It must be Iyanna.
“Kiera? Kiera, are you there?” she heard her friend calling.
Kiera seized the connection like a drowning woman grabbing a rope.
“Iyanna!” she gasped. “Why did they take him? Why did the warriors take Brux? Did you send them?”
Iyanna’s distress came through at once, sharp and nearly frantic.
“Oh honey—are you okay? Did they hurt you?”
“No, they didn’t hurt me!” Kiera snapped, then immediately felt guilty because Iyanna was clearly worried. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m just—God, I’m upset. They just came and took him like he was some kind of criminal!”
There was a pause. Then Iyanna said carefully,
“Kiera, you have to understand–after I spoke to you, I told Dra’vik everything you told me. And it turns out that Buck–or Brux–is a kind of criminal.”
Kiera’s stomach dropped.
“What? What the hell are you talking about?” she demanded.
“It has to do with the kind of Monstrum he is,” Iyanna explained. “When I told Dra’vik you were living with a Lykan, he got extremely concerned. Kiera, unbonded Lykan males can be extremely dangerous. If they go feral they can kill everyone around them!”
Kiera stared numbly at the open sky where the shuttle had disappeared.
“That isn’t true,” she said fiercely. “That isn’t true about Brux.”
“Honey—”
“No!” Kiera snapped, filling her mental voice with desperate conviction. “I’ve been helping him control his primal side. He’s not some monster running loose! Even when he was fully a wolf he never hurt me. Never!”
Iyanna’s grief and worry pressed against her mind like a weight.
“The fear is that he could lose his mind completely and slaughter everyone around him,” she said softly. “Dra’vik says that’s why Lykans weren’t allowed on the Mother Ship in the first place. They were considered too dangerous–too unstable. Brux is being taken before Commander Rarev and the Monstrum Council for stowing away…and for endangering a female.”
Kiera gave a broken laugh that was half sob.
“Endangering me? He’s done nothing but save me and help me and love me!”
“I'm so sorry,” Iyanna said, and now she really did sound as if she might cry. “I didn’t understand how much this would hurt you. I thought—I thought if he really was dangerous, I had to protect you.”
Kiera closed her eyes. For one awful second, she was just too upset to think at all. Then she said fiercely,
“I need to be there. I need to tell them they’re wrong. If he’s going on trial, I need to be there to speak for him.”
“Yes,” Iyanna said at once. “Yes, of course you do. I’ll come get you in a shuttle so you can speak for him at the trial.”
“I’ll be waiting,” Kiera sent back. “Hurry!”
“I will, honey–I’m sorry!”
The mental connection faded after that, leaving Kiera alone with the chiming trees and the open sky and the hollow, aching space where Brux should have been.
For a few moments she simply stood there…then she wandered back into the home-dome in a daze.
Should she change clothes? Put on something more formal? Something that would make her look respectable and serious before Commander Rarev and the Monstrum Council?
She opened her dresser drawer and stared at its contents without seeing them. Then she closed it again. No–she couldn’t think about clothes…couldn’t think about anything but getting to Brux and telling them they were wrong about him.
