Chapter 15

Evie

Aramon!” I screamed through a crushed windpipe, as I struggled to get up and reach him. Chaos surrounded me, but my eyes had only one focus: him, my mate. He’d collapsed next to Theronix, and he wasn’t moving again. This time, I feared it was final because blood was dripping from his eyes, his nose, and even his ears. It looked awful to see all that red coat his ivory, skull-like features. It pooled beneath his head, staining the white marble floors.

I did not know how Jaxin had known something was wrong, but they burst into the room just as Aramon wrested Theronix from on top of me. Jaxin was restraining the bastard, and someone at my side was steadying me, helping me up. They tried to steer me away from Aramon, but I wouldn’t let them. Wrenching my arm from the grip on my elbow, I stumbled forward and threw myself down at Aramon’s side.

“No! Come on, wake up, Aramon. What’s wrong? What did you do? Come back to me! That’s a fucking order! Do you hear me? Come back right this instant. I need you…” Wiping the blood from his face with my robe, I searched for a pulse but couldn’t find one. I whirled on Theronix and jabbed a finger at the Xurtal male. “Tell me what you injected him with! What did you do?!”

Two mercenaries held him between them, his arms tightly restrained behind his back, but the male was not resisting. He laughed. “What do you think? There’s only one poison that makes a male bleed that way.” That was not true. Sadly, there were many poisons that could, and I’d had to learn about all of them—their tastes and their symptoms. But I knew instantly which poison he talked of, as it was considered so cruel and awful it had been banned on Xurtal. There was no cure.

My heart dropped in my chest; pain seemed to swallow me whole. I could not lose him—not like this. Not my always-so-irreverent, full-of-life Aramon. Not him. A sob rose in my chest, and I muffled the sound with a bloody hand, trembling all over. “Aramon, please…”

“It’s not poison,” someone said, but that came to me from far away, beyond the rushing in my ears. I couldn’t breathe, though not because of the bruising around my neck. I couldn’t breathe through the fear. Hands were reaching past me for my mate, but I felt as feral as Aramon’s twin sometimes became. I slapped the first hand away by instinct, striking it on the wrist with a hard blow. The second I caught with a pinch at a pressure point in the elbow, then threw myself forward to protectively cover Aramon’s prone body.

“Don’t touch him! Aramon, wake up! Please!” I ducked my head and pressed it against his chest, searching for a heartbeat. If it wasn’t poison, then what? Why wouldn’t he wake up? I wanted him to open his eyes and grin that cheeky, slightly sinister grin. I wanted him to laugh and ask me why I was making such a fuss. I wanted my loud-mouthed, often slightly obnoxious Aramon back.

I could not hear a heartbeat. I could not hear him breathe either, and panic clawed at me, filling me. There was so much of it that it felt too big to keep inside, and it spilled over—spilled in tears, in wrenching sobs, in the words that fell from my lips. Maybe it spilled in other ways too. I’d never know, because the mind of an Asrai was as confusing as it was complex.

“Ah, sweet princess, why do you cry?” I swear that sounded like his voice, and he was saying exactly the things I had imagined he would say. “See? I knew she loved me. You lose, Tass.” It felt like a warmth enfolded my head, but that had to be the lack of oxygen from my stupid, useless crying. Then it felt like warmth against my back, just like it felt when Aramon held me. “Princess, I’m okay. I’m here. It was just a little stint of doubling—nothing to worry about.”

It was the mixture of words, which I did not expect, that made me flick my eyes up to his face. There was that grin, but I had to be imagining it; I still couldn’t sense a pulse inside his chest. His red eyes were stained with blood at the corners, but they glimmered with life. His hand slid up my spine, curling gently beneath my hair to touch the bruises that marred my flesh. His expression went dark as a thunderstorm. “Where is that bastard? He needs to pay for these.”

“Aramon?” It really was him, but how? I grabbed his hand and pressed it to my cheek, leaning close. His fingers were warm, and they wriggled in my grip before settling against my face. “How is this possible?” I recalled his previous words: he had said doubling, that it was doubling that had done this. But that word held no meaning for me in this context.

He sat up slowly, but he caught me around the waist and pulled me into his lap. I went willingly, refusing to let go of him for even a moment, and threw my arms around his neck to hold him close. My fingers roamed over his bare skin to test how real this was. He felt alive—everything about him seemed alive—but I was certain I still felt no pulse in his neck, and I kept checking for it.

“It’s bloody illegal, that’s what it is,” Jaxin barked out, startling me. I had forgotten about our company, about anything but Aramon’s apparent death-but-not-death. Awareness rushed in, and I felt unease shiver down my spine at how absorbed I’d been in him. Anyone could have sunk a dagger into my back while I’d focused on him; I would have never noticed.

The head of my security detail stood behind me with his portable laser cannon cradled against his massive chest with one arm. His black armor gleamed, but blood streaked along his left palm as he held the gloved hand out and pointed at my mate. “Those idiots doubled: Solear joined Aramon in his body to save you from that nutcase and warn the Varakartoom that you were in danger.”

I glanced from the weapon master to the others—Tass, the Tarkan guy, Raukash, and a human male I hadn’t noticed before. Then I glanced at Aramon, my eyes widening with confusion. Solear in his head? Sharing a body? All those things seemed as implausible and unscientific as they were bizarre. He rolled a shoulder. “Don’t listen to what he says. I’m fine, anyway. Where did you take that asshole? I’m not done with him.”

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.