Chapter Thirteen
Kodran’s beast was snarling to be freed, and it took considerable effort to keep from shifting. He couldn’t shift; not here, underground in the caverns. There was no room.
He stood in the doorway, trying to compose himself before he went to check on the cavern’s occupants. He was itchy and on edge from spending yet another night apart from his heart’s fire. She was infuriatingly stubborn.
Why would she not just accept that he wasn’t doing anything wrong, and let him please her all night long and into the morning? He had plenty of tricks that he had not tried on her yet. Would she really leave him and return to Agora, taking his very heart with her?
After she’d returned to her room, he’d sent Lina to try to talk to her, but Rosamund had politely turned his sister away. Then he’d sent gift after gift, but his servant had returned with them, saying she’d declined them all and said she did not wish to be disturbed again.
This seemed like a dilemma without cure, and it stabbed him to the very core of his being. There were many difficult decisions that came with being the clan leader, but he had never anticipated this.
The whole mess had unfolded before he’d even met Rosamund…but either way, he had done what he had to do. He could never have acted differently.
“Is everything all right?” asked Florian, Leader of the Guard for Kodran’s clan, as he stalked by.
“Of course everything is all right!” he snapped, and his tunic burst into flames. Impatiently, he tore it off and threw it on the floor. “Why do you keep asking me stupid questions? What makes you think that everything is not all right?”
Florian glanced at the flaming tunic. “Oh, nothing,” he said.
From down one of the tunnels, he heard Prenzal’s voice.
“What is he doing here?” he asked irritably. Prenzal was so insubordinate these days that he was one step away from being either exiled from the clan or fried to a crisp. He was the last person Kodran wanted to deal with right now.
“He has come down here every day since you moved the Draell-nar in here,” Florian said. He walked with Kodran around the bend so that Kodran could see Prenzal, who was kneeling next to a Draell-nar female. . She was thin and pale and, like the other Draell-nar, had scars on her face and arms from radiation burns. A little girl clung to her side. Prenzal was handing the little girl something – a small stuffed animal, it appeared – and the girl gave him a shy smile.
“He always spends his time with those two,” Florian said.
Prenzal said something to the woman, who shook her head, looking unhappy. Prenzal nodded, bowed to the woman, and walked away.
He looked startled when he saw Kodran. “I did not expect to see you down here,” he said.
“Nor I you.” Kodran looked at the woman. A widow, as he recalled. “She is your heart’s fire?”
“Does it matter?” Prenzal’s tone was bitter.
It all made sense now – Prenzal’s paranoia about bringing Rosamund here and his fear that her presence was attracting attention. Prenzal’s irritability and snappishness.
“She does not wish to mate with you?” Kodran was puzzled.
Prenzal avoided his gaze, staring at the floor. “She does. But she says she cannot, because they must live in hiding for the rest of their lives, and she will not shackle me to such a fate. I told her that I did not mind, and I would hide with her forever, but she refuses me.”
Kodran knew that feeling quite well.
He put his hand on Prenzal’s shoulder. “It’s horrible, isn’t it?”
“It is like death,” Prenzal said miserably.
“We may yet find a solution to our problem…one that does not cause the Federation to declare war on us.”
Prenzal nodded as if he did not believe him, and walked away without a word.
Saran, the matriarch of the Draell-nar, approached him. When she smiled in greeting, only the left half of her mouth lifted. Her face was more thickly scarred than the others; from what he had been told, she always volunteered to take other people’s shifts when they were too sick to work, and she had received more exposure to radiation than most.
It had been a brutal life they lived, mining precious minerals for Sekari on moons that were so dangerous that most Draell refused to go near them. However, since the Draell-nar were a clan who could not shift, Sekari considered them inferior, and for generations his family had banned them from Duscoria and consigned them to a hellish existence
That was until the brutal cyborg attack they’d suffered a few months ago, which had wiped half of them out. Kodran and his fleet had been in the vicinity at the time, so Sekari had sent them to deal with it, but he hadn’t liked what Kodran had found. That was when Kodran had been forced to make some hard decisions, and to move his clan to a new world.
The Draell-nar had been hiding in the bowels of the Sky Reign clan’s massive star-cruiser for months now, while Kodran’s family prepared the caverns for them to hide in.
