by Sara King
“Nothing,” Victory whispered. Whether she was saying it to him or herself, it wasn’t clear.
“I’m going to help you,” Dragomir said. “I can’t not help you. It’s what I’m here to do, this life. Just, when I do do it, don’t expect me to stick around for long.”
And, by the way her eyes widened, she knew that he wasn’t talking about simply walking off to go cool down beside a stream.
Victory had hesitated, hearing him address her as his brother, but had found his admissions too tempting to resist. She had stayed silent, shamefully, and listened to him pour out his deepest worries to what he thought was his brother.
Now she was sitting beside him, still aglow with the warm energy he had wrapped her in, and he was telling her that he could not only alleviate her fears, but was going to end his own life, once he had.
After several minutes of her silence, Dragomir sighed and got to his feet. “I’ll finish with your ramas soon, Princess. Not today—I’m still exhausted from opening your womb rama—but soon. Until then, I’m gonna take those blankets the Cooper boys left and make you a nice bed on the couch.”
Then, without another word, he turned to depart.
Victory wanted to call out to him, wanted to say something to reassure him, but she could find nothing. She could promise nothing. She was a Royal Princess of the Imperium. She couldn’t make such promises to a peasant.
She sat, watching the stream, wondering why that disturbed her so much. A month before, she couldn’t have cared less about the life of a peasant. After all—it was the peasants, in their hatred and ignorance—that had dedicated six years of their lives to hurting her.
But now…
Now, it bothered her beyond reason.
She spent another hour at the stream, picking at the stones, before she finally sighed and got up to go back. She meandered, stopping to look up at big trees, to pluck blades of grass, to kick at dead leaves. Through it all, she tried to think. She knew there had to be a way to satisfy both of them. Yes, he was beautiful, both in body and—she was beginning to think—soul. But a mate for her? She just didn’t see it. She couldn’t picture herself sharing that bond with a man. It wasn’t…necessary.
She was a royal, after all. Royals couldn’t afford the same emotional attachments as peasantry.
When Victory finally rounded the last copse of trees, she saw the dark shape of a ship squatting behind the stone cottage. It carried no markings, and for a heart-fluttering moment, she thought it belonged to her brother.
Then she saw Thor and Dragomir kneeling in the yard, their fingers laced behind their heads. The three men gunmen behind them were not of her brother’s service. These were dirty, bronze-skinned natives, wearing motley colors and showing very little discipline. One of the three gunmen was picking something out of his teeth with one hand, his gun limp in the other.
They made the brothers put their hands behind their backs, then cinched them together with double bands of zip-ties. They pushed them forward, chests to the ground, and put their muddy boots between their shoulder-blades.
As Victory watched, a fourth gunman emerged from the inside of the cottage, dragging Whip behind him, hand fisted in her short black hair. As soon as she saw the fourth man, her knees lost their strength. Victory’s stomach twisted with the memories of being chained to that post, and it was everything she could do not to turn and run at the sight of his piggish face and powerful build.
You have to do something, Victory thought, watching the man drop Whip down in front of the two brothers, on her knees. He walked slowly around her kneeling form, grinning as he sized her up like some expensive cow. Victory knew what would come next. She had experienced it herself, more times than she could count. Quickly, before she could convince herself better of it, she started looping around back, staying out of sight of the men in the yard, creeping up to the gaping, open windows at the back of the house.
“Heard what happened to your last girl, Emp,” Victory heard the leader say, so close it made her body jerk with old terror. “Sounded like fun. Thought we’d give ya a bit of a reenactment. Jog your memory, ya know?” Several men chuckled, and the surrounding forest rang with the Shipborn brothers’ curses and struggles. “So you just watch the show,” the leader went on. “Let us know how close we get.”
Hang in there, Victory prayed to Whip. She knew that the Praetorian were sterile—their bodies surgically removed of their ability to reproduce upon their oaths to their ward—but she knew the horror all too well.
She hesitated beneath a window, then slowly raised herself to look inside. Lion was still chained to the rafter, the older woman’s wrists bloody from where she was struggling to free herself.
The open portals that had let in the frigid mountain air on so many cold nights in the past were now her saving grace. Biting her lip, Victory grabbed the stone sill and, using the rocks in the wall to give her toes purchase, eased herself into the room. Lion heard her and swiveled. Immediately, the Praetorian froze.
Crouched against the wall, Victory had a good view of what was happening in the yard directly outside the door. The man had stripped Whip of her shift, holding her tight to his chest by her collar as he ran his dirty hands down the long curves of her body. Whip, for her part, looked as stoic as if he were a hairdresser giving her a new cut.
He hasn’t started yet, Victory thought, utterly grateful, for once, that the beast loved to inspire terror and humiliation in his victims. He would draw it out as long as possible, just to make the two men on the ground scream.
Slowly, eyes on the men outside, she crept across the room, to the burlap sack of potatoes by the stove. She gingerly pulled it aside, biting her lip at the individual thumps of each potato as they slid against the floor, each tiny thud an explosion in her ramped-up senses.
The key was there, right where he had said it would be. Victory’s hand was shaking so much that she couldn’t pluck the tiny bit of brass from the dirt floor the first time, and had to use both hands and her fingernails to scrape it up into her palm.
Lion was watching her with rapt attention, now, utterly alert, anxiousness lining her face. The Praetorian hadn’t spoken, but Victory knew what she was thinking. She wanted Victory to get away from this place. Now. Leave the rest of them, just go and save herself.
Trembling, Victory held up the key.
Suddenly, Lion’s face changed. She glanced at the scene through the doorway, then her face darkened and she nodded.
It was all Victory could do to crawl on her hands and knees across the room, her terror was so great. Her joints, so pumped full of adrenaline, reacted much like gelatin, and Victory couldn’t have run away at that point if she’d tried.
Outside, she heard the sound of a zipper and leader of the group’s jeer. “What is it, Ice Maiden? Never seen someone so big before? Scared I’m gonna rip you apart?” The gunmen laughed, and the two brothers struggled on the ground. One of them was crying. “Oh look,” the leader said, “The Emp can’t watch. Rick, make the Emp watch.”
Then she was at Lion’s cuffs, desperately trying to get her shaking to stop long enough to insert the key.
She dropped it.
Outside, she heard the man jeer, “So how’s the reenactment so far, Emp? Accurate enough for you?” Then a pause. “Is he asleep?”
“Passed out,” one of the gunmen laughed. “Poor Emp couldn’t handle it.”
“What a shame. Shoot him.”
Victory gasped at the gunshot, at the sound of the body jerking against the dirt out front.
They shot him. Oh gods, they just shot him. Victory scrambled to pick up the key, her every nerve afire at the voices that seemed to be right over her shoulder, but her fingers wouldn’t work. They felt like numb, fleshy sticks attached to her hands, and she couldn’t force the key into her fingers.
“Hurry, Princess,” Lion whispered above her.
“I’m trying,” Victory whimpered. She tried again to pluck the key off the ground, b
ut it fell out of her hands again before she got it halfway to the Praetorian’s shackles. I’m not a warrior, she thought, trying desperately to scrape the brassy bit of metal into her hands. I’m not trained for this…
“Please let her go.” It was Thor. “You’ve got no argument with the girl. It’s my brother and I that caused offense. My brother’s dead. Just kill me and get it over with.”
“Oh, we will,” the man said. “But she’s an Imperial. I think I’ll have some fun with her, first.”
Victory glanced over her shoulder as she fumbled with the key, her heart hammering so hard it was making her dizzy. She watched the man yank Whip off of the ground by her collar.
“See this pretty little band of metal, here?” the man demanded. “You know what this means, to those bastards? It means, by her own rules, I can do whatever I want to her.” He dropped her back to her knees. “And right now, I wanna screw her pretty brains out.”
It was then that she saw his pants open, his flesh fully erect jutting from the crux of his thighs. Victory felt her heart clench, felt the memories start to rush up from the depths once more.
A warm blanket of energy settled around her, easing all of her fears, steadying her fingers, slowing her panicked heart. Suddenly, the key went steady in her hand, and it was a simple thing to insert it into the lock, and turn.
Once her first wrist was free, Lion took the key from Victory’s hand and smoothly unlocked the rest of her shackles. A moment later, the Praetorian stepped through the doorway and into the light outside, her face a deadly mask.
She stepped behind the man holding Whip by the hair, grabbed him by his chin with one hand while cupping the back of his head with the other, and violently twisted his head up and backwards, making the yard go silent with the loud pop of his spine.
She grabbed the man’s gun from him as he fell, moving forward without pause, the act only having taken a split second of her time. Whip, who had been watching the process, moved aside with disdain, allowing the body to thump against the bare earth.
The men, startled, peppered the area with gunfire. Lion brought her weapon up and flawlessly executed two of the three gunmen, and, as the third gunman was trying to get his weapon up and ready, she kicked out, caught his weapon as he stumbled, twisted it from his grip, and sent it flying across the yard. He screamed and looked at his fingers, obviously broken from where they had gotten caught in the trigger guard.
Lion brought the weapon to his face and shot him. As he was falling, the Praetorian turned to the two brothers on the ground. She raised the gun up to Thor’s head and the man flinched, but didn’t look away—
“Lion, no!” Victory cried, lunging out into the daylight. “Don’t shoot him!”
Lion didn’t look up from Thor’s face. “He was part of this.”
“He and his brother live,” Victory ordered. “That is my command.”
Reluctantly, Lion glanced at the Emp. “Well, one of them will live, Princess. The other…” She twisted her face as she looked down upon Dragomir’s still body. “No one can live through a gunshot like that.”
An Emp can, Victory thought stubbornly, but when she looked, she saw too much blood, and white shards of bone and gray matter…
“If your Praetorian isn’t going to shoot me…” Thor softly said, eyes still riveted to Lion’s face.
Instantly, Lion had the gun leveled between his eyes, waiting.
Carefully, in a very even tone, Thor continued, “…then you should untie me, Victory, so I can help my brother.”
Victory frowned at him. “What do you mean?”
Eyes still focused on Lion, he said, “I’m a shifter.”
Victory felt her heart give an extra thump. “A what?”
“A Shi. The external kind, not internal.” Thor’s voice was speeding up. “Can’t shape my body, only things outside me. That’s how I patched my brother up last time, but I need my hands.” He nervously took his eyes off of Lion and looked down at his brother. “I never told anyone before this. Hell, Drago doesn’t even know. But I can help him, I swear. I just need you to free my hands. I can patch up your Praetorian, too, but I doubt she’d let me get near her.”
Victory glanced at Lion, startled, and realized that the spray of gunfire had caught the Praetorian in the shoulder and gut. Even then, a stream of crimson was running down her calf to pool on the ground beneath her bare feet.
“Release him,” Victory said.
For a long moment, it didn’t look as if Lion would obey her. Then, glaring, her Praetorian lowered the weapon and stalked back to the first man she had killed. She yanked the knife from his belt and walked back over to Thor. She kicked him, hard, in the spine, and Thor fell forward into the dirt with a startled grunt.
“You can tell him that was for his part in all this,” Lion snarled. Then she slid the knife blade between his wrists and, with one quick, upward jerk, cut the ties. Before Thor could get back up, she kicked him again in the ribs. “And that was for leaving Whip in chains.”
Then, as if Thor no longer existed to her, the Praetorian went and searched the rebel bodies, taking all the weapons and slinging them over her shoulders and hips. Then she stalked toward the ship and up the ramp, passing into the darkness of the hull. There was a moment of silence, then a sharp male cry, cut off suddenly. Two moments later, a dirty male body rolled down the gangplank, sliding to a stop in the dust. It was followed shortly by another.
Victory expected Thor to comment on the Praetorian’s ill-bred behavior, but the man was already kneeling beside his brother, eyes closed, hands smeared with Dragomir’s blood as his thumbs waded through the crater in the man’s head.
Oh my gods, Victory thought has his fingers slid into the hole in his head. She quickly looked away, feeling a pressure rising in her gut.
Whip, who had watched the proceedings with interest, was frowning at the way Thor was running his hands through Dragomir’s wound.
“That man’s a Shi, ain’t he?” Whip asked. There was an intelligence in her eyes that dwarfed Lion’s.
“He claims to be,” Victory said.
“Makes sense,” Whip said, looking intrigued. “The mutations run in families.”
Victory ducked into the cottage to retrieve the key to Whip’s shackles, but could find it nowhere on the floor. Frowning, she stepped back into the daylight, carefully avoiding the growing patch of blood and brains on the ground under Thor’s hands. “Whip, I can’t find the—” She stopped when she realized Whip was free of her shackles, and was simply kneeling there, naked, watching, her hands tucked carefully behind her back, chains dangling loose over her ankles.
“Lion dropped me the key, milady,” Whip said, without looking up. “For now, I’m just watching. I’m going to have to kill him if he decides to do anything unpleasant, though.” She almost sounded disappointed. Then, after she continued observing for a moment, “Does he really think he can heal a wound like that?” She didn’t sound incredulous, just puzzled.
“He says he’s done it before,” Victory said. But an anxiety was building in her chest as she watched the big man work on his brother, and the longer she sat there, the more it began to hurt. It was an odd pressure, almost like someone was jabbing her in the chest with a finger.
Stay alive, she prayed, willing the Shi to work faster.
But the body began to pale, the blood oozing from his scalp slowly coming to a stop.
“He’s long dead,” Whip said, shaking her head.
Even as she said it, Thor pulled his hands away from his brother’s head and slumped forward, his big shoulders wracked with slow, uneven sobs.
“That’s not possible,” Victory whispered. The odd pressure in her chest began to feel like someone was running a stake between her breasts. She rubbed at her breastbone, wondering if she was having some sort of reaction to the excitement. The pressure continued to build, relentless, until it felt like her chest was caught in a giant’s fist, its fingers squeezing her lungs to a tiny
portion of their former capacity. Grimacing, she sat down against the outer wall of the cottage, her breath starting to come in low, pained breaths.
Whip turned to give her an anxious look. “Are you all right, milady?”
“No,” Victory whimpered. Her entire chest was hot and tingly, and it felt like every breath was wedging that stake further between her ribs. “I think…heart attack…” She groaned, sliding sideways along the wall, suddenly needing to lie down.
Whip was on her feet in an instant. She knelt beside her, her gray eyes filled with concern. “We don’t have the facilities for you here, milady. The closest hospital is about four hundred miles away, and is run by your father.”
Victory closed her eyes against the spike of agony shooting up and down her spine with every beat of her heart. The Praetorian lurched to her feet and ran to the spaceship. She heard her conferring with Lion.
Interestingly, Victory caught sight of Dragomir, standing beside his brother, a hand on his shoulder. He turned, then, and started walking away. The forest beyond was glowing, more alive than she had ever seen it before, every tree seemingly radiating golden light.
Is that the sun? Victory thought, squinting at the clouds. It was, just as it had been all day, overcast. The patch of trees that he was walking towards, however, seemed to be bathed in a pocket of vibrant sunshine.
Go to him.
The voice came from within, and for a moment, Victory thought it was her imagination. She watched Dragomir’s back grow distant. Why is he leaving his brother? she thought, confused.
Go to him, the voice ordered again.
Somehow, Victory pulled herself onto her hands and knees. Every bit of her chest feeling torn and punctured, she crawled over to the corpse beside Thor. She frowned down at it, then at Dragomir’s back, almost in the trees.
But she didn’t have time to contemplate it. Something was pushing her to flip the Emp over.
Victory wedged her hands under Dragomir’s body and, heaving, she began to strain to roll him onto his back.
