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Through my nose, I scoffed. “Then I will simply have to wear one of your shirts. Cover my marks so you cannot use them.”
He bared his teeth at me. “You. Wouldn’t. Dare.”
CHAPTER27
WES
The absolute nerve of Jax to try to put me back in the helpless box when I’d finally found a way to be useful was galling.
I understood his motive. I really did.
Jax was worried about my health. He didn’t want me to die, and I was happy to go along with that goal. His own goals as a warrior weren’t entirely about being the biggest baddest fighter, but about what he saw as the purpose of a warrior—to protect the innocent, which was how he saw me.
It was nice, in a way.
And it pissed me the hell off, in another.
I had always been good at my job, programming, but programmers were a dime a dozen. We could always be replaced.
This? This was totally different. Mages died out, and Thorzi society was apparently still reeling from the loss of them. It made a lot about my time with them make more sense, actually. The Thorzi had lost a third of their society’s diversity when they had lost the Zathki as they left their original homeworld, and then much more recently, they had lost half of what remained.
A society wasn’t meant to be made up of only warriors, and the Thorzi had become exactly that. Worse, in the process of doing so, they had found an enemy they couldn’t defeat: genetics. Maybe if they had still had the Zathki with them, things would have been different, but they’d been too focused on killing each other to come together.
No use in wondering about that now, though. Everyone was in a mess, much of their own making, but the important part wasn’t retrospection and blame. It was moving forward and trying to fix things.
I took one giant bicep in each hand and stared into his sapphire eyes. “I understand. You want to protect me. I’d like to protect you too, you know. I don’t know how this has happened, and I’ve known you for, like, no time at all, but you’ve become very important to me.”
The notion of saying the L word stuck in my throat. Marex had called the Thorzi a passionate people, but it was too soon, wasn’t it? So soon I’d have run for the hills if any guy I’d ever dated had said it so early in a relationship. I had, in fact.
That wasn’t the point of the conversation, though. No, I needed Jax to understand that he couldn’t protect me from everything. He couldn’t defend me from my own abilities, and if he tried, we were going to fight about that.
And maybe I didn’t know everything about Jax, but I knew he didn’t want to argue any more than I did.
He pursed his lips, expression saying he both did and didn’t want to tell me again why it was a terrible idea for me to be useful. And, like, sure. I didn’t want to overreach and die, but what was the likelihood I would ever be called on to link a whole army together in some kind of magical battle-mind?
I sighed and shook my head. “Let’s not have this conversation right now, yeah? We’ve got time, and I really don’t want to argue it out while we’re both annoyed about this.”
“Do you think your feelings on the matter will change?” He lifted a brow at me, but as much as he was trying to hide his smile, he was failing.
So I stepped up to him, lifting onto my toes and brushing my lips against his. “No, but I’m pretty sure I can change yours, given the right inspiration.”
He scowled at me for a moment, but before he could try to resume the conversation, there was a clanging knock on the door to the room we’d been given, and I opened it to Marex’s slightly disturbing toothy smile. Not that I was going to tell him his rows of sharp teeth set off a niggling bit of my fight or flight instinct.
He seemed like a genuinely nice guy, and I wasn’t going to be the asshole who told him to stop smiling. I’d get used to it eventually, or I’d continue to keep my mouth shut.
“I thought perhaps the two of you would like to learn more about the city,” he said, his smile fixed in place.
Jax came up behind me, wrapping an arm around my middle protectively. Possessive little shit.
Fine, possessive big shit.
Still, he cut right to the heart of the matter with his answer. “That is kind of you, but your people would not want a Thorzi wandering about. And why give us information I might use against you when I return home?”
Marex’s smile didn’t dim in the slightest. “Because it is time. Your people know we live on Zathkar. You already knew where. Me showing you our circumstances doesn’t make this city more vulnerable to your attack. It would be difficult for you to dig us out or attack without invading, and we both know it.”
“And if you give me a route around your city?”
“The tunnels I will be showing you are the ones that are evacuated first in case of emergency,” Marex shot right back, clearly having thought this through. Then he took a step forward, meeting Jax’s eye more steadily than he had previously. “And it is time for this, Jax. Your people need us, and we need you. We were a single race once, and we still need each other to survive. Both races stand on a precipice, and the ledge is precarious. If we do not start here, we might never have a chance to start at all.”
