The Bonding

by Imogen Keeper

  “No longer your concern.”

  Tam forced his body to sit upright, with a hand to the floor, turning so the bulkhead was behind him. It hurt like hell.

  Ajax cursed and finally helped him lean against the bulkhead.

  His head spun. “How is she?”

  “Same as you. You’re both screwed.”

  Tam inhaled sharply when amusement made his furious stomach lurch. Ajax passed him the bowl just in time for another bilious offering.

  “I need something,” he said when he could talk again.

  “What’s that?”

  “Vials.”

  “Why?”

  “To give her some serum.” He lay down, letting his face rest on the cool fabric of a pillow Ajax had placed on the floor.

  “No.”

  “Why?” Ajax’s face was stubborn as always.

  “Because she doesn’t deserve it, that’s why.”

  “Say that again and I’ll kill you.”

  Ajax laughed at that, which said a lot about how bad Tam must have looked. He let his eyes drift shut. He’d kill Ajax later.

  WHEN HE WOKE, seven small vials sat on the metal floor a few feet in front of his face. He inhaled sharply. This was what he’d been reduced to. Closing his eyes, he tried to reach Nissa through their bond. He felt nothing but pain and grief and longing.

  Abject denial of all that was sacred. It took a deal of vomiting but he got through it. He hated every second of it. This was wrong but at least it was over. The vials were full. He closed his eyes against a surge of arching shudders.

  “Why?”

  Tam winced at the loud interruption to his sleeping.

  It was Ajax. Sounding curious. He slitted open a single eye. The lights were on. Hissing against the brilliance, he squeezed the eyelid closed again. He lay on his belly, face smashed to the side on the cold floor. He couldn’t form a question, so he let his silence do the talking.

  “Why not let her burn?”

  Tam shrugged, sort of. He was too sick to move so his eyebrows formed the gesture. Too tired to muster up any anger. After a moment, he grunted, “She’s my mate, Ajax.”

  “Not anymore.” Ajax was angrier than Tam had ever seen him. “Let it go. Let her go.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t understand. Maybe you will someday.” He breathed heavily against another rolling burst of nausea. His cock pulsed, thick against the floor. “I hope so.”

  Ajax made an unreadable face at that. He sat on the floor next to him. “You smell like ass.”

  There was no arguing with that. He smelled worse than ass. He smelled so bad he made himself sick.

  Ajax half carried, half dragged him into the bathroom and dumped him in the bathing pool. The hot water brought on fresh chills and shaking and the smell of the soap made his stomach pitch. Ajax had barely hauled him back out of the water before he puked again. Foaming yellow bile mixed with the bubbling bath. Beyond disgusting.

  “That’ll take a few days to clean itself,” Ajax said with a shrug and dumped Tam into a bed with fresh sheets. After Nissa, there was no one in the world Tam loved more than Ajax.

  “Please.” He hated begging but he could hardly take the vials there himself. Ajax would know what he meant.

  Ajax sat on the edge of the bed, pressing a glass of water into Tam’s hands. “She’s been sick. Calling out your name in her dreams.”

  Salt in an open wound. Tam swallowed heavily and pressed his head against the pillows. His eyes stung.

  He. Would. Not. Cry. He remembered his mother. A fleeting glimpse of a cool hand against his brow when he’d been sick as a boy. He shook his head against the image and stared at the ceiling overhead, eyes burning.

  He heard Ajax rise. “I’ll give her the vials. It will help.”

  Tam turned his face away. He was too sick. He passed out before he heard Ajax leave.

  27

  Angry words

  And a bowl of hate.

  DREADING TRIANNON. Missing her mother. Hating her father. None of it mattered. Her mind throbbed with a single beat. Tam. Tam. Tam.

  She convulsed and retched. People came and went. Trianni women. The other healers whose names she’d never learned. At some point her father had entered her room, which had compounded gross humiliation on top of the pain.

  He’d stared at her, where she lay, twisted in bed, her body barely covered, reeking, no doubt of sick and pussy. His eyes had been wide with fear. “Are you dying?”

  “Yes,” she croaked out, because she thought maybe she was.

  “I’m sorry Nissa. For this. For how I lost control, and nearly... I’m sorry, but you need to understand. You can’t have that man. Whoever you marry must be a person proven to belong on Triannon.”

  Nissa had glared at him briefly and heaved into her bowl.

  “We could bring in a surrogate male,” he’d suggested.

  Nissa had screamed then, violent, enraged words that tore at the inside of a raw, angry throat. Shouting out Tam’s words at him, she’d spewed a steady stream of vituperative, foul-mouthed abuse that had surprised her in its sheer vehemence.

  She must have looked like a monster, her face filled with blood, spit flying from her lips, and when she ran out of breath, when her voice refused to obey her commands, she’d found strength from somewhere she’d never known before. She’d lifted her bowl of vomit and lobbed it straight at him.

  He’d left, ashen, and didn’t return.

  Days passed, she thought. How could she tell? The lights never changed, there was no discernable pattern. She shook. She puked. She dozed. She screamed. It was an endless cycle.

  One of the Trianni girls she hadn’t known on their planet had been elected her primary caretaker. She didn’t miss the slight. Ajax would never have left her side if she and Tam had still been mated. Her chest pitched. Tam must hate her.

  Her name was Feola, the girl who helped her, and her hair was pink and curly. She was sweet and smiled often. Nissa hated her. She was small and too frail to be much use. She smelled like a woman. She wasn’t Tam.

  Nissa wanted her to leave and never return, even as the other woman bathed her and brushed her hair, cleaned her sheets and forced her to drink glass after glass of wretched water. The towel hurt her skin. She threw it off and puked on Feola’s feet. The woman had forced soup down her throat and now it spread on the floor, chunky and thick.

  Feola left her in peace. Nissa collapsed to the floor a few feet from the puddle of vomit. She burned between her thighs. Her stomach roiled. Her skin burned, itchy and fevered. She wanted to die. She wanted Tam.

  When the hatch opened and a male stood there, silhouetted against the lights in the hallway, Nissa’s heart stopped. For just a moment, she thought it was Tam. Elation. Deliverance. Salvation. Fresh burning need tore through her.

  It wasn’t Tam. It was Ajax. He cocked his head, surveyed her, lying pathetic and naked on the floor. She closed her eyes. He couldn’t help her.

  “Tam is a better man than I.” His voice was gruff.

  Nissa breathed through her mouth so the smell of vomit wouldn’t make her sick. Her heart beat furiously in her chest and her stomach flopped again in a familiar warning. She rose up on shaking hands and knees, body convulsing in fresh heaves.

  Ajax handed a towel to her. While she was sick, he cleaned up her previous mess and slipped a bowl under her. She wiped her nose and running eyes. Red smears covered the white towel. Her nose bled. Ajax seemed interested in that.

  He carried her, naked, to her bed and covered her in sheets, cleaned her nose with gauze. He returned a few moments later and attached a bag of fluid to her arm. “Tam will be fine,” he said and she felt profoundly grateful that he hadn’t made her speak to ask. Her throat burned. She closed her eyes, breathed deeply.

  “This will help with the fever. Calm the nausea. You should be able to sleep a bit.”

  “Thank you.” Her voice was barely a croak. When was the last time she’d spoken?


  “Tam sent something for you. It will help.”

  She opened her eyes to see him standing over her bed. He placed seven vials containing white fluid on the table beside her. Tam’s serum.

  She stared at the vials, hope mingled with disgust. This was what had become of their beautiful bond. Seven clear vials. Long slender tubes with black stoppers. She imagined Tam, his hands around his cock, jerking off, the weeping eye on the head of his cock pressed against the vials’ necks. Her throat convulsed.

  “He wants you to have it. I think it will help lessen your symptoms. Reduce the burn. Wean your system more gradually.”

  Tears welled in her eyes. Even in this, Tam wanted to take care of her.

  Ajax opened a vial for her. He held it to her lips. She opened her mouth. He pulled the vial back. “He is dead to you. You will not hurt him further.” His eyes bore into hers, too dark to read. “Do you understand?”

  Though it hurt like a vise compressing her chest, blocking out breath, the beat of her heart stopping the flow of the blood in her veins, she nodded. He tilted the vial.

  The taste on her tongue was sweet and rich and potent. A balm to a crumbling existence. She swallowed it down with burning hunger, dragging her tongue around the neck. She looked at the other vials. She wanted to drink them all now, rub the fluid into her skin, push it between her thighs. She couldn’t. There wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough. Never enough.

  Her stomach settled, her skin burning hot and tender. The vial was too slim to get her tongue to the bottom. Ajax grimaced and inserted his finger, dragging it along the bottom of the vial, scooping up the last few drops that clung there. He brought his finger to her lips and she sucked it clean, dragging her tongue over his skin.

  Her eyes locked on Ajax as her nipples pulsed. Her pussy throbbed and an orgasm tore through her as the serum spread along her veins, buzzed along her cells. Torso bucking, breath gasping, her whole body bowed and shook and shuddered. The look in Ajax’s eyes as he watched was unreadable.

  He withdrew his finger. Tears poured down her cheeks. Her face crumpled. Sobs too long suppressed tore from her chest. She cried for her dead mother. She cried for her people. She cried for Tam. She cried for herself and all the broken dreams of a lifetime. She turned on her side, wrapping her body around the empty vial in her hands. It smelled like Tam. The pillow grew damp with tears. She cried until her head pounded and no sounds came from her mouth but strangled croaks. Ajax stayed with her, his silent presence strangely comforting, until she ran out of tears and her exhausted body slipped into sleep.

  Tam waited for her in her dreams. It wasn’t enough. It would never be enough again.

  28

  I’ve got to go.

  I don’t even care where.

  Anyplace is better.

  TAM STOOD before Admiral Fior. The older man’s eyes had the kind of gentle understanding that made Tam’s teeth itch and reminded him all too well of the days after his family had died. Pity.

  He waited for Fior to give him a nod to proceed.

  “Sit down, son. Tell me what you need.” The sympathy burned a hole in his gut.

  Tam inhaled against the painful urge to walk out, to find another way to gain leave. He could go to his own commanding officer but he had a history with the admiral that went all the way back to Argentus. Fior had known Tam’s mother before she’d mated his father. They’d been friends and maybe at one point, he’d hoped they’d be more. He’d looked out for Tam over the years.

  Tam’s body trembled, thigh muscles burning as he lowered himself into his chair. He’d never been so weak in his life. He’d woken yesterday morning with a limp dick, a steady belly and an empty heart.

  He’d lost weight, a significant amount in the twelve days that it had taken for the fever, chills, nausea and spasms...and Nissa to leave his system. His clothes hung on his frame. He’d had to tighten the harnesses that held his knives and if he was forced to raise a hand in self-defense he’d probably collapse at his attacker’s feet and beg them to be fast.

  Weakness sucked. He hated himself. But he wasn’t dead. He wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

  He forced his eyes to meet the admiral’s. “I’d like to formally request leave, sir.”

  “Where will you go?”

  Tam swallowed. “Not sure. Just...” He looked around the room, remembering the last time he’d been here, seated in the black, molded-plastic chairs, hand in Nissa’s, asking for permission to go to the planet that destroyed his life.

  He’d fucked her hard that day. Had that been his first big mistake? If he’d been more gentle, would things have turned out differently? That was the day he lied about Criamnon too. So many mistakes.

  He swallowed again. “Just away, sir.” He felt a stab on Nissa’s side of the bond. Something new and painful had happened to her.

  When he’d woken yesterday morning, he’d still been able to feel her. The bond hadn’t severed the connection, at least not on his end. She still lived in his chest. He wasn’t sure how to feel about that, either.

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Tam. Maybe—”

  “I need to get away, sir.”

  The admiral looked as if he might argue again.

  Tam clenched his jaw. “Please, sir.” He’d never liked begging. He liked it less now.

  The admiral exhaled. “How long do you need?”

  “Extended leave. Indefinite.”

  Fior stared at him for a long time. Maybe he remembered losing his wife and daughter twenty-three years ago. Maybe he imagined what he’d feel if he were Tam. Maybe he was glad to get rid of him. “Granted, Captain.”

  Tam’s eyes stung. “Thank you, sir.” He walked to the hatch.

  “Tam?”

  He looked back at the admiral, seated behind his desk.

  “This isn’t your fault, you know that. No one blames you.”

  Tam swallowed. And nodded.

  29

  With trembling knees, I rise.

  FEOLA HELPED NISSA STAND, all slender, soft palms and sweet smiles. Nothing like Tam. Nissa’s head swam and her knees buckled but it was the first time she’d put weight on her legs in a long time.

  Later that day, she insisted on walking to the bathroom. Her legs trembled and a new round of chills and fever came as a result, but it felt like progress.

  The next day she drank the vile, chunky soup and kept it down. She didn’t use the bedpan at all that day. When she slept, her dreams were vacant. Tam had abandoned her. She floated in an empty mist. She felt him, though, through the bond. Steady, solid, miserable.

  The next day she took a bath. In the mirror, she saw a woman she didn’t know. Pale, gaunt, aged ten years. Faded, as though all the life had been washed away.

  She’d used the serum only sparingly. Every couple of days when the sickness grew so bad that she couldn’t go ten minutes without heaving, she had swallowed down a gift from the mate she’d forsaken.

  A gift to which she no longer had any rights. A gift from a man who deserved much better.

  She had one vial left. She’d keep it with her until the day she died. She wouldn’t need it after that.

  She tucked it into her pocket as she donned the freshly laundered, newly hated red dress. It hung loose from her shoulders, her breasts having shrunk to half their size.

  Afterward, she had to lie down for a while to gather the strength as the muscles of her arms protested the effort and her legs quaked from standing, but she left her cell that day.

  The infirmary was full. Of the ninety-nine pods, there had only been two deaths and one missing woman. Criamnon and her mother had died.

  Nissa couldn’t find any more grief. There was a well inside her, vast and empty of emotion. She felt nothing when she thought of the man who would have been her husband. Not even for the queen, her mother, could she muster any feelings. Her soul had died. She was a shell of a faded woman.

  Three pods had been discovered empty. One had been successfully tr
aded for. Eleven women had awakened without the blue-tinge, the rest had been mated off, to good warriors, she sincerely hoped.

  Trianni closed around her in an embrace of red cloth and blazing hair, sympathetic strokes that felt like sand rubbed on a rash. She met Ajax’s gaze across the room. She let the question show in her eyes. How is he?

  He shrugged as if to say I don’t know and turned away. How could he not know? Maybe the shrug had meant, why would I tell you? Nissa returned to her cell and crawled into bed. Her fist closed around the vial containing the last physical link to her Bonding. She curled around her fist and prayed for a dream of Tam.

  While she’d been sick, the universe had been busy. Or at least her father and the admiral had.

  The moon, Teemo, had been bombed. Five thousand unwitting Vestige men had died in a single blast, leaving a crater that would forever be visible from Triannon. The planet had been retaken.

  Twenty thousand uneducated, miserable slaves had been freed, unshackled for the first time in anyone’s memory. Her father had already returned home, taking a few of the females and their mates with him. He permitted the Tribe to establish a base on Triannon, to help defend them should the Vestige ever return.

  In exchange, the Tribe earned the right to court the Trianni. The truth was, there wasn’t a chance in hell that they could keep Triannon without the help of the Tribe and they all knew it.

  Childers sent her daily comms on the little digi that Tam had given her so long ago. He wanted an exclusive as he called it, meaning he wanted to interview her and give the Argenti even more reason to hate her. She’d ignored his messages, too drained to care.

  A ship was ready, filled with supplies and awaiting another group of warriors, blissful, no doubt, at having won the lottery selection. Eager to take up residence on a planet with women.

  The Trianni who hadn’t been mated or accompanied her father would return with her. She couldn’t help but remember her last space voyage. A vision came to mind of Tam, big body on his knees before her. A white-toothed grin, a dare hiding in happy eyes.