. On my ship. One cannot make a fool of fate.”
I let out a sigh. “And then they fell in love and lived happily ever after.”
Torin let himself roll onto his back once more, raking a hand through that soft hair of his. “And then she fell in love with him and insisted they live happily apart.”
Another clench in my stomach, deeper now, winding along my guts. It combined with the unspoken frustration vibrating off Torin’s body, forming into one question: what if I didn’t send him away? Not for love. But for the child?
No, that was just crazy.
“And what about him?” I asked, letting my cheerful voice cover the gloom of the moment. “He doesn’t fall in love with her?”
A moment of thoughtful silence, before he let a sigh blow toward the ceiling. “Love is not an emotion I am familiar with, Eden. Most of the time, I’m sure I don’t have the capability for it.”
“That’s the biggest piece of crap I’ve heard ever since you got here.”
He pulled the blanket over his chest and gave a punch against his pillow, which was Torin’s way of saying this conversation was over. For him.
“Explain one thing,” I said, rolling onto my side. “If you believe in this Gaia link, why did you send me away twice? I get the benefit of the doubt and all, but if you’re so convinced, why did you try sending me to Seneca the second time around?”
The moment he turned his head, he stared at me from the same tortured eyes. Haunted orbs from the night he’d woken in terror. They held shame woven into the gleam of his irises, until he quickly blinked it away, saying only one word. “Control.”
“What?”
“I’ve always considered myself unfit to have a mate,” he said, voice thick enough to make him swallow before he continued. “You brought me to the edge of my control that day. I can never completely lose it, Eden.”
I lowered my blanket, the sudden force of blood rushing through my veins overheating my core. “Why not?”
No answer.
“Does this have anything to do with you sleeping with the lights on?”
“Can we leave it at I simply thought I wasn’t good enough for you? Still do? Perhaps one of the main reasons why I agreed to leave once you’re with my child.”
The moment I sucked in a breath; he threw his wrist between us.
“Look.” He fumbled with his com, letting rays of orange and red burst into a hologram between us. “I took this recording of the habitat a few days ago.”
His attempt at distraction definitely worked.
Hundreds of trees reflected their autumn foliage on the surface of a lake, pulling me in, turning back time. I was six, running toward the edge with a fishing pole double my height. A cold breeze licked through the fabric of my polka-dotted thighs, painting the tip of my nose red, and turning my ears hot.
I sat up and stared at Torin, his features blurry, distorted by sudden tears. “How did you know?”
“I took one of your drawings after I caught you in the hallway,” he said. “A human architect drew up the plans for me, but it took me many suns to find a place similar to the one in your drawing. I believe the area was formerly known as the state of Maine.”
My heart trembled; my eyes transfixed on a piece of my past I thought I’d never get back. I let my hand shove over the blanket in search of a leg, a waist, anything, while my gaze remained locked on the hologram.
Fingers intertwined with mine. “Why tears? I meant no offense with it.”
“They’re happy tears.” Sudden and intense emotions roiled inside me, so turbulent it made me lean over and press a kiss onto Torin’s forehead. “Thank you so much. It’s beautiful.”
He nodded and squeezed my hand. “Any day now, the report on your parents should be back. Perhaps you’d want to invite them there once they’re allowed to travel.”
“Turn onto your stomach,” I said, drying my tears with the corner of the blanket. “Can’t have you massage my legs all the time, and you never get repaid.”
He turned without hesitation, the motion letting the fabric slip off his brawny back.
I climbed on top of him, seating myself on his waist, carefully letting my palm press against his shoulder blade. “Is this uncomfortable?”
His head shook into the pillow.
Inch by inch, I worked my small hands over the endless landscape of his muscles, encouraged by his lack of tension. Torin was entirely still, not a single tremble against my fingertips.
His muscles were firm, his scarred skin taut against it, and beautiful in its own, masculine way. All I could feel was him underneath me, his heat searing against my palms.
I enjoyed exploring his body with my hands more than I should have.
I blamed the softness of his skin for it, smooth patches between ridges of bunched tissue. Blamed the way his body rubbed over me once a day, leaving behind a distressing need for my own release.
And yet no excuse seemed important enough for wondering if I still wanted him gone.
Chapter 16
Torin
Eden was late on her bleeding. A fact I had realized when I looked over her profile to confirm the genetic link to her parents.
Life had arrived in time with death.
My hand rested on the couch, the report underneath my fingertips scalding my skin. Kael had brought it only an hour ago. Translated and printed on old-fashioned paper, it included the three pages of classified medical information on Eden’s mother.
I had promised her that I would find her family.
How thoughtless.
I considered making the report disappear. I had stood by my word on every single account of our agreement. Surely, I could have let this one slip.
I feared giving her the results of the investigation, and the way it might destroy what little familiarity had grown so tediously between us. Silence had blossomed into conversations. Loneliness had transitioned to shared moments.
None of it had served a purpose in the big picture of seeding her with my child, and yet I enjoyed this intimacy so much, the thought of ruining it spiked my pulse.
One lunar cycle ago, I wouldn’t have cared. I came to this planet convinced it held nothing for me.
Now it held Eden.
My deepest desire.
I sat there, elevated from the darkness of my memories, a potential truth weaving around me that gave me hope. What if I could provide Eden everything she deserved in a mate? What if I could be a father? What if, for reasons unexplainable, I wasn’t too broken? Defective? Not a danger to her or my child, where all others of my crop had been a danger even to themselves?
I poured myself another glass of chokeberry wine, but the dry beverage never touched my lips. Hurried steps clip-clopped from the hallway, turning my stomach into a raging roil.
“Can you believe I met a girl who went to the same school as me?” Eden blurted, that bubbly excitement of hers not matching the heaviness in my chest. “I swear, I wanna bite myself that I agreed to thirty minutes. Half an hour isn’t nearly enough to make a friend. And since the rotations are all over the place, who knows if I’ll ever see her again?”
She slipped out of her shoes and hung her coat over the chair. I soaked up that joy radiating from her before reality forced me to quench it.
“There’s something I wanted to ask you.” She grabbed the glass from my hand and sat down across from me. “And I know you’ll think I’m crazy, but I already discussed it with Nifal, and he thinks… what’s wrong? Why are you looking at me like that?”
My breath caught on a rib.
What was that tightness in my chest over something so inconsequential? Her parent’s fate was of no importance to me; how came it pained me so?
I stared at h
er beautiful brown eyes against the backdrop of looming disaster. “Eden, there is something I have to tell you.”
“We need to hire a maid?” she said jokingly, trying to elevate the mood. Her eyes wandered to the yellow folder underneath my burning hand, then jumped back up to catch mine. “What is that?”
She already knew.
I could tell by the way she shifted her weight away from the report and put the wine back on the table, her eyes already glistening with tears. Her breath turned labored, and she sucked in her lips before she let them go, her face an ever-changing grimace of fleeting emotions.
“My parents?”
“Yes.” I picked up the folder and held it out to her, my hands trembling even more than her lips. “I had it translated into your language, so you may read all the details yourself, without having to rely on my translation.”
Chaos grew between us, invisible, settling on my body only as tension, and air going stale inside my nostrils. Never had anything confronted me with the pains this invasion had caused the humans. But that uncontrollable need I had for Eden made her suffering extend itself into my core.
The weight of the report increased in the palm of my waiting hand, but Eden only shook her head. “Can’t you just tell me?”
I nodded and placed the file back down, the words scratching my throat as if I’d swallowed shards of moonstone. “Your father was submitted into the care of a healer. He sustained a gunshot wound to his stomach after he defended your mother from a group of human looters. They could not save him.”
One stuttered breath escaped her quivering lips. She fumbled her hands in her lap as if keeping them from freezing, her eyes long gone adrift between the grains of the white couch. And yet, no tear fell.
Her shoulders jerked up and down, putting a stutter into her words. “A-and my m-mom?”
“The report states she transitioned well, and her sector offered her a position at the new household of a high-ranking officer. She cooked the meals for his human mate.”
“Oh yeah, I can see that.” A surreal chuckle wormed its way through her shaken voice. “Mom’s pot roast is out of this world and… and her c-coleslaw is…”
The first tear.
It snaked down her cheek, clinging to her jaw before it pooled there, only to break loose and disappear into the black fabric of her dress. Others soon followed, and each one seemed to drop onto my heart and grind a hole.
“Can I see her?”
My head shook all on its own. “It’s not possible at this moment.”
“What?” she barked, rage quickly joining the glistening of her tears. “Please let me see her. How can you just sit there and tell me it’s not possible? You promised!”
“I promised no such thing!” I shouted, too overwhelmed with the situation to sound anything but cold and unyielding. “I said I would find your parents, and that I have done. If anything, I stood by my word in every way possible.”
Her finger fell to her chest, tapping the sternum. “Oh, and I’m not? Am I not letting you fuck me every day?”
“Stop acting as if you don’t enjoy it,” I snarled. “You think I don’t notice how you stare at the ceiling to distract yourself from how good I feel between your legs? How you clench around me, then shift your hips to escape your own peak of pleasure?”
“That’s the stuff you blurt out a minute after I learned my dad’s gone? You’re unbelievable.” She curled her arms above her head and let out a desperate scream, the words which followed breaking against gritted teeth. “I hate you so much! I should have taken the fucking gun that day and blown my brains out.”
“So, you prefer death over being with me?”
“Yes!”
By the Three Suns, I cursed the day I caught her. “I should have let you rot in that room of yours!”
She grabbed my glass and shattered it against the ground, the liquid painting her naked feet in splatters of light red. “You insensitive asshole!”
“Do you think your parent’s fate makes me feel nothing?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I think. You’re incapable of feeling anything but a hard-on. And how would you? What do you know about losing a parent? About missing your mother?”
“Just because I never had a mother doesn’t mean I never missed her!” Rage clawed to the surface, twining around me with suffocating tightness. “At least the memories of your father are real, whereas mine are nothing but the remains of a child’s imagination. You miss a mother you will see again, but the mother I miss never existed.”
“I’m sorry-y-yyy.” Tremors ran down her frame, threatening to make her collapse onto the ground any moment now. “I didn’t mean to say those things. My dad… Torin… my dad…”
“Don’t cut yourself on the shards, anam ghail.” I walked up to her and grabbed her by her hips, lifting her wine-painted feet onto the couch. “I didn’t mean a single thing of what I said either. I’m sorry… I’m sorry.”
She was face-to-face with me now, the plea in her eyes making me soak in her pain. “Why can’t I see her?”
“Because she’s sick, Eden.” I cupped her cheek, redirecting her tears to stream over the back of my hand instead, and soaking the cuffs of my jacket. “She had a reaction to one of the vaccinations and is currently being treated in a high-level containment infirmary off-planet. It’s not possible. I do what I can, but even my hands are sometimes bound.”
And just as I thought she could not grow any smaller, she all but crumbled apart, her fight eliminated. “She’s sick?”
“Unfortunately so. Jal’zar ice fever.”
“Is she going to die?”
“No,” I said, my voice soft, whatever rage she had flared in me dissipated, quenched by her tears. “She’ll make a full recovery. But she’s currently contagious and will be for another few lunar cycles.”
She nodded, her demeanor quiet, and pitiful, and so unlike my Eden. “You said my dad was shot by a group of looters.” A sniff climbed into her palm as she wiped her tears away. “Is that true? Or was it one of your men, and you’re just not telling me?”
“Have I ever lied to you?”
She shook her head, the lack of hesitation elevating my mood, if slightly. At least in honesty, I was sufficient, even if I seemed to lack so much else.
“Here.” I leaned over and grabbed for the report, then handed it to her. “Ask if you have questions.”
She contained her cries behind soft lips.
Watching her dissolve in pain, my body reacted before my mind wondered what to do. I reached around her back and pulled her into my chest.
She didn’t resist and nestled her head against my shoulder, allowing me to hold her close. “Do you want me to carry you upstairs?”
Her nod bounced against my chin.
I draped her legs over my arm, while her quiet tears soaked through my uniform shirt. With the other hand, I supported her shoulder, the report sitting tightly pressed against her chest.
The way to the bedroom took longer than it needed to. I slowed my pace. Faltered up the stairs so I might steal more moments during which she rested against my pounding heart. Any second now, I would have lowered her onto the bed, and then this moment would evaporate.
But I sat down myself instead, cradling her as I let my eyes search for hers. They held no sign of discomfort or disapproval, so I worked us across the mattress and leaned my back against the headboard.
Vetusians had no concept of seconds before we arrived on Earth, but they seemed so indispensable now that I counted each one as I held her. Eden had never allowed me this close to her, this intimate, and it made my core fill with more hope.
But what could the Commander who’d captured her hope for? That she would let me stay?
“Whenever my dad deployed…” Her voice shook. “He always came back with a scarf for me. Like one of those pashminas from Iraq and Afghanistan with leaves and flowers on them. Sometimes birds.”
I remained quiet, saying absolutely nothing and
giving her the room to talk if she wanted to or stay silent. Either was fine with me, as long as she stayed close.
She wiped the back of her hand across her cheeks and coughed a sad little laugh. “He deployed so many times, my entire closet was full of pashminas of all colors. One time he brought me the same twice, but I never told him. I didn’t wear them much, but I loved the gesture. That familiarity.”
Like silk against my rough hands, I stroked her hair back. “You’re lucky to have such memories. I remember how I made up stories as a child, telling my cropmates how my father taught me how to trap quilled animals. Or how my mother looked like the statue of the goddess at the temple of the Three Suns.”
Her sobs eased into faint trembles, so I continued. “Nifal let me have a pet when I was a child, similar to a dog. Her name was Aurora, and she slept in bed with me. I couldn’t take her with me to the stratum, which broke my heart.”
My chest swelled with a feeling, unfamiliar and concerning alike, amplified by how she quietly stared up at me. “I know you don’t believe in fate, Eden. But I do, and I know I was born to hold you right here, right now. You are strong to a fault, anam ghail. Be weak in my arms. Cry, for I will not judge.”
She lifted her hand toward my face.
I closed my eyes, somehow expecting a slap.
Perhaps even a punch.
Instead, her palm settled against my cheek.
Nobody had ever touched me like this before, the tender caress in it undeniable. As much as my instincts told me to pull away from it, I closed my eyes and allowed myself to ease into the touch. There was neither disgust nor discomfort. Only contentment.
Her body moved and shoved in my arms, and when I opened my eyes again, they immediately caught at her lips, a mere breath away from mine. She stared at me like she had the day at the pharmacy, as we’d both wondered what was happening while our shared thoughts seemed suspended in time.
I lowered my head, my grip on her body strong, but my lips soft against hers. Eden gasped and opened her mouth, sucking my lips between hers, giving me an idea of what a kiss tasted like when she gave it willingly.
