The images of the visitors appeared on her screen.
Mina’s heart felt as though it actually stopped.
“I have… I have… I have to… Voso?”
“What does that even mean? Mina? I just need you to—”
Mina waved away Aidtha’s call and her face and voice. She stared at the screen.
She stood up and approached the device. Something was truly, deeply, terrifyingly… wrong.
The device continued to demand her attention.
Not knowing what else to do, bewildered, Mina swallowed and said in a cracking voice:
“Entry granted, Mina Groza, lawful resident of unit 6312. I confirm knowledge of the requesting entrants.”
Knowledge of them.
But that was where all her knowledge ended.
* * *
As she waited, standing in front of the door, motionless, Mina tried desperately to think of what she would say. Her mind was a blizzard of half-finished thoughts, of feelings that had no center or balance. She tried to connect all of the things that had just happened together, and none of them would fit. The door companion glowed and a faint ping echoed through her apartment.
She hesitated, then pressed the screen to open the door.
“What have you done?” was the last thing she settled upon saying, but when the doorframe was filled by Mozok, Voso’s large body visible behind him, her interior thoughts dissolved, and her entire soul melted inside of her. She could barely stand, let alone speak.
Oh, how she wanted to hate them, how she wanted to slam the door on them. But that wasn’t what she was going to do, she just couldn’t.
Instead, to her own frustration, she started crying.
When Mozok rushed in to wrap his arms around her, it only became worse.
“What… what is… happening? What have you… why are you…?” she sobbed.
She heard the two of them speaking Draquun rapidly to each other. Next, she felt Voso’s hand on her arm, fingers combing through her hair. The heat of Mozok’s breath as he whispered into her hair at the crown of her head. “Our little Human, Mina, it will all be as you want, exactly as you want, but you must allow us to have one more chance.”
CHAPTER18
Mozok worked his fingers beneath the knot of the black tie, frowning in his very subtle way. Mina approached him to assist, smiling.
“This is a very uncomfortable costume,” Mozok told her plainly.
Mina smiled. “You only have to wear it for a few more hours,” she said, loosening it as much as she could without destroying the aesthetic of the traditional Human wedding suit. She grinned at Mozok and pecked him in the cheek affectionately. “Thank you,” she said.
Mozok gave the tie another tug. “I really don’t have much of a choice,” he half-grumbled, which only made Mina smile more. Mozok put on quite an act, but over the past few weeks on Earth, he and Voso had explained to her—and even more importantly, backed up their words with actions that left it impossible to disbelieve them—what it meant to be mated to a Draquun and a Herstrakaa.
Mozok could no more deny her requests—large, tiny, grand—than he could cease breathing. In fact, to hear Voso tell it, the impulse was exactly like the impulse to breath, the pain growing the longer he denied what she wanted.
Mina had at first refused to believe any of it. Until she had actually collected her stunned parents from the spaceport, she had refused to believe that Mozok and Voso had retrieved them from Callia-14. Mozok had paid their debts, purchased them a new home on Earth, and arranged for their immediate transfer on the speediest luxury transport ship available.
While Mina had languished in wait for a space on a cargo ship from BKG, staving off Paolo’s questions with career-damning lie after lie about the contracts, forging documents and convincing Paolo that all was in order—with the sole goal of obtaining her passage home, to deal with consequences later—Mozok and Voso had located her, discovered her plans, and then arranged for everything to work out exactly as they believed she had desired.
Mozok had, evidently, tried very hard to resist his primal instincts and undo Mina’s plans. He had drafted orders to seize what was now Mina’s property and to exclude BKG from any rights to Old Celox. But it had proved impossible for him to do so. Voso had recounted his many days and weeks of torment as he searched for Mina, discovered her plans, and then tried desperately to undo them, only to find himself, for the first time in his life, incapable.
It had been Voso who had dug deeper into Mina’s life and career, Voso who had discovered that Mina’s parents were trapped on Callia-14, and Voso who had concocted the plan to save Mina’s parents, and then to come to Earth on a faster ship, to attempt to convince Mina to come back to them. Mozok had admitted defeat: he could not live without Mina, he could not deny her wishes, and so he had to let the city of Old Celox go.
