Page 15 of Taken to Lemora
I’m about to yank away from Tana for good and ignore her completely when Essmira tightens the hold she had on her tears and whispers. “I thought I was ready…Igmora ensured that I was ready…but seeing them in person was so much more overwhelming than I thought it would be. The thought of mating with that Egama was…hard.”
Her voice gets smaller and smaller. “And the Oosa delegation was very…” She shakes her head, flicks her gaze to me, breaks it just as quickly. “I know I have no right to ask anything of you all, but if you are displeased with me, I would accept any punishment happily other than being sold back to Tyto or a pleasure house where Oosa and Egama frequent.”
Everything about her is coiled so tight. She looks so close to the edge. Like she might shatter into one trillion pieces and if she does, there will be nothing left. Not of her. Not of me. I grab onto my right horn but the outer shell is so abruptly sensitive that I have to hiss. I drop my hands and fist them by my sides while Tana continues to hold me in place.
Merquin lets the silence linger for just a breath before she speaks and, when she speaks, her voice is calm, a balm that soothes everything in the blast radius. “You are a brave female, Essmira, to survive what you have. You were stolen from birth. Your parents, wherever they are now, would not have given you up. They loved you.”
Essmira’s eyes widen and her voice hitches. “How…do you…” She swallows and when water starts to accumulate on her lower eyelids, I can’t breathe through the agony of this moment. “Do you know of them?”
Merquin shakes her head. “Nob, I don’t. We had never heard of your species before this solar, but we know Igmora and Tyto and their nefarious ways. They stole you because they have a good sense of beauty and you are beautiful. That’s clear to everyone. But we didn’t purchase you because of your beauty. We purchased you because we don’t support the buying and selling of beings and we wanted to liberate you.
“Our hope is that, even though we aren’t your species, we might serve as an acceptable substitute for companions and maybe, even, if we play our tokens right, family to you. Lemora is a diverse planet filled with many different types of species. My mate, for example, is Hypha. She was exiled from her community for rejecting the mate proposed to her and she knew Lemora to be an accepting place — wild and rugged, certainly, without the gadgets of the Niahhorru pirates or the rigid governance structures of the Voraxians — but a good place. An easy place.
“She came and when I saw her at the market, I knew immediately that she was the female for me. We have been together nine happy rotations. Likely the length of your entire lifetime. And if she ever found out that I purchased a living being for fourteen tuns of kintarr with the intention of using her, abusing her, or selling her, she would leave me. And there is no kintarr in the world and no amount of beauty that would ever cause me to risk what I have with my mate. She is everything to me.”
Essmira’s shaking has gotten so violent that she can’t speak even though she’s trying. She covers her face with her bandaged hand.
Merquin reaches for Essmira, but curls her hand into a fist before she touches her leg. Then she says words I certainly wouldn’t have thought to ask. “May I touch you, Essmira?”
“Yeffa!” The word blasts out of Essmira’s throat and a moment later, Merquin’s arms come around her. She forces Essmira to untangle her arms from her legs and removes her hands from her knees so she can wrap Essmira fully in a hug. Bebette, who I’d forgotten was so near, suddenly fans her face. She’s got tears on her face, too.
“I want to join!” She drops to the ground and wraps her arms around Essmira’s back, hugging her from behind.
“Out of my way!” Tana shoves past me and goes and wraps all three of them up in her arms, her exposed breasts swinging wildly as she lunges for them and doing absolutely nothing for my cock.
“What am I missing?” Reyna shouts from the front of the ship. “Raingar, move your giant butt out of the way. I want to see!”
I shuffle to the right absently, dumbstruck by the scene. Gobsmacked. Essmira belts out a sob. She breaks down. Falling into pieces. Into little fragments of pieces. I wonder what she sees as she falls apart. What she feels. Because what I see is enough to make me want to fly this ship back to that atrocity of a planet, find Igmora and Tyto and rip their hearts out through their mouths. What did they do to her?
I watch her cry in the arms of my clanswomen for an eon. Long enough that the pain in my body recedes into the background — not gone, never gone, it seems like, but reduced to a dull throb.
Finally, she starts to breathe a little easier and in between the broken cracks of her voice, she manages a whisper, “If you all don’t…don’t like flesh peddlers…why did you buy me at all?”
Merquin pulls back, disentangling herself from the bunch. “Raingar.” She jerks her thumb at me over her shoulder and I clutch my chest again, with both hands this time, to defend against the dagger she just lobbed at my heart. “He told us that it was the right thing to do.”
Essmira looks up at me and I feel like dung. Merquin makes me sound like an ohring hero. Because that might be what I said, but it wasn’t what I meant. I meant that it was the right thing forme.I couldn’t stomach the idea of leaving her. Nob, Icouldn’thave left her. It would have been like trying to leave both my legs behind and walk on outta there.
But I should have been thinking of her. I should have been.
I hadn’t been, but I should’ve.
I’m an ohring bastard and a piss poor excuse for a mate.
I’m a mate. I’mhermate.My horns choose that moment to vibrate. I cringe. Behind me, Reyna yells, “Alright. We’re home.”
What?
I turn around and outside the world is dark, illuminated only by floating orbs we buy from the Eshmiri. In the lunar, they light our winding dirt and tarnished-yellow cobblestone roads. Several other ships are docked here on the circular, mossy ledge. Ringed in lights, the glow of the Eshmiri orbs gleam on the outer hulls of the other ships. They sparkle in all the colors of kintarr, while beyond them the ledge drops off. Only the height of a body, the elevation still makes the world below seem darker and more sinister.And Essmira’s here now. My mate is here. And I will have to defend her against all of it.My stomach hollows. I feel so empty. Nob — so full, but it’s alive, what’s inside. Alive and terrified andhungry.
I hear shuffling behind me on the ship and the sound of the ramp lowering to touch the mossy floor of our dock. Cold air billows into the space. Too cold for me without a cloak, but for Essmira it must be freezing. I turn to shout at someone to give her their shirt, but I already see Merquin draping a blanket over her shoulders and guiding her down the ramp and off of the ship.
“Pagh! Merquin! Where are you going?” I bumble after them, feeling tension ripple over my bones and then ripple some more when her scent wafts to me over the clean, mossy scent of my home. She smells just like it.Justlike it, only stronger. A thousand times more. Like moss and wet dew and silk and Walrey honey and also like the bloodstone we harvest deep in the mines that, at their cores, hold small droplets of water. She smells like the Dark Flats, too, wild and rugged. There, where kintarr sands ripple with constant colorful explosions. She smells like the sweet stalls at the markets.
I crash into Tana’s back and when I back up, I crash into Reyna. “Opf,” I grunt, trying to shake the other clan chiefs free and reach her. I end up standing facing all four of them, Essmira tucked slightly back, Merquin’s hand on her shoulder. Essmira’s perfect face looks slightly swollen around the nostrils and mouth. Her eyes are also puffy and red. It makes my knees hurt and I have trouble not giving in to the urge to collapse.
“Where are you going?” I bark at her.
She blinks at me with round eyes. Her lips part. They’re dark brown on the outside, but on the inside, they’re the same blood red that parts of her skin are. Ohr, I want to know how far the red goes. I want to knowbadly.
