by V. K. Ludwig
“Ehh… MILFFR— MILFRML or something like that.”
“Too complicated. I’ll just stick to Katie.”
“Hmm,” was all she said and nothing more after that.
She remained quiet in my arms and continued to stroke my chest, the motion turning slower at each pass. Eventually, they stopped. And just like that, she fell asleep in my arms.
Her soft features showed her at peace, happy, and so unlike the female I’d found trembling on the floor that day. Katie was officially mine, though the incident at the dock cast a shadow over this moment. It loomed over us, growing dense in the corners of my room, and between the sparse knickknacks of our make-do life on Odheim.
I worked myself out from our tangle of limbs and got up, placing a kiss onto her cheek. “I have to talk to K’terra, but it won’t take long. Stay here.”
“Mhh…hm…” she mumbled and turned onto her stomach as she rubbed her face deep into her pillow.
I picked up my pants from the ground, my head spinning at the quick shift in elevation. My ribs ached, and I struggled myself into it while leaning with my shoulder against the wall.
As much as I needed to rest, talking to K’terra took priority. The hacker had escaped, and the problem at hand remained. As a sgu’dal wanted for murder, the Empire had little motivation to investigate my allegations. Executions were quicker. Cheaper, too.
The living area hung dark once more, and I carefully closed the door of my room behind me. I sneaked toward the door, but movement caught at the edge of my vision.
Tension grabbed my muscles.
I couldn’t fight off a bounty hunter in my condition.
With my stance wide, I turned toward the dark figure.
My heart jolted at the familiar Vetusian sitting on the couch. “What the fuck, Kael. How long have you been sitting there in the dark like a creep?”
He leaned back and folded his legs on top of the low table in front of him. “Congratulations on your bond.”
I let out a scoff. “That long, huh?”
“You stole my access card.”
“Borrowed,” I said, pointing at him to stretch my point. “I had every intention of giving it back to you.”
“Why didn’t you then?”
I raked a hand through my hair and flung myself onto the armchair across, immediately regretting it when pain rippled through my chest. “Shit… things got out of hand that day.”
“Clearly.” He let out one of those sighs especially reserved for whenever he’d saved my ass. “We have a dead Vetusian. Two abducted females. And a department at the brink of hysteria. The Empire wanted the Gaia Split Case out of the media, and you fucking went and put it right in the spotlight of the entire universe.”
“What should I have done when I found her, huh? With her meniscus torn and her soul shattered? Call the guards on her? Watch her execution? Wouldn’t you have done the same for your anam ghail?”
He looked away as quickly as if the last word had slapped his cheek. Even in the darkness, the way his jaw clenched underneath dark bristles turned visible.
“Commander Torin and I watched the surveillance recording. Kidan had this well planned out because he pulled her behind the wall at the end of the bed. A blind spot.”
“So, you do know it was her…”
“Of course we do,” he snarled. “Katie dragged herself over the ground and into the bathroom. Another blind spot. But it’s clear she hit him over the head with the toilet tank lid. She literally smashed his brain so hard the official reason for his death is suffocation.”
“If there’s footage of the attack, why by the Three Suns am I wanted for murder then?” Shadows of all shades of gray spun around me, turning me dizzy, turning me desperate. “I refuse to play a part in the politics of —”
“The recording’s gone,” he said matter-of-factly, remaining motionless as if he hadn’t just shattered our chance to return to Earth. “Before we managed to make physical copies for a trial, the recording disappeared from every single databank. As if it never existed.”
As if it never existed.
Panic clasped my throat and squeezed. The chair pulled out from underneath me. No matter how much my mind tried to hold on to gravity, it came crashing down along with any chance of a fair trial, and my hope to offer Katie and Grace a better life.
I swung myself up, my body swaying in all directions as my knees caved in underneath me.
Kael dropped his legs off the table and jumped up.
A steady hand clasped my neck, maneuvering me back onto the chair. “Sit your fucking ass down before you go vomiting all over me again. And now you listen to me. After the recording disappeared, all the High Court had left was your DNA in a room you shouldn’t have accessed, along with the deep-rooted belief that fated mates don’t go killing each other. This is murder, and statements alone don’t offer enough proof, even if they come from the Commander or me.”
I shoved in my chair, arching my back to take tension off the burning skin around my wounds. “And now, you sit your ass down and listen to me.”
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, not even knowing where to start. “Katie never had a split link. She is mine and always has been.”
Kael tsked. “Look at you all confident and romantic again. I have no fucking —”
“Kidan paid someone to link her to him. A hacker. Vetusian.”
Kael tilted his head and stared at me with narrowed eyes. “Impossible.”
“Impossible as in accessing the Imperial databanks and deleting surveillance footage?” That shut him up, and he gave me a wave so I would continue. “I went to a hacker today to unfreeze my account, so I could pull my savings out. Did you know there’s currently a human female in transit to Odheim? To be sold as a sex slave to one of the underground brothels?”
He stared at me, not a flicker of shock anywhere on his dark blue eyes. “We’re getting more and more reports of missing females. Four suns ago, commander Torin managed to intercept the abduction of five women, smuggled in cargo crates. Tell me what you know. Everything. Now.”
“I saw a hologram of the female,” I said, swallowing hard at the memory. “You have no idea how she trembled, Kael. Naked. Nothing to cover herself but her own limbs. The hacker offered her to me. Sophie. That’s her name. Said if I could come up with the credits, he could have her linked to me as my official match.”
“Fucking shit.” He sunk his forehead against his knuckles, shoving it across the hard bumps as his face scrunched up. “Are you telling me someone is accessing the Imperial databank, creating fake links?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” I said. “It happened to Katie and me, but there was one detail the hacker missed in our case. He told me he usually assigns females who originally matched Vetusians ineligible for Garrison Earth.”
“Since those links never connected in the databank,” he said, his eyes narrowing with focus. “You weren’t supposed to be assigned to the mission, so he accidentally linked Kidan to a female already matched to another. Do you think he deleted the footage?”
“Who else?” I scoffed. “We’re talking about a guy here capable of accessing every single piece of information out there. If he can hack the Imperial databank, he had access to the recorded distress calls once they found the body.”
“So he could delete whatever traces would lead us to believe it was an organized crime, instead of a jealous Vetusian killing the other match.”
“I said from the beginning that they should have redone our genetic profiles.”
Kael let his thumb scratch over his chin, his gaze fixed on the tip of his boots. He clenched his eyes shut, the shake of his head announcing the inevitable. “Please tell me you have proof.”
“The hacker got away,” I said. “I only found out today, but here’s —”
“No proof then.”
“But if they would retest us now —”
“You are wanted for murder, Melek,” he snarled. “As if
the department would go through the trouble of testing a wanted Vetusian hiding out on Odheim, simply because he says a hacker is selling fraudulent links.”
“Would you just shut up and listen?” I shouted, my eyes immediately falling to the door of my room. Kael glanced over his shoulder, and we remained silent for a moment. When I couldn’t detect any sounds of movement, I continued. “There’s a Jal’zar pleasure worker that I know for a fact is on his payroll. I gave her credits so she could pay me for her treatment tomorrow. If I’m lucky, she might still show up.”
“Melek, you’re like… the unluckiest Vetusian I know.”
“Not lately,” I said with a chuckle. “My anam ghail is sleeping right over there. And she knows everything, Kael. About the drugs, the Jal’zar… the young Vetusian.”
Pain settled on his irises, and he pressed his lips together, his head once more turning away from me.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“They, um… they found my match.”
I nodded, the heaviness of his statement growing denser with each shake of his head. “She’s dead?”
“Oh no, she isn’t dead, and she won’t die anytime soon,” he said, the scoff accompanying it drowning in sarcasm. “She’s an eight-year-old girl, Melek. A girl. Orphan. Her parents and her brother died during phase one in a car accident. No other family members left except for a grandmother on her deathbed.”
“Wow, um…” I leaned deeper into the cushion, watching him die a slow death right in front of me. “You’re twenty Earth years older than her.”
“Thanks for pointing it out as if I can’t perform basic math,” he hissed, but quickly deflated into himself. “Commander Torin was kind enough to assign me as the new diplomat for Dunatal.”
“Kind?” That chuckle barely made it out of my chest. “We didn’t have a diplomat on Dunatal in ages because everybody refuses to go there. One day on Earth is nothing but a blink of your eye on that planet. We had Vetusians return from there with severe trauma because of that galaxy’s time gap, Kael.”
“They also returned barely aged.” He sucked in a deep breath and let it huff from his chest. “How could I claim her once she is mature when I am two decades older than her, Melek? Perhaps even more if I deploy into a time gap that ages me even quicker.”
“Who will take care of her? She’s too young for a stratum.”
“Something humans used to call an orphanage,” he said. “We restructured it, but she’ll basically grow up in something similar to a stratum, but without the educational components.”
“But if her parents and brother died, you’re the only family she has left now.”
He jumped up from the table and paced before me, his hands flailing all around him. “I can’t raise my own mate, Melek. It’s already wrong the way it is, but that would be sick.”
“I hope you know that I’d take her in if my situation were different,” I said. When he remained quiet for what felt like an uncomfortable eternity, I changed the subject. “How is Eden?”
He made a sound at the back of his throat. “That female is something else entirely. She’s one of the most important political assets we have on Earth right now. Eden and the Commander married in a public event to take attention away from phase one. Her idea. Marriage. Something so brittle, but the humans loved it. Oh, and she wanted me to give you this.”
Kael rummaged through one uniform pocket, then the other. When he opened his fists in front of me, my heart skipped a few beats. While one hand contained ICs engraved with the crest of the house L’naghal, the content of the other hand was what sent an itch into my limbs.
I took the sphere, rubbing my fingertips over the smooth surface like I had so many times in the past. If I had squeezed it, I remembered it would pop open, revealing fine blue dust.
“Eden is sending me drugs?” I said, that chuckle an insecure one. “That’s hard to believe, Kael.”
He clasped his fist shut and bumped it against my head before he opened it again. “She sends you five-thousand ICs, but I changed five-hundred into five souldust spheres for you. The money is to pay off bounty hunters. But those sgu’dals trying to finance their next hit are easier to get rid of with one of these.”
I squeezed the sphere.
Pop.
Powdered dunes shifted above the tremble of my fingers. I leaned back, leaning away from that puff of dust rising into the room, reflecting that bit of light breaking through the window.
“You can’t expect me to carry this around,” I said, my eyes flicking between sphere and that scar on my wrist, the ragged outline already twitching again.
“Look at me.” He squatted down in front of me, his eyes catching mine and keeping them locked. “You and I come from the same crop, Melek. You’re my brother, and I’m telling you that you’re stronger than most of us. As difficult as this might be for you, it’s necessary. Things might look rosy now, but it won’t last.”
“We’ve done okay so far.”
“Hiding in a brothel?” he asked. “Not being able to go anywhere without a cape? Who is teaching her daughter? When was the last time she saw someone her age? What work will she do one day without going through a stratum? If word spreads on Odheim that there are two human females, you’ll have bigger problems than bounty hunters. You’re living a dream, Melek, and it’ll pop soon. Eden gave you this so you could enjoy it a while longer, but she also wants you to understand that Katie and Grace could return to Earth if you confessed to Kidan’s murder.”
“You want me to give them up?”
“I can only repeat what I said before. You have an anam ghail now, and it’s your duty to do right by her.” He got up and straightened his uniform as he turned away but glanced at me once more, saying, “Find that Jal’zar whore. And find her fast, because they raised your bounty to a thousand credits.”
Nineteen
Katie
* * *
“Grace!” I shouted, trailing my fingers over the embroidered wallpaper as I walked down the stairs. “Where are you?”
The moment I turned at the bottom landing, she hurried from one of the backrooms over to me. “Why are you screaming like that? I’m right here.”
“What did you do in there?”
Blotchy spots of pink traced her cheekbones, and she rubbed her hands as she shrugged. “Just… rearranging some of the old furniture. Adora wants to replace the broken stuff upstairs, and the backrooms are stacked with nightstands and other tables.”
Every inch I shifted to the side to get a glance toward the gap of the room, Grace shifted with me. She fidgeted with her shirt, that smile on her face way too sweet to be anything but trouble.
“Grace, if you’re lying to me —”
“Nothing!” K’terra’s voice shattered from beside us, and the way she slammed the door shut added a beat to it. “I searched the entire old dock for him, but nobody would talk. His bay is empty. Gone. Nothing left but cables and old boxes with fake access cards. Where’s Melek?”
“Still standing guard outside,” I said.
“She didn’t show up?”
I shook my head. “No sign of her so far.”
K’terra placed her hands onto her hips and sighed. “It was a long shot to begin with. She isn’t going to be so stupid to come to the healer her boss ran away from a sun ago. I better go tell him.”
“I’ll do it,” I said, but pointed at Grace once more. “I don’t like this sneaking around of yours lately.”
She rolled her eyes and let out an annoyed grunt, throwing her head back as if she was about to fall into a tantrum. Her foot stomped onto the ground, then she huffed, and walked off toward the community kitchen.
I turned and made my way to the backdoor, the whiff of fresh air a welcome change no matter how many traces of urine clung to it. The moment I stepped outside, Melek threw me a concerned glance.
“Where’s your cape?”
He leaned against a stone column, one foot crossed behind the other, s
taring over the empty street that lay in front of Brot Adnak. The moment he lifted his cape, I slipped underneath, waiting for his embrace to fill me with that scent of iodine that followed my mate around.
“It’s just for a moment, and the streets are empty anyway.”
The cape dragged heavier on my shoulders with each passing day as if the fabric grew thicker overnight. Now we couldn’t even enter the main room without it. Ounce for ounce, it weighed down on me, reminding me of our reality. Three people living in hiding, trapped between musk, moans, and moisture.
I dug my face into his chest, taking in the scent of my mate. “She just got back.”
His eyes widened. “And?”
“Nothing. She said it’s all gone, and nobody would talk.”
“Shit.” His arm clasped me a bit tighter, and he gave a couple of vacant nods. “There’s still a chance she’ll show up. Might have overslept. If not today, perhaps tomorrow.”
I said nothing, and yet his face scrunched up, knowing full well she wouldn’t come. The moment I’d woken in Melek’s arms this morning; he had told me about Kael’s visit. With the increased bounty on his head, leaving Brot Adnak shrunk into a faint memory of the past.
“I’m failing you again,” he whispered, my hair shoving around underneath his kisses. “I really wanted us to go back to Earth. Find ourselves a nice little habitat. Make one hybrid after another. You nurse, I rock back to sleep.”
My heart clenched a little because I wanted that as well. Wanted to live the life of a mother with a male by my side just once.
“You’re not failing anybody, Melek. But I guess we’ll have to cancel our date at the Son’idar festival for real now, huh?”
“Probably, anam ghail.”
I wrapped my arms around him and stared up into those eyes speaking of determination and self-discipline. “I love it when you call me that.”
“That’s what you are, Katie,” he said, the way he stroked his forehead over mine, making his hood shove over my hair. “And now, do your mate a favor and squeeze a bit less, because my ribs are killing me.”
