by Kate Rudolph
“Should I expect an angry call from some SDA official when they figure out that you guys snuck away from the shuttle?” Toran NaLosen asked with a grin. He had his arms around a human woman and didn’t seem particularly worried about whatever answer Kayde gave. But then he straightened up and narrowed his eyes at Kayde. “Something’s different.”
Dru hadn’t realized it, but Kayde’s team couldn’t have known about his mating to Quinn. Communications to Earth had been strictly monitored and controlled, and the report of one warrior’s mating would never have been deemed important enough to send the information back to his team.
Kayde smiled and the room around them went dead silent. He laced his fingers in Quinn’s and she laid her head on his shoulder. “I have news.”
“Holy sh—” Sierra was cut off by a knock at the door.
It seemed a little quick for SDA officials to figure out where they were already, but Dru slid off to the side, keeping himself out of the door’s direct line of sight. Toran stared at Kayde for several more seconds before he approached the door. Finally he opened it and everything in Dru’s world fell into place.
Laurel stood beside an older human man and looked just about ready to fall over. He stayed where he was standing, even though he wanted to rush towards her. She looked ready to bolt, and he wasn’t sure whether or not his presence would make things worse.
“Good afternoon, everyone,” said the man. “I’ve brought you your guest.” He gestured for Laurel to step inside and when she did, he took a step back. “It’s good to see you all, but I have fires to put out.”
“Dad!” Sierra said from beside her mate. “You’re not even going to say hi? Thanks for bringing her here.”
The man gave his daughter a fond smile. “I have some SDA operatives to distract. I wouldn’t want to lead them directly to you. But I’m sure they’ll be following up with you no later than tomorrow.”
Toran and Sierra both nodded before the human man left, closing the door behind him and leaving Laurel alone. She hugged her arms around her stomach and looked down before snapping her head up and dropping her arms, as if she suddenly realized how vulnerable her stance made her look. Her jaw firmed and her fists clenched and Dru couldn’t suppress his smile. His mate looked ready to take on the world if anyone challenged her.
Though he hadn’t made a sound, her gaze swung his way and their eyes locked. For a second, Dru was worried she was going to start a fight, or that she was going to start something, but instead her stance loosened and she offered him something that might have been called a smile if he were being really optimistic.
It wasn’t a frown, at least.
Before Dru could say anything, Sierra began to speak. “I’m so glad you’re here!” She lunged forward and swooped in for a hug, her arms clasping Laurel tight enough to bruise. His denya didn’t return the gesture, but she didn’t push the woman away. When Sierra finally stepped back she was still beaming. She took her place beside her mate and wrapped one arm around his waist.
Laurel shot Dru a glance and he took a step closer to her. She looked like she wanted help and he wouldn’t deny her. “I—”
Sierra didn’t give Laurel time to speak. “You’ve met our Detyens, right?” She gestured to the men around her and gave Raze a kiss on the cheek. “Raze, my mate, then we have Toran and his denya, Iris. There is Raze’s brother, Dryce, and, of course, Kayde and Quinn. Quinn said she gave you the rundown of everything that’s happened in the last few months.”
Laurel’s eyes were wide and even Dru had a bit of trouble keeping up with Sierra’s recitation. “Uh, yeah, about that—”
“Good.” Sierra nodded decisively. “I know it’s a lot to take in, but we’re so happy to have you here with us again. You should never have been left behind like that.”
“No!” Laurel jerked her hands through the air in a slicing motion, as if she couldn’t take it anymore. The room around them went quiet, and Dru took a step closer to his denya, offering his silent support. “Please don’t apologize to me, I should be apologizing to all of you.”
Sierra studied Laurel for a long moment, her eyes narrowed. “What?”
Laurel took a deep breath and glanced at Dru, as if she expected him to back her up. But Dru was equally stunned. Yes, he knew all about the control chip, and he had realized that Laurel was carrying some issues from that, but he hadn’t known about all this guilt. Did she really think she was responsible for all the Oscavians had done? For everything the slavers had done? He opened his mouth to speak, to try and give her comfort, but Laurel kept talking.
“I nearly got all of you killed, I did get Detyens killed. It doesn’t matter if there was a chip in my head, I should have been able to do something about it. Warn you somehow. I don’t know.” She raised her hands as if she were about to cradle her head but instead curled her hands into fists and brought them back down, swaying slightly from side to side.
Everything within Dru screamed at him to reach out and hold his mate. She needed comfort, needed someone on her side, especially since she didn’t seem to be on her own side. He didn’t know if she would push him away, but there was only one way to find out. He stepped closer and placed his hand on the small of her back, offering her that small piece of himself, a tether to the present, something that would keep her memories from swallowing her whole.
“It’s not your fault at all,” Sierra insisted.
Laurel tilted her head back and squeezed her eyes shut, holding back her tears. “It’s kind of you to say that, but it’s really not true.” She leaned into Dru’s embrace, and he slid his hand from her back to her side so that he was hugging her more tightly.
Dru looked up and met Kayde’s eyes, and the silent request passed between them. Kayde nodded at Toran, and after a moment the overwhelming group of Detyens and their mates filed out of the room, giving Dru and Laurel their privacy. Dru dimly realized that they were standing in the common room of the suite and that it was possible his fellow Detyens were all holed up in a tiny bedroom, waiting for him and Laurel to sort things out, but he couldn’t worry about that at the moment, not when his mate was on the verge of tears, ready to fall apart.
He led her to the small sofa and pulled her down until she was half sitting and half lying against him. Dru ran his hand through the longer hair on half of her head and gave Laurel a few minutes to calm down. Once her breathing evened out and the few tears that had escaped dried, he spoke. “Is that what you’ve been worried about?” He didn’t bring up the fact that she’d been avoiding him for the better part of a week, now wasn’t the time. And if she had all this guilt about what she’d done to his people, it wasn’t difficult to realize that the two issues were related.
“I betrayed them.” Her voice was muffled since she was speaking against his shirt, but Dru could hear her perfectly well.
He wanted to deny what she said, wanted to do exactly what Sierra had done and tell her that she had no control over her actions and he understood that perfectly. But everyone had said that to Laurel, and it didn’t seem to be sinking in. Perhaps there was someone better she could talk to, someone who would understand these issues, but for the moment he was going to do his best not to make this any worse. “Okay.”
Her head tilted up and her expression was almost comically confused. “Okay? You agree?”
“Not really,” Dru admitted. He tucked her hair behind her ear and let his fingers trace over the soft skin there. “But you’re not going to believe that until you’re ready to believe it. So until then, what are you going to do to make up for it?” Maybe that was what she needed, some action to keep her from wallowing in all of the negative emotions that had swallowed her up for the past weeks.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
Laurel sat up a little straighter, but she didn’t let go of him, and Dru held himself still while she thought. He absorbed these moments, reveling in her touch, and hoping this wasn’t the last time that she allowed it. If she
had rejected him out of some misplaced sense of guilt, he hoped they could find a way past that. His mate was strong, stronger than he’d ever imagined, and she could get past this if she wanted to. But that was the big question, did she want to? Or was she going to let it drag her down into despair?
“I’m going to do whatever it takes to help them defeat this asshole,” Laurel said finally, answering the question that Dru hadn’t dared ask. “And if Varrow comes knocking, I’m going to kill him for what he did to you.”
Maybe a promise of violence shouldn’t have lightened his heart, but Dru could not have stopped the smile that broke out across his face if his life depended on it. He moved in slowly, giving her plenty of time to realize what he planned, giving her plenty of time to move back, but Laurel watched him and as the distance shrunk between them, her eyes drifted shut. At the last moment, she leaned close, eating up the space between them and sealing her lips over his.
Dru could’ve gotten lost in the kiss, but after only a few moments he forced himself to pull back. Laurel’s eyes seemed brighter, some of the shadows extinguished, but he didn’t doubt that they would have more battles to fight before she was ready to be healed. And he would be by her side the entire time.
Chapter Twelve
THE NEXT WEEK PASSED in a whirlwind of excitement and stagnation. The Detyen suite had a spare room, the one that Raze had never taken possession of, and Laurel moved in there. She would have thought that she’d be nervous moving in with a group of Detyen warriors, but it made her feel strangely safe. Quinn was there too, which might have made it feel a little less weird, having a woman, a human, with her. But mostly Laurel kept to herself.
Some of the guilt that she’d been carrying with her had begun to dissolve as she worked with the Detyens, mainly Dru, to give as much information about Brakley Varrow as she could. Most of it she’d told someone before, but Dru explained that each time she related her story, she seemed to remember more details, more things that could help them ultimately catch and destroy the Oscavian scientist. That was Laurel’s ultimate goal, and she would do whatever it took to see that it occurred. She wanted to be the one to pull the proverbial trigger, but she knew that was unlikely to happen. Not when she was surrounded by hundreds of warriors. They had the training, the skills, to take a man like him down. She was still just a farm girl from Earth. She could live with that, as long as someone took Varrow out.
General Alvarez had promised that he’d contacted Laurel’s family, but an emergency at the farm meant that most of them couldn’t come to the city immediately. Her older sister, Jules, had arrived in town ready to scoop Laurel up and take her back home. When they’d met, Jules had assumed that Laurel would be eager to go with her, and she hadn’t understood when Laurel said she planned to stay in the city with the Detyens. The meeting had ended poorly, and in the days since, Laurel had been dodging her sister’s calls. She couldn’t do it for long, she knew, but she could only deal with so many problems at a time.
Which brought her to Dru.
They were spending a lot of time together. A lot. But except for that kiss on the couch on their first day on Earth, Dru hadn’t made a move to touch her. Well, they touched. Their hands brushed, he did that thing where he rested his fingers at the small of her back, and there had been a few hugs, but no kisses, nothing to show her that he still desired her the way she desired him.
And, oh boy, did she desire him. Most mornings she woke up sweating, her body all hot and yearning and crying out from dreams she could barely remember, dreams starring the purple Detyen who spent so much time at her side. With her guilt waning, and a niggling belief that maybe she wasn’t responsible for the betrayal she’d committed beginning to grow, Laurel was beginning to think that maybe something could happen between her and Dru.
Only, she was afraid that her moment had passed. Sure, he’d said that he was her mate, or she was his mate, however that worked. But maybe he’d moved on from that, maybe there was some sort of timeframe that things needed to happen within, a timeframe she had let pass. Or maybe he was taking her rejection of him to heart. She tried to tell herself that was a good thing, that he was being respectful. But if that was the case, it meant that she had to be the one to make the next move, and that was a little terrifying.
On the global front, the Detyens were the darlings of the news. It was impossible to hide the fact that thousands of aliens that shown up on their doorstep with well-equipped ships and hundreds of warriors. The SDA and the Detyen Legion had come to some sort of agreement, and of the Detyens, Dryce had been the one nominated to speak for them. Everyone who knew was trying to keep news of the threat of Yormas of Wreet and Brakley Varrow under wraps. But Laurel didn’t know how long that would last. With the help of the Detyens, Earth was greatly increasing its exoplanetary defenses, and eventually someone would notice that they were preparing for a military attack.
It was too early yet, and while the Detyens and those in the SDA were training incessantly for an attack they knew was coming, for everyone else life went on. And for Laurel, that meant her life was on hold. Until they had information about Varrow’s whereabouts, or those of Yormas, there was nothing she could do. Nothing but relate her story again and again and hope that it helped.
And somehow in all of that, Laurel had managed to ask Dru on a date. She wasn’t exactly sure how it had happened, but now she was standing in front of her closet, looking at the handful of outfits she’d managed to buy in the last week and trying to decide which one would work best. She didn’t have a dress, or anything dressy at all. It was all casual pants and shirts, and one jumpsuit, things she could throw on easily, and mix-and-match. It wasn’t like they were going anywhere fancy, but Laurel couldn’t stop overthinking it.
If she wore her purple shirt, would he think it was a comment on his skin tone? If she wore the red would he think it had to do with his eyes? Was black too dour? After staring at her clothes for more than 10 minutes without being able to come to a decision, Laurel finally squeezed her eyes shut and grabbed something at random. The red, okay, that was fine.
But was it really?
She almost screamed at herself in frustration, but before any more doubt could creep in Laurel pulled the shirt on and matched it with a dark pair of pants. It was fine, it would do, and she didn’t have any more time to panic, because the buzzer was already ringing, and Dru was there.
All of the other Detyens and their mates had made themselves scarce, and she was able to lead Dru downstairs without the delay of greeting everyone else. They climbed into a waiting taxi and Laurel entered the address of where they were going.
“I found it my freshman year of college when they had this amazing special, and I’ve been going back ever since,” she told Dru as she settled back in her seat.
“Freshman?”
“First year.”
They drove the rest of the way making awkward small talk, as if they hadn’t already known each other for weeks, and as if they hadn’t been spending most of their time together. Why did a date make it weird? Laurel let out a relieved sigh when they pulled up in front of the restaurant. She and Dru found seats in one of the corners with a nice view of the window, and settled in on opposite sides of the table.
“What made you choose the city?” he asked. “It’s so far from your home.”
Laurel let out a bark of laughter. “Exactly!” He had unwittingly answered his own question. “I mean, I love my family, but they—”
“Laurel?”
Laurel practically spilled her glass of water when her older sister showed up, as if conjured out of thin air. “Jules. Hi, um, what are you doing here?”
Jules crossed her arms and tapped a foot. Her long blonde hair fell down in waves over the trendy gray dress she was wearing. She looked like she belonged in a board room, not overseeing the fall harvest, which she would be doing in just a few months. “I could ask the same of you.” Jules didn’t sound pleased. “You’ve been dodging my calls for the
last week, and now you’re, what, dating?” She shot a look at Dru and raised an eyebrow.
“This is my friend, Dru. We, uh, met in space.” Suddenly Laurel felt small, like a child, unable to find the right words to make the situation okay. It was true, she had been avoiding her sister, and the tone of this conversation was a big reason why. Jules made it sound much worse than it was, like Laurel was out being irresponsible, picking up men, or doing other dangerous things, when she should have been spending time with her family.
“Clearly.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” Dru offered.
Without being invited, Jules grabbed a chair from a nearby table and sat down beside them.
“Sure,” Laurel deadpanned, “join us. You’re not interrupting at all.”
“Like I’m going to miss the opportunity to see my little sister, who I thought was dead for months, when I run into her on the city streets.” Jules looked at her in challenge for a moment, as if daring Laurel to send her away. And once it became clear that Laurel didn’t have a response to that, she turned to Dru. “Now, tell me about yourself.”
Dru looked momentarily stunned, but he quickly recovered, and began to explain his role in the Detyen Legion. Laurel didn’t mean to tune it out. She loved the sound of Dru’s voice and could normally listen to him for hours, even if they were talking about nothing. But she’d spent the last weeks surrounded by the Legion, and she had hoped that she and Dru could escape it for a little while on their date.
Something in the window caught her eye and Laurel glanced over and practically jumped out of her seat when she thought she saw Brakley Varrow walking down the street. Her skin went icy and a fine sheen of sweat broke out over her arms. Her stomach roiled, her appetite gone. It was impossible, she tried to tell herself. Earth had been practically on lockdown since the Detyens arrived. There was no way Varrow could have snuck past all the safeguards. Especially not if he was coming in that giant ship of his. No, it had to be a trick of the light or something.
