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“Keep her here,” Rex orders his men. “I must report to the President.”
* * *
“STELLA!”
My father booms my name from his office. I know he is in his office, because he is never anywhere else.
I hear his footsteps coming down the stairs, shaking the old wood beneath the weight of his gravitas.
I rise to my feet and move toward him out of some old instinct.
He sees me as I leave the vestibule and rushes toward me like a force of nature.
My father is a massive man. He stands well over six feet in height. I get my hair and eyes from him. His dark locks are long and curling, cascading over his shoulders. His dark eyes are ringed with dark lashes and even darker brows. He has seven wives, and counting. But there’s only one daughter. Plenty of sons. Only one. Me.
He looks like a pirate, basically. A massive, swashbuckling, city-controlling, probably-evil-except-he-is-my-father-so-I-can’t really-dislike-him-properly, pirate.
“Stella! My little star!” He engulfs me in the biggest, warmest, most relieved hug.
Tears escape my squeezed eyelids. I have missed my father. He wanted the best for me, but his best for me is my worst for me. Didn’t mean he didn’t love me. Doesn’t mean I don’t love him.
“Rex tells me of incredible adventures,” he says. “My Stella, among the stars. I thought you had run away, but you were leading my best men to treasures beyond any found anywhere on this world.”
He’s giving me a lot of credit, and I know that’s partially because in spite of wanting to marry me off, my father truly believes I could never do anything wrong.
I wish so badly I had been born a male. If I had been, I would have been one of his finest generals. I would have conquered every inch of this city and all the remnant cities beyond. Instead, I have been relegated to an object of tender care but not a person worthy of respect.
“Why do you sob so?”
“I fell in love in the stars, Father. Rex and his men killed him. The one I loved.”
“You met a man out there?”
“A man of sorts. He had fangs and tusks and he was big and he was strong. And they killed him because they feared him.”
My father has undoubtedly already been briefed on the alien situation. There is no way he does not know what I am talking about, but he plays ignorant so that I can tell him the situation as I see it.
“This man, he was an alien?”
“Yes, but he was just as we are inside his head. He had thoughts. He had feelings. He had… he had a life. And Rex took that because he thinks I’m a thing. But I’m not a thing. I’m me.”
“Of course you are you, Stella. There is nobody like you. Not on this world, or off it. Of course an alien fell in love with you. What other choice would he have had?”
My father’s excessive flattery is almost enough to make me smile. He has such a charismatic way about him it is easy to forget the heinous cruelties done in his name. But I won’t forget this cruelty. Not the one that wiped Kahn off the face of the universe.
“We are going to have a great celebration in honor of your return,” my father tells me. “You need to immerse yourself in this world, and in all the goodness that awaits you here.”
I know I don’t have any choice, and I know that pretending to play along is the only way to save face, which is what my father really wants. Nobody is going to talk about my running away. Not in any way that acknowledges how miserable and desperate I was when I did it. That’s one small mercy, a little silver lining in this complete bullshit. I won’t be humiliated, because humiliating me means humiliating my father and nobody dares do that.
In some ways, I’m getting away with everything.
In other ways, I’m getting away with absolutely nothing.
13WEDDING BELLS
“Let’s take that collar off, it really doesn’t fit the dress.”
A very nice woman is fussing with my hair and my makeup and everything else about me. It is her job to ensure that I look as good as I can possibly look. My appearance in the next few hours matters more than it has ever mattered in my life, and much more than it will ever matter again.
