Chapter 4

Lorran:

“What is that?” Mylomon stood back, as if the female were contagious.

“A human female. I know you are well acquainted with them.”

“I know it is a human female. Who is she? Why is she unconscious? What did you do? Why is she here?”

Lorran licked his lips, feeling greedy. He had suspicions. He had hope, that cruel and desperate thing.

“I do not know, sir. The female is not listed on the manifest, and the notification of the delivery does not specify. It is possible she is a stowaway.” He continued to answer Mylomon’s questions. “She is not unconscious. She is asleep. I found her in this state, and, again, I do not know.”

“From the Judgment? Impossible. Every person has a registered identity chip and is assigned permissions.”

The two males stood, observing the slumbering female. Her breath snuffled softly, and Lorran melted inside at the sound.

“Scan her chip,” Mylomon ordered.

“I found no such chip. Is she one of the rescued females from the stasis pods?”

“No, they left months ago, and we do not have unassigned females wandering the Judgment.”

“And yet—”

“She must be your match,” Mylomon said.

“No.” The word hung in the air. “I do not have a match.”

“And yet.” Mylomon grinned, and the menace shook Lorran down to the quick of his horns.

“If she were my match, I would have received notification. That is protocol.” He lifted his chin, triumphant. There. He proved it without a doubt. This female, luscious and tempting, was not for him. “The hangar was very hectic. It would be easy to climb aboard the wrong vessel. This is obviously a mistake.”

His comm unit chimed with an incoming message.

Fregging hell.

He read aloud from the message, “I have been matched to a Terran female called Bronwyn Davies. She is expected to arrive in…three weeks? Fregging freg. How long did this take to be delivered?” Lorran angrily punched at the comm’s screen.

This was pointless. He couldn’t keep a mate. He wasn’t responsible enough to have messages delivered in a timely manner.

Images of Gavran, splayed out on his back, helmet askew, and staring up with blank eyes haunted him.

Lorran attempted to move to the helm. Mylomon blocked the way. “Explain why you flee from a sleeping female.”

“We have to return the female. The mission is too dangerous,” Lorran said. He couldn’t keep a child from injuring himself with protective gear. How was he meant to keep a female safe on a rescue and recovery mission?

Mylomon glanced at the sleeping female.

Lorran instinctively positioned himself to block Bronwyn from view. When Mylomon raised a brow, Lorran lifted his chin in stubborn defiance. So what if he acted protective? He’d do the same for any slumbering, defenseless female.

“We do not have the luxury of time. Our mission is a priority. We remain on course,” Mylomon said.

“The warlord does not expect survivors. We are to recover the crew if possible. A brief delay will not be significant.”

“The warlord informed you of that?”

“The shuttle tells me. The basic supplies tell me. If the warlord expected to find a living crew, we would be able to accommodate a crew. We are not prepared, nor do we have the skills for significant injuries.” Lorran waved a hand at the supplies stack in storage. “And keep your voice down. You will wake my—the female.”

Mylomon retreated to the helm. Lorran followed. “We cannot delay. There could be survivors in need of assistance. Any delay could cost lives,” Mylomon said.

“Then I will send a message. We can stop at the nearest station and have her picked up.”

“What part of covert and urgent mission confuses you?”

“What is this attitude? I do not wish to bring a female into a covert, urgent, and potentially dangerous situation. We have no idea what we will find.” Though Lorran suspected. The best-case scenario was a disabled ship needing enough repairs to limp into the nearest station. The worst-case would be debris from the destroyed ship floating in the deep black. No, that was not the worst-case scenario.

“The distress call could be a trap,” he said.

“The probability is high.”

And yet the male seemed unconcerned that they were hauling an unknown female—his mate—into a trap. “That probability as high as system-wide communications being down?”

“Are you questioning your mission? Me? Or perhaps the warlord?”

Stars help him, he was. “I’m questioning the need the warlord has to charge into situations without adequate preparation. This is why the Council does not support him. This is why communications went unrepaired for so long. They punish all of us as retaliation against him. We both agree that whatever is waiting on the other end of that distress call is not good and perhaps requires more than two warriors and a standard medical field kit to fix!”

Lorran’s voice echoed in the confines of the helm.

A slow grin spread across Mylomon’s face. “So you do have a spine. I had my doubts.”

Lorran ran a frustrated hand through his hair. He noticed Mylomon did not deny any of his statements. Lorran’s father served on the Council and spoke of division between members, between the Mahdfel elders and the Sangrin civilians.

Correction: politicians.

It had not always been so. The Council once coordinated movements between the clans, allocating resources and ensuring adequate coverage for the territory. Then the relationship soured. Perhaps it was the inevitable outcome of distrust between the civilians and the Mahdfel, or a politician wanted to control the Mahdfel. Had Lorran paid more attention to history lessons, he could pinpoint the moment the Council actively worked against not just his warlord, but all the warlords of all the clans associated with Sangrin. Paax led the largest clan and commanded the Judgment, for sure, but even a powerful warlord had his limitations.

The Council saw to that as they dragged out the necessary repairs to the communications systems. Their actions blinded and silenced not only the Judgment, but all the clans and every other vessel, station, and base in the Mahdfel fleet.

Did the Council want to invite Suhlik aggression? The raid on the moon colony should have been warning enough. In addition, the Council did not seem overly concerned with the increase in smugglers with sentient cargo. Little holes in the defenses the clans created kept emerging faster than they could be patched.

Was this the spiral that led to Rolusdreus’s trouble? Ren, a male who recently joined the clan, came from that planet, and had made vague statements about the Suhlik invading his home planet twice. Pressure from civilians for the Mahdfel to withdraw created a relaxed environment. This Lorran had read in many history texts. It happened on Sotet and Alva.

The second invasion was always far more brutal than the first. Both were dead planets now.

“I can hear you thinking,” Mylomon said. Lorran expected some barb about the strain from an unusual activity, but nothing surprised him more than the male saying, “Give me your analysis.”

“I do not have enough data to make solid connections,” Lorran said with caution. The reports he prepared for the Security office, and ultimately the warlord, were half intelligence and then projections on that intelligence.

“I have read your reports. Your projections are more than adequate.”

Damn if he didn’t swell with a little pride.

“Suhlik incursions will increase. The Council will be mired in indecision. Any action that they take will be ineffective. This could last for several cycles, years perhaps, but the rate of incidents is increasing. Our warlord will move without the Council’s backing.” Lorran paused. That had not been a difficult leap to make, as Paax had done so in the past, but the next bit required more abstract thought. “Most of the smaller clans will join Paax, but the more ambitious will use the division between Paax and the Council. An outright challenge to Paax will fail as it did previously. Isolating the Judgment from the support of the smaller clans, starving the clan and the families of resources, would be the most strategic.”

“All that from a distress call?”

“This situation has no good outcome,” Lorran said. He gathered intelligence and made the connections. The Academy wanted to place him with the Council, but Lorran declined, not just because his father served on the Council but because politics made his skin crawl. It was unnatural. “I drag my mate into a dangerous situation, I fail. I send her away, I fail. How are you so calm?”

“Terrans are not as helpless as they seem.”

He wasn’t so sure about that. The sleeping female looked remarkably helpless.

“Sit with your mate. Do not let her wake alone.”

Lorran recognized the order for what it was, a command to stop trying to avoid the responsibilities of a mated male.

His mate needed him, but he did not need another person to disappoint.

Wyn:

An alien stared at her. Her alien. Her legal husband, Lorran.

Seated on the floor, his eyes were level with hers and they were so fucking gorgeous. Blue, but like pow, blue. Lapis, even. Flecks of a more brilliant blue just glowed, and if she could have ever made paint do that, she’d be a master painter.

Dark hair flopped playfully forward on his brow. He pushed it back, but it fell forward again. Behind the flop of hair and his striking eyes, his posture proclaimed him to be fairly pissed.

Weird, but okay. In his photo, Lorran looked like the kind of guy who laughed easily. That made her feel like this situation could have a good outcome, that everything would be okay.

“Um, hey. Hi. Hello,” she said. Moving to sit upright, her head protested.

“You are injured,” he said.

“Just a headache from being jabbed with huge needles and shoved into a teleporter. Hello,” she said again. “I’m so happy to finally meet you, Lorran. Where are we going? I mean, I’m trying not to get my hopes up about a romantic get-to-know-you retreat, but you know.”

She shrugged and held up her hands, as if she were helpless to regulate her expectations. Her mother and Sonia told her to get her head out of the clouds, but she was in space, so moderation could suck it regarding her expectations.

Oh. Wyn couldn’t help but stare. He was more handsome in person, and that just did things to her. Mostly, her brain short-circuited, but also her lady parts were waking up from a long sleep. Coma, more accurately.

He was also younger than she expected. Then again, the last time she was this close to a genuine Mahdfel, she was barely four and a half feet tall. The aliens had all looked so old and huge, like grab your mountain climbing gear, we’re going for a hike huge. The roundness to Lorran’s cheeks gave him the appearance of youth.

Still handsome, though.

She gave him her best smile.

He reared back. “Who are you?”

The smile fell. “Wyn? Bronwyn?” He stared blankly at her. “Your mate?” Nothing. “We were matched three weeks ago?”

He blinked.

“There seems to have been a misunderstanding. We need to talk,” he said.

Well, shit. That never ended well.