The Bonding

by Imogen Keeper

  There was one man left. Still crouching on the ground, his hand covering a bloody eye, babbling in Vestige. Begging. Tam ignored him. There would be no sudden salvation for the man. No change of heart. Tam had both the capacity and the intent. He used a foot against the man’s shoulders, to knock him back. The man splayed on the ground.

  A soft, feminine cry sounded from across their little cliff. Nissa. He glanced over at his mate who squatted naked on the edge of the cliff, eyes wide and terrified. Head shaking.

  “Please.” He wasn’t entirely sure what that meant. Tam sighed. He’d rather have taken his time with this one. Instead, he picked him up and tossed him over the edge of the cliff.

  It was too easy. He hadn’t come close to expelling the fury in his heart. The whole thing had taken fewer than fifteen breaths. He turned to Nissa. Her whole body shook, vibrating in the aftermath of her attack, adrenaline coursing through her system. She was unaccustomed to bloodshed. Her hair hid some of her nakedness, but nothing could undo what had been done to her. Her eyes were wide. He moved toward her and took her chin in his hand, tilting her face left, then right, feeling renewed fury. Already, purple stained her cheek. The skin of the bruised eye had puffed into a half squint. Her lip was fat. Blood ran from the gash on her neck.

  She pulled away jerkily, eyes wide and blank. He reached for her, to comfort her, pull her in to an embrace, but she only backed away. Blood that wasn’t hers streaked her arms.

  He stared at the line of crimson that ran down her breast. Following her, he touched her good cheek, hoping to comfort her, and left a thick smear on smooth skin.

  Tam had never seen a woman in the aftermath of bloodshed. He’d never seen a civilian in the aftermath of bloodshed. What were you supposed to do for them?

  “You are afraid of me?” he asked, finding it hard to believe.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  Tam looked down at his hands with a frown. He was unsurprised to see that blood covered them, dripped from his fingers. He looked down at his naked body. He might as well have bathed in it. It matted the hairs on his chest and arms.

  Sero dropped down from the cliff above them to stand at his side, holding one of the simple gray blankets that Base issued to each warrior. He took a single step toward Nissa but halted his progress when Tam snarled. His intention was probably simply to wrap the blanket around Nissa to hide her nudity but Tam didn’t really care. No male would touch her. He’d just watched an asshole rape her with his fingers. The growl built deep in his throat.

  Sero pointedly dropped his gaze toward Tam’s blood-covered body. “You need to clean yourself.”

  “Don’t touch her,” Tam said.

  Still, the birds screamed all around them. They needed to leave. She needed to wash that man from her body.

  Kaleus spoke softly. He too had dropped down to stand beside them on the promontory. “The ship won’t be back to get us for hours. There is a small pool a ten- minute walk from here. You could wash there.”

  Tam nodded. “Lead us.”

  Nissa couldn’t back any farther away from him as he approached. He dropped the blanket around her shoulders and lifted her in his arms, ignoring protests that clawed at his heart. She groaned and turned her face away. She wouldn’t meet his eyes.

  Kaleus led them through a glade of ferns and sparse trees that clung to the face of the cliff. The white soil was dry. They left the loud birds behind. Splashing sea and the calls of strange animals with no feet and no arms were the only sounds.

  The other warriors turned their backs, drifted through wide leaves of low scrubby trees to give them a semblance of privacy. The pool was shallow with cool water as Tam lowered himself into it, Nissa still in his arms. She shivered against him.

  The sun sat high in the violet sky above. It was barely midday. They had many more hours before nightfall when they could return to their departure pod and get off this godsforsaken planet.

  Fish swam, flashing orange and pink amid waterweeds that floated with the current, slippery around his ankles. Soil swirled around his feet as he moved through the pool and gently set her down on a lichen-covered stone. Nissa stared into the distance. He washed the blood from his hands. It spread through the water around him in a pink halo.

  He dropped below the surface, scrubbing his hands over his face. Blood liked to hide around the corners of his eyes, under his chin. He ignored the pain in his nose as he washed. He’d have one of the warriors set it for him in a moment.

  He surfaced and studied his silent mate. “I am sorry, eyana. That should not have happened. I failed to protect you.”

  Her gaze snapped to his then. Green eyes blazed. “You ripped a man’s throat out with your hand.”

  Tam used one of his knives to scrape blood from below his fingernails. “Yes.”

  “You protected me,” she said simply.

  Tam was confused. She wasn’t angry at him for what those men had done to her. What was the problem then? “I wouldn’t have had to if the weapons hadn’t been out of my reach. If I hadn’t allowed myself to be distracted.”

  She just stared at him, face expressionless.

  He tried again. “I am sorry that you were forced to raise a weapon to defend us.”

  She shook her head, her gaze returning to the trees. “You smashed that man’s skull as if it was nothing.” Her voice had a musing quality, disbelief and curiosity. “As if he was nothing more than a pot to be broken.”

  “He threatened you.” He was less than a pot to be broken. Pots were useful. Still, he’d have preferred if she hadn’t had to see it.

  She shook her head again, her gaze on her fingers as she trailed them over the surface of the pool. “You liked it. You liked killing them.”

  He had. He’d gladly do it again. He would do it more slowly. He doubted that was what she wanted to hear though, so he said nothing.

  She pulled a piece of moss from a stone on the bank and tore it in half, handing him a piece. When she dipped her half in the water and used it as a sponge to wipe at the blood on her arm, Tam followed her example.

  “You have blood on your right cheek,” he told her, wanting to touch her, wash the men who had touched her from her skin, but he knew she’d pull away.

  She shuddered. “The last time I saw blood like that, bodies ripped apart was when they slaughtered us in the square.”

  “I was protecting my mate. They were executing innocent people.”

  “But you enjoyed it. There is a darkness in you that is like them.”

  “Too fucking right there is,” Tam said with heat, furious that she dared compare him to them. He breathed deep and ran the moss over his body again, lowering himself into the pool, hoping the cool water would calm him. It didn’t. She needed to stop dreaming. “This is the universe we live in, Nissa. War is ugly. No one is all good. Quit pretending you don’t see the facts in front of your face. Quit pretending that your people aren’t just as capable of being dark and nasty and brutal when the need surfaces.”

  “I stabbed a man in the eye,” she said in a small, awed, petrified voice that drained away the last of his anger.

  Tam nodded. “And I have never been so proud to call you mate.” He eyed her from across the still surface of the pool. “He would have hurt you, Nissa. They’d have killed me and probably kept you for a slave.”

  They were silent for a long moment.

  “My people were gentle and kind. We didn’t even have guns.”

  “That was a product of your way of life, not an intrinsic nature.”

  “They look like my people.”

  “Imagine two children. Both the same. One raised by a loving family. The other beaten, threatened and abandoned by turns. That is who they are now. But they are the still the same.”

  “These people have no hope. They are not like they were.” She lowered her body into the pool and scrubbed at her skin with the sponge.

  “No.” Tam bit his tongue to keep from shouting that he’d been trying to t
ell her this all along.

  She frowned. Tam moved to her and this time she didn’t flinch away. He used his moss sponge to clean her cheek. She submitted to his ministrations, staring out into the glade around them.

  “This isn’t what I wanted, Tam.” She met his eye. “This isn’t what I wanted at all.”

  “Me neither.”

  “They need help.” She looked shattered.

  Tam shook his head. They didn’t need help. They needed to be exterminated. He frowned.

  “Your nose is broken,” she said. “You need to have it set.” She moved out of the pool.

  19

  To spare your heart.

  NISSA DRESSED IN SILENCE. Every time she looked at Tam, she saw his face as he’d reached with a hand like a talon and sunk his fingers into the Trianni man’s neck. He’d been exultant. Satisfied. He’d moved with such fluid, animal grace that he’d flowed, passing in and out of visibility and melting over the ground. One second the man had looked scared and the next the shining tendons of his throat had been in Tam’s hand. Pink under the sun. A fine red mist had sprayed through the air to coat Tam’s skin from face to groin. He’d dropped it and moved on before the man had even fallen to his knees.

  She’d been proud of the unbending prowess of her mate. And terrified by his impassive precision. And brokenhearted at the squalid misery of the Trianni.

  She closed her hands over her ears, remembering the noises the man had made as he’d knelt, disbelieving, hands clutching his neck. Thick, squelching, sucking, gurgles as blood frothed down his front.

  How much of the blood on Tam was even his? The water all around him in the pool had turned dark, like her dreams of blood that sucked at hands and feet. Trianni blood that ran thick over the quartz stones in the central square.

  She ran shaking fingers through her hair. None of this was how she’d imagined it. Since the second she’d opened her eyes and seen Tam’s dark face for the first time. Dark eyes, shaped by worry, water drops clinging to the hard planes of his face in the sterile bathroom of his ship, she’d had a hidden hope, a bright, shining, secret dream.

  When they’d seen the men attacking the Trianni woman, her dream had flinched, pulsed but reformed. The last trace of that bright hope had withered and dried up when the man had pushed his fingers inside her, when she’d seen their unhappy, stupid, leering faces. The future stretched before her, dark and heinous.

  The people on Triannon needed her. She couldn’t abandon them. Her blood thinned.

  It was Kaleus who set Tam’s nose. Tam didn’t even make a sound, though she felt the sharp stab of pain through their bond. He said something quietly and the males had all laughed, and clapped him on the back.

  She sat alone and apart from them, staring into the trees, feeling betrayed. By the birds of her planet who had led the men to them. By the Trianni males who looked like her uncles and cousins but knew no other way of life than to rape and kill. By the people she’d abandoned, who’d been enslaved and who needed to be freed. By her mate who had revealed himself to be more brutal, more deadly than she could have ever dreamed and had shown her a glimpse of her own savage soul. By herself for letting her mind be ruled by an unreasonable hope. By her parents for giving birth to her and raising her for only one possible future. By the gods for giving her a glimpse of happiness.

  A familiar pressure built between her thighs where the awful little Trianni man had pushed his fingers. She swallowed a wave of nausea, recalling the dirty hand squeezing her breast, the thick, rancid tongue in her mouth.

  Tam met her eyes and she nodded, moving into the trees away from the warriors. He reached for her, trying to be tender, needing comfort from her that she couldn’t give. His eyes asked for absolution. She had none to give. Tam might have taken her virginity all those days ago when he’d awoken her from the pod, but the dead Trianni men had taken something else. There was a hole where her heart used to be.

  She stripped down the black skin suit and turned away from her mate. When Tam entered her, she remembered another man’s sour breath against her ear as he’d spoken.

  Tam was gentle. She didn’t want gentle. She pushed him away and dropped to the forest floor, her fingers and knees sinking into fallen leaves, ferns tickling her breasts.

  Tam mounted her and she moved against him hard, refusing to take his gentleness. He cursed and increased his pace, moving inside her with a fury she’d only experienced when he’d taken her on the sofa back at Base. Finally, he gave into the rage, and fear and shame she knew he felt, giving credence to her own storm of murky emotions.

  As soon as he was done, she moved away from him, keeping her gaze averted. Her soul was shattered. He reached for her and she shrugged him off. She would spare him as long as she could.

  20

  Something stinks.

  NIGHT SETTLED over Triannon and with it came humidity and bugs that clung to the sweat on Tam skin. He’d never been so hot in his life as on this godsforsaken hellhole. The gray moons hovered, dismal and sullen over the sea.

  It would take them about an hour of solid walking to reach the grav-bus, maybe more if they had trouble. Nissa had been anxious since she’d been attacked and had barely tolerated his touch. He cringed every time she spurned him. He’d prefer to avoid another of her rejections, all things considered, but he had no choice. She needed him at least once before they set off. He sighed deeply.

  Nothing about their mating had been easy. He wished, not for the first time, that there had been a tutorial on mated life. He had no idea how to proceed. The woman mystified him.

  He pushed to his feet, fully aware of how the other warriors avoided his eyes. They were embarrassed for him. What had been done to his mate was an abomination to his people. She’d been assaulted, held at knifepoint, and penetrated. As he watched. Shame burned through him at the memory of the little man’s fingers pressing between her legs. He held his eyes shut tightly for a moment, facing the sea, and let the breeze wash over him. The muscles of his thighs shook as his temper boiled afresh. The wind was bad. It carried the stench of something rotting offshore. Everything was wrong.

  Turning, he gazed at his mate. She sat against a tree, head angled out over the water, eyes closed. Sadness emanated like a live-wire through their bond.

  How do you comfort someone who refuses to be comforted? Tam had been the lone survivor of his family. The years after the plague were a blur. The Argenti had tried to comfort one another but no one had been untouched by death. Every single one of them had family to mourn. Tam’s grief had not been unique. There had been a strange comfort in the routine of understanding.

  He didn’t understand Nissa. He approached and stopped a few feet away. She was so small, curled against the trunk of the tree.

  She met his gaze. He didn’t need to speak. She understood him without words. She glanced back in time to see Sero and the other warriors turn their backs, melting into the blackness of the forest. With empty eyes she rose to her knees and reached for his belt. He tried to pull away but she stilled him with a palm, flat and gentle on one of his thighs.

  “Please, Tam. I can’t.” A tear spilled out, silver under the gray moonlight. “I just can’t.”

  Yeah, well, neither can I, he wanted to say but didn’t. He might know next to nothing about bonds but there was one thing he was pretty sure was sacrosanct. Be stronger for your mate than you can be for yourself.

  With a sigh, he freed his cock and stepped forward, guiding it between her parted lips. Because she couldn’t avoid his touch, he used the moment to stroke her head, to run his fingers through her hair, to offer what comfort he could. She sucked him deep and he let his head fall back, absorbing the pleasure of her soft tongue. When he came, her name spilled from his lips sweeter than honey.

  __________

  THE WARRIORS refused to meet her eyes. At first, she thought they offered her privacy and respect but the silence stretched during their journey. They refused to even look in her direction.
<
br />   What did they have to be angry about? Tam, she realized. They had closed ranks, rallying around him, attempting to protect him. From her.

  Her shoulders slumped. She was alone in the world but for Tam. He had millions of his brethren, scattered far and wide across the universe. She had no one but him, a hundred frozen souls lost in space and a planet of dirty rapists who spoke a foreign language.

  They’d abandoned them to enslavement. Her pile of dreams had eroded into nothing more than a puddle of oozing wishes, pathetic and murky and rotten.

  The universe had ceased to make sense. Her destiny pulsed like a bleeding, cancerous mass.

  She had a sudden flash of the filthy Trianni’s face as he stuffed his tongue into her mouth. She shuddered, fresh sweat breaking across her skin. That was what had become of her people. She resented the life she had been born to.

  Guilt. She’d abandoned them. Tam lifted her bodily into the ship. Gone was the jovial comradery of their journey to Triannon. Instead she stared stupidly at the floor, hair matted and lank around her face as Tam checked the straps of her flight chair.

  He paused briefly before her, squatted down. A rough thumb ran down her cheek, wiping at a stray tear. She let her gaze flick briefly to the purple stains below his eyes, his swollen nose. She longed to touch him, to stroke his cheek, to bury her head in the crook of his neck, take comfort in his strength, but the distance between them had spread, insurmountable and cold. She wanted to traverse it but it would be too cruel.

  A pulse sounded between her thighs as always at Tam’s proximity. She pulled her gaze from his, forcing herself to ignore his quick inhalation.

  21

  It’s a sad day,

  When a blowjob makes me mad.

  THEY’D BEEN ON THE SHIP for two days. There were two more days left on their journey and Tam couldn’t shake the solid knowledge that if he didn’t fix their problem now, the chasm would stretch. Already their bond felt brittle. Nissa had resisted his every overture since they’d been attacked on the cliffs. She treated him with a polite distance that had left him cold, uncertain. He hated uncertainty.