Page 117 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

“Compliance drop.”

“Yeah,” I say. “He does that. Obedience isn’t his strong suit.”

Gray turns the wand again and the receiver reaches for Rhazek harder.

Once.

Pause.

Again.

Then my name moves through the connection like a hook.

Not spoken.

Commanded.

Rhazek’s whole body goes rigid.

I see the instant the old Krixian training recognizes the new order and wraps itself around the thing he wants most.

Me.

The command inside Rhazek wakes, and this time it wears my name.

28

Rhazek

Kessa’s name is the command.

That is how I know it is still a leash. It can drag me toward her, but it cannot choose what I do when I arrive.

It does not arrive as sound. Sound would be cleaner. Sound can be ignored, twisted, drowned beneath pain or rage or the memory of sand packed into the teeth after a bad fall in the arena.

This comes from under my skin.

The anchor beneath my throat opens like a poisonous flower. Every old wire the Krixian healers buried in me wakes at once. Pain burns down my chest, across the black plates over my ribs, along the green-black scar burned into my forearm. The cage around me hums in answer, thin lines of light threading through the bars like living veins.

Kessa.

Not spoken.

Pulled.

The command drags her name through every part of me. Through the bone under my horns. Through the hinge of my damaged wing. Through the old arena scar beneath my jaw. Through the part of me that learned, young and starving and bleeding, that obedience sometimes buys one more breath.

Find her.

Hold her.

Join the pair.

I clamp my teeth together hard enough to taste blood. The taste should frighten me. The line likes blood. It tastes blood and names the body it came from. It writes ownership in wet proof.

It is too late. My mouth is full of copper and rage.

Beyond the cage, Kessa stands with her weight off her trapped left foot. A narrow ring of green light cinches her ankle and runs in a thin line across the chamber floor to the cracked receiver. Syin is down on one knee beside a slab of broken metal, one arm braced against his ribs, his face drawn tight with fury. Renn crouches behind the low rail housing, knife in one hand, blood on his temple, watching Kessa, the guards, and the damaged receiver in turn.