Page 42 of Taken to Heimo
An icy realization creeps up on me like frost before the thaw.
This is what Svera feels.And I didn’t care when it counted.I failed her when I needed to wrap her in strength. I need to get to her now. If I get to her fast enough, maybe I can fix this…undo it, somehow…make her believe she’s my…
“I’m not sure. I’d guess a while, though she’s way too polite to say anything.”
Anger. Towards Svera, this time. Howdareshe know that which I’ve totally failed at hiding. “You authorized her to find a new guardian,” I hiss. “And you knew that she is my Xiv…Xiv…”
“Xiveri Mate. Hexa, we know. Svera is your Xiveri mate, but that doesn’t mean that you’re hers. For all we know, humans might have the ability to call the Xanaxana in a whole bunch of different Voraxians, and she can do a lot better than you.”
“You xoking…”
“Krisxox,” the dark rasp is immediate and sharp. Va’Raku steps up beside his female and slides his hand around the back of her neck. He levels me with a stare that I’m too xoking weak to repel right now. Because as she circles her arms around his waist and they step out onto the lift, I realize that I’ve lost something very precious to pride.
Time.
Half a rotation of it. Because Va’Raku is right. She was my Xiveri mate from the first moment I saw her on board that transporter. And if I’d been kind, I could have swayed her sooner. We could have been sharing laughter, clandestine looks and stupid little xoking kisses the way Va’Raku and his mate do now.
“It isn’t possible,” I say to her, but mostly to me.
“Maybe.” She looks up into Va’Raku’s eyes as she speaks, his jet black hair streaming over her skin like water, marred by just one flash of white. Drakesh heritage. Another hybrid. Is he, this male who I respect more than almost all others, truly so different than Svera? He holds Drakesh ancestry as well and is a product of inter-species mixing. Yet, he still holds his own planet, the largest in Voraxia and one of the wealthiest, one of the strongest too. He repelled a Drakesh invasion led by the former Bo’Raku. And now he’s taken a human mate without any shame or hesitancy on his part.
From what I’ve heard, he even wooedher.As if she wasn’t already his by right.
And now she looks up at him with total adoration. She holds him.She holds him.And he sweeps his hands into the cloud of her hair, pushing it back from her face.
And just before the doors close, Va’Rakukanna says, “Hate fills the wound. Love erases it. Trust me on this before it festers.” She points at my ridges and before I can shout at her and demand she tell me what the xok she’s talking about, the doors shut with a ding.
There is a knock on my door. I lie on my sleeping pallet between two Drakesh females, their red skin glittering as their fingers trace the outlines of the muscles in my abdomen. They feel excellent against me, but they are simple breeding females that have agreed to accompany me on this voyage. We have already coupled many times, but I feel a surge oflustandadrenaline— I’ve felt it ever since we landed on this wretched colony moon. It makes me want to take each of them again a dozen more times.
Nox, it does not. It makes me want…something else. But I don’t know what…
The knock on my door distracts me from the way their fingers lace together around my turgid xora. I shove them off and give whoever it is leave to enter. The door slides open soundlessly and Ga’Roth appears with his hand locked around the upper arm of the most shocking creature I have ever seen.
She is small. And her skin is not the proud, Drakesh red, or even the Voraxian blue — or any combination of the two. Her skin is a dark sandy color, much lighter than darkness, but much darker than the xamxin river. And her eyes — her huge, round eyes — they have different colors and though the colors are static, I can see at least three different shades shining at me in horror. She is terrified, this female, and she is not Drakesh and she is not Voraxian and she is the most beautiful creature I have ever seen.
It hits me — this wounded female who smells of blood and war and something dark and twisted and pulls me to her like she’s aimed a grappling hook for my chest, fired and now, reels me in — she is my mate.
I order Ga’Roth to stop touching her, because she is naked and her naked body will take mine now. I order the two females to leave and never to return. And then we are alone. And I have the naked female cowering beneath me and my thoughts are firing with every effort at restraint because I know that this female is my Xiveri Mate.
But she isn’t Drakesh.
She. is. not. Drakesh.
The realization tackles me from behind. I pull away only to be surprised when she also pulls away. Surprised and also deeply disappointed.
What has Xana done?As I snarl for the female to get the xok away from me and she disappears into the wet room, I sink to my knees, cover my forehead ridges with my hand, and I know…I know…
I am cursed.
And it does not stop me at all from grabbing my xora and pumping my seed onto the floor in bright blue bursts at the thought of the small, impure female in the other chamber, who was born mine from the start.
A female who I lost.
And now, I’m going to get her back.
I run onto the lift, power it down onto the scorching hot sands and charge through the colony’s little village. People jump out of my way as I sprint, running so hard my full lungs buoy me all the way to Svera’s parents’ house, where my illegal tracker on her life drive says that she is. Though Raku told me to, I never removed it.
I bang on the door angrily only to remember that these are her sires and she cares for them deeply in a way I’d never cared for mine.
