“You would?” she whispered, meeting his eyes once more.
“Pax,” he murmured, holding her gaze, never looking away. “As big as you would want. You could grow your daisies. Your vegetables. Your plants.”
Valerie smiled. It was a strange sensation, to feel such sadness and longing and excitement over his words. Because she knew that it would never happen…but it was nice to dream that it could. It was nice to dream of a life with Dravka, away from Everton, where they might be free to…
To be with one another. To love one another, openly. To touch him when she wanted. To smile at him. To know that he was safe and happy and free.
She decided to play along.
“And what would you want?” she whispered, her toe twitching with her bold question. “What would you want for our quiet little home with the garden that you’d build for me? A working area for all your inventions you would create?”
Dravka had told her about his hobby when he lived on Kerivu. He’d worked as a trader, within the city limits of Kerivu’s capital, to keep his sister and his father supported. But during his work, he came across little trinkets and spare parts that he would bring home and craft into something new.
He’d told her of a light he’d made for his sister, made of piping and shards of broken glass. When lit, it spun slowly and reflected shimmering stars through the glass, onto the walls of her room.
Dravka looked at Valerie now, his gaze intense and steady. She swallowed, feeling something in the room change, as it always did, and warning bells went off in her head even as her belly fluttered.
“Isn’t it obvious what I want?” he rasped.
Valerie’s lips parted at the guttural emotion she heard in his voice. All ragged and raw.
“Dravka,” she whispered, the heat in her belly blooming, trailing over her, warming the room and making her shift in her place on the floor.
She saw his gaze drop to her lips and she couldn’t help but nervously lick them, knowing that they were entering dangerous territory, as they often did. Those opal eyes flared to life, his pupils visibly dilating in the low light of the room. Valerie shivered at that look, her nipples pebbling to tight peaks underneath the band of her bra. She hoped her dress was thick enough to hide the evidence of it.
With a rough sound in the back of his throat, he tore his eyes away and silence dropped over them. All she could hear was her heartbeat in her ears, frantic and desperate.
“I want…” he started after a moment, his head tilted towards the wall in front of him, where the sole window in his room was.
It was getting dark. The shadows across the room were deepening. Clients would be arriving soon and Valerie would need to be downstairs to greet them with a smile on her face, as much as it shredded her insides. In a few hours, Dravka would be inside another human woman, releasing his seed inside her, and it made her want to crawl in his arms and never let him go.
But she couldn’t.
“I want a lot of things, Val,” Dravka finally finished.
She sobered.
What went unspoken was that he would never find what he wanted on Everton. Not while he was working in Madame Allegria’s brothel, not while he was one of the infamous Krave.
Their dream was just that. A dream.
And sometimes, they both didn’t want to wake up from it.
She wanted a home with him. She wanted to be safe and free with him. She wanted him to build her a garden so she could spend long afternoons with her hands deep in fragrant, black soil. She wanted to watch him make new things from old things and watch his hands and his mind create something beautiful. She wanted a family, she wanted children with him—children with beautiful opal eyes like their father.
She wanted to love him without feeling shame for it.
“Me too,” Valerie whispered, blinking back her tears so he wouldn’t see them.
Chapter Seven
Valerie knew it was morning when she woke, though it was pitch black inside her windowless room.
Next to her small bed, a lamp flared to life when she tapped the base. She squinted, blinking, allowing her eyes to adjust as she stared up at the ceiling of her room.
She’d made the small space her own over the last five years. It was meant for storage, but it fit a small bed, a dresser, and a console table that she used to place her knick-knacks. She’d taken a rug that Madame Allegria had ordered her to dump when it grew too threadbare for the clients’ rooms and placed it on the hard flooring. The walls were dark in color but Valerie had hung old photographs she’d found years ago, photographs of Old Earth. Landscapes of hills and blue skies, of wildflower-ridden fields, of misty, mysterious forests.
Valerie was grateful for the room, though it was next to the room where Madame Allegria had whipped her, had nearly killed her. The room where she punished the Keriv’i too if they displeased her.
