“Run, N’kal. I'll hold him here until backup arrives.”
Sirens wailed in the distance, but I couldn’t tell how close they were. “You don’t really think I would leave you, do you?” My hands shook as I inspected her shoulder. The knife hadembedded to the hilt, its point jutting out of her chest. Tears sprang to my eyes. “I don’t know what to do, Timber. I am afraid to remove the knife. It could be the only thing preventing you from bleeding out, but any movement you make will exacerbate the wound.”
“Leave it,” she said. Her steely gaze locked onto Voor, who sobbed over Lliaa’s body. Timber’s lip trembled as she spoke. “I’m not moving an inch until he’s secured.”
“Do you have your metal wrist bindings with you? I cannot find the human word.”
“Handcuffs. And no, but I think the Director might have had some on her. Go check her belt. They should be clipped to the side.”
“But—”
“Go! She's not using them anymore. Just grab them and put them on him before he comes to his senses.”
Keeping Voor in my peripheral vision, I scurried over to where the director lay. I knelt next to her to check her belt for the handcuffs, nearly jumping out of my skin when her arm rose to hand them to me.
“Dir—”
“Shh.” She put a trembling, blood-covered finger to her lips. “Quiet.”
Voor’s knife still jutted out from her chest, and her blood soaked the ground around her. How was she alive? Ghostly pale and shaky, yes, but somehow alive.
Dumbfounded, I grabbed the handcuffs and made my way to Voor and Lliaa. Voor stood as I approached, taking a menacing step towards me. I stiffened, prepared to fight, but I need not have worried. Twin clicks sounded behind me as Timber and Director Hall readied their guns. Voor paused, his eyes flitting back and forth between them before he finally lowered his head and knelt with his wrists raised.
“Bested by Earth females,”he muttered as I snapped the cuffs on his arms.“At least Mother did not live to see this humiliation.”
Chapter 32
Timber
By the time the AARO backup arrived on the scene, the drama was pretty much over.
It took some serious convincing to get N’kal to leave in a separate ambulance from me, but after the exasperated EMT demonstrated that two stretchers wouldn’t fit in one bus—and after he nearly passed out from moving too quickly after taking a couple blows to the head—he begrudgingly agreed.
Through some miracle Director Hall survived. Voor missed her heart by millimeters, and she needed several transfusions during her surgery to remove the knife and close the wound, but she survived.
The hospital let N’kal visit me as soon as I was in recovery. He probably wore them down by sheer stubbornness. That, and a little white lie fromMoya’aShil about Xalanites needing close proximity to their bonded mates for proper healing, both tipped the scales in his favor. He even got special permission to share a room with me in the stepdown unit. Not that I was complaining;I felt better with him there, and my doctors commented that my vital signs improved when he was nearby.
Recuperating from the knife wound took some time, but N’kal helped me every step of the way. He listened carefully to my therapists’ advice and followed every instruction to the letter. I couldn’t have asked for a better caregiver during my recovery.
Voor got extradited to Xalan before I was discharged from rehab. Word trickled back that he’d been secretly executed on the flight back, but no one seemed to know for certain. The Xalanite equivalent of a news channel reported that he did not survive the flight, but that was all they would say.
The upheaval caused by Voor and Lliaa’s scheming reached all the way to Xalan.
After some digging, Xalanite officials arrested N’kal’s former nanny, Killaria, for crimes against the crown. The Xalanite military police found birth records listing Killaria and Lliaa as coming from the same litter. Killaria had wormed her way into Jiinal’s household when Voor was still a baby to keep an eye on her nephew’s half-siblings. Through her influence on N’kal’s father, she managed to orchestrate the uprising from behind the scenes. When questioned, she admitted her goal had been to secure a place for Voor on the throne in the future, when Jiinal was dead.
According to the reports from Xalan, N’kal’s journey to Earth had sidetracked Killaria’s plan. With him gone, she and Lliaa worked together to hire a human cop to kill him. That of course didn’t work, so she had to send Voor after him to finish carrying out their plot.
So many lives lost, so much pain, and it was all due to one man’s rejection.
When everything came to light, we learned that the AXL attack at the con had been a total coincidence. No connectionwas ever found between them and Lliaa, and AXL leaders even publicly disavowed any contact with the Xalanite traitors.
Once things settled, Director Hall offered to hook me up with a nice house in Rochester, so I could be close to the intake center for work. I respectfully declined and asked if I could stay on-site with N’kal instead. Since Xalanites still weren’t allowed to live off the grounds, it didn’t make sense for me to live away from him. Besides, we were a team, and my new wages, though considerable, didn’t cover two homes. Now that things had settled down, the AARO was charging N’kal rent since he had obtained semi-permanent resident status after officially renouncing his claim to the throne of Xalan.
As a surprise for N’kal, I arranged for a trip to themoya—for a procedure to reverse his sterilization.
His eyes widened when themoyagave him the good news. “You are certain?” he asked.
I gave him a hug and a kiss. “I’m sure. I know you’d make a great dad, and it’s about time we got started on a family here. I askedMoya’aShil to run some genetic tests, and he thinks our species might be compatible. It’s worth a shot, anyway.”
