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I feel him slump in my grasp as he gives up on trying to negotiate his release.
“That woman needs to be captured and returned to Earth,” he rasps out.
“Why?”
“Because she belongs to a very powerful man.”
“She belongs to a very powerful me,” I snarl in his face, tusk and fang slicing a fraction of a hair of an inch in front of his smooth human skin. “Do you imagine that any human man would have a greater claim to Stella than I do?”
“Her father,” the human says. “She is the daughter of Antoine, the Rex Regem Hierophant. The most powerful man on the planet. General of the Last Armies. Deliverer of the Masses. He who commands the Atomic Forces.”
He names all these titles with the gasping, rasping breaths of a desperate man near passing out, but too enamored of the one he is naming to dare miss a ridiculous syllable of any one of them.
I look over at Arkan.“Do we know this Rex Regem Whateverelse?”
“Might be a more recent political development.”
“We don’t pay enough attention to their societies. We take them without thinking. It has to stop.”
“You’re going to choke him out,”Arkan reminds me.
Once again, I very nearly forgot about the man writhing in my grasp.
When I direct my gaze to him, his lips are starting to turn blue. I drop him, not because he deserves release, but because I want to ask more questions and I am clearly on the verge of an inadvertent slaying.
He drops to his knees but quickly attempts to rise. This motion I arrest with a firm palm, pressing him back down. It is about time this human learned his place.
“Tell. Me. Everything.”
10GUILT
Stella
It’s a long time before Kahn comes back. That means it is a very long time to think about what I’ve done. The feeling of guilt only deepens as the minutes pass into what have to be hours. I start to get a little hungry, then I stop being hungry as the guilt eats my appetite.
“Did you kill him?”
“Why did you not tell me that you were a runaway?”
I stare at him. He still has that vibe going on. That big, mad, alien vibe that makes me reluctant to say what first comes to mind when I hear that question: none of your business.
“The first step to getting away with running away is not telling people that you’re a runaway,” I say. “I wanted out of the city. I wanted out from under my father’s influence. He was using me, and he was going to trade me for power, basically. I didn’t want to be forced into marriage or made to live a life that was never mine. I wanted to be free. That’s why I ran. That’s why I’m still running.”
“You said the soldiers would kill you if they found you.”
“They may as well. It would end my life one way or another. Now they know I’m on this ship, they’re going to do everything in their power to turn it around and get it back to Earth. They will do anything to please my father. Absolutely anything. They’re obsessed with him. He’s like a cult leader. With a lot of weaponry.”
“Understood,” he says. “Is there anything else I should know?”
“Probably a lot of things.”
His tusks and fangs clamp together with the action of his jaw. He dos not like my flippant response. He wants me to take this seriously and tell him everything. I bet those soldiers already told him. I bet Rex told him all sorts of shit.
“No more secrets,” he says, stepping forward to pick me up from the bed. I don’t resist. I’ve been anticipating this from the moment I saw him grab Rex.
“Did you kill him?”
“Not yet.”
