by V. K. Ludwig
“I have to see her,” I mumbled, dread turning to panic.
Kael’s face came into view, frown lines covering his face. “Ei thenk’ur lang’ech chps b’sted.”
“What?”
He huffed in annoyance. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Your language chip is fucking busted. It’s sticking halfway out your skull, you fool.”
Vetusians huddled around us, only stepping aside for the droids who came to clean up my blood from the floor. I wiped my fingers down my searing temple, slick fluid spreading across my fingertips. The sharp corner of the metal confirmed it: my chip was shot.
“Shit!”
“Get your ass up,” Kael snarled, draping my arm over his shoulder. “Let’s get you out of here and over to med bay before the guards take notes. I put my ass on the line getting you assigned to Garrison Earth, and this is how you repay me? Shit… there they are.”
He picked up the pace, dragging me across the hallway whenever my feet wouldn’t obey. The walls spun around me, the only clear thing I could make out was that access card bouncing into vision. It came, went, came, went, came… and never went again.
I held it clasped between my bloodied fingers, smearing red all over the chip. A hard stumble and a tug on the chain later, and I slipped it into the pocket of my pants.
“They’re still behind us?”
“What do you mean with us?” Kael hissed, his hold easing around me. His steps slowed until he said, “They want you, not me. I’m just the lunatic once more getting you out of trouble.”
I grabbed for the wall and pressed my forehead against it, bile pushing up my esophagus. One moment later, I reconsidered my choice of breakfast, Kael’s curses offering little distraction for how yellow strings of vomit clung to the corners of my mouth.
“I’ll call Med Bay,” he said. “Tell them to get you.”
I pushed myself up and wiped my shirt across my mouth. “I’ll be fine. You’ve done enough.”
“Don’t I know it…”
Keeping my legs in a wide stance and the sway from my torso, I faked as much strength as my body could muster. “Bit of a walk might do me good. Gets the adrenaline taken care of and all.”
“You sure?” His brows drew closer, and he cocked his head to observe me, read me. Then he made a grunt at the back of his throat, crossing his arms in front of his chest. “I requested seven suns of leave so I can take care of a… personal matter. Think you can stay out of trouble for that long?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Another stare, then he turned away with a wave of his hand.
My heart matched each beat of his hurried steps, working itself into a full-blown frenzy. I counted to ten, slowly, then turned away from Med Bay and walked into the direction of Katie’s room.
Chapter 2
Katie
I stared at the pile of dirty dishes submerged in the kitchen sink, a lone spaghetti floating at the surface. “You do understand that you’ll still have to scrub those, right? Drowning those plates for an entire day won’t get them any cleaner.”
Grace gave an exaggerated sigh in teenager fashion and flicked her eyes upward to make it extra authentic. “I told you I’ll do it later.”
“When later?” I asked, pointing at the clock on my nightstand. “And then you’ll go to bed too late again and yawn all day tomorrow.”
“Mom… pleaaase.”
“Please what? Sleep is important, especially at your age.” I followed her into her room, my nose catching on a whiff of mildew. “Hey, can we talk about this? This isn’t okay, and you… what happened in here?”
“What?” Grace asked as if this wasn’t the way you got cockroaches. Could cockroaches survive in space? I wondered.
She threw herself onto what may or may not have been her bed. It was hard to tell with the piles of clothes spread across, and mandarin peels shriveling away between it all. Papers with doodles covered the floor, some crumbled into balls.
“When was the last time you made that bed?” I asked, my tone doing one somersault after another. “Please tell me that’s clean laundry.”
“Who cares?”
“I care! This is…” I walked over and grabbed the first piece of clothing I got my hands on, the smell of something fried clinging to the fibers. “This is so freaking gross, Grace. Why do we have a laundry hatch if you’re not using it? When I was your age, I had to hang my laundry outside even if my butt froze off, and you can’t throw it down a metal pipe?”
“I’ll clean it up later.”
“Like you said you’d do the dishes later?” My stab toward the living area triggered another roll of her eyes, the notion sending heat into my veins. “When do you intend to do all that? This room is a pigsty.”
“So?” She gave a lazy, one-sided shrug. “Close the door from the outside if you don’t like it.”
“Excuse me?”
Cables snaked toward her ears with the same motion a headache slithered into my brain. Grace tapped over her iPod, my fingers itching to rip it from her hands. But it was the only thing she had left from before. That and me, though she preferred her music lately.
“I want this room clean tomorrow,” I shouted, but Grace only gave another tap against her iPod. Turning up the volume, most likely.
Tired and defeated, I left her room and closed the door just like she had suggested. If the Vetusians had to squeeze single mothers into one-bedroom apartments with their hormonal teenage daughters, why the hell didn’t they stock this place with wine? Cultural research my ass.
A breeze rushed through the hallway and brought fresh air, and yet my lungs faltered to a halt.
“How is my beautiful female doing today?” A strong set of arms wrapped around me from behind, the kiss settling against my neck too wet to be anything but uncomfortable. “Sorry I’m late. There was a… situation I needed to deal with.”
I turned around and detangled myself from Kidan’s embrace, blood clinging to his knuckles. “What happened to you? You’re bleeding.”
“Huh.” He stared at his hand for a moment, then stepped into the bathroom and washed them. “It’s not my blood. How was your day?”
“Grace and I kind of argued.”
The moment he stepped back over, one arm wrapped around my waist while the other prodded against the back of my head “I missed you so much, I couldn’t think of anything but you all day.”
Each of his kisses pricked the thin skin along the side of my neck like a burn I had the urge to pull away from. “Can you believe her entire bed was nothing but a pile of laundry? And I could swear there’s a wet towel somewhere in there growing one mildew spot after another. She’s out of control.”
“Who?”
“Grace!”
“She’s in her room, isn’t she?” he whispered, his breath settling moist against my earlobe. “We should take the opportunity and… you know.”
I gave a little grunt when his hand slipped down between us, my limbs clumsily reaching around his neck in support at the uninvited touch. Each of his strokes over the inside of my thigh left my skin pebbled, my arms going stiff with nowhere to go.
What was wrong with me?
It wasn’t that the idea of being with a Vetusian bothered me. Every woman who said she would never bond herself to one of them clearly wasn’t a few birthdays away from a midlife crisis with a teenage daughter in tow. Yeah, my profile never ranked high on Tinder.
“Mate with me. I’ll be good to you. Treat you like a queen.” He grabbed my hips and pulled me flush against his erection, whispering, “You’re so fucking sexy, Katie, I want you so badly.”
A juvenile giggle spilled over those lips which didn’t even remember how to kiss. Three years without a date and my sexual confidence had somehow gone dormant, shriveled into something that felt in no way, shape, or form sexy.
I averted my gaze, dodging his kisses. “How, um, how was your day at work?”
“Who gives a shit?” he said with a chuckle and backed me up a
gainst the wall, kneading my ass. “I sparred. I went on patrol. I put a fuck up in his place.”
He grabbed my hands and lifted them to his head, making my fingers rake through his hair. “Come on, touch me. Don’t you feel that you’re ready for me, baby? Listen inside yourself. We belong together.”
Guilt clenched my eyes shut.
I stroked my fingers through his dark strands, listening so hard inside myself my ears pricked at how his moans distorted somewhere in my brain, turning into faint sirens at the back of my mind.
There had to be a spark.
There had to be a tingle.
“Do you feel it?”
Hard and brutal, the question shot right through me, leaving behind a hole of doubt. There was no spark. There was no tingle. There was…
Nothing.
I stared up at him, blinked once, twice, again, my voice an apologetic whisper. “We have time, Kidan. There’s no rush.”
He made an annoyed sound and lifted me up, pinning my pelvis between a hard wall and an even harder cock. “Well, I feel it, and I’m sick of waiting.”
“Whoa, whoa, slow down,” I said, my crotch burning at how his shaft pressed against my panties. “I will not have sex with you, Kidan.”
His eyes locked with mine, a plea sitting at those faint wrinkles at the corners. “Kiss me. Just once kiss me as if you love me and mean it and as if you were mine.”
A moment of hesitation, the room going still around us. “That’s all you want? A kiss, and then you’ll let me down?”
“Yeah.”
His eyes fell shut the moment I pressed my lips onto his. I watched his eyelids twitch while I suckled on him, stroking my tongue over his mouth, pretending I still remembered how this worked, pretending I liked him.
Once our lips parted, his eyes opened wide, the sudden darkness sitting behind them stalling my next inhale. He stared at me, his features switching back and forth between protective and predatory.
“Fuck it,” he said, a snarl twitching on his mouth I’d never seen before. “You cost me too damn much for someone else to push in and claim something I paid for.”
“What?”
He hurried to the end of my bed and squeezed us into the corner of both walls, one hand pressing me against the mattress, the other fumbling his pants open.
“No…” My spine rounded, and my shoulders hunched like a mimosa plant, curling away from his touch.
Grace.
My one clear thought.
I opened my mouth.
I pressed tongue against gums.
No sound came.
My parched throat, frozen with terror, refused to scream. Fear overwhelmed me, sweeping through every single cell. Willing a whimper forward, it stalled somewhere dark inside me. What if he hurt her? My precious daughter?. If I made a wrong move, a wrong sound, endangering Grace, then every second of the last fifteen years would have been for nothing. A mother’s choices were always limited within the boundaries of protecting her child. That went above everything. Even myself.
“I promise I’ll be gentle,” he whispered, the hem of my dress shoving up my thighs. “I don’t want to hurt you, baby. Just want you to be mine. Be my mate. Be my anam ghail.”
My lips quivered. Blood rushed into my extremities, turning them itchy, turning them angry. Please stop. Please stop. Stop stop stop.
“Shh,” he hushed into my ear, prying my legs open with a gentle thrust of his hips. “I’m only doing this for us, Katie. Can you forgive me that, huh? Things will get easier from here. I promise.”
The way he tore my panties resonated through the room like paper shredding. My vision narrowed into small, panicked frames of trivial details. How a single hair grew from a mole above his collarbone. How the fabric of my dress bunched uncomfortably underneath my armpit. How a string of saliva stretched between his fingers and the corner of his mouth after he spit in his palm.
Wet fingers swiped over my entrance, a chain of panic twisting link after link around my body, disabling all fight with paralyzing fear.
“Beautiful leska.” His voice filled the gap between us, robbing me of air to breathe. “I’m so sorry… so sorry…”
He apologized over and over again, his cock desperately shoving between my legs. And yet he continued to apologize, his sorries soon stretched by moans of anticipation.
I didn’t move.
I didn’t breathe.
I didn’t live.
But my mind screamed, telling my pelvis to tilt away from him while I sunk deeper into the mattress, drowning between the fibers, suffocating underneath his weight.
My palms punched against his shoulders all on their own. I placed my soles against the bed and shoved myself away from him, the sheet searing into my skin like glistening embers.
I pressed my thighs together, struggling against the pry of his hands. “No. I can’t… please.”
“Don’t make me hurt you, Katie.”
The more I tensed, the rougher his touch became. Kidan slapped my hands out of the way whenever I punched against his unmoving chest with loud smacks.
“Stop it!” I shouted, my voice tasting rancid at the back of my throat. “No… no…”
He grunted low, his fingers digging deep into the wedge between my clasped thighs. They shoved and pried, pulled, and scratched. His fingernails seared against my skin, but I kept on fighting against inevitable defeat.
For a moment, his hands retreated, only to place one above my knee, and the other at my ankle. With one twist, he sent a stabbing pain deep into the core of the joint.
“Augh!” My legs fell open all on their own.
Pressure built against my entrance, only to disappear a second later. I rolled. I tumbled. A shift in balance, the hot sheet replaced with the coarse fibers of the carpet scratching against the back of my neck.
I turned onto all fours and crawled. My knee scorched and gave way, my arms burning with how I dragged myself over the carpet and onto the cool tiles of the bathroom.
My foggy mind did little to muffle each of Kidan’s preying strides after me and soon echoed throughout the bathroom with thud-thud-thuds. “You’re making this harder on yourself than it has to be.”
Hot tears squeezed from my eyes, blurring my vision into a distorted nightmare. My hands grabbed for something. Anything. Cold. Smooth.
I pulled myself up on the toilet, a blurry Kidan crouching down, pretending not to be a threat. Cowering there on the lid, my fingers searched frantically for… I didn’t know what.
And yet they found something, heavy, sleek against my palm but rough against my fingertips. I lifted it up in one quick move, my muscles powering through the weight of it. Then I crashed it down onto what I hoped was his head.
An ear-shattering clank.
Kidan’s body collapsed onto the floor before me.
He jerked and trembled unchecked. Saliva-drowned groans coming from the deepest part of Kidan’s lungs snaked into my ears, filling me with panic.
I sucked in a lungful of air, my ribs aching at the expansion of my chest. With each blink, more and more blood trickled across the white tile, like a dark red shadow spreading its way across the room.
Eyes ripped open, entirely white, Kidan’s head twitched before me. Beside him, the ceramic of the toilet tank cover lay broken in two. Blood gushed from a massive wound at the top of his head, glistening there between the dark strands of his hair.
All blood drew from my body as if I bled out right along with him, cold trembles wrecking every fiber of my muscles. Was he dead?
I didn’t want to check.
Didn’t want to know.
Until, an eternity later, his grunts stilled along with all movement.
My soles pressed against the cold tile, toes remaining inches from the crimson outline of the puddle. Cold fingertips pressed against a still warm neck, searching for a pulse, searching for relief and anguish alike.
No pulse.
Pupils wide.
Eyes abando
ned.
Dead.
Fear stripped me bare. What had I done?
I stepped over the body, the way my toe caught on it, making me stumble back into our living room. My knee burned, already turning colors underneath me. Grace’s door was still shut, my teenage daughter oblivious to what had just happened here. Good.
That draft just now?
My skin registered it, but I didn’t turn around until strange words pushed into my foggy mind. “Sert, Katie. Neshk, neshk, neshk.”
A Vetusian stood in the hallway and strained fistfuls of his dirty blond hair, his uniform filthy, his lips pressed into a thin slash. He shifted his weight and glanced into the bathroom, all color draining from his face. His two-toned eyes locked with mine, stripping everything away from me down to the truth. He looked at me, around me, and right through me.
The moment he stepped toward me, hand outstretched, a primal scream lodged from my throat.
He wrapped his arms around me and held me tight, old sweat creeping into my nose. “Shh… sochair, sochair.”
“Don’t touch me!” I screamed, fought, tossed myself around with whatever strength I had left.
“Sochair,” he repeated over and over again, his brows furrowing more and more each time I screamed. Until he let go with one arm, raising it high above his head. Then he said something I understood. “Sorry, Katie.”
Pain struck against the back of my skull, sizzling into my brain, making everything around me go gray, darker, darker. Black.
Chapter 3
Melek
“Sorry, Katie,” I said the moment I slammed my elbow against the back of her head, then repeated it when her body turned limp in my hands. “I’m so sorry, but you have to be quiet.”
It wasn’t like I had another choice. If even one guard heard her screams, it would seal her fate.
A life for a life — the law was clear.
I allowed myself three cycles of breath, taking in her scent, the softness of her skin, and the heat of her exhausted body. Then I assessed the situation, suffocating tightness creeping into my chest.
