by Juno Wells
“No. That would be a breach of privacy.”
Hmm. So there was no way she could listen to the conversation, or to somehow send a voice file of it to Wraxic and the others.
She needed more proof.
Feeling cleaner and reinvigorated, she stepped from the shower and wrapped a towel around herself.
She knew it was none of her business, that she was sticking her nose in where it wasn’t required, but this was what she’d always wanted to do. If she couldn’t be a member of the CIA on Earth, she’d make her own CIA on Vaher and figure out what the hell was going on.
Focusing on this would stop her focusing on the men who were slowly driving her insane, too. She was slipping, she knew it. She’d gone from flinching when they touched her to accepting kisses on the cheeks happily within a couple of days.
The memory from the temple still made her hot all over. Aavik and Wraxic kissing and touching her. She wanted more of it, had fallen asleep—on the couch, but this time with a thick fluffy blanket that Veiko had obtained for—with the memory replaying again and again in her mind.
The temptation to crawl into bed with the men and let them do whatever they wanted to her was dangerously strong.
She wished the goddesses were still on the planet so she could go and lodge a complaint with them.
Do you have any idea what the schedule of the men is like?
“What men?”
My men.
“I don’t have access to that information.”
Hannah scowled. She’d asked Amy on the mountain how Wraxic was contacting Veiko and found out that the AI could ring each other like phones and leave messages. If she left a message with any of the men asking when they were back, they would suspect she was up to something, and they’d know Wraxic wasn’t with her.
She tapped her foot then stripped off her towel and put on a different pair of yoga pants and a hoodie. She slipped her feet into her sneakers.
She really should have brought more clothes with her. She’d been too consumed with the men and the culture shock of Vaher that she hadn’t even unpacked her suitcase yet. Her room was huge, but there weren’t many surfaces for the few photographs she’d brought, or her make-up bag and straighteners.
It wasn’t really her room. It was someone else’s room that she was being allowed to stay in.
Well, it looks like we’re going to have to just risk it.
Amy didn’t reply.
Hannah sighed. As much as she didn’t want anyone else from Earth to come into this situation blind, she missed having other girls to talk to. It wasn’t that she particularly had any good friends on Earth, but she at least had people she could make small talk with without the pressure of them thinking she was the love of their life.
You can at least remember the layout of where I came last time, right?
“Yes. You requested that I begin mapping the layout of the palace when you walked around. I have access to this map.”
Perfect. So I guess you can’t just make me see random images, but you can give me instructions to the place where I heard the king and the Hystian talking, correct?
“That is correct.”
I’m gonna need those instructions right now.
On the way to the room where she’d heard the king plotting to defile a special place to his people, Hannah let herself wonder if she was ruining her chances at achieving her real aim: to make sure no more human women were dragged to Vaher without knowing what they were getting themselves into.
If she was the one to reveal the king’s dodgy dealings, she wasn’t likely to be able to convince him to do anything about Yvonne afterward.
But this was big, she was sure of it. Big enough that Wraxic had been willing to completely blank it so as not to shatter his devotion to the king.
She had to follow this through to the end. She had to convince her men of what was happening before it could go too far. She didn’t want to make trouble for them, but she didn’t want them to be hurt either. If this temple was desecrated before they found out about it, they would be devastated. Aavik especially.
And selfishly, she wanted to prove to herself that she could do it. The CIA had obviously thought she wasn’t good enough for a real job in the agency, but she had a chance to make sure the identity she’d carried around for twenty-six years now wasn’t completely shattered.
She turned the corner onto the corridor where she’d stood and listened to the king’s conversation.
And walked straight into two slabs of muscle.
She jumped, breathing hard, and took several steps backward.
She half expected it to be Veiko and Aavik, but she didn’t recognize the faces of the men in front of her. And her body didn’t sing at the sight of them. There was no urge to reach out and feel their abs, or to press her lips to theirs.
She supposed that was definitely confirmation that she didn’t just have a Vaherian fetish, as if the spaceship ride surrounded by Jukk and the other guards hadn’t confirmed that already.
It was just her men. They were the only ones she wanted.
“I’m sorry,” she said, trying to regain some composure and not look too guilty. “Am I not supposed to be down here?”
“This is the king’s quarters,” one of the men said.
“It is off limits,” the other informed her.
She pressed her hand to her mouth. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I had no idea. I haven’t been given a map of the palace or anything, and my mates are working, so I couldn’t ask them if I was all right to walk down here.” It was the first time she’d called them her mates, but she thought it was a good idea. She didn’t want the king to think there was any weakness in their relationship.
“We need to escort you back to your quarters.”
“Right, of course. Thank you so much.”
But when they started walking back, they were taking a very different route to the one Hannah had taken to get there.
This isn’t the way back to my room.
“It is certainly not a route to your room that I have mapped out.”
Shit. You need to send a message to my mates. Now she’d said it once, it rolled off her thoughts so easily. It sounded so right. Tell them that two guards are taking me somewhere and I don’t know where. Can you like, beam my location to them or something?
Her heart was pounding and when she knew Amy was trying to contact her men she worked through her options. Fighting back wasn’t one. Ignorance was the only one she could reasonably play. She was just walking about, no idea where she was going, and stumbled into somewhere she wasn’t supposed to.
But that wasn’t going to be good enough and she knew it. They wouldn’t be leading her to some unknown location unless they knew she’d overheard the conversation between the king and the Hystian.
She was in so much shit.
Her mates turned a corner at the same time, walking with purpose toward her. Veiko strode ahead, Aavik and Wraxic slightly behind them.
She’d never been more relieved in her life. She gave them a wide smile. “Oh hi! These guys were just taking me back to my room. I managed to walk somewhere I shouldn’t have. I know you keep telling me not to leave my room, but I was just getting so bored stuck in there, you know?” Ignorance had to be the way to go until she knew exactly what the king thought she knew.
She sent a hard look at her mates, begging them to go along with her. Veiko was the first to speak.
“I’ve told you a thousand times to just wait until we finish our shifts and we’ll take you out then. If you’re going to insist on going out anyway at least let us give you a map of where you can and can’t go.”
She stepped forward and away from the guards behind her. She stepped on her tiptoes and pressed a kiss to Veiko’s cheek. “I know, I’m sorry. It’s just still a bit hard for me to adjust to being here, that’s all. I really am sorry for causing trouble.”
“No trouble,” one of the guards who had been escorting her said. “Just k
eep her under control.” This was directed at Veiko.
Hannah slipped into the middle of the trio where she was in the safest spot. The tension eased from her body and she struggled not to breathe a sigh of relief. Surrounded by her mates, she was sure things would be okay.
Veiko gave a stiff nod. “This won’t happen again,” he promised.
He rested two hands on her shoulder and then teleported them back to her room.
“What the fuck is going on?” he demanded the second they were back.
Hannah, safely back in the room, struggled not to shrink away from his angry glare.
She really hoped they all didn’t have the same reaction as Wraxic.
17 AAVIK
Aavik paced the room. “Where the fuck were they taking her? It definitely wasn’t back to her room.”
“I don’t know,” Veiko said, but it was obviously worrying him. “Probably they thought she was staying somewhere other than her actual accommodation. I know there have been plenty of rumors about her precise location, to make it harder for someone malicious to find her.”
“I’m not sure about that,” Hannah said. She folded her arms and stood tall. Aavik couldn’t see a sliver of fear in her. It had disappeared completely since they’d teleported. “I overheard a conversation yesterday between the king and a Hystian.”
Wraxic sighed loudly and shook his head. “This is nonsense. I already told her.”
“It is unlikely that a Hystian would be on the planet,” Veiko confirmed.
“Amy told me that they were speaking Hystian. So maybe it wasn’t a Hystian, but that’s the language they were speaking, one hundred percent.”
Aavik stepped closer. “What did they say?”
“The king was talking—”
“She’s not certain it was the king,” Wraxic interrupted again.
Hannah told them exactly where she’d heard the meeting take place, and Aavik confirmed it was where the King held meetings, and that no one else was likely to be in the palace except guards who would have no access to the room. It was surrounded by a cage that prevented teleportation into it except for if a teleporter had been specifically authorized. None of the guards had been authorized. Certainly the interior guard hadn’t, and they were the at the top of the guard’s hierarchy.
Wraxic waved hands and took Aavik’s job of pacing.
“They were talking about mining the Tricanite from underneath a temple and selling it to the Hystians. The king—”
“We don’t know it was the king,” Wraxic said again, teeth clenched.
“He asked for an advance on the money he’ll get from selling the Tricanite. The Hystian said that if the Tricanite didn’t appear then they’d be coming back with an army.”
Aavik ran his hands through his hair. “What the fuck,” he said under his breath, trying and failing to absorb all the information he’d just received.
His body was split in half. Loyalty to the king that he’d felt all his life warred with the love he now felt for Hannah. The love given by the goddesses. The goddesses whose temple the king was about to destroy.
“Motherfucker,” he hissed.
“She’s lying,” Veiko said easily, waving a dismissive hand. “One day on the planet and she’s already trying to throw us into political instability. I told you we couldn’t trust her.”
“I don’t think she’s lying,” Wraxic said, “I think her AI just fucked up. She’d had it in her ear for less than ten minutes. It was just a mistranslation.”
“What about the guards who were taking her to who knows where?” Aavik said, standing closer to Hannah in case he actually had to defend her from Veiko. “That can’t be a coincidence.”
“She was in the king’s quarters. They were probably anti-human from the beginning. I’ll speak to them,” Veiko said. “She has to stay here. She can’t be trusted.”
Aavik was stood completely in front of his mate now. They couldn’t even see her. “You aren’t going to touch her,” he said to Veiko, voice a low warning.
Veiko had the decency to look disgusted. “I’m not going to hurt her,” he said. “But I don’t want her spreading her bullshit to anyone else. Okay?”
Aavik weighed his options in a split second and then nodded. “Yeah, I agree we should keep this between us for now.”
“There’s nothing to keep secret.” Wraxic was still stood with his arms folded at the corner of the room staring at the floor. “It’s just a misunderstanding.”
Aavik didn’t think it would take much to put cracks in Wraxic’s denial. It was Veiko’s distrust of Hannah that posed the biggest problem.
Silence descended on the room, and Aavik was torn. He wanted to speak to Hannah, but he couldn’t just take her away from the room and have a conversation with her in private.
So they spent the rest of the evening in the awkward stalemate. They ate dinner in silence and then went to bed early.
Aavik wanted desperately to lay on the sofa with Hannah, or even to lay at the floor beside her, to make sure no one hurt her, but he stopped himself.
Veiko had still mated with her, he was sure of it. He wouldn’t actually hurt her.
And tomorrow Aavik was the one who was staying with her while the other two worked. He could have his conversation with her then.
18 HANNAH
Hannah didn’t think she’d be able to fall asleep, but all the walking earlier in the day had exhausted her. She was asleep in seconds.
When she woke up, the reality of the split between her mates was evident. Aavik stood close to her, tense, like he really worried they were going to do something to hurt her. That made her antsy even though she didn’t believe it.
Wraxic and Veiko weren’t speaking either though. Their opinions on what she’d said were too different for them to bond over it together.
After a silent breakfast, Veiko and Wraxic disappeared to go and work, leaving Aavik and Hannah alone.
“You really believe me?” she asked in a small voice.
“Yes. I really do.”
“So what do we do?”
He ran hands through his hair, and Hannah wished she could do the same. Even now, when everything was so stressful, she was still distracted.
“We need to find more proof,” he said. “Something that will mean they can’t keep denying it. Wraxic will be easier to crack I think.”
“I’m not sure. Veiko doesn’t trust me, which is fair enough, but Wraxic is way deep in his cognitive dissonance. I’m not sure he’ll be as easy to drag out of it. Anyway, you want to go to the temple? Where the tricanite is?”
“It seems like the best bet. I’d rather do that than go skulking around the king’s quarters.”
“Yeah, my plan didn’t go quite so well yesterday.” Her pride was still a bit hurt that it had gone quite so dreadfully. “I had no way of knowing they already knew I’d listened in on the conversation the day before though. I mean, they must know, right? That’s the only reason they’d be so dodgy about it.”
“Veiko’s theory that they’re anti-human isn’t a terrible one. It’s a possibility.”
“There are that many people against it?”
“It’s hard to tell. No one will speak out against the king even if they don’t like his plan. Veiko barely made a fuss about it and you know how much he disagrees with it.”
“I guess.”
She finished pushing her food around her plate and then changed into some jeans, a sweater, and her sneakers. “I really should have brought more clothes,” she said.
When she turned around Aavik was staring at her with a slack expression. “I’ll be happy if you run of clothes.”
She laughed and rested a hand on his arm.
For a moment he tilted his head to the side, wondering if she was going to go further.
For a moment she thought she might. The bed behind them called to her.
“You should teleport us,” she said, and hated that she was a little breathless.
Seei
ng the temple where the goddesses had departed the physical realm made her breathless for a completely different. All thoughts of pushing Aavik back into their plush bed and wasting the rest of the day disappeared.
It was awe-inspiring.
The temple was in the shape of a dome again—it must have been the traditional shape—only this one was huge. Large enough that it could have housed a small village beneath it.
The roof was made up of hexagons, all joined together and all different. Some had intricate patterns. Some told stories of the Vaherian’s history. Aavik pointed to the one just above them dictating one woman in the middle, surrounded by men. The men were painted wearing headdresses of either green or orange. The men closest to the goddess had ripped off their headdresses.
“The planet at one point was divided into two tribes fighting over an area of ground that was especially fertile for agriculture. The goddess Iida solved the dispute by mating with both leaders of the tribes and settling their disputes.
Hannah laughed, though she was worried it might be seen as disrespectful. “Well, I guess that’s one way to solve a dispute.”
Aavik wrapped an arm around Hannah’s waist and she didn’t protest. The blessing felt almost more powerful inside the walls of the temple, but she didn’t know if it was just her mind playing games on her.
“If you can make me and Veiko see eye to eye on everything then you’ll have performed and even greater feat,” he said.
She laughed and listened to his explanation of why they fought in the first place. Aavik’s resentment at being overtaken by someone younger.
Hannah wanted to tell him that age wasn’t everything, but she didn’t think that would have been remotely helpful.
They were surrounded by Vaherians here. The temple was huge and dozens of people filled it. Like the smaller temple there was a large pool in the middle and lots of people bathed in it.
She was getting plenty of glances, but none of them seemed openly hostile. Aavik was alert beside her, but not enough that it was making her nervous. She was reassured by the fact he could teleport back to the palace in an instant.
