Page 18 of Betrothed to the Alien Mercenary

He rose to his feet fluidly and picked me up in his arms as he did it. I found myself cradled bridal-style against his chest, my robe flaring open and exposing my legs beneath the short nightgown. Aramon noticed it at the same time I did, and our eyes clashed. Then he grinned. “Fine. It can wait until tomorrow.” He waggled his brows cheekily.

“No, we need a medic right now!” I demanded. “Better yet, a doctor.” I wanted someone in here this instant to take care of Aramon. He needed a full workup, scans of his brain and heart. I wanted someone to tell me that he was fine because I still couldn’t wrap my head around that possibility.

To my surprise, Aramon rumbled a very vehement agreement. However, when that was followed by, “You’ll have to turn on your illusion device. Will that interfere with his scans of your neck?” I realized he wanted the doctor for me, not himself. It was also the first time I realized that my illusion device had gotten turned off in the scuffle. None of the mercenaries had so much as batted an eye at my changed appearance, and Aramon had gotten me too used to seeing my own skin. I hadn’t even noticed. I couldn’t believe I’d made that kind of mistake, and it made my heart race when I realized what had happened. I was a fool, and this could spell the end of this alliance before it even began. Word would get out now—I had no doubt.

“No,” I said, but thinking of this failure to keep the secret, and the possibility of relief, suddenly made me all too aware of every ache and bruise. My neck was the worst, but I’d suffered scrapes and bumps all over, including several lacerations on my feet from a broken vase. “I want the doctor for you, you idiot. You just fucking died.” Now I was slipping up and using the all-purpose English swear word; it was too easy to let it slip into my vocabulary, and somehow there seemed to be a perfect match for its use in Aramon’s native language, and he liked to use it a lot.

There was a sudden silence after my words. The mercenaries with us seemed frozen in place. Then the one human guy barked a laugh, muttered “fuck” under his breath, and shook his head, which made Aramon turn to him and growl, “Watch your fucking tone, Thatcher. Gene mods and cybernetics or not, I will kick your fucking ass.” And there he went, swearing with that word that translated to “fuck.” The guy, Thatcher, raised his palms in surrender, but he still chuckled, and his eyes were on me.

“A doctor can be called,” Jaxin interjected before Aramon could start in on the guy a second time. He seemed to want to, but he shut up as his boss started talking. “But I do not think it’s wise to call for one. We can’t be sure they are trustworthy. I could request Dravion to do a house call, but it will take a bit longer for him to get here… And you know how he is about leaving the Varakartoom.”

Aramon huffed, clearly unsettled by this information, but he did not protest. “Fine, just bring me the medkit in that case. I’ll take care of my mate myself.” Another sudden silence fell, and I glanced from Thatcher to Jaxin to Tass to watch their expressions. Not surprised exactly, they were all watching me to see if I’d deny it. I wouldn’t. I clung more tightly to Aramon’s neck and wished they’d leave. I was grateful for their rescue, of course, but I was feeling far too naked at this point: no illusion, only a flimsy nightgown and thin robe. It was damn cold too, and I was painfully aware of my nipples poking at the silky fabric.

“Fine. If I may suggest, your Highness,” Jaxin said, directing his words at me with a polite and deferential tone that we all knew I did not deserve. They could plainly see I was a fraud, but Jaxin dipped into a polite bow as if I were still the Xurtal princess. “Leave the bruises; nothing says ‘assassination attempt’ better than visible injuries to those delegates.”

To the sound of Aramon growling furiously that he’d never let that happen, the three mercenaries left the room. Almost, I’d call Jaxin’s rapid departure fleeing, but that was a little too undignified for the massive weapon master. Once the door shut behind them, Aramon stalked from the sitting room to the bedroom and gently laid me down on the bed. When I refused to let go of his neck, he was forced to sit down on the edge next to me. “Idiot? Did you really call me an idiot just now?” he murmured into my hair, a hint of laughter in his voice.

“Yeah, you’re an idiot,” I said, doubling down. Ah, damn it. I still didn’t understand what the hell was going on, and if there wasn’t going to be a doctor, Aramon would have to do the explaining. “Tell me what this doubling is. Is Solear okay? Did it hurt him too?”

The knock on the door prevented Aramon from answering, and I finally released him. He returned in a flash, his boots thudding against the floor as he jogged back in with a large matte-black crate in his arms. The bed dipped when he set it down at my feet, and I gave in, letting him take care of some of my aches and scrapes first. I was not feeling up to physically wresting the handheld medical scanner from him, and that’s what it would have come down to. “But not the bruises around my neck. Jaxin is right; it will be the most convincing evidence.”

Aramon started to protest again—vehemently, and with a lot of swear words, some I’d never heard before. When I pointed out that prolonging these negotiations was like prolonging the threat to my life, he shut up, his teeth snapping together. “As soon as the alliance is signed, the assassins stop having a reason to kill me. I’d be safe. I can deal with a little discomfort for a few hours. I’m tough.”

“I know you’re tough,” he said immediately. “But I hate that you’d be in pain. It’s wrong. You should never be in pain. Never.” He said it in such rough, heartfelt tones that I felt seared to the bone. I couldn’t recall when anyone had ever cared that much about my feelings. Not even Evadne had ever said anything like that, and she’d been basically my only friend.

“I’ll be all right,” I told him, hiding a wince when talking made my throat ache. “And now you need to stop avoiding my questions and talk.” That made him laugh—obnoxious male that he was—and, while shaking his head, he kept working on the cuts on my feet. His hands were infinitely gentle as he rotated my ankle to get a better angle, and I let him care for me because it was nice. But I was starting to struggle with the impulse not to clobber him over the head if he didn’t start talking.

Like he sensed how my thoughts had turned violent, he smirked over my toes at me. Then, he finally handed me the scanner and started to explain. “Asrai twins or triplets often share a psychic gift. Most commonly, it’s telepathy, but there are other options. Solear and I are strong telepaths. Our gift became stronger because of what Solear went through as a teen—caught beneath rubble for over a week while I couldn’t find him.”

He fell silent but, this time, it wasn’t to avoid the conversation—his expression turned introspective as he remembered the past. I took the chance to run the scanner over his chest, checking his heart first. Though I was not a trained medic, I had basic first-aid training that had been meticulously kept up to date. The scanner told me there was nothing wrong with Aramon’s heart; it was beating at a perfectly optimized ten beats a minute. I did a double-take at the number and then searched for my datapad to locate what the average heart rate should be for a healthy Asrai male. I was certain that ten beats a minute was not normal.

“Doubling is, like Jaxin said, a banned practice in nearly every Asrai fiefdom. It’s dangerous, painful, and often results in death for one or both twins.” He said that so casually that my heart dropped into my stomach. Death? He’d risked death to save me—risked the life of his brother to do it. How could he do that? I opened my mouth, a protest on my lips, but he raised a hand to silence me.

“It was our choice, and it was the only choice. I was dying already. Theronix injected me with a paralytic, and it had stopped my lungs from working. If Solear had not come into my mind when he did, I would have died, you would have died, and then Solear would have died of sadness. What would that have achieved? Nothing. It was our only option, and it was our risk to take.”

He picked up the scanner, stared at the reading of his impossibly slow heart, and chuckled. “Ah, that used to be more like forty. No wonder you couldn’t find my pulse.” I hadn’t told him that. How did he know I had been unable to locate his heartbeat? “Side effect,” he said with a casual shrug. “The body is not meant to contain more than one Asrai soul, mind, entity—whatever you want to call it. It overloads the nerves, the heart, the muscles—everything. Briefly, we were super strong, and that allowed us to defeat Theronix. Then the strain became too much, and we collapsed.”

I didn’t think he realized how easily he called himself and Solear’s combined essence ‘we’ when he spoke about it. It was clearly natural to him, but I still struggled to wrap my head around it. He talked about great strain and overloading, but none of that could be picked up on the scanner. The only sign of change was his lowered heart rate, but that did not seem to worry the scanner. “Fine, you’re okay,” I agreed, “and it saved us. But you’re still seeing Dravion when we get back to the Varakartoom. Promise?”

He grinned and nodded, his smile radiant.

Chapter 16

Aramon

She fell asleep quicker than she herself wanted to; I could see it in her face—the way sleep caught her by surprise. I had never planned to sleep tonight, but now I was definitely too wired to even attempt it. My entire body buzzed and hummed with energy, a side effect of a successful doubling; it would fade, though my heart would always remain more powerful, slower, and quicker to heal.

As a young boy, I’d read countless illegal publications about the phenomenon, and that was one of the things the scientists had yet to explain. It was going to be an advantage in the future, so I could only be happy about tonight’s results. No, not entirely. My eyes slid to Evie’s slender, pale neck and lingered on the dark ring of bruises that had formed there. They were still deepening, a ring of purple and black in the unmistakable shape of fingerprints.

She was a brave woman, willing to do whatever it took to see this mission through to the end. She had no idea how badly I wanted to burn the entire Xurtal Kingdom to the ground for what they’d put her through, for what they’d demanded of her. I knew she did not do this out of loyalty to Theronix. If she had any loyalty left, none remained now. She did it because she cared about all the innocent people on the planet who had nothing to do with what had happened to her. I was neither that good nor that kind. They could all burn if it were up to me.

Sliding lower on the bed, I gently tucked her into my arms and took comfort in knowing that she was safe right now. We’d weathered this storm, and we’d come out victors with the next and the next. For tonight, I’d keep her warm and shelter her with my body. Tomorrow, I’d make those lazy delegates sign that fucking treaty, even if I had to hold a gun to their heads.

When she started to stir a few hours later, I’d been stewing in my anger at the situation and my rage for Theronix. Solear had reached out to calm me, but each time he did, he spun off into his own anger, unable to find a cool-headed anchor in me the way he usually did. At least I knew that the captain was at his side, there for him when I couldn’t be.

“Hi,” Evie whispered softly, rolling over. Her warm smile as she greeted me soothed the frayed edges inside of me, the way I usually did for my brother. She was beautiful, but it bothered me that I still had not seen all of her without the Evadne mask. Her red contacts were still in place, as was the green dye in her hair. I had contented myself during the night to steal peeks at the coppery red roots near her skin. That was her—the real her.

“Hi, my love,” I said, giving in to one impulse I could surrender to, not the vengeful, murderous ones, but my passion for her, my desire to claim my mate. When I couldn't fight, I needed to fuck to relieve the tension coursing through my veins. I wanted, needed that with her, right then. She sighed against my lips as I moved close to kiss her, her hands reaching up to cup my head and hold me. I didn’t have words the way I usually did, nothing rose to the tip of my tongue. I simply needed to be with her, and no one else.

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