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“A time out I bet you earned.”
“Don’t argue his side!”
“I’m not arguing his side. I can understand how frustrating you must have been to have as a child. Strong-willed, rebellious…” He holds me closer as I start to squirm.
“Shut up! I didn’t come all this way to hear that the Patron is right and I’m wrong.”
“You blame someone for shooting you down. That little mount. Was that your ship?”
“No, of course not. That was my shuttle. It’s a much smaller version of my ship.”
“And you were doing… what in that shuttle?”
“I was looking…”
“At?”
“At the people down here. I wanted to see them.”
“Why?”
“Because I was curious…”
“Curious, or lonely?”
Truthfully, maybe both. Years of solitude take their toll on a girl. Long distance holo-conversations didn’t cut it. They were nothing like this, being held, being touched, being able to look in someone else’s eyes, feel their voice rumbling through their chest—even if I don’t like the words.
“You shouldn’t take the Patron’s side,” I say. “You don’t understand what he’s really like.”
“And you don’t understand what trying to look after you is like,” he says in turn.
“Neither does the Patron. Never looked after me once in his life. Left me to maids and instructors, shipped me off to the academy when I was old enough to hold a pen. You don’t know me, and you definitely don’t know him. Now put me down. I want out.”
I’m upset. Zion wants to paint the Patron as a misunderstood father with a misbehaved child, but that is not what this is.
“You’ll get out when I say you do,” Zion says.
I splash water in his face to try to convince him to drop me. It doesn’t work. He hoists me out of the water, my hips emerging just enough to give him the chance to slap my ass hard then plunge me back down into the water.
“Stop it,” he says sharply. “I’m not going to argue with you.”
“I’m not going to argue with you either. You don’t know what you think you know. You don’t know anything. You’re an anima—oww!” I scream as he pulls me up and out of the water, his big palm slapping my cheeks again and again.
“Behave yourself,” he growls at me. “I am not your Patron. I will not send you away. I will not freeze you out. I will lash your bottom. I will make you hurt. I will use you. You will not run from me. You will not hide. You will bear the pain. And you will learn.”
His eyes are locked on mine. His voice is even, not angry. He is firm and he is calm and I know he means what he says. For that reason, his words do something to me his hands haven’t. They touch me somewhere deep inside. They reach me in the very core of my pain, the part that has sent me careening across the sky, made sure that I never obeyed a single order I was given.
His palms cup my ass and he pulls me close, kissing me deeply. I let him. I give in, because despite everything, I know my time here is short.
Zion doesn’t know what he is up against. He doesn’t know the power and the rage that will be vented when I am discovered to be lost. He was right when he said the Patron might not find me. That doesn’t mean he won’t look. Hard.
Chapter Eleven
Tselia
Zion takes me back to the tribe and I do my best to fit in. I truly, actually do. I fumble my way through their customs. I even learn to sew so I can make the skirt he says will celebrate our mate-ship. Our togetherness.
We have been intimate many, many times, but in spite of the fact he tore my protection from me, he has not come inside me again. He holds back. He spends it anywhere, everywhere besides inside my sex.
I should be grateful. I am grateful. I did ask him not to and he has respected that. He hasn’t respected much since I met him, but he has abstained from impregnating me.
Zion is not my only problem. Fitting into a village of prehistoric humans is difficult. Their customs are strange, their ways of communicating are subtle and I often miss them because they are nonverbal. A look, a flicker of a lash, a raise of the head, can communicate thousands of words. I find myself physically illiterate in their world, clumsy and rude and often left out.
It is made worse knowing that in the past, Zion was intimate with the huntresses. When I was in school, there were popular girls. I was not one of them, even as the daughter of the Patron. Now, I find myself in a similar situation. The huntresses preen and strut and make great shows of themselves around the village—and they mock me. I don’t understand what they’re laughing about, but I know when mean girls are talking about me. No matter how advanced the species gets, or how much it regresses, some things stay the same.
