Epilogue | Kara

Epilogue

Kara

It had been a few months since I’d come to Akrod and found my way into my alien chef’s loving arms, all four of them. Things were settling down now that we’d renamed the bar and had a grand reopening. Stellar’s Bar was a hit, drawing in huge crowds every day to taste Rex’s fantastic lunch and dinner food. I thought he should have called it a restaurant, considering food was the main draw, but Rex didn’t want to change the character of the place too much.

We’d hired a bunch of staff, and I’d had the greatest fun finding vendors and suppliers with better prices and better quality foods to work with. It felt like I was getting to apply the things I’d learned in college, and it was fun to realize that business lessons from Earth, hundreds of years ago, still managed to apply on an alien planet.

It was a slow hour today, right before the first rush of lunch, and I was polishing the bar while overseeing two of my waiters taking care of the patrons currently present. When the human girl with a freckled face walked in, I recognized her instantly. The alien at her back helped; he was very distinct and also a type of alien that I’d never seen before—yellow skin with darker brown and orange spots, and instead of hair, a pair of long, agile tentacles.

They were the couple from the image Rex had once shown me, the one about Jenny and her male on the run from the Akrod authorities. I greeted her warmly, oddly giddy to see a human girl for the first time in months, and extremely excited to show her to Rex.

That had been the one dark spot in our otherwise blissful months. We didn’t know what had happened to this woman. If she’d gotten away safely, or if the yellow Akiladian really was her mate. When I led them into the kitchen, I could see how incandescently happy it made Rex to see his friend safe and sound. His spots glowed such a bright yellow they seemed golden.

Then he did what he always did when he was happy: he fed the people he cared about, starting with pushing Jenny and me into chairs and prepping plates in a flurry of hands. He was signing rapidly too, but it was clear that Jenny could not understand any of it. I opened my mouth to explain, but the Akilad beat me to it. “I believe the Pretorian Rex is inquiring about your health and happiness, wife,” he drawled in a posh voice in crisp English. Not translated by my implants—no, real English spoken as if he were a native.

Astonished, I looked at his face, at the cool analytical gaze in his eyes that softened to love as soon as he looked at his female. “Ah, yup, that must be a shock!” Jenny laughed. “Akri speaks any language in the galaxy. He used to be a computer and all that.” Then she leaned conspiratorially closer. “Now tell me everything about you and Rex! Everything.”

Surrounded by friends, inside the safe, cozy kitchen that was all Rex, I was the happiest I’d ever been. My future was bright and starlit, my fated mate at my side, and now with the promise of more human visitors and friends to make. Jenny and Akri did not even for a moment think that I should return to Ker. They knew, like Rex and I did, that I was exactly where I belonged.

I caught my mate’s fingers with mine, giving them a gentle squeeze when he laughed at one of Jenny’s anecdotes from the spaceship she and her friends lived on. We had earned this, every hard, scary step of the way.

He glanced at me, his spots growing from yellow to such a bright gold that I knew he was filled with love for me, just like I was for him. Yeah. Happiness—we had that in spades.

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