A hot breath brushed my ear. “Mmm, don’t stop, darling.”
I snapped my head to the side, my teeth snapping on empty air as he jerked his head out of my way with a laugh.
“Bite me and I will bite back,” he warned. A hot slow lick to the side of my neck had me freezing in place, suddenly very aware of where I sat. “And I’d make sure you’d enjoy it.”
“Hell will freeze over first,” I ground out, my fists clenched at my sides where he had my arms pinned.
“We shall see.”
He stood, taking me with him like I was made of air, and plopped me down on my chair and took his seat again. “But finish eating first. Important decisions shouldn’t be made on an empty stomach.” He held out my steak knife, his eyes mocking me. “Here dear, you’ll be needing this.”
I snatched it, and glared at him.
“Eat. You can go back to your room once you’re done.” He rose and stood over me. “I will give you three days to decide. Three days to ponder your situation and whether or not you can truly afford to say no. I’ll see you in the morning. Sleep well, darling.” He winked at me and left. The twins had stood sentinel at the doors the whole time and they looked at me now with matching smiles. I flipped them off and finished my meal.
six
Callie
Iwokeuptoa low roar of noise, like being outside a concert venue, and sat up in bed with an irritated groan. Rathal’s mini palace was in the core of the station, which meant it was surrounded on all sides by the city. It was noisy as all hell.
Erral was completely self-sufficient and had over ten million people living on it.
The station had five pointed “petals” like an elongated daisy, which could open and close as needed for defense. There were several floors on each petal, but the core was more like a massive dome filled with artificial sunlight, where most of their cultivated greenery was. I was told that there were great gardens here and fields of hydroponic farms that grew all of the food the station needed.
I’d pictured in my mind a hodgepodge station barely holding together with maybe a few hundred raggedy pirates living on it. The holographic images the twins had shown me had quickly disabused me of that. Oh, the pirates were still a raggedy group,and the station was still slapped together with scrap, but it wasn’t small. Rathal was the king of a city larger than New York. It sounded like it too. My room might not have any windows, but that didn’t stop the noise from filtering in through the walls.
I rolled over with a groan and brought my ridiculously fluffy pillow over my head to try and muffle the chatter, but it didn’t matter. I was awake. It didn’t feel like I’d been asleep long. The twins had kept me up late into the “night” explaining a few things for me and answering some questions.
One of the first things they’d told me was that since the station wasn’t near a star, there obviously wasn’t daylight. The artificial sunlight was on a set schedule of ten hours of light and twenty hours of dark since there were more nocturnal species on the station so they’d won the majority vote for longer nights. Which was fine with me, since I now preferred the night. I was active during the day, but I felt sluggish. The half spider doctor, Ghix, had prescribed a hell of an upper pill for me that I was sorely going to miss here.
There was also the bit of weirdness in finding out that the twins, Rixa and Hassa, whom I had absolutely no hope of ever telling apart, were related to Rathal. Distant cousins like he was to the Rijiterans (which, hello, wasn’t good news) much like dogs, coyotes, jackals and wolves were related. The Rijiterans had just made themselves genetic superfreaks with their tech and gene meddling.
Now the twins weren’t nearly as old as Rathal, being closer to a hundred in Earth years, so speaking to them didn’t make me want to stab anyone. I’d even managed to get sort of used to their eerie laughter.
I’d been warned that Rathal was old.
Nearly as old as Anu, give or take a few hundred years, and that came with… issues. Apparently, most ancients tended to get a little odd. Which didn’t make me feel too hot about mynewfound immortality. Eternity loomed in front of me like a sucking blackhole of doom if I survived this war and nothing managed to kill me in the future. I would live forever now. My parents—if I could convince them to move to a new planet with me—could live forever if I got them nanos. My future children would live forever. It was enough to make me break out in a cold sweat. For some reason, an eventual death was easier to think about than living forever. Everyone thought it would be cool when they read about it in books, but the actual prospect of a life that wouldn’t end unless someone killed me or I died in an accident that did catastrophic damage was something that made my stomach swoop every time I stopped long enough to think about it.
But that was if I survived this stupid ass war I’d gotten myself involved in. I had to get the hell out of here and get back to Korsal. With that thought ringing in my head, I tossed the covers aside and got up.
The dress hanging on the hook next to the bathroom door stopped me cold. It was another flimsy excuse for clothes, nearly sheer and with so little fabric that it would maybe cover one nipple and one labia lip if I really squeezed into it. A snarl worked its way up my throat while I looked around the room for any sign of cameras. I knew they were in here. I could feel an itch between my shoulder blades. It wasn’t there in the bathroom, thank god, but it was here in the bedroom.
“I’m not fucking wearing that,” I growled, stomping to the bathroom to shower. I’d slept in my armor, which wasn’t the most comfortable thing to do. It was subdermal, and I couldn’t actually feel it when it was on as it acted more like a hardened second skin, but it was the mental aspect of being covered in metal while I was in bed that made me feel itchy and it had taken forever to fall asleep.
The twins were my liaisons to the station, as well as my guards. Rathal had tasked them with fulfilling my requests within the framework of my being a prisoner. I couldn’t ask them to get me new clothes, for example, but I could ask them to get me something as close to a bonnet as possible, a wide tooth comb, a spray bottle, a good leave-in conditioner, and if it existed in space, some goddamn hair gel.
They’d delivered, sort of. They’d brought me a long strip of green fabric, about four feet long and a foot wide that was softer than any silk I’d ever touched. I’d detangled with my fingers again before they’d brought me new stuff. I’d then used the new deep conditioner and prayed it wouldn’t ruin my hair before making a passable head wrap before falling into bed, and as I took it off in front of the mirror, I was pleased to see that my curls looked less dry today than they had when I first arrived.
A whole ass week laying on the floor of a cell will do that to you. The twins had dropped that little nugget of information unprompted, so I knew exactly how long I’d been gone for now. I added it to the tally of reasons I was going to murder Rathal slowly and painfully.
I’d showered last night before dinner and used the soap provided and utilized the oil, but I’d snatched that conditioner out of the twin's claws when they’d brought it to me with damn near tears in my eyes. Apparently, Rathal enjoyed a good moisturizer for all his fur, and the twins figured it would work on my hair well enough.
I sprayed my hair until it was good and damp, paying close attention to the longer curls on the top of my head, and then added the oil. The comb was some type of wood, or maybe cork? I wasn’t entirely sure, but it worked well enough. I’d thought my finger detangling had done a good enough job, but the comb humbled me. Next came more conditioner, which was pretty thick and smelled like something a male would use. A kind ofteak woodsy smell that wasn’t unpleasant, but it made me a little uncomfortable to be smelling like my enemy. It wasn’t entirely a human emotion. Another aspect of my new normal.
Beggars couldn’t be choosers though. Once that was all worked in through my hair, I took about a quarter sized dollop of pearl colored gel—which had the same consistency as a raw egg and something I wasn’t the biggest fan of—and prayed it wouldn’t flake and worked it throughout my hair with my fingers. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in my heart that this was going to work out the way I wanted it to, but in the end it looked okay. I was in need of another cut, as the sides and back of my head were long enough now that the line pattern on the left side by my temple was barely visible now, but all in all, my curls were defined and didn’t look too dry and they weren’t matted so that was a win in my book.
Back on Korsal I’d had everything I needed, as Ghix had made it his personal goal to make sure us humans had all our creature comforts and my hair was high on my list of things that made me comfortable. I made a mental goal of getting back to Korsal before my next haircut. No one but Ghix was cutting my hair.
