Alien Prince: (Bride of Qetesh) An Alien SciFi Romance (14 page)

Calder growled something into Garrick’s ear, and I could not make out what it was from my position on the floor. But eventually Garrick just said, “Let the girl up. Let her up, I say.” And the guards obliged. One of them withdrew his knee from my back, and the other reached out to give me a hand. I stood up on my own, and brushed my hands over the skirt of my gown.

“Now unhand me,” Garrick hissed, but Calder hesitated.

“We have you out numbered,” Calder said. “Give me one reason why we shouldn’t kill you where you stand?”

“To begin, friend,” Garrick said, gripping Calder’s sizable forearm with his two small hands, “you appear to have brought fists to a gun fight.” It was true. The Keldeeri Quarter Moon guards had semiautomatic laser rifles in their hands. They could kill off the lot of us in moments.

“True. You would probably kill us, but not before I snapped your neck like a twig.”

I heaved a sigh, pressing my fingers to my temples as I spoke, “We cannot kill him,” I said, however begrudgingly. “We need to find my friends.”

I stepped up to Garrick with the guards close at my heels, and I locked my green eyes on his yellow ones, and I said their names: “Teldara Kinesse. Tierney Mafaren. Ciara Zehr. Sara Yve. I want them back.”

Garrick chuckled, a choked sort of laugh. “If you think I have committed to memory the name of every whore I ever picked up—” Calder tightened his grip. “All right, all right. Just tell your oafish brute of a husband to let me go, and we can discuss this like civilized individuals. Yes?”

I swallowed hard, and gave a nod of my head; Calder let the creature go, and he sucked in a huge gulp of air when he was free. “All right,” Garrick said, straightening out his uniform as he staggered and regained his balance. “These women. I assume they were the ones who were taken with you?”

“They were,” I confirmed.

“I do not know where they are, presently — I was telling the truth! I have not committed the whereabouts of all my slaves to memory. But they may very well still be aboard the ship.”

“I will buy them,” Calder said. “All of them.”

“That, good King, will prove quite a hefty sum. You know many of them are for breeding purposes. And as you well know, certain species are willing to pay a pretty penny to spawn with my girls.”

“I understand that. Name your price.”

“Well, if you’re buying in bulk,” Garrick teased with a disgusting grin between his mandibles, “I don’t see why I couldn’t cut you a bit of a deal. Including your girl? We will call it an even three million.”

“Three million,” Waelden and I echoed lamely in unison, our faces painted with similarly dubious expressions.

“Done,” said Calder, finally extending that hand to seal the deal with Garrick, whose grin could only be described as shit-eating.

Garrick took his hand, and they shook on it. “A pleasure doing business with you,” the little Keldeeri hissed. “Your Majesty.”

The two men arranged for the transfer of credits, agreeing that the women were to be brought before us before any exchange of currency would take place. “You will come to our ship, won’t you, Your Highness?” Garrick asked. “You would be my honored guest. Chief among my illustrious clientele.”

“He would never willingly step foot aboard your goddamned slave ship,” I asserted, and I saw the feint of a smile play on Calder’s lips.

“The lady speaks truth,” Calder said, propping his hands up on his hips. “For the time being, our business has concluded. Bring me the girls, and you shall have your credits.”

Garrick gave a sharp nod of his head, indicating that he required a day or so to get his affairs in order, to contact the buyers to whom he’d sold the girls, and manage the so-called “business end of things” before he could bring us what we were owed.

“But you have my word,” he added at length, “I shall return.” With that, Garrick, the slimy little slaver, gave a shallow bow and brushed past us to leave the room, the Spire, and the planet altogether.

I hadn’t realized I had been holding my breath while he was there, and I heaved a sigh full of relief even as the gathered men began to clamor about Calder, voicing their sudden and immediate concerns.

“You’ll bankrupt us, Fev’rosk!”

“That was not solely your money to spend!”

“All for some human pussy?”

“What will we do?”

But Calder held his hands aloft, immediately quieting the agitated crowd. “Gentlemen, please,” he said, and they brought their din down to a grumble. “I have no intention of bankrupting us. The women I bought were abducted from their homes. They will surely have people who will want them back.”

“That’s right,” I said, adding my voice in support of the King. “The Echelon will not allow you to bankrupt yourselves, not when you have done them so great a service as return their loved ones to them. One of the abducted girls is a Mafaren, the daughter of one of the highest ranking members of the Echelon. You will get your money back. I will see to it personally.”

“When?” Waelden demanded. “I am sorry, Calder, but I had not anticipated that you would put the needs of the humans, the needs of the Echelon, or the fleeting desires of your wife before what is best for your people.”

“I have already hailed the
Atria
,” I said. “When they arrive, as I know they will, I will speak to them on your behalf. Please.” I looked out over the dozen or so Qeteshi warriors in the room around me, trying to muster all of my courage. “Please, you do not know what it was like aboard that ship. If those girls are anything like me, they are utterly terrified. They do not know where they’ll be sent, they do not know what manner of man they will be forced to bed. They deserve better than this. All of the women aboard that vessel do.”

And it dawned on me then that this should never have been about getting my friends back. This always should have been about putting a stop to the Quarter Moon slavers altogether. Calder, whose eyes were locked on me, saw the subtle change in my expression as I spoke and gave an almost imperceptible nod of his head before jumping in.

“Patience, friends, as we work this out, for the good of everyone.” And with that dismissive — and vague — comment, the men began to file back into the banquet hall. Calder and I followed them for a time, but after a few moments he took my hand and led me down a different corridor.

“When we transfer the credits,” I said to Calder, “we will need to implant the data transfer with a set of code that will allow us to track the slave ship.”

“Is that…easy?”

“Easy enough. I’ll write up the code, and we’ll just tell Waelden to send it along with the credit transfer when the slavers return.” Calder bobbed his head in a nod, and we went back to the command room where he stood silently behind me as I cobbled together what little I understood of scripting into a very rudimentary programming.

“Coding is a language in and of itself,” I said to Calder as I worked. “And languages…well, they are just sort of my thing.” The program was designed to run silently in the background, and it would be in whatever computer they used to open the credit transfer. That could be a personal device attached to Thassian himself, or a shipwide program that would allow us to track the movements of the vessel itself. Either way, we would have our man.

“There,” I said at length. “That is the best I can do. I think it will work, but it is inelegant. They might spot it before it can really do any good.”

“It is a start,” Calder said, and pressed a kiss to the top of my head.

“Shall we return to the banquet?” I asked.

“I am through with the public for the night,” he said, and I allowed him to lead me by the hand out of the command room and through an unfamiliar hall. The hallway was dimly lit with incandescent light, and the hall gave way to a modest staircase that led down three flights until I found myself in a vestibule by a small door. Calder pushed through it, and held it open for me. I was met with a blast of freezing air. “This way,” Calder said, and I dutifully followed.

He encircled my shoulders with one strong arm to shield me against the harsh cold of Winternight, and we moved quickly over the packed dirt that surrounded the Spire. The village was quiet, and when I glanced behind us, I could see a warm glow emitting from the Spire itself. That was where most of the town’s inhabitants were, and I wondered where he was taking us that would bring us further and further away from his people.

We jogged through the market. My teeth rattled as I moved, the cold biting through my gown and burning my skin with frost before– we found ourselves by a house near one of the middle rings. The houses were situated in a sort of half-moon around the Spire; this house was about halfway back, just at the edge of the market. The houses looked much the same: sturdy two-story homes made of stone and wood, with shuttered windows and small gardens in the front. And this house, Calder pushed into until the door creaked and gave way. “Inside,” he commanded, and I was all too happy to oblige.

It was slightly warmer inside, but only slightly, and Calder immediately set about building a fire in the pit by the door. This was how it was in Qeteshi households. You had to be careful to walk around the stone fire pit at the front of the house. There were no windows or doors at the back.

Calder lit the fire quickly, and with it came warmth, but also light. I looked around. It looked very much like the home he had been building for himself, alone in the wilderness. I could see immediately that this house had been the model he was trying to replicate. But there was a great deal more furniture in this house than there had been in his other place, all of which was covered in bolts of white fabric and a healthy layer of dust.

“Please, sit,” he said, and set a chair for me right next to the fire. The chair was a beautifully carved piece of craftsmanship, made of dark wood oiled to a bright polish. I ran my fingers over the stunning details as Calder, a king, set about removing the fabric from the furniture. He did it slowly and carefully to make sure that the dust didn’t go flying into the air, and once he had collected everything, he set the fabric by the door. He lit candles in the far corners of the room until the entirety of the small space came alive with candlelight.

The house was lovely, cozy, and warming up with every passing moment. There was a ladder to my right, and I turned and looked up at the loft where the bed was. The shape of the roof and the position of the flue suggested that the most comfortable spot in the house would be that very loft. Warm, but not boiling hot as it would get in this kitchen space shortly. For now, I was content to boil, since I had come so close to freezing.

“This is your home,” I said quietly against the music of a crackling fire.

“Yes,” he confirmed. “This is my home. And yours now, too.”

I scoffed quietly, but smiled all the same. It was beautiful. Tapestries adorned the back wall, and everything was either made of hand woven or knit fabrics, or hand-carved wood. There was a table and chairs, arm chairs with fitted pillows, ottomans for resting your feet, beautiful wooden trunks, and shelves carved into the walls themselves. It was straight out of a fairytale.

“I didn’t want to spend another moment in the Spire,” he said, gingerly plucking the crown from his noble brow. He held the thing in front of his face as though he did not recognize it, and then set it on the table with a sigh.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, rising and going over to him.

“My first act as king, and I nearly bankrupt my people.”

“You did a wonderful thing in there tonight, Calder,” I said, laying my hand on his arm, but he only jerked away.

“Did I?” he asked. “I gave up my people’s fortunes because I fell for some human girl with more problems than anyone else I’ve ever met.”

“I didn’t ask you to spend all of your people’s money on getting my friends back, Calder,” I shouted. “And don’t you dare behave like I did!”

“What would you have had me do instead? Let the slavers keep them? How might that have played out between us?”

Then it was my turn to sigh. “I’m not going to fight with you again,” I said, rubbing lightly at my eyes with my fingertips. “I’m too exhausted.”

“Fine,” he conceded. “Let’s go to bed.”

“Fine.”

Calder climbed up to the loft and relieved the furniture of its protective covers, and I joined him, finding that I was right about the upstairs space, that it was pleasant in terms of temperature. I tugged at the laces of my gown until it was loose enough to tug up over my head, but my sore hand — the one I’d used to punch Garrick in the nose — caught in the sleeve and I sucked in a sharp gasp of air between my teeth as I tugged it free.

“Are you hurt?” Calder said, advancing on me. I was naked in the dim glow of candle light, modesty be damned, and I thought little of it. He was my husband, after all.

“I’ll be all right,” I insisted, cradling the hand near to my torso. Calder reached out to take my injured appendage gently in his overlarge hand, chuckling quietly as he examined it.

“What?” I asked, smiling somewhat in the dark at the sound of his laughter.

“The moment where you reeled back and punched a Keldeeri Quarter Moon Slaver,” he said, his tone low and full of mirth, “that is the moment where I knew I loved you.”

My heart did a full backflip in the hollow of my chest before swan-diving into the pit of my stomach. “You love me?” I whispered the question, as though I were afraid to break the spell if I had misheard.

“Of course,” he said plainly, letting go of my hand and unbuttoning his brocade doublet. “I think I loved you from the first moment I saw you. But when you hit that man, I was certain.”

“But,” I protested, my breasts rising and falling with the rapidity of my breathing, “you yell at me all the time, argue with me.”

“Yes,” he said, chuckling again, “I said I loved you, not that I did not also find you infuriating. Because I do, in fact, find you infuriating.”

“Well,” I snapped, “you are pretty infuriating yourself!”

He grinned. “I never once claimed otherwise.” He kicked off his boots and tugged down his breeches, and was as bared to me was I was to him. I felt a twinge between my thighs, and was made suddenly aware of how desperately I wanted him.