“She can take care of herself.” A small, warm hand slips into mine, and there’s a faint pressure against my side. My mate.
Harl nods and wisely leaves while his hide is still intact.
“Did you mean it or were you just arguing with him?” Lena tips her head up to watch my answer.
I trace along her hairline where pale skin meets paler hair, then draw a line down her nose to rest on her lips. “You’re very weak. Often stupid. But you’re a survivor. You’re like your little bug. Uncrushable. You don’t need Harl or me or anyone.”
“I like that. A lot, actually. But listen—”
I don’t listen. Anyone who claims they like it a lot when their mate says they’re weak and stupid is not worth listening to, because they’re lying. I interrupt her nonsense with a kissinstead, coaxing her lips open, drinking her in. Maybe my last taste, so I want all of it. All of her.
“Listen!” She pulls her head back and fists the edges of my cloak in two hands. “I do need you. Come back to me. Don’t forget. Promise me you’ll come back.”
I wish I could. But too much stands between today and a future together. “My promises mean very little.”
“That’s not true,” she protests.
“What I can promise is that I’ll never forget you, pet. I could forget everything else, the goddess herself, and I’d remember you.”
“Because I’m so stupid and weak?” she jokes.
I nod somberly. “Only the stupidest and weakest female in the Five Planets would fall in love with me.”
She reaches around to the back of her neck and removes the cord holding Elvis’s shell. She loops it around my neck. I look down at it resting just above my heart and frown.
“What’s this?”
“He’s going with you. So you won’t be lonely.”
“I prefer to be alone,” I scoff, swallowing my welling emotions. I know what she means, truly. She is giving me her bug because it might as well be her heart. She trusts me to care for it and return it to her. “I hate insects.”
It’s not a lie. I hate them in general, even though I’m beginning to like this one. He’s grown on me.
“I know.” She grins at me. “That’s why I’m sure you’ll come back, to get rid of him. He’s my insurance.”
Desperate to give her something in return, I take off my cloak and drape it around her. The hangar door’s warning tone sounds, so I quickly clasp the back of her neck for one last, rough, soul-flaying kiss. Then I push her toward the door. “Go.”
The hatch closes behind her and all my senses home in on the sound of her footsteps as she dashes for the exit, away fromthe dangers of the exhaust and the opening hangar doors. Away from the dangers of being my mate.
Goddess, protect her.The prayer lifts out of me, fervent and unbidden. And for the first time in my life, Alioth answers. Well, she doesn’t answer. She just laughs, pure and golden, in my ear. Shedelightsin my misery.
If it’s misery she wants from me, she’ll soon have plenty.
I strap myself into the pilot’s seat and set my course at the nav panel, shaking so much it jostles Elvis out of his shell. When the insect emerges, he seems surprised to be around my neck rather than Lena’s. He waves his antennae accusingly.
“I’m not happy about it, either,” I tell him, stroking his fuzzy forelegs with the back of a claw.
The hangar doors slowly slide open to reveal R’Hiza’s fog. I follow the transport birds out before peeling away from their formation, lifting out of the mist into the bright, dark unknown.
Chapter 27
Lena
Nobody will look at me as Harl and I walk back to his lab. The guys who’ve been friendly and kind to me, swapping favors and cracking jokes, hug the walls of the passageways when I pass, keeping their eyes on the floor.
“Ignore them,” Harl says softly, brushing his knuckles against mine in the Frathik gesture of friendship. “They don’t know what a sacrifice you just made.”
“It’s okay. I get it. I’m a traitor.” I feel numb and empty, like my insides flew away with Lyro and Elvis on that little black, triangular spacecraft. Maybe I should have gone with them.
