Page 34 of Taken to Heimo
For a moment, I panic, thinking she’s going to come speak to me and ask me questions that I won’t be able to answer, but she steps right past me. She doesn’t even look at me. It’s almost like she didn’t even notice me here even though she’s xoking branded into my forehead. A beacon for me to carry for all time.
I charge out after her into the spacious hallway filled with doors to other birthing chambers, each just as opulent as this. There are hundreds of these on the new birthing center built on the human colony meant to serve human, hybridandVoraxian females. It is meant to be the pinnacle birthing center across all Voraxia, as if they wanted to create a specific planet where children of all kinds were worshipped.
What will Svera’s kit look like?
The thought makes me stagger and liquid rushes up my throat along with a heaping of bile. But I am not sick at the thought of Svera’s potential kit.
I am sick at the thought that if I don’tfix this, it won’t also be mine.
I can scent the baby on her arms, its wet matter clinging to her clothing still. It’s confusing me. Making my brain hurt. My Xanaxana is thrilled.
The memory of her naked flesh writhing beneath mine haunts me in the solar’s light. It was, in a word, spectacular. It was xokingeverything. Looking down at her on that low pallet, hearing her shred me apart when she asked me to get Tur’Roth.That male shouldn’t even be alive.
Bloodthirsty thing.
I have known Niahhorru pirates without such savagery. She had been using me for her pleasure, the filthy little thing, making my xora hers. It won’t ever be anyone else’s. It isn’t even mine. It is bent, broken to her will, already. She doesn’t know it yet, but all she has to do is ask me for what she needs. All she has to do is ask me to ruin my pride and marry her.
But she won’t.
Because I’m not even sure she wants me.
The thought suddenly hits me like a lightning strike. Pure and wrong. She doesn’t want me.
She is my Xiveri mate and she. doesn’t. want me.
And I don’t want her, but she’s mine.
Silence. It whistles through my ears, passing through empty space. What happened to my brain? Like a holoscreen shutting down because of a malfunction, I suddenly can’t compute.
What am I supposed to do?
I…if we don’t want each other, but are bound, are we meant to live like this forever? In pain?
Not xoking happening.
I don’t like seeing her in pain.
She needsmeto make that step. She needsmeto ask. She needsmeto fix it. To protect her. Even if it is from myself.
“Svera! Stop!”
She’s nearly at the door to the lift that will take her down to the planet’s surface. We are on the highest of five floors of this new monstrous center for younglings and while the lift has railings, like a glider, it has no walls. She could fall.I want to catch her.
Her cheeks are round and smooth and her eyes are bright, but glossy. Something’s wrong. “Are you going to confront Mathilda?”
“That’s all you think about, isn’t it? Punishment?” Xok me. What did I say?
I’ve never heard her like this. She sounds like she’s in pain. “Are you hurt? What did that xoking little…”
“Oud? Is that what you were going to call it?”
The sound of hearing that word in her voice stands out as something wholly wrong and I suddenly hate that I ever revealed to her its meaning.
“Svera…”
But she just makes an aggrieved sound and turns away from me.
She waves her palm in front of the vein reader and a low, dark green light illuminates the threshold and lintel, letting her know that her request has been registered.
