The Bonding

by Imogen Keeper

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 21

  Author’s Note

  THE BONDING

  by Imogen Keeper

  He must choose - her life - or his freedom.

  Tam is a warrior of Tribe Argentus. Brutal. Hard. Uncompromising. Resigned to a lifetime alone. Until he finds a woman frozen in space, suffering from a deadly disease. There’s only one way to save her – to Bond her to him for life with his mind, his body, and his serum.

  She must choose - her people - or his love.

  Pampered princess and public servant, Nissa's life is not her own. When her planet is invaded by alien slavers, she launches into space in a cryo-pod in a desperate search for help. What she finds is unexpected.

  Struggling for peace amid a universe at war, Nissa and Tam battle their dangerous addiction and their own stubborn hearts. Their strange part-chemical, part-mystical Bonding brought them together – and just might be what tears them apart.

  THE BONDING

  IMOGEN KEEPER

  Dedication

  To my son—for long naps. To my husband—for our wonderful life. To Monalisa Foster, Elle Wylee and RA Winter—for the endless support, laughs and reads.

  Thank you!

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  EPILOGUE

  Author’s Note

  Sample from THE BREAKING

  PROLOGUE

  You want me to get in what?

  NISSA RAN so hard her lungs burned. If branches cut the skin of her hands and tree limbs slapped at her face, it didn’t matter. It was nothing compared to the suffering of her people.

  She had to warn her father. She jumped over a log and landed in dark mud. Her feet lost traction and she slipped, falling hard onto her hands and knees, tearing the thin fabric of her dress. Bloody scrapes marred the skin of her knees.

  One of her sandals had broken. It hung, hopeless, from her left ankle. They hadn’t been designed for frantic running through the forests. They were for dancing on the terraces outside the palace, for strolling manicured paths through the Red Gardens. They were designed to be pretty and useless. Like her.

  Nothing was pretty anymore. Nothing was right. Nothing was how it was supposed to be. A drop of blood rolled off her palm, disappearing amid decaying red leaves on the forest floor.

  She closed her eyes. Red. The color of life. Beauty. Warmth. Now, the color of death. Destruction. Blood. Above her, barely visible between crimson leaves, the sky burned blue-violet. Even the furry-tailed splirantu were silent in the trees, mourning the death of her people. Of her world.

  How many had died? Thousands. The quartz-cobbled streets of Trian pooled with Trianni blood—the bodies of men piled up like bricks in a wall with blood for mortar.

  Still fighting to catch her breath, she tossed the broken sandal. It landed amid lacy ferns and low, scrubby trees with fiery fronds. She took off the other one and threw it too.

  They weren’t just enslaving her people. They were torturing them. Executing them.

  She had seen them, seen the murderers, their skin glowing white as specters. Laughing as they’d leveled their weapons on the surviving Trianni, herding them like livestock.

  She’d spied from the edge of the forest, crouched behind a fallen log, desperate for a glimpse of the defected people, hoping they’d been given safety. They hadn’t.

  She had watched the off-worlders, their shining black hair flowing down their backs, glossy beneath the sun. They moved like animals, smooth and almost graceful.

  Fast. The deal was off. The Trianni who had gone to them had been promised food and shelter in exchange for labor. Lies.

  She rose to her feet and ran on toward the ancient bunker her people had been using for shelter.

  Finally, she rounded the dip in the forest floor and saw the familiar metal doors. Her father stood in a cluster of elders with Hialmeron, the wise.

  “Father,” she called, but her breath was so short it barely made a sound. “Father!” she tried again and this time they all turned, faces shocked. No one had even known she’d gone. They’d never have allowed it.

  She stopped, panting, resting her hands on her knees, careless of the breach in decorum from the queen-designate. The king raised his eyebrows at her. “What is it, daughter?”

  “They are killing them. I saw it—thousands in the town square.”

  The men froze.

  Hialmeron, with his pale, pinkish-gold hair run through with white, was the first to speak. “It is time, Your Highness.” He turned his gaze toward her father.

  She did too.

  Her father had aged a decade in the months since the off-worlders had arrived, since they’d stolen their city. Bags had formed under his eyes, deep lines around his mouth. He’d barely eaten, saving as much of the food as he could for the others. His robes hung, stained and frayed, on a frame grown skeletal. “You propose abandoning our people.”

  Hialmeron shook his head. “I propose saving what lives we can. A hundred preservation pods for a hundred lives.”

  Nissa’s belly convulsed. A hundred of their people hurled into space. And the rest—abandoned?

  “It takes only one pod being found,” Hialmeron continued when the king simply shook his head. “The survivor can use the transceivers to locate the rest. We will launch them in the direction of the neighboring solar system. There is life there. We must have faith in the Goddess that one will be found to bring help back.”

  “How do you choose a hundred from ten thousand?” He gestured helplessly at the dark doors to the bunker that led to the underground caves.

  The last of their people, still unenslaved, lived there, in the vast underground network that had served as sewers to the ancient cities.

  “You don’t,” said Hialmeron. “You let the Goddess decide. We leave it to her.”

  Her father’s eyes were grim. “A lottery.”

  “Yes,” said Hialmeron. “No mother would leave her child. No child should awake alone in space.”

  “No,” said her father again. “There are only four pods large enough for males. The rest go to unmarried females, then.”

  “Except for you, Your Highness, and the queen. Our people will need their leaders when they awake.”

  Her father shook his head.

  “And Criamnon, their future king,” said another elder, and Nissa’s breath caught as always at the thought of the man who’d won her hand in the Games.

  “And Nissa,” said one of the others. “They will need their queen-designate.”

  All eyes turned toward her.

  She bow
ed her head, breathing deeply against the sudden burst of panic. A pod? They wanted her to enter one?

  “We will have the lottery tonight,” her father announced with a trace of his old confidence. “The pods launch in the morning.”

  She barely heard the rest of the conversation over the sound of her heart pounding in her ears.

  1

  There’s probably a place you belong,

  but it’s not with me.

  TAM CURSED. But not with ire. With wonder.

  A red orb floated lazily across space only a handful of yards from his viewscreen. It wasn’t the orb itself that caused the expletive to pass his lips—it was what he’d seen through the oculi cut into its smooth surface. Just a glimpse. Too fast to be certain. But it was enough.

  The orb floated away, taking that glimpse of arms and legs with it, pulsing like a heart, flashing and dimming. Red. Red. Red.

  What he really wanted to do was dock the damned thing now, rip it open with his bare hands and find out if what he’d seen was real, but space pirates were a reality. Or worse, the Vestige. And he needed authorization first.

  So, he contacted base. “This is Captain Essinger of Whistlerjet Tango-Alpha, passing though Sellulax in Andromeda on my way back from a training exercise at Sub-Base One-Romeo.”

  “I hear you, Captain. Speak.” The ghostly hologram of the blond-haired captain flickered.

  “I’ve encountered a vessel, suspected preservation pod. Possible life on board.”

  The feed crackled and hummed. “You had eyes on?”

  Tam didn’t want to admit it. But not to do so would be a blatant breach in protocol. “I had a visual. Yes.”

  “Female?”

  Tam blew out a frustrated breath. “Yes.”

  HolCom Tycho nodded. “Contacting your chief, Captain. Stand by.”

  Tam perched on an armrest, checking his weapons in case he had to engage.

  Warriors of Tribe Argentus were always fully armed, and he was no exception. He wore rezal blasters strapped to either side of the black leather bands crisscrossing his chest. A Marssollian blade hung in its holster at his waist, a deadly knife graced a skede on his hip. A long spear-like nustal sword rode a scabbard on his back.

  Tribe warriors trained long and hard and brutal, and the result was that he, too, was long and hard and brutal.

  The markings on his ship were usually enough to warn off pirates—no one wanted to tangle with Argentus, but still. Caution was ingrained. He’d handled his fair share of the stupid and the desperate and there were formidable alien races out there, to be respected if not feared.

  “Please approach, Captain,” Tycho said, his pale hologram wavering. “Report as you proceed.”

  Tam guided the ship to dock beside the blinking sphere. He tapped his screen and confirmed that there were no traces of viruses, amoebae or bacteria. Still, the pod and the items it contained would have to be warmed and decontaminated prior to absorption.

  The light pulsed as the pod drifted, slowly spinning, subject to the trajectory of its initial push into space.

  One oculus aligned with his line of sight just as the light flashed on. And he sucked in a breath. He’d been right. It held a body. Definitely female. Silhouetted against the red light. Frozen. Nude.

  Her hair floated around her like she was suspended in fluid or gel. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled.

  “Fuck,” he breathed, pure wonder.

  Definitely a woman. What the hell was she doing in a pod in the middle of nowhere?

  If he was honest, a single, selfish thought reigned. I want that.

  “What was that, Captain Essinger? Please repeat.”

  Tam blinked and when he spoke the words came out robotic. “Definitely a female life form present on board. Visually consistent with Argenti physiology. Definitely frozen.”

  “Alive?”

  “How would I know?”

  Tycho silenced his end of the flickering feed and spoke to someone off the HolCom.

  The sphere spun away and with it his view of her. The presence of a female removed any lingering hesitation.

  He no longer had a choice. Base no longer had a choice. He didn’t feel like waiting. “Initiating process of absorption, now.”

  Tycho’s hologram shimmered in and out of focus. “Continue, Captain.”

  Even across the HolCom, the excitement in the other male’s voice pissed him off. He curbed the overwhelming compulsion to shout, It’s my pod. I found it.

  Finding a female anywhere at all was rare, but to find one floating in the midst of space, especially one who appeared to be so similar to their own race, was a statistical improbability. Tam’s jaw hardened and with effort he slowed his heart rate.

  Fewer than twelve percent of the females of his homeworld, Argentus, lived. This was nothing short of a miracle.

  He wasted no time.

  PACING OUTSIDE the sterile docking room, he waited for the computer’s voice to echo over the intercom, alerting him that the sphere’s core temperature had regulated.

  Away from the HolCom and all the watching eyes that came with it, he allowed himself to rub his hand down his face, scrub his hand through his hair.

  A woman. A fucking woman.

  His hands itched to open the pod, to get close to her, to study her.

  The tinny, computerized voice came through the speakers. “Decontamination completed. Object is neutralized.”

  The hatches to the docking chamber unsealed with an echoing hiss.

  He stepped so close to the window his breath fogged the surface in the eerie glow.

  The woman floating in a reddish liquid was so small she was downright dainty. Her hair floated around her head and shoulders like the weeds that grew in the seas of Argentus.

  Even unanimated, her face was beautiful, as delicate as her figure, with pale, clear skin.

  If she’d been an old crone with a bald head, sagging breasts and a beard, he’d probably have gotten hard anyway. Just because she was a woman. He hadn’t seen one on anything but a digi-screen or a holo-vid in half his life. The women of Argentus were kept away from warriors like him to keep them safe.

  And this was no crone. She looked like the women of his planet. At least enough to hope for genetic viability.

  Staring at her, his chest tightened, with a thousand warring instincts. Claim her, fuck her, Bond her, make her his. Protect her from whatever had sent her into a pod in the first place.

  Space was big. The sphere was small. Entering life preservation pods was a ridiculous act of extreme faith or desperation. No sane person would do it unless under extreme pressure. Putting herself in a pod like this had been a massive gamble.

  It meant terror. And a total lack of reasonable alternatives. She had essentially crossed her fingers, said a prayer and killed herself, in the hope that someone, somewhere, at some time would find her, open the pod and bring her back to life.

  So many variables could have left her lost. If he’d taken a different route, if he’d come by a week later, she’d have already drifted off, out of sight. She may never have been found.

  He shook his head at the stroke of fate that brought them to this point, his roving over her body, lingering on the small, round breasts with pink nipples.

  He circled the sphere, wanting to see her from every possible angle.

  She was so small it made him feel like a giant.

  She was his. He just knew it.

  His footsteps echoed in the silent room.

  His mouth dried and his cock grew so hard between his legs he could barely walk. He adjusted the front of his flight-suit.

  He hadn’t seen a woman since just after he’d come into his manhood, but he knew what they looked like. He dreamed about them every single night. This one was perfect.

  Averting his gaze, he searched for an opening to the sphere, a hinge or mechanism that would trigger its unlocking.

  Two depressions in the shape of hands, albeit hands far smaller than hi
s own, were the only markings on the surface.

  His hand overhung the small depressions by more than an inch on each finger and the entire heel of his palm, but when he pressed into them, the pod went dark. A buzzing hum sounded from within. The color of the fluid changed, becoming a brighter, deeper red as the sphere vibrated.

  The surface warmed. With a hiss, it cracked open in a horizontal line, separating the container top from bottom. The top’s internal springs pushed up, lifting away. It left a gap large enough for him to shove his hand inside. Fog wisped from the opening. He hefted the top with a grunt and tossed it aside.

  The fluid had congealed, leaving a perfectly round gelatinous form that glistened in the light.

  Nothing happened.

  How the hell was she supposed to breathe in that gel?

  He waited, but nothing happened. At some point, shouldn’t the gel melt, drain away, something?

  Nothing.

  Fuck.

  Unsheathing one of his knives, he cut the thick gel away, moving gently as he got closer to her skin.

  His hands and forearms stained rusty orange, he tossed chunks of the gel aside and they landed with thick squelching plops, jiggling under the harsh lights, piling up on the floor around them, like so much carnage.

  Her eyes stayed stubbornly shut, her hair matted, dark and sticky, clogging in her nostrils. And no detectable heartbeat.

  He needed to get her clean. And warm. And awake.

  Bending low, he lifted her, as carefully as he could, and cradled her against his chest.

  For just a moment, he held her tightly to his chest. He’d never held a woman before. Not like this. She was so light.

  Maybe she would want him when she woke.

  He shrugged. He’d never been lucky in his life. Not when he’d buried his mother. Not when his sister had died five days later of the same damn disease. Not when he’d watched his father waste away from the loss of his bonded mate.

  It didn’t matter. She was a woman and she needed him.

  RESOLVE BURNING THICK, he carried her to the bathing pool, lowered her into the bubbling water and shoved her face under the surface.