by Lea Linnett
Helik sighed, closing his eyes as he pushed back from the desk and stood. “It’s fantastic. I just don’t want us to get ahead of ourselves.” He circled round to the door, smiling at his assistant as he passed. “I don’t think I’ll be able to relax completely until the program is done,” he admitted, truthfully.
Until the program was done and the human was safely back in Manufacturing where he couldn’t touch her.
Roia’s red eyes were slits as she followed him out of the office, but she soon let go of whatever she was thinking about in favor of reporting on the program participants’ evaluations of their humans, much to his relief. He valued the xylidian for her sharpness; he just preferred it when it wasn’t directed his way.
He spent the week in this manner, burying himself in work at Kaan Tower during the day and ghosting through the offices at night, not even trusting himself to sleep at home after the second day, when he’d gone to lay down on his freshly made bed and had smelled the human’s scent on the laundered sheets.
His office paradise came crumbling down when he walked in at the end of the week to find his private office packed with security and his desk covered in a thick layer of fire extinguishing foam.
He stood dumbfounded before the display as a small crowd gathered in the hallway behind him, trying to catch a glimpse of the wreckage. Nothing had escaped the dark, chunky substance; it was as if a featureless black blanket had been draped over everything, from his chair to his desk to the large digital storage banks that lined the walls.
His grandmother had built Kaan Tower a long time ago, and as was common with older buildings, while many parts of it had been upgraded as technology progressed, others had fallen by the wayside. Fire safety was always important, which is why the sensors had been kept in peak condition, but now Helik wished he’d forked out the extra credits to replace the foam-based extinguishing system with one of the newer chemical suppressants. The foam was already hardening, turning a sickly brown in places as it oxidized. This stuff would turn rock hard after a few hours, and would take at least a week to clean away.
He grimaced, looking at the data banks that were now buried beneath a foot of foam. They had backups, but that didn’t change how expensive they would be to clean or replace.
Roia appeared at his elbow, her blood-red eyes cataloging the damage as she let out a sigh.
“I found it like this this morning and called security. Looks like someone forced the door open. I’ve kept everyone out—there’s no way to know whether they tampered with any of the data banks with all that extinguisher fluid covering it.” Helik heard her grinding her teeth. “Do you think this might be connected to the issues we had at the conference?” she asked in a lower tone.
Helik shivered. “I hope not,” he squeezed out, his throat feeling tight.
“I’m going to have to call the police, aren’t I?” she said with a sigh. “Or maybe the enforcers?”
Helik closed his eyes, resisting the urge to drop his head into his hands. “Yeah. I’ll deal with them and move into one of the shared offices for the week.”
Roia narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re kidding, right? I may not be an enforcer, but it seems pretty obvious that whoever did this had help from inside. It’s not easy to break into this building. They could be sitting right next to you in the office bays, looking over your shoulder at classified documents.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing that seriou—”
“It is that serious. There will be some who take incidents like what happened at the conference to heart. If they’re willing to start a fire in Helik Kaan’s personal office, who knows what else they’d be prepared to do. You’ll be safer at home.”
Helik turned to her, his voice becoming a flinty growl as he tried to stay out of earshot of the small crowd that filled the hall behind them. “Why are you so focused on getting me to go home?”
“Why are you so intent on staying away?”
Helik made a displeased sound, his lips turning thin with frustration.
The xylidian gave him a look, her own ink-black lips set in a grim line. “I understand it might be hard to get used to having a… human in your home,” she said, guiding him down the corridor away from prying eyes. “But I really think this could be an opportunity. You could actually make a difference with this campaign.”
Helik looked away. “I can make a difference from the comfort of a shared office, Roia.”
A clawed hand reached for him, stopping before it came into contact with his scales, and the xylidian’s blood-red gaze zeroed in on him. “You know that’s not what I meant. I apologize if I’m overstepping,” she continued, not looking apologetic at all, “but the girl’s switched on. You saw her at the conference. And people like her. She’s popular. She could become a permanent fixture, Helik—”
“Permanent?” Helik froze, the word leaving him with far more force than necessary.
“Yes, permanent. There’s a real chance of opening up a dialogue, sir.”
“Roia.” He sighed, glancing back at the flurry of activity surrounding his office door. “It’s better if I keep some distance.”
“What, why?”
Roia’s eyes turned to slits, and it took all of Helik’s self-control not to break eye contact like a frightened chintah. “I can’t be around her.”
“That’s not an excuse. Surely you don’t hate humans so much that you’d hurt her?”
“No, that’s not—”
The words died on Helik’s tongue. He couldn’t tell her the truth; not even his assistant could be trusted with something so delicate. He felt an itch beneath his scales, as if he were being watched, as though if he said the truth aloud, the words would be plucked from the air and brandished across every news page in the Constellation.
But without the truth, what explanation did he have?
He searched for something, anything, but came up short.
Roia’s expression softened. “I don’t know what human offended you enough to make you feel this way, but while the guy championing human rights having a deep-seated hatred of them might be poetic, it doesn’t work so well in practice. You need to sort this out,” she implored, “and I say this as your assistant. What will it look like if you can’t stand to be in the same room as her?”
Helik scowled, because it was either that or start begging.
“Go home. Lock yourself in your office if you have to, but please think about what I said. And try to be civil with her. This campaign means a lot, if not to you, then to others.” She looked uncomfortable for a moment, as if she’d said more than she meant to, and looked away. “I’ll handle the police. Or the enforcers. Does destruction of a senator’s property qualify for enforcer involvement?”
Helik blew out a breath, shaking his head. Enforcers were the levekk-only branch of the law, reserved for the worst of infringements. “If it does, then I’m happy you’re dealing with them and not me.”
Roia gave him a close-lipped smile, hiding her teeth. She opened her mouth as if to say something but quickly closed it again. “Call me if you need anything,” she said as she turned back to his office, and Helik raised a hand in farewell.
Roia had been good to him. She’d gotten him through more than one PR nightmare since he’d hired her, and he suspected he owed a fair chunk of his success to her managerial claws.
But he couldn’t let her help him through this. This was a nightmare he had to face down on his own.
His stomach flipped at the thought of returning to the penthouse this early in the day, but he slowly made his way towards the elevators nonetheless, trying to ignore the coil of hot excitement that burned beneath his fear.
6
Ellie’s week was blissfully Helik-free.
He left before she woke up in the mornings, and he didn’t return until long after she’d gone to bed. She hadn’t heard a word about her work or whether she was doing a good job or not, but that was fine. If it gave her some respite from the vaguely constipated
looks he’d started sending her after their… confrontation, then she was okay with it.
She quelled the small part of her that was disappointed by his absence. All that voice would do is get her into trouble, she was sure, and then Lena and Augusta would never let her hear the end of it.
It was clear that Helik didn’t like her, and that was fine. All she needed was to do her job, keep the credits rolling in, and stay invisible like Roia had told her to.
Then tomorrow, she could explore. It was her first day off, and apart from a mandatory Monitor meeting, she was free to do as she pleased.
Away from Helik.
She nodded to herself as she crested the stairs, ignoring the twinge of unease in her gut as she squared up to the bedroom doors. She’d barely touched this room after her run-in with Helik, only stealing in to change the sheets. But today she was going to face her fear and clean it properly.
Rolling her shoulder a little, she swung open the double-doors, shielding her eyes against the light streaming in from Helik’s floor-to-ceiling windows. That was odd, she noted. Usually when she poked her head in, the security blinds were drawn closed…
Ellie froze in the doorway, her eyes finally seeing past the glare.
Helik was in the room.
And he was very, very undressed.
Ellie’s eyes widened to the size of dinner plates as they scanned his entire, massive form on autopilot. He stood with his back to her before the closet’s gaping jaws, wearing nothing but a pair of tight underpants that clung to his ass and upper thighs like a second skin. The rest of him was bathed in mercilessly bright sunlight, and Ellie couldn’t drag her eyes away.
The first thing she registered were the scales. The tiny, diamond-shaped patches stretched across every inch of him, and they glittered like gold in the late-morning light, defining every dip and curve of muscle.
And boy, was he muscular. She’d seen Lena’s guy—she knew levekk were big. But that hadn’t prepared her for this.
She knew now why he’d looked so good in his clothes during the commencement conference and why even the loose drape of a shirt looked tailor-made on him. Wide shoulders angled seamlessly into narrow hips, his muscled flanks rippling as he reached for something in his closet, and even through the fabric, Ellie could see that his ass matched the rest of him. Each of his thighs had more strength to them than the entirety of her body, and they flowed down into strange, non-human legs that tensed with the effort of keeping him upright.
His legs almost seemed to bend backwards at the knee, so he stood up on his toes like a house cat. There were other aliens with joints like these, but where cicarians and xylidians looked like they were standing on toothpicks, the levekk exuded power. Every shift of his weight seemed deliberate, and she could see the muscles in his calves bunching as he turned to look over his shoulder at her.
She had time to notice the line of bone running down his spine, accentuating the curve of his back, before her eyes met his.
Her feet took an automatic step back when she saw his expression. His icy blue eyes fixated on hers, gleaming in the same predatory way they had at the conference, but they were soon overtaken by a cold anger, and Ellie’s cheeks flamed.
“I-I’m so sorry!” she blurted, retreating over the threshold. She tried not to look at the levekk as she slammed the doors shut but caught a glimpse of a defined chest as Helik turned to face her fully.
With the heavy doors safely between them, Ellie ran for it. It took all of her self-control not to go and hide in her room, instead forcing herself to walk down the hallway towards the library at a measured pace. She barely looked at where she was walking, her gaze unfocused, but one thought rose above the panic: Keep working. You’re probably about to be fired, but keep working.
She tried not to slam the library door shut behind her, but it was a near thing. She immediately set about dusting the shelves, barely pausing to drop her bucket to the floor and blind to the once-breathtaking sight of the books that surrounded her.
What was Helik even doing here? For days, he’d been like a ghost wisping in and out of the penthouse at crazy hours—or not returning at all—and the one time she trusted him to be gone and didn’t knock, he was there? A despairing sound peeped out of her. And he just had to be naked as well. Or close to it.
Ellie shook her head. She’d unwittingly crossed what felt like an enormous line—worse even than before. There was no way he’d keep her around now, no matter how spotless she made his apartment. She was so fired.
The image of his eyes boring into her cut back through her thoughts. Maybe she was worse than fired. She’d never seen someone look that angry and that hungry all at once. With a twinge of unease, she remembered the pindar reporter’s words at the conference. Disappearing humans? Maybe Augusta had been more right about the levekk than she knew, and humans were routinely spirited away and eaten or something. Maybe the last human to work with Helik had managed to anger the levekk so much that they’d been skewered on one of his long, piercing claws and devoured.
Ellie shuddered but continued to clean until she heard footsteps in the corridor, her heart seizing.
She was actually going to die. She’d trapped herself in the library with no way of escape, allowing Helik to stand between her and the only staircase that went to the lower level. This was it.
Her vision tunneled as the footsteps stopped outside the library door, but she kept cleaning, her arm moving mechanically over a shelf.
There was the tap of claws on the door handle, the creak of the door, and the overwhelming rush of blood in her ears.
And then silence.
---
Helik hovered before the door to the library, fully clothed now, his hand resting on the old, human-style door handle that his grandmother had preserved and which he’d forgotten to replace.
He… didn’t know what he intended to do once he confronted the girl.
Anger coursed through him, setting his teeth on edge and making his muscles bunch beneath the shirt he’d hastily thrown on. But he wasn’t angry at her. He was angry at himself.
Because a part of him was still trying to convince itself that what had just happened was okay. He could still feel the human’s eyes on him, admiring him, and for half a moment he’d basked in the attention, reveled in the fact that she hadn’t been able to look away.
A wave of shame hit him. How far had he slipped that he was now reading desire in the eyes of a human? He was the one in control here—or at least, he was supposed to be. This was the second time she’d encroached on his space, and whose fault was that? Why should she expect him to be here when he’d barely slept in the apartment in days? There was no ulterior motive to her seeing him like this—she couldn’t want him—and it was wrong of him to even consider it.
She was here to work. He was here to provide that work. There was no deeper level to their interaction, and he couldn’t force one on her.
So he clenched his fist at his side, reining himself in. It was a simple accident, and of course the girl stared. How many levekk would she have even seen in her life, let alone half-dressed? This wasn’t her fault, and he couldn’t blame her eyes for wandering. He’d caught his own wandering enough in the past week.
Breathing in deep, he considered his options.
He was sure others in his position would simply send her back to Manufacturing and select someone else—maybe someone older, safer—but he couldn’t do that now. People had seen her face; if the reports Roia had received were any indication, she even had something of a fanbase developing. Losing her would cast the reputation of his entire program in doubt.
He would just have to… talk to her.
With a sigh, he tried to calm his racing heart. He dealt with the expectations of thousands with his public persona. He could summon it up now to ease over this bump in the road. He couldn’t let this human throw him off as she had earlier that week.
He pushed open the door, and his eyes fell to the girl, who stoo
d frozen in the middle of dusting, her hand gripping a cloth with white-knuckled intensity. She looked tiny, dwarfed by the towering shelves of books—real, inked human tomes—that his grandmother had collected.
He nodded, smiling politely in an attempt to soothe her. If anything, she looked more frightened, her shoulders hitching up as if she were getting ready to run.
Tilting his head, Helik tried to decide how best to approach this. He stepped forward, and when she didn’t bolt, gestured towards the small collection of chairs by the window at the end of the room. “Why don’t we sit down?”
The human tensed a little but moved haltingly over to the chairs nonetheless. She sat with her knees clasped tight together, her hands still gripping the cloth as they rested on her thighs. Helik tried not to stare as he settled into an adjacent seat, still smiling.
“Don’t worry, you’re not fired,” he began, and she froze, her posture briefly relaxing before it soon tightened again in caution. She was still expecting some kind of punishment. “Accidents happen, right? You’ve worked hard this week. I wouldn’t want to punish you for an honest mistake.”
The girl’s eyes widened hopefully. “I am so sorry, Mr. Kaan. I-I should have knocked, or… or just not come in, I—”
“Please,” he said, waving a clawed hand and finally settling into the warm, confident tones of his public persona. “Helik is fine. You’re living in my house.”
“Yes, sir.”
He flexed his toes into the carpet, the only outward sign of his discomfort. “And it’s my fault,” he continued smoothly. “I should have briefed you better when you got here. Or when we last had an… incident.” He glanced at her, trying not to notice how the light made the flyaway pieces of her hair glow. “I propose we make a new rule. Bedroom door is shut, you leave it alone. Don’t worry about cleaning inside. Bedroom door is open, you’re free to enter. It’ll be my fault if I’m in the way, and I’ll take responsibility. How does that sound?”
The human blinked at him as if he were crazy, and maybe he was, but he had a feeling they were each reaching that conclusion through very different trains of thought.
