AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Take me back!” she whispered, opening her eyes. But the drug pulled her under again. She squeezed the hand. “Have to wait… I have to wait…”
And she was asleep again.
CHAPTER 19
Torian breathed a sigh of relief, even though Quaia was talking nonsense. She was heavily sedated, but she still had her wits about her, and seemed to have avoided any brain damage. He had arrived just in the nick of time, and with the proper medical equipment on his ship to treat Quaia rapidly for extreme hypothermia and oxygen depletion.
“She’s quite stable,” Avalar told him, coming into the treatment room. Avalar had faithfully followed him on this crazy adventure, and he was grateful to her for that. “You can leave her with me.”
Torian turned to Avalar to see a look of concern on her face. They had passed through a very hairy section of a free-floating cluster of asteroids to extricate Quaia, chasing down her distress call and arriving hours after her final message had been sent.
He had been afraid, after capturing the ship in the cargo bay of the Sangsen, that Quaia was almost definitely dead. But his crew had obediently worked to extricate her from the wreckage, and she had miraculously been alive.
“We’re clear of any asteroids,” he told Avalar, who returned a disbelieving look to him. “I promise.” Then he took Quaia’s hand in his and pressed it to his lips. “I don’t want to leave her side.”
Avalar bowed her head slightly before returning to the corridor, a smile on her lips. “As you wish, Captain Torian.”
Torian pushed a stray hair from Quaia’s face and checked her stats again, for good measure. When they’d retrieved her, her lovely teacup pout had been blue, her pale skin almost gray. A rosy pink had returned to her cheeks and her lips were moist and colored again. He placed his hand on her forehead to feel for himself that she was returning to a normal body temperature. Then he smoothed her hair gently from her face and kissed her forehead again.
It terrified him to think of what would have happened if he’d been even a few hours later. He’d arrived at her station, ready to at last whisk her away as he’d promised, his nerves on edge, his heart bleeding in his chest. Quaia hadn’t responded to any messages he’d sent to her, and while he had hoped and tried his best to believe that her silence was a result of the meddling of High Mother—who still clawed back as much power for herself as she could manage—he hadn’t known that for sure.
All his planning, all his manipulations, had come down to that single moment. He’d used all of his regained political capital in one go, getting High Mother a meeting on the Imperator’s Congress ship, with the sole intention of removing her meddlesome and bothering presence from the station long enough to get a message to Quaia.
But when he had arrived there, Quaia had already departed. There, in that moment, he’d made a crucial decision: it was reckless to follow her to a distant hyperspace gate, where he would only have to wait for her return from her run. It smacked of desperation and lovesickness, and it unnecessarily wasted fuel.
But he wasn’t able to wait a single moment longer than he had to in order to find his love, his mate, the human woman he couldn’t extricate from his mind or his heart. He lived now with the sole purpose of finding her, of taking her with him to start a new life. Of possessing her, completely. Of breeding her and caring for her as a proper Voklish male would: fiercely, forever, and with obsessive zeal.
Her ranking commander, a shady type named Farange, was nonplussed by his decision. “You got some kind of supership, there, running on nothing?” he had laughed. “You’ll burn more fuel heading out that far than I go through in a quarter-cycle. She’ll come back on her own—on my dime, I might add—in less than a full day cycle!”
The fuel supplier of the station, on the other hand, had been very encouraging.
It didn’t matter. None of it mattered except that he needed to see Quaia, to fold her small body into his embrace, to feel her pulsing heart beating against his chest. He needed to calm the wild, furious clawing of his Voklha. It attacked him more furiously than a chemical addiction, never letting him stop, never letting his thoughts wander too far from her, never quenched.
In the end, if it hadn’t been for this force within him, he wouldn’t have set out on his ridiculous expedition. And he never would have heard her message, her quiet, cracking voice on the distress channel.
Captain Torian, she had said. If you’re out there…
And so now he had to wait. Wait for his beautiful human to wake up, to heal, to recover. All he could do was hope and pray to gods he didn’t truly believe in that when she awoke, she would remember him. And that she would feel however humans felt—humans! without a Voklha—about him, enough to say his name at the end of her life, enough to go with him to start a new one. As his mate, as his love, as his reason for existing. The only thing that would ever satisfy the desire and single focus of the freakish Voklha living inside him where it was never supposed to be.
He squeezed her hand gently and brought it to his lips again, grateful that her skin was warm and dry, a good sign. “I’ll never leave you, my love.”
CHAPTER 20
Avalar was obviously having trouble answering her questions. She was hiding something, and she was feeling ashamed of it, but no matter how Quaia implored her, or how often, Avalar always retreated to doing what she was doing now—looking at the floor, a faint smile on her lips, and shaking her head.
“I apologize, but I simply cannot divulge this at this time,” she repeated, for maybe the tenth time.
“Why?” Quaia groaned, throwing her hands up in exasperation. “Avalar,” she said, sighing, trying a new tack. “You are my friend, aren’t you? I mean, it’s a weird friendship, but you are, right?”
Avalar lifted her eyes quickly. “Of course,” she said, and seemed to genuinely mean it.
Quaia crossed the room and held her by the shoulders, wanting to shake her. “Then please tell me what you know… this is crazy! I feel like I’m going crazy. I just do not understand why he can’t even… come in here and just say… ‘Hello! Remember me? I rescued you and now I want to take you with me on my ship, but I have this super-secret stupid reason that I can’t talk to you right now, so… see you in a bit.’ Why? Why can’t he do that?”
Avalar looked at her hands, still with the same strange smile on her face. “He cannot.”
Quaia released her shoulders and looked up at the ceiling. “Whhhhhhhyyyyyyy?” she groaned. “Ugh. I’m going crazy in here. What are we waiting for?” She stomped her feet and clenched her fists, feeling like a child, but not caring. “Avalar? Please at least tell me that.”
Avalar nodded solemnly, still smiling, which was the only reason Quaia was putting up with her nonsense at all. The smile indicated that something good was in store at the end of this pointless—at least from Quaia’s perspective—ordeal. “We are waiting for your health.”
