He’d gotten blood on his new shirt.
The feathers would never recover.
It was almost enough to trigger another blackout, but as the male was as dead as he was ever going to be, he’d managed to ward it off. When one lived as long as he had they tended to go a little insane. Memory was such a heavy burden, they all jumbled up and spoke over each other all at the same time in whispers that echoed into reality. He sometimes skipped time or spoke to people that were not there. They were phantoms. Memories of those long dead.
It frightened those that witnessed it and he had something of a spooky reputation here on Erral. His underlings feared him, which worked in his favor. The random bouts of violent rages had absolutely nothing to do with it, of course.
A dark chuckle escaped up his throat and the clerk who was currently going over our quarter rotation spending reports flinched at the sound.
“My Lord?” the clerk asked, staring at Rathal over a hologram hovering above his portable desk that he’d pressed as near to the door as he could possibly get. Though, seeing as how there was a body at Rathal’s feet, he could hardly blame the poor fool.
Rathal waved his hand, dismissing the clerk and went back to watching Callie pace her room on the holoscreen emerging from the arm of his throne. She’d disappeared into her cleansingchamber—uh, bathroom the humans called it—and emerged with clean hair and clothed in her Rijiteran armor. Rathal’s dress had been rejected, which wasn’t unexpected. He’d picked it to enrage her after all. He did enjoy her anger, it made his blood heat. If she knew, it would only make her more angry and the thought tickled him pink, as the saying went.
Even now she was jerking her body across the room in angry stomps, her face set in a harsh scowl. Her armor was her way of telling the world to “fuck off”.
Blessed stars, Rathal loved human curse words! So inventive.
With every enraged pass across the room, the gold of her armor caught the light in such a way as to almost hypnotize him, but he’d managed to tear his gaze away and watch her face instead. She had lovely bone structure, high cheekbones and a full lush mouth. Her brown feline eyes flashed at the door as if she could light it on fire with her mind.
Rathal had seen this face before when she’d first arrived on the Solus Geshgid with the other survivors of the crash. It was her “Drill Sergeant” face. A face that she’d worn often those first few days. He’d been deep into their surveillance system before Anu had stuck her annoying nose into his business and shut him out. It had taken him days to get back in and he was constantly covering his tracks to avoid her detection.
Wretched busybody Empress.
She’d always been that way, even when he was young and hiding behind her legs to avoid the larger children chasing him. She could never leave well enough alone. Always asking questions and meddling in his affairs.
Rathal’s kind, the Ahar, were a younger, smaller cousin of the Rijitera. Not as violent, or as formidable, but they’d had their uses. Wanting a lovely prize was not his sole motivation behind collecting one of the Rijitera’s humans. Risking her wrath was not something he took lightly. Rathal wanted to reconnect withhis long lost cousin, not have her break down his door and rip his head off his shoulders. It was entirely too handsome a head to be removed. Not to say that he didn’t enjoy an angry female, it could be very exhilarating, but he preferred to keep to the ones who couldn’t eat him while he was still alive. Callie was a beautiful woman when angry and thankfully Rathal would never be on her menu.
She was back to kicking the door and threatening him with body dismemberment. She reminded him of those Earth predators, dogs or maybe jackals, that were bred to guard the pharaohs in their limestone palaces that looked and acted so fierce. One wrong move and they’d tear your throat out but a well placed pat would have them soft and pliant under your hand. Rathal just needed to find what it was that made her soft. The goal was her falling deeply in love with him after all. How long would that take?
What did he remember about humans? The last time he’d been to Earth was several thousand years ago. When the Nile ruled all it touched, Egypt was new, and Mesopotamia held the secrets of a race from the stars.
He’d hunted his cousins down after the Fall, after he’d returned from a voyage to find Ara’Ama in smoking ruins, with an airborne virus so hot he couldn’t risk landing to investigate. Rathal found them on some primitive planet at the far edges of a sector with no name and no jump point. It had taken him the better part of two hundred years to locate them. By the time he’d landed on Earth, the Rijiteran survivors had established themselves deep within the culture of Sumeria, hidden in plain sight in the form of humans. How they’d managed the change, he’d never understood, but great breakthroughs in science can happen in the most desperate of times.
They’d shooed him away from Earth after a rather unfortunate incident with Egypt and the worshipping of a jackal headed godthat had taken on his appearance after he’d walked among the humans a time or two. Rathal hadn’t known to hide himself. He’d never interacted with an uncontacted species before and now there was a whole damn religion because of that mistake.
He hadn’t planned on staying anyways. Hide his glorious self under the guise of a human? Absolutely not. Though, had he chosen to stay, his human self would have been a god among sheep, as magnificent to behold as he was in his natural body. He’d left to the sound of humans weeping in sorrow at his departure. He’d learned much of their mannerisms and behavior while he was on Earth though.
They were social creatures, gathering around food to share stories and laugh together. He could have a feast made for Callie. That would be a good place to start in his wooing of her. What else? What did human women enjoy? Jewels? Rathal had never seen any of the human women wearing jewelry, but then they were in space and involved in alien politics. Perhaps he would ask. The best way he had found in understanding what it was that brought a woman joy was to ask and then listen. Granted, he would probably get a flurry of curses and threats from Callie, but that was what broughthimjoy.
He scoffed to himself. He was thinking too hard about this. He would simply show her that he was someone she could trust herself with. Though, now that he thought about it from her point of view, maybe abducting her wasn’t the smartest thing he’d ever done but he’d never been one to think things all the way through before taking action. Besides, if he courted her the old fashioned way, with patience and understanding, it could take ages! Who had that kind of time? There was a war going on. One that she was directly involved in. She could die and then where would they be?
Dead. That’s where. Dead and alone.
No. He had made the right choice and he’d do it again. Perhaps if he fucked her well enough she’d forgive and forget. There was nothing a few spectacular orgasms couldn’t fix. There. It was decided. He would seduce her, wring as many climaxes out of her that it took until she forgot how she got here, and then they would marry and he could spend the rest of eternity proving to her that he was a male that could love deeply and completely. Because at the core of every person, there was a deep need to be loved.
See? Simple.
With that settled in his mind, Rathal stood from his throne and stepped over the body to make his way out into the hall, making a few turns down several halls and into his own quarters. When the door closed him inside, he strode to the balcony, taking in his domain of cobbled together homes and greenery. The station was his greatest accomplishment, a steady accumulation of wealth and influence that he’d used to build a refuge for criminality. In the Unity, despite its carefully crafted image of utopic bliss, there was a deep and dark void of corruption that spread tentacles throughout the known universe, tangling around anyone they could reach and choking the life out of them. It was all a lie. Behind the shimmering curtain lay a snake poised to strike.
There had not been freedom of choice in the galaxies in thousands of years. The Fall had stripped them of not just their Rijiteran rulers and golden age of technology, but of their autonomy as well. Rathal had been collecting people fleeing the Unity’s reach for the better part of the last thousand years. To sustain themselves they hijacked, stole, and murdered their way across the Unity’s space. He had no shame about it, only a sense of pride so big it threatened to topple him over. And now there was a Rijiteran cutting a bloody swath through the Unity’s forceswith her mate and clan of aliens and humans. It was enough to make him downright nostalgic.
Rathal turned from the balcony and went to his storage unit to begin dressing for dinner. He had an irate human to impress after all.
He collected interesting things, and Callie had been at the top of that list. He saw her on the surveillance feeds and knew he had to have her. She and he would marry and Rathal would help her crush her enemies. They were his as well, so he would help his cousin, Jack, kill the Unity anyways, but there was no reason Callie needed to know that.
five
Callie
