Doryan

by Kate Rudolph

  “And does this normally happen when you kiss someone?” Tessa asked. She ignored the little sound of displeasure that Amy couldn’t help but make.

  Doryan put his hand on top of Amy’s. “I haven’t kissed anyone in more than six years.”

  She’d known that. Obviously. But hearing it out loud soothed something inside of her.

  Tessa looked back at the report and let that information mull in her mind. Finally, she asked, “How old are you, Doryan?”

  It was loaded. Tessa had to know about the denya price if she was the mate of a Detyen. Would Doryan tell her his age and how he’d gotten so old? What would she do with that information?

  Doryan remained silent.

  Tessa let him get away with it. “I know Detyen biology pretty well, and what I’m seeing here is… different than what I’m used to. Is there a Detyen equivalent to an appendix?”

  “What’s an appendix?” he asked.

  “A vestigial organ. It does nothing vital but has a nasty habit of getting infected and if not treated can kill a person. I ask because there’s a strange… blankness in your chest. Just below your heart. There might be something incredibly faint there, but my scanner is going haywire trying to sense it.”

  Could the soul be an actual organ? Doryan had said that something had been removed. But he didn’t seem eager to answer Tessa’s questions, and finally she gave up.

  “You seem fine now. But if something else happens let me know.”

  He nodded. Tessa left.

  Amy didn’t know what they were supposed to do now. Kissing had made Doryan collapse. It wasn’t like she could drag him off to bed and have her way with him. No matter how much her body wanted his, she couldn’t put him at risk like that.

  The smart thing to do would be to go back to her files and try and tear the case apart. She’d spent half an evening paying almost no attention to it and she was running out of time. NaMasee no doubt had his own people from the Legion coming her way and they’d want to take Doryan with them.

  She couldn’t let that happen.

  Amy pushed off the couch, but Doryan reached out and held her in place.

  “Can I touch you again?”

  SOULLESS WARRIORS DIDN’T have mates. They sacrificed everything for the Legion. But the longer Doryan looked at Amy, the surer he was that she was his.

  Denya.

  How had he missed the recognition before?

  It didn’t matter. He knew it now. And nothing could make him deny it.

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Amy asked, but she didn’t try and move away again. If anything, she settled closer to him.

  The only thing he was sure of was that he needed more of her.

  He laced their fingers together. It still hurt. In fact he hadn’t stopped hurting since he’d woken up on the couch. It was like a limb had fallen asleep and was only now waking up. Of course there would be pain. “It is,” he said, nuzzling against her.

  “Do you think the thing Tessa mentioned was your soul? Is it something physical?” She tilted her head to the side so he could get closer.

  “I suppose. How else could it be removed?” And why should he care when he had his denya in his arms?

  “Could it grow back?” He could hear the hope she was trying to contain. He could almost feel that same hope within himself.

  Could it?

  “I’ve never heard of it,” he admitted. “And I’m one of the older soulless. We don’t have long life spans.” But they didn’t exactly share their experiences. The soulless were assigned to different units. They weren’t useful as one group.

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  “Thirty-six.”

  “I’m robbing the cradle,” she muttered.

  “What?” There were no cradles, no babies around them.

  She squeezed his hand. “I’m thirty-nine. It was a joke, though now that I’m thinking about it… those don’t work so well on you, do they?”

  “I used to be funny.” He could almost remember it, friends laughing all around him as he weaved a tale. He hadn’t been able to miss it for so long that he’d forgotten.

  “There’s probably a joke there, but it would be mean-spirited.” Her fingers traced over his nails as if she was fascinated by the feel of his skin.

  His hand ached, but he could deal with that, so long as it meant she kept touching him.

  “Does this hurt?” she asked.

  “A little.” He didn’t want her to stop, but he wasn’t about to lie. “But don’t stop.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you.” Her voice had gone soft, the words dancing over his skin.

  “I don’t mind it.” He lifted their joint hands and brushed his lips against her fingers. “I haven’t wanted anything in six years. But I want this. Please. Let me touch you.”

  “Tell me if it gets to be too much,” she insisted, pressing close.

  “I promise.” But as long as he was conscious he doubted it would be enough.

  He didn’t immediately touch her beyond what he was already doing. He wanted to press into her and mark her as his, but he also needed to soak in the fact that she was sitting beside him, letting him do this with her. She was letting him take his time, explore this curiosity, and she seemed in no hurry.

  The troubles of the outside world could wait another few hours.

  Her skin shined in the dim light of the cabin, the moonlight streaming through the window and bathing her in silver light. It gave her an ethereal quality, something magical that he hadn’t seen on Earth. Or, perhaps, he hadn’t been looking for it. Her hair was pushed back behind her shoulders, mostly straight but a little frizzy from the day’s work. Her dark eyes were almost as black as his own, but they were softer, hotter. Wanting.

  Doryan traced his fingers along Amy’s cheek and over her ear, letting her hair tickle him. She leaned into the touch, her eyes falling closed for a moment before opening back up and staring at him, waiting to see what he did next.

  He was entranced by the feel of her skin. He’d never thought he’d want another after sacrificing his soul, but since meeting Amy it was all he could think about. And his body was reacting to her presence. His blood rushed downward and if this went on for long he knew he’d be hard.

  He was both nervous and excited at the prospect. But he didn’t know how far he’d manage before everything became too much. Already his vision was going a little fuzzy around the edges and his chest hurt, but he wasn’t going to stop.

  His lips followed his fingers, landing featherlight kisses along her cheek and over the ridge of her ears. Amy sighed against him as he found her neck and took his time, playing with the taut skin and memorizing her taste.

  But when his lips found the fabric of her shirt he could have cursed. His claws ached to slash out and cut it to bits to get rid of the offending material. Instead, he gently worked it off her, watching to make sure she was still okay with everything he did.

  She was.

  She wore a black bra underneath the shirt, but he left it in place for now. There was something sensual about removing her layers one by one and he wanted to take his time. His twitching cock didn’t feel the same way and Doryan adjusted his hips, trying to get some relief.

  He splayed his hands across Amy’s stomach and watched as her skin expanded and contracted with each breath.

  “I want to touch you,” she said, “let me help you with that.” She tilted her head down to where his cock strained against his trousers.

  His “yes” came out on a ragged breath. The need he felt now bordered on pain, but it had nothing to do with whatever was going on in his mind and soul and everything to do with the need for relief.

  Her fingers undid the clasp of his pants and slipped inside, brushing against him. For a second, Doryan’s vision went white as sensation flowed through him. His denya was touching his cock.

  He was supposed to be touching her, but his head lolled back as he let her explore him. He couldn’t focus on a
nything but the sensation. He’d gone too long denying himself everything, too long deadening his senses. Now he needed relief, and it could only come from her.

  “We should get these off,” Amy said, kissing his jaw while she pushed against his waistband with her free hand.

  “Yes.” He’d agree to anything as long as she kept touching him.

  “Here—”

  Someone banged on the door and Amy froze. So did Doryan.

  She pulled her hand out of his pants, but she was breathing heavily. She looked between him and the door, clearly torn. “I should—”

  Before she could stand up, the handle turned and a woman walked in. “It was unlo… hello.” The woman had a small bag slung over one shoulder. Her dark hair was cropped short and set off against light brown skin, slightly darker than Amy’s. She wore all black and was staring at them like something was on fire.

  “Kyla!” Amy jumped up from the couch and then glanced down at her shirtless torso. Her eyes widened and she reached down for her top only to realize Doryan had tossed it somewhere.

  Kyla pointed off to the side and they all saw the shirt in a pile on the floor. Kyla crossed her arms. “I think you have some explaining to do.”

  Chapter Ten

  “I THOUGHT YOU COULDN’T get here until tomorrow.” Even as the words came out, Amy knew they were the wrong thing to say. She’d insisted that Kyla get to the settlement as fast as she could. Clearly she had. It wasn’t Kyla’s fault she’d caught Amy with her hand in the cookie jar… or down an alien’s pants, as the case may be. She snatched her shirt from where it had fallen and tugged it over her head. This conversation would be bad enough without being half naked.

  “I got my hands on a car,” said Kyla. She put her bag down and then pulled a larger bag into the room before shutting the door. “Who’s your friend?”

  Doryan’s face had gone blank, slipping back into that soulless mask of his. Amy hated to see it. He didn’t look at her like that. It wasn’t him, it was something that had been done to him and something she wanted to find a way to undo. But he couldn’t be in the room for this conversation. “This is Doryan. And he’s going to go to the NaZade cabin while we talk. Okay?” The family were his friends. And he should be safe enough from NaMasee while he was there. “I hope they’re still awake.”

  “It’s nine PM,” said Kyla. “I think they’ll be fine.”

  Was it? Amy’s sense of time had been scrambled over the last twenty-four hours and she could have sworn it was much later.

  Doryan stood and quickly buckled his pants. He didn’t kiss her goodbye as he left, but Amy didn’t expect it, not when he was sinking back into his unfeeling state. She only hoped one of the NaZades could get him out of his funk.

  Kyla watched the door close behind him. “Is he a suspect?”

  Amy wanted to lie. She’d eliminated him, but Kyla needed all the facts. “Technically, yes.” She probably should have felt shame at what she’d done, but she couldn’t, not with Doryan.

  “Technically?” Kyla walked deeper into the room, but steered clear of the couch. She approached Amy’s tablet and written papers and poked at them. “What does technically mean?”

  “He was discovered standing over the body and had motive to kill the victim.” Even saying the words out loud made her feel sick.

  “Amy!” Kyla spun back to face her. “What the fuck?”

  “He didn’t do it.” And now she sounded like all the spouses and partners she’d ever interviewed, completely convinced of her lover’s innocence despite all the evidence.

  “Is there proof of that?” Kyla backed up until she was sitting on a stool.

  Amy came to join her and shuffled through everything until she found the transcript of her interview with Linda Marino. “One of the witnesses says she saw him approach the corpse. The guy was dead when he got there. And there was no blood on him. The victim was killed by claws or some kind of bladed weapon. His assailant would have most likely been covered in blood.”

  “Weak.”

  It was. “My instincts are screaming at me that he didn’t do it. Long before any of that happened.”

  “Long before? The murder happened yesterday!” Kyla looked ready to hit her.

  Maybe Amy deserved it. She felt like she was experiencing two different timelines, one where she was investigating the murder of Captain NaPyrsee and one where she was falling for Doryan. But the two were intertwined and she forgot that at her own peril.

  Kyla took a deep breath to calm herself. “I remember this really good investigator telling me that instincts lie while facts don’t.”

  “Sounds dumb,” Amy scowled. She might have said that at some point, but it had nothing to do with anything now.

  “It sounds like you’re lust addled.”

  Kyla wasn’t saying anything that Amy wouldn’t have said if the situation was reversed, but it wasn’t going to change how she felt. “Please, Ky, go with me on this one. We’ve got a woman who was having an affair with the victim and a lieutenant who’s itching to kill or imprison Doryan for reasons that have nothing to do with the murder. There’s more to this.”

  Kyla still wasn’t convinced. “So what are we going to do if it turns out your boy did do it?”

  Her stomach roiled but Amy swallowed back any bile. “We’ll do our jobs.”

  “Really?”

  “You might have to knock me out to make the arrest. But he didn’t do it.” She’d never been more sure of something in her life.

  Kyla rolled her eyes. “This is going to be great. Now tell me about the case.”

  THE FARTHER DORYAN got from Amy’s cabin, the more doubts assailed him. And he had no defenses against them. Doubts had been just as absent as emotions for the last six years and now they rang around like sour truths in his head.

  The soulless did not have mates. The only thing they ever felt was fixation. If he thought Amy was his denya it meant that his mind was playing tricks on him and he was liable to get violent at the slightest provocation. He might not have murdered the captain, but that didn’t mean he’d be innocent for long.

  Deke answered the door when he knocked.

  “You look… freaked.” Deke’s face screwed up at the last word. “You don’t usually look anything. Is everything alright?”

  Doryan followed him towards the couch in their cabin. He sat down, his mind still stuck on everything that had just happened. “I don’t think it is.”

  “This isn’t about Captain NaPyrsee, is it?” Deke asked. “I don’t care what anyone says, I know you didn’t kill him.”

  “What do you know about the soulless?” That question sucked all the air out of the room. Doryan was almost certain Deke wasn’t breathing. Doryan had never mentioned it before, though he’d gotten the idea that Deke and the others knew. They’d spent months around him, so they knew he wasn’t like other Detyens. But the Legion didn’t talk about the soulless, and Doryan had kept his mouth shut.

  “I know a bit,” Deke acknowledged. “Mostly rumors.”

  Doryan nodded for him to keep going.

  “You do something to allow yourselves to live past thirty without mates. And it takes away your emotions. I know the legend of how it started.” It didn’t escape Doryan’s notice that Deke counted him among the soulless.

  “What’s your version?” The Legion had their stories, but with Detyens dispersed across the universe, the tales were bound to change.

  “My dad told it to Shayn, and then Shayn told it to us,” Deke warned him, “so it’s probably missing some bits.” He plowed on. “A long time ago, a thousand years at least, way before Detya was destroyed, there was a scientist with a bunch of children. And despite all the denya matching services none of his kids found their mates. And they died one by one until only a daughter was left. The scientist became obsessed with finding a way to extend her life. And the daughter agreed to undergo a procedure. She survived her thirtieth birthday… but she came back wrong. She got hyper-violent, kill
ed her father, destroyed his lab and notes, and then killed herself.” He took a shuddering breath. “Until I heard the rumors, I thought it was one of those stories made up to tell us not to mess with fate. That we have our time and we pay our price or we don’t, but it can’t be changed.”

  “It’s not a story,” Doryan assured him. “At least, not completely. The Legion found notes for the procedure hidden away on one of our servers shortly after the destruction of Detya. Our numbers were already dwindling. They hoped that the procedure would save us.”

  “Did it?” Deke asked.

  Doryan didn’t have an answer. He was alive, but was he really living? “There’s a particular trouble that faces the soulless. Fixation. We become obsessed with something or someone to the exclusion of everything else. We delude ourselves into thinking… well. We get violent. Deadly.” He’d spent so many years not talking about this, and now it had come out twice in one day. But Doryan needed to get it out. He needed to get the perspective Deke could give him.

  Doryan wouldn’t have been offended if the younger man got up and walked away, but Deke stayed in place. “Have you fixated on something?”

  A vision of Amy crossed Doryan’s mind, but he could still feel that pulsing recognition of the denya bond. “I can’t have a mate.”

  One thought didn’t exactly follow the other, but Deke caught on. “Have you heard of Raze NaFeen or Kayde NaDetya?” he asked.

  “Members of the Legion,” of that Doryan was certain. “But I haven’t spoken to either of them in more than ten years. How do you know them?” He thought he remembered hearing that both of them had decided to undergo the procedure to become soulless, but their paths hadn’t crossed.

  Deke was nodding. “I’ve met them. They both used to be soulless. But they found their mates and somehow they’re not soulless anymore.”

  “Impossible.”

  Doryan stood up. He needed to move. The soulless didn’t pace, but he walked back and forth across the room without a thought.

  “I know for a fact that it happened,” Deke insisted. “I’ve been speaking with a lot of members of the Legion, trying to learn more about Detyen culture and history. And I’ve met Raze. He has emotions, and to hear him talk about his denya… it’s real, Doryan. And it sounds like it might be happening to you.”