“No.”
She returned his look this time.
“Partly, perhaps,” he half conceded. “But no.”
She rolled her eyes. For a man who claimed to prefer dour stoicism, he certainly had a flair for the dramatic. “Why then?”
“I murdered a lorok.”
Her eyes snapped down to meet his. “You not.”
Torek cocked his horns sideways. “I’m a liar, then?”
“Maybe you kill a lorok. But you not murder her.”
“A negligible difference.”
“The difference between right and wrong often is,” she whispered.
Torek thought about that a moment, then nodded deeply. “She thought that our government had done a grievous wrong to her and her family. She retaliated by breaking into the Onik estate with her husband’s RG-800 and attempting to murder my entire guard.”
“RG-800?”
“A powerful military weapon. With it in hand and in her mindset, she possessed the means to wipe us out.”
“But you stop her,” Delaney said, certain.
“She’d already slaughtered a few dozen lorienok on her way through the courtyard, but yes, I killed her before she murdered anyone else.” He took a deep, unsteady breath. “In all my seasons of service to Lorien, in my entire life, I’d never killed a lorok before. And now I’ve come to learn that she had some right to her anger.”
Delaney jerked, taken aback. “A right to kill a few dozen people?”
He swallowed. “Her husband’s death was ruled a suicide without a thorough investigation.”
Delaney’s teeth clacked closed. She knew what he was going to say, but he needed to actually say it for her to believe it.
His lips twisted bitterly. “Her husband was Keil Kore’Weidnar.”
She inhaled. Then exhaled. She looked upon Torek—he refused to meet her gaze directly—and shook her head back and forth in slow denial.
“You not know,” she said, her voice guttural and not her own. “And even if you know, you never choose her life over your guard.”
“Of course not,” he said. “My point is that of all the many wounds I’ve survived, it’s the one that didn’t leave a physical scar that actually injured me the most.”
His leg stroked hers again. It didn’t look like he was stretching, but he must be to reach her while she was curled so far from him.
“There’s no shame in surviving,” he said. “As much as we might suffer afterward—and there’s no shame in that either—life is worth it. We have struggled. We are struggling. But we are here.”
Delaney lifted her eyes to meet his.
“And I’m here with you,” he murmured.
He was. Torek was the highest-ranked military commander on Lorien—as different a person from her as she could possibly imagine—and yet, he really was here with her in this moment. He knew her in ways she wasn’t sure she even knew herself.
“They remove me from the Todd house and give me to a different family,” she whispered. “A perfect family, but I hate them. I want to light my eyeballs on fire watching them eat dinner and laugh together. Baking cookies, playing games, watching…watching the teleprojector. They try including me, but…” She shook her head, and a laugh scraped up from the back of her throat. “They not even fight right. No yelling or hitting or threats. Their love is like a deep well they all drink from, and they thrive from its nourishment. But for me, seeing their love is poison.” She wedged her hands between her thighs, feeling the raised parallel tracks. “They say it about control and pain release. I not know. I just remember their laughing. I cut myself while the sound of their love echo up the stairwell and through my locked door. It stab deeper than any blade.”
“Which thigh?”
Her gaze snapped to his. “My right.”
“And your left?”
She pursed her lips. “I not self-inflict the cuts on my left thigh.”
“You earned those scars while with the Todd family.” His naturally deep, guttural voice dropped an octave so the sentence was more thunder than words.
Delaney dropped her gaze to watch the bubbles bob over the water’s surface and nodded.
Torek leaned forward this time, abandoning his efforts to reach her unobtrusively beneath the water’s surface. His hand found a forearm under the suds, and by feel alone, he stroked down her arm until her clamped thighs blocked his progress. His thumbs drew soft, coaxing circles on her skin as he waited. His gaze drilled through her self-conscious fear and shame to the core of her aching heart.
Like lava inside a volcano, the story churned inside her, but she’d trapped it without an outlet, letting it gain pressure for years. If she released it now, it wouldn’t just seep out. It would erupt, and she didn’t know what was more painful: the burn of keeping it inside or the devastation of eruption.
Her thighs parted, lured into relaxation from Torek’s constant soothing. The space was slight, more just unclamped than actually open, but enough for Torek to pull her hands free and sandwich them with his own. His palms were noticeably warm, even in the warm water, and strong and large—hands accustomed to holding heavy burdens.
“The Todd father abuse his son.” The words cut unwillingly from her throat like vomiting razor blades. “After years of punching and slapping and slicing into him since childhood, it no surprise he is what he is. It no surprise he do what he do.”
“What did he do, Delaney?” Torek’s voice was only a low rumble. A comforting murmur and a growling threat all at once.
She took a deep, shaking breath.
“He come into my room at night. The first time, I not expecting him, and before I even realize, he push me face-first into the pillows to muffle my screams. The four other times, I did scream. As loud and long as I could while I could. But he muffle me with the mattress, the pillow, the sheet, his sock—whatever available. I not know why he bother. His father work nights, and his mother…” Delaney shook her head. “The house catch fire and burn to ash around her, and she not notice.”
“She did nothing,” he murmured, horrified now.
Delaney swallowed. “He muffle my face into the mattress and cut my thigh. He enjoy it. He…he take pleasure in it.”
Delaney tried to slip her hands from his to cover her face. Torek’s gaze was relentless, and she couldn’t watch him watching her as she remembered the sticky slide of Kane’s cum in her hair, on her back, smeared into the blood between her thighs. But Torek tightened his hold.
“His mother never ask about the mess. She just clean the sheets and the next week, when it happen again, she clean the sheets again. Like it normal.”
Torek narrowed his eyes. “Like it had happened before?”
She shrugged. “Maybe. I not know. My doctor report the cuts to the government people who pay the Todd family, and they give me to the perfect family.”
Torek squeezed her fingers. “At least you can take comfort in knowing the Todd family was fed to the predators of your planet.”
Delaney blinked, so thrown that she gaped for a long moment, replaying his words in her mind several times. But no, she hadn’t misheard or misinterpreted him. It must be a Lori euphemism. “Fed to the predators of my planet?”
“They were caught. I’m assuming they were punished appropriately.”
Delaney blinked again. “Is that what happen on this planet? Literally?”
“If a son were convicted of torturing another person under the eye of his parents? Yes, they would be imprisoned in the deporak, our underwater containment facility, until the coming Genai then released under the ice and fed to the zorel. She may as well become full on our evil people rather than our innocents.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“I’ve assumed incorrectly?” Torek asked dryly.
Delaney laughed. She couldn’t help it. “Yes, very incorrectly. We do sometimes kill our ‘evil people,’ as you say, but only for bad crimes.”
“The crimes against you were grievous.”
“Not grievous enough on my planet.” She was still chuckling under her breath.
Torek blinked. Then thundered, “He’s still alive?”
God, she couldn’t believe she was talking about all this and still laughing. “Sorry to disappoint, but we not have a zorel on Earth.”
“Blood should be repaid in blood.”
Delaney continued grinning even as the scalding pressure behind her eyeballs leaked down her cheeks. “I enjoy the sound of that,” she whispered brokenly.
Torek released her hands, raised his arms above the water, and hesitated with his hands hovering over her shoulders. Drops of water from his fur dripped onto her skin and slid over her collarbone. His eyes darted from her face to the water’s surface and back to her face. He’d forgotten she was naked. Honestly, so had she.
Her entire body blushed so hot and fast, she actually felt light-headed.
“I would…” He cleared his throat. “May I touch you?”
His hesitation was her undoing. Her face crumpled in on itself, and a sob burst from her throat. She slapped a hand over her mouth to contain it the best she could, but she couldn’t contain it alone.
She nodded.
Torek wrapped his broad hands around her shoulders. They were so large, they cupped her from collarbone to shoulder blade, and the certain, calm strength in those hands drew her forward. One hand slid across her back, pressing her to his chest. The other slipped into her hair, cupping the back of her head. He tucked her face into the crook of his neck, and the vibration of his low viurr against her forehead was as soothing as the steady double thump of his heart against her cheek.
She cried and shook and raged against him, and he took it. The pain, the shame, the doubt, the embarrassment and guilt and resentment—they were the blades that had shaped her past and the person she’d become, but they didn’t have to shape her future and the person she chose to be. Not if she chose to shape it.
Torek cocooned her with his arms and sheltered her with his chin over her temple. His legs braced on either side of her, and the solid muscle of his abdomen spooned against her flush body. At first, all she felt was the secure pressure of his hold. His arms could protect an entire country from the zorel; they could certainly protect her from herself. As the wracking of her sobs subsided, however, she realized that her hands had left her mouth and were fisted in his fur.
She released her hold. Most of the fur came loose in her hand. She winced, but he didn’t seem to notice. The hand stroking her back didn’t pause, and the steady hum of his viurr never faltered.
She smoothed her hands flat against his chest and stroked her nails through his fur. His viurr did falter then, just a hiccup-like inhale before he resumed his soothing.
She slowly became aware of his chin abrading her temple, his wet beard dripping tickles of water across her cheek and down the back of her neck. They dribbled between her shoulder blades, and he wiped them with the comforting brush of his stroking hand.
She was safe and understood and wanted—more so than she’d ever been in her entire life—and she wasn’t quite sure when it had happened. However unlikely the circumstances, she was happier in this moment with Torek on Lorien than she’d ever been with anyone else on Earth.
Her brain instantly recoiled—he was an alien Sasquatch, for heaven’s sake!—but he was, without a doubt, a man in every sense of the word, in gender and deeds. She could have dismissed him had it just been his gender, but everything he’d done for her—his kindness and compassion, the strength he’d lent her—couldn’t be ignored. And neither could the warmth and want and hope his hands stoked inside her.
He was about to ease away from her. She could feel his retreat in the minute slowing of his circling hand. Her grief was assuaged, but she didn’t want his hands to stop touching her.
She burrowed deeper into his embrace, and he readjusted his grip, holding her without stroking.
She exhaled, content in his embrace.
His nipple tightened from the heat of her breath. His abdominal muscles jumped in reflex, and the arms around her froze. Despite being pressed skin to fur, cheek to chest, an unbridgeable distance suddenly yawned between them. She wasn’t sure what had just happened, but something had from one moment to the next, and he was going to push her away.
“What scar your eye?” she asked.
Twenty-Three
Torek Lore’Onik Weidnar Kenzo Lesh’Aerai Renaar had never once in his entire twenty-five kair of life released himself without deliberate intent, and he wasn’t about to do so now. Especially not after having just consoled a very dear, lovely creature who needed his kindness and comfort, not his cock. But that was the rub, wasn’t it? She wasn’t a creature. She was a person. And she wasn’t just any person. She was clever to have fooled everyone with her charade, courageous to have survived such extraordinary challenges, undeniably intelligent to have learned an alien language and assimilated herself in their culture, and loyal to have cared for him while he was sick. She was tender and soft and beautiful, inside and out, and his cock was a throbbing bruise inside his sac, aching for release.
He was the worst sort of monster.
Two touches—the delicate scratch of her blunt little claws across his chest and her warm breath against his nipple—and he’d nearly lost his self-control entirely.
He froze. He didn’t shove her away, which perhaps he should have, but if he moved even one muscle, other muscles would move, and he’d be lost. Concentrate! He stared at the ceiling. The vents could use a good scrubbing in preparation for Genai. Who on his staff could he ask for a report on the vent-cleaning schedule? Maybe—
His cock throbbed.
After a moment, he realized that she’d asked him a question. He hadn’t heard it through the rushing in his ears. He’d only known she’d spoken at all by the vibration and breath of her voice against his chest.
Rak, his self-control wasn’t the only thing he was losing his grip on.
“Torek?”
He took a deep breath and forced himself to relax, first his cock-sac—Lorien skewer him—and then his thighs, biceps, abdomen, and finally, his jaw, so he could actually express himself with words like a lor. Even if he felt like an animal.
“Yes?” The word was barely more than a growl despite his best efforts.
She blew out a soft exhalation that nearly undid him a second time.
Get a grip, Torek!
“I am sorry. I should not ask.” She tensed to pull away.
He locked his arms around her. “No, it’s my fault,” he ground out, and congratulated himself. His voice was only mildly gruff this time, as if he wasn’t throbbing in agony. “I was imagining feeding your Todd family to the zorel.”
She grinned. “A satisfying thought.”
“Extremely.” He nuzzled the top of her coil-haired head. “What did you say?”
She hesitated, then relaxed into his embrace. “What scar your eye?”
Maybe words would sufficiently distract him where the vent-cleaning schedule had not. But… “There isn’t really a story there.”
“I doubt that. A scar like that has a story.”
“Not all scars are visible, remember? Not all visible scars are worth a retelling.”
Delaney resumed her innocent scratching. His nipple puckered. His breath hitched, and his cock-sac contracted. The warm rush of bathwater caressed its tip.
“I was injured during a training exercise,” Torek blurted, desperate for distraction. “Applicants for the Federation are typically taken at a young age, around thirteen kair, but Dorai Nikiok made an exception for me because my father was a war hero. It was generally expected that I would follow in his footsteps, continuing the family tradition of our many forefathers, so who better to train me than my father, the former captain of the guard? But it was just a well-executed excuse so that I could remain at home in Aerai.”
Her face shifted against his chest. He glanced down; her brow was pinched into a frown. He strok
ed his thumb lightly across the back of her arm.
“You not follow in his footsteps?”
“Eventually, yes. But leaving for Federation training would mean leaving Zana.”
“Ah.” Her face shifted again. He could feel without looking this time that she was smiling. “And you could not leave her?”
“No, I couldn’t, and truly, it wasn’t much of a hardship. Much to the indulgent chagrin of my family, I had a real talent for horticulture.”
“A talent for what? I not know that word.”
“I could make plants grow even in the most unlikely circumstances. I’d nurture them and the soil, and the sickliest plant would suddenly take root and thrive when it should have died.”
Delaney leaned back slightly, her smile widening. “You, a gardener?”
Torek shuffed. “Gardeners plant flowers for aesthetic beauty. My work could’ve transformed Lorien’s entire agricultural system.”
Her smile widened further. “You want to be a farmer.”
He thought about that. “I wanted to invent a new way of farming, yes. One in which we could grow crops on Lorien’s surface without the wasted energy of plasma heaters.”
She glanced over his body with a sweep of her eyes. “I can see that.”
He grinned back. “My body is built for battle, and truly, my mind is as well, but having a talent in one field doesn’t preclude having a talent in another.”
“I not being…” She opened her mouth and closed it, then shuffed in frustration. Almost a real shuff this time. “I not know the word. I being truthful. I can see it. I of all people know your ability to nurture and protect. I am that unlikely plant, thriving in the wrong climate.”
“Not everyone can see that,” he murmured. “Not everyone can see me.”
The left corner of her grin tipped down ruefully. “How can they? Do you show anyone else your true self?”
Torek was quiet for a long moment. Honestly, he hadn’t thought of his dreams for the future of horticulture since Zana’s death. But he couldn’t bring himself to say so now. He was already uncomfortable and uncertain of himself with Delaney in his arms; inserting Zana between them would only further complicate his uncertainty.
Beyond the Next Star Page 22
