by Raven Dark
“You must be dying for a long soak in that tub, Your Highness.” The same slave who’d spoken a moment ago settled my hair around my shoulders. I picked up on her accent. It was similar to those of my captors, a Xandari accent. “The water is nice and hot.”
I looked over my shoulder at her, bristling at being addressed as royalty. “Why are you calling me that? Don’t I have to be married to Raul to be a princess?”
Married to Raul. My insides gave a funny jolt.
The other slave’s bright blue eyes twinkled. She said nothing.
An inexplicable alarm shot through me. The only other slave I’d seen on this world had turned out to be a girl from the Home. This one was obviously older. Had she been a slave taken from the Home like me? If she had, it must have been years before I’d been there.
I shivered. How horrible.
The two women waited for me to get into the huge tub. I sighed and walked down the steps, wading into the waist-deep golden pool. When I turned to look back, the two women were squatted at the side of the pool where shampoos and soaps sat on the marble deck.
“Sit here, Your Highness.” The one with the purple eyes gestured to a ledge that ran along the wall of the pool, under the water.
I dropped onto the ledge. “Please don’t call me that, okay? I’m not Raul’s wife.”
Besides that, the title imparted a responsibility that scared the fuck out of me. It was too big to fit inside my head.
“You belong to him, and you will bear his children. What else shall we call you?”
“How about Danika? It’s my name.” I was being snarky, I knew that, but I wasn’t about to be forced into a marriage too!
She lathered up my hair with shampoo and pushed me gently down so that I was leaning back with my head on a spongy depression in the deck. “Slaves do not address the Head of Slaves by name,” she said, scandalized.
“Will it get you in trouble with Raul to do it?” I asked.
“No, Your…er… Danika. I am your personal slave; whatever name you wish me to use, I will call you. But he won’t like it.”
“Then do it anyway.” If it pissed Raul off, so much the better. I almost smiled at that. Then I sat up sharply and stared at her. “Wait. My personal slave?”
“Yes, Danika.” She said my name as if it was a title of its own. Sacred.
I let out an angry breath. It pissed me off enough that this planet’s men treated women like chattel. I wouldn’t allow myself to treat anyone that way, even if it was protocol.
“Well…that’s not going to happen.” I shook my head. “No way in hell.”
The older slave gave a soft laugh. I glared at her, but she ignored it.
The woman with the purple eyes drew back, her hands covered in shampoo suds. “You wish me not to serve you, Danika?”
“Damn straight.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why?” I didn’t like the fear in her eyes.
“Because. If I am not yours, I will be sold to someone else.”
Someone unpleasant, I realized, by the look on her face. I dropped my shoulders, looking at the ceiling, unwilling to see the poor woman sold to some barbarian who’d do who knew what to her.
“Fine. But none of this whole bowing and scraping thing, okay? It’s demeaning. To both of us.”
Instinctively, I had the urge to tear a strip of Raul for this, the same strip I wanted to tear from him for roping me into having his kid. Realistically, there was probably no way out of it. He had all the power here, and he would have even if he wasn’t a fucking king. Still, the anger coursing through my veins felt therapeutic, and far better than the numbness. I needed that anger, clinging to it like a lifeline. It let me know I wasn’t broken, that I hadn’t given up.
While the women scrubbed out my hair and soaped up every inch of me with a sponge and floral scented soap, I sat there and seethed, letting my rage burn away the fear that threatened to swallow me whole.
Twice, I’d tried to grab the soap, insisting on washing myself, but neither of them would have it. So much for doing whatever I wished. If I was honest, the bath felt wonderful, the hot water soothing muscles I hadn’t realized were so sore, the scent of the soap relaxing while the sponge wiped away the grime and dirt from a day I just wanted to forget.
Half of me wanted to rush through the bath and find Raul, giving him a piece of my mind. But my stomach also clenched at the thought of facing him, terrified I’d lose my temper. The son of a bitch wasn’t beyond physical violence. He was oddly accepting of my temper at certain times, but that acceptance had its limits. He wouldn’t take kindly to my resistance to have his child, and he wouldn’t likely tolerate my outright challenging him. If I snarled at him that I wasn’t having his kid and that was the end of it, he’d probably…how had he put it? Belt me across my gorgeous face.
At the same time, I had to confront him. Everything in me rebelled against accepting any of this mess, screaming that I was weak if I didn’t at least do something. I wasn’t a doormat, and I wouldn’t act like one.
The slaves—women, dammit; I wouldn’t think of them as slaves—were finishing up when the doors hissed open. My heart went into my throat as I turned on the bath ledge, half of me hoping it was Raul, the other half praying it wasn’t. If I saw him now, I wasn’t sure I could have kept myself from knocking his block off.
It wasn’t Raul, though. Instead, Malek strode in, all swagger and badassery personified. A smirk pulled at his gorgeous mouth the moment he saw me. I rolled my eyes.
“Oh, great,” I muttered.
His smile broadened. “Not happy to see me, then.”
File that one under Duh. His acceptance of the situation ticked me off as much as Raul’s behavior. “What do you think?”
One of his dark brows quirked. “Leave us.” He dismissed the slaves with a wave of his hand, then took the end of my leash from the guard and clipped it to his bracelet. Funny how he’d dismissed the slaves with every ounce of the arrogance and authority I’d have expected of Raul, even though he wasn’t the king.
Both women bowed and scurried out, but the older one glanced at me once before she left the room with her younger counterpart. Whether it came from sympathy for a new slave, or simple curiosity, her look bothered me for some reason.
The doors closed and Malek squatted on the pool deck beside me.
“Fuck, you’re even beautiful when you’re soaking wet, shleta.” His voice was throaty and soft with desire, his purple eyes deep and smoky as they roamed over my exposed breasts and down to the junction between my thighs. His dark pupils grew until the purple reduced to a thin line around the edges.
Fuck, I was supposed to be livid with him, and I was. Shleta. I hated that damn word, especially with the way he used it, as if my entire purpose was to fuck him on command. And yet my blood temperature rose a degree as if the insult had turned it up.
Shit, would he decide to join me like he did in the ship? My insides squirmed in anticipation. This close, that intoxicating scent of him filled my nose, making my skin hum with longing.
He ran his fingers over my shoulder. “So perfect. Your skin is like the finest Andarian silk.” His voice washed over me, velvety and husky.
I whipped around, putting my back to him and snatched up the soap, scrubbing my arms that were already scrubbed clean.
“Why are you here, Malek?” The question was probably as stupid as my biting his head off.
His fingers gathered my hair and yanked my head back just hard enough to offer a bite of pain and make his point. I winced. Fuck, I really needed to check my damn temper.
Malek raked his mouth over mine in a single, burning kiss. “So insolent. I love it.” He drew back and released my hair, running his hand through the wet strands. “Never change, nayna.”
I slapped the soap down on the deck and rinsed off. Christ, this man infuriated me. I wanted to tell him as much, but something held the words back.
His palm slid around my na
pe, hot on the skin. He pressed his nose to my hair and inhaled. “I came in here for a bath, nayna, but now I don’t think I can leave here without bending you over this deck and burying myself in your tight little hole.”
The complacency in his tone, the sheer ownership made my fists clench, especially after what Raul had done. His words also made me feel suddenly cornered. The feel of his palm encircling my nape didn’t help. This was the second time my bathing had led to having my self-respect torn to shreds at Malek’s hands.
Note to self: never let Malek catch me in a fucking bath.
I turned on the ledge and glared up at him. He was already stripping off his clothes, baring that muscled body in all its hot glory. Funny how my cheeks still heated seeing him in the nude. His huge hard-on jutted toward the ceiling. My mouth watered.
I covered my attraction with anger. “Okay, how the hell is this supposed to work, Malek?”
He raised a questioning brow as he came down the steps into the bath. He waded toward me, and I instinctively stood up, moving away from the ledge. The water rippled around him, sending splashes of golden luminescence across his skin, making him look like some dark-haired mythical alien god.
“If I’m supposed to have Raul’s kid, how am I still supposed to be with you or Z’pheer? How could he accept that?”
Malek’s lips quirked, whether at my tone or my moving away, I couldn’t tell. Without answering, he sat on the ledge, squeezed shampoo from the bottle on the deck onto his head and started lathering it into his silky black hair. He made no move toward me, but I knew better than to think that meant he wouldn’t make good on his earlier statement about fucking me.
“Raul, Z’pheer, and I are Bra’an,” he said, scrubbing his hair out quickly. “‘Bonded Brothers.’”
As if that explained everything.
“I don’t understand.”
He dunked under long enough to rinse off and smoothed his hair back, ringing the water out. “It’s a quirk of Xandari evolution. Males who spend a lot of time together throughout their lives develop a… connection to each other. You might call them soul mates, but it’s platonic. Anywhere between two and fifteen males can be part of the same bond. The Order has always gifted one woman to each Bra’an Circle. Some men who aren’t born linked will choose to become bonded, taking an Oath to seal the Circle. Raul, Z’pheer, and I have taken the Bra’an Oath, so any woman who is given to us belongs to all three of us. For life.”
I raised my brows. “Fifteen men? So a woman could end up with fifteen masters?”
“Yes.” He picked up the same floral scented bar I’d used and lathered up his body.
“Jesus. I guess I should feel fortunate I only ended up with three. Can men add someone to the Circle later?”
He grinned, picking up on my concern. “When the bond happens on its own, men will sometimes become linked to an already formed Circle. Men who form a Circle of their choosing become very close, like brothers. Adding someone after years of having one is rare. Not to worry, nayna. You have three masters now, and you will have three forever. Nothing will change that, including a child.”
I couldn’t help feeling a genuine interest in this surprising detail. I crossed my arms. “And does the woman become bonded to the men? Does she become part of the Circle?”
“No.” He lathered up his chest again, then rinsed off. “The Bra’an Bond is based on love, nayna. Like brotherhood. Xandari men do not love slaves.”
The hardness in his voice somehow made me feel hollow.
They didn’t love their slaves. And I would always be a slave. Why it should bother me that there would never be more between us, I didn’t know, but it stung.
“You’re going to end up smelling like a flower, you know.” I was avoiding the emotion eating at my heart, I knew that.
Malek shrugged and set the soap down, rinsing himself off thoroughly.
Figures he wouldn’t care. There was nothing hotter than a man completely comfortable with his sexuality. Someone so comfortable in his own skin that nothing could shake him.
“So, where is Raul, anyway?” I asked, unsure I wanted to know the answer to that either.
“He’s helping get the people settled in the shelter and seeing to his father’s funeral arrangements.”
“Oh.” I bit my lip and looked away, irritated at the sympathy I felt for the Raul.
“So you do care for us.” Malek’s teeth flashed in a smile that made my stomach flip-flop.
I sighed and started out of the pool to dry off. If I was lucky, I could slip out before he changed his mind and came after me. “So, I gotta ask—”
“Not so fast.” Malek tugged on the leash just as I reached the other side of the pool. I turned. He wound the leash’s slack around his fist, bringing me back to the middle of the pool and preventing me from leaving.
So much for escaping with my dignity intact. I dropped my shoulders and stayed where I was.
“You were saying?” he prompted.
Asking the next question unsettled me. I didn’t know if I wanted to hear the answer to this either. “The women…” I trailed off nervously.
“What about them?”
“Well, why are there so few of them here? I’ve only seen two since I came to this world. Three, if you count Gwen.”
I wished I still had a reason to be angry with him for killing her, but after seeing what had happened to Raul’s father, I could guess why he’d killed her. Raul’s father had looked horrible before he’d died, and he’d said there was no cure for a Rith bite. I’d never admit it to Malek, but I guessed he’d probably been sparing Gwen a horrible, prolonged death.
Malek leaned back against the side of the pool, laying his arms across the edge of the deck. He watched me for a long moment, long enough that I thought he wouldn’t answer my question.
He lowered his chin to his chest, thinking, perhaps. When he met my eyes again, his expression looked guarded.
“You might say, it’s another quirk of our evolution. In times of extremes, such as war, our species produces only males. Men who can be bred as soldiers. In the last war with the Rith, five years ago, a vast number of our species were wiped out. In the years of peace that followed, we started producing females again, but since only five years have passed, and our women have never been all that fertile, there are only about a thousand Xandari women left. And most of them are children.”
“My God.” My face drained of blood. “So that’s why you take female slaves from other planets. To avoid extinction.”
“Yes, mostly.” His eyes sparkled. “Why did you think we did it?”
I shrugged. “You’re barbarians. I thought…” I looked away, struck by a twinge of empathy for his people so intense it made my stomach roil.
Malek gave a low, husky laugh. “You thought we stole thousands of women from their worlds and brought them here just to satisfy our male urges.”
Feeling like a jerk all of a sudden, I shrugged lamely. “But… There must have been a better way. A better way than to kidnap people and take them to a strange world, away from everything they know.”
“And what would that be, woman?” Malek’s voice was tight. “A few years longer without tapping into another source of females, and the Xandari species would have been dead. Gone forever. You don’t come back from that.”
I opened my mouth to respond, only to realize I didn’t have a solution that didn’t suck.
“The government had to take action and fast,” Malek said. “There was no good solution to this situation, nayna. No solution where everyone wins.”
Unfortunately, I knew exactly what he was talking about. I knew what it was like to be in a situation so desperate as to be forced to do things you never would have otherwise done. That’s why I’d ended up stealing on the street, to escape my father. My actions weren’t on the same scale, but neither was the situation these people faced. I couldn’t imagine how the people of Xandar had felt, being forced to do whatever they had to do to k
eep their species alive.
I looked at the ceiling, humiliation with my own gross misjudgment of the men of this world making my throat tighten. “I get it,” I whispered. “You were out of options.”
And now, with the world on the brink of another war with the Rith, they’d soon be in the same boat again if the Order stopped taking slaves from other worlds. Unless they got rid of the Rith and fast.
The leash tugged as Malek slowly wrapped more of the slack around his fist. Forcing me to walk toward him. “Enough talk, shleta. Come to me.”
Did I imagine the hint of gentleness in his voice? I’d never heard Malek sound like that. It was almost seductive. I definitely didn’t trust it, especially not with his use of that damn word.
Xandari men didn’t love slaves. I wished the hell it didn’t feel like my heart was being crushed.
22
Conquered
Little by little, he reined me in like a fish on a hook. Delaying the inevitable, I slowed my steps to match the pace at which he shortened the slack, my body temperature creeping up the closer I came.
When I stood only a foot in front of Malek, his hand encircled my wrist and he pulled me closer until I stood right between his muscled thighs. Close enough that his scent made my senses go haywire. I inhaled without even thinking.
“That would make it so much easier, wouldn’t it, nayna?” His voice was soft and low, his violet, almost black gaze trapping mine. “It would make it easier to continue to hate us if we were just a bunch of callous, aroused savages who kidnapped women to slake our lust, wouldn’t it?”
I hated that he was right, just as much as I hated the empathy twisting in my gut. “Sorry,” I muttered.
“For what?” He reached up and pushed a wet lock of my hair behind my ear. His fingers brushed my skin, making me shiver with delight. “Are you sorry that our world needs women to survive?” he asked tenderly. “Or are you sorry you were being a judgmental bitch?”
