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“Thirty-eight years ago, for my twelfth birthday, my father gave me a human slave. She was a beautiful wisp of a girl, a fourteen-year-old named Lissy.” Even after all these years, her delicate face still appeared clearly in my mind’s eyes with her pointy chin, high cheekbones, heart-shaped lips and big, blue, doll eyes. “I had become sexually active a few months prior, and Father considered it a rite of passage to deflower a human female.”
It was more than a rite of passage. Virgins were hard to come by. Beautiful human virgins even harder. Wealthy clans paid high prices to get willing young females for their sons to bed. It became a sign of status. Between the ages of eleven and fourteen, a Braxian male’s girth was still small enough for a human woman to handle with reasonable ease. By fifteen, coupling with a human usually resulted in serious tearing without Denax. However, frequent and excessive use of the dilator endangered the woman’s health.
“Within a year, I committed the unforgivable. Not content to fall in love with a slave, I also impregnated her with a male.” My chest ached reminiscing about the way she’d fearfully revealed her pregnancy to me. I’d been both excited and terrified of what that would mean for us. “As you may have found out from Anton, under my father’s rule, Braxian law decreed that half-breeds were abominations to be eradicated lest they taint Braxian bloodlines. An exception was made for females who would then be used as clan whores. But, in defiance of that law, I allowed my son to live and kept him a secret for fifteen months.”
Ravena’s hands tightened around her braid, her gaze penetrating, and her shoulders tensing.
“Your father discovered his existence,” she said, when the silence stretched.
“Yes,” I said, swallowing past the lump in my throat. “While he lived, my father, Magnar Sigmer, had been a zealot and a bigot. For his own son, the future ruler of Braxia, to taint our bloodline, the purest on our home world, and with a slave no less…”
“He must have completely lost it,” Ravena said, her eyes filling with compassion.
I snorted. “That’s quite the understatement. It had been foolish of us—of me—to think this could go on forever. A human snitched on us. The Narinda colony’s ambassador came to discuss possible trade agreements.” My lips stretched in a sneer, my hatred for the human still burning bright. “He knew Braxian protocols. When Lissy refused him, he complained to my father who had guards escort him to her quarters. If she refused him again, they would hold her down for him and then punish her. Apparently, she was breastfeeding our son when they barged in.”
Ravena shifted in her seat, no doubt imagining the barely seventeen-year-old girl that my Lissy had been at the time, watching in horror as the guards dragged our child away. Variations of that image still haunted me.
“That bastard never got to fuck her. The guards finding her with a hybrid superseded any courtesy to a foreign guest,” I said bitterly. “After realizing the consequences of his lust, the coward left Braxia behind him along with the irreparable damage of his actions. He must have known I would come after him because he broke all contact between our peoples.”
The Ancestors knew I had sought opportunities to cross paths with him, but he’d always managed to avoid any place where I might show up. He eventually met his untimely demise thanks to a misfired arrow during a hunting trip, courtesy of a mercenary hired by yours truly.
“My father recalled me early from the training camp where I’d been. I naively thought he had summoned me as a reward for the distinctions I’d earned during combat training.” A sad chuckle escaped my lips thinking back on the foolish boy I’d been. “The guards directed me to the courtyard where he awaited me. When I saw over a dozen juveniles from Elder Clans gathered there, I thought they came to celebrate me.”
Ravena shuddered, her obsidian eyes riveted on me as she listened with morbid fascination. I gazed upon her beautiful face as if to memorize the way she looked before contempt for me filled her eyes. I didn’t want to speak anymore, but I’d already gone too far. If we were to have any chance of a future together, this truth, however horrible, needed to come out.
“The moment I stepped into the courtyard, their malicious smirks and condemning expressions told me something was wrong. That’s when I saw my Lissy, naked and shackled on an altar. Our son, Goliath, wailed for his mother, trapped in a cage like an animal.”
I remembered hesitating when she’d chosen that name for our son. Although pleasant sounding and appropriate in that the boy would grow to be a giant by human standards, the story of his demise at the hand of a smaller man had struck me as an ill omen.
“My father made me watch as the juveniles took turns—fifteen in total, one for each month I’d kept my son’s life a secret. He chose them because their age made them the perfect size to fuck a human without killing her in minutes.”
Ravena’s hand covered her mouth, muffling her horrified gasp. That moment was forever burnt in my memory, and not just the dreadful sight of those men violating my female as I stood there, helpless. The sounds were the worst as they panted and groaned with pleasure under the cheers of the others; Lissy’s desperate cries as she begged me for help; the heart-wrenching screams of my son who had been old enough to understand they were hurting his mother while I, his father, stood there not coming to her aid.
I closed my eyes and exhaled loudly, my hand rubbing the stabbing pain in my chest.
“By the fifth one, Lissy stopped calling out for me. When the last was done, my father held the cage up for me. That’s when she finally understood that the punishment wasn’t for her alone. She begged and pleaded for me to spare Goliath. She even offered to send him away or ask that we sell him as a slave, as long as we spared his life. But that would never have happened. Not with my father. Not after he’d setup this whole circus.”
I ran a shaky hand through my hair, shame and guilt burning like acid in my gut.
“You see, the altar usually has a wall at its head. Once the female has been punished, the sire is expected to bash the child’s head on it so the blood and gore can rain down on the mother’s face. When the deed is done, he is to place the corpse on her chest, there to remain through the night.”
Ravena’s hand slipped to her chest, gripping her heart as if to contain it. Head slowly shaking from side to side in denial, her eyes pleaded for me to say I hadn’t done it. My throat constricted painfully while my blood seemed to turn to acid in my veins. I lowered my head in shame, unable to withstand the condemnation and the disgust that would follow.
“I couldn’t bash his head on that wall, but I couldn’t let him live either. I’d known it all along but wanted to live the illusion of a happy family. When I delayed to act, my father threatened to do it himself. He would have made a spectacle of it, so I broke our son’s neck and placed his dead body on her chest. And thus they remained until the next morning.” My voice choked on those words. I inhaled deeply to get the strength to continue. “Lissy took her own life the following day. From the doctor’s account, she would have died anyway from internal injuries.”
Ravena abruptly rose from her seat and walked away, stopping in front of the waterfall, arms wrapped around her waist. The sense of rejection struck me like so many daggers in my chest. I fisted my hands on my lap, trying to contain the vivid pain that had been my companion for decades, made even more acute at the thought of losing the one female that had reawakened my heart in all those years and given me the desire to wish for more.
“I could have saved her,” I whispered, the same regret gnawing at me. “I could have saved them both by simply renouncing my clan. Instead, I spent the next thirty-eight years with their deaths on my conscience.”
“No, you couldn’t have,” Ravena said over her shoulder in a voice hard as steel, laced with barely repressed anger. “Your father wouldn’t have allowed tainted blood to sully his bloodline. With or without your cooperation, they would have been made examples of.”
I wished she’d turn around so that I could see the expression on her face.
“You’re right,” I conceded, realizing that I’d never looked at it from that angle, too swallowed-up by self-hatred. “He would have destroyed them, and probably killed me as well or tortured me until I recognized the error of my ways. But that doesn’t change what I’ve done. The Fates have made it a point to remind me of my sins” I said, laughing sadly in self-derision. “Six of those juveniles—well, make that four now—sit on my council. Every day, I eat and drink with them, work with them, socialize with them. And all I see, are those bastards rutting over my Lissy while she begs me to save her.”
“Those remaining of the Fifteen?” Ravena asked, turning around to face me.
Her hard stare bored into me. I hated being unable to read her emotions right now, aside from sensing her underlying anger. Where condemnation and contempt would have crushed me, anger I could deal with.
