Chapter 14

CHAPTER 14

THREXIN

T he next time Threxin awoke, it was to the growing awareness of his uncomfortably parched, tight apertures.

The jump.

Breathing hurt.

There was a grunt and pain shot through his ribs, which suggested the sound came from him. An intake of breath somewhere beneath him snapped his eyes open.

A brown human head popped up at his side.

Threxin snarled as his limiter kicked in, suppressing his initial reaction. Instead of digging his talons into the thing's throat, he dug them into the fabric at his hands.

"You're awake." The female—for that was what it was—appeared as disoriented as he was. Remnants of sleep washed out her brown eyes. Her elbows were propped at the side of the bed on which he lay. The rest of her was on the floor.

Threxin scanned the room. Why was he in a human's cabin? He reached toward the ache beckoning in his chest and froze when the female bent forward at once, grabbing his forearm to push it back to his side. And he let her.

"No no no," her words came fast and urgent. "You can't touch it. "

It?

It was the pink blotch center-left on his bare chest. It spread along his skin in an uneven pattern, puckering at the edges. Threxin looked at the human's hands, both folded atop his arm. When her eyes followed his, she jerked them away as though burned.

"Crap." Something clattered, and she reached to scoop up a tablet that had fallen from her lap. There was footage of humans on its screen, laughter peeling at low volume between quiet speech he could not make out.

"I'll get Renza." The female moved to stand, and Threxin grabbed her wrist—a mindless reaction. She froze, color draining from her face.

"When is it?" His voice cracked, several octaves too deep from disuse.

"When is… what?" Her brow furrowed. "Oh, the time? It's midnight."

"What did you do?" Threxin was in a strange cabin with a human, and he had clearly been unconscious. The flesh of her arm blanched white as his grip tightened.

"Nothing! You were stabbed," she rushed. "You had a blood transfusion. I… Renza made me watch you."

Renza.

The tone with which the human said his brother's name was too familiar.

"Let me get him. He said to?—"

Threxin stiffened his hold, making her squirm in a shimmy she tried and failed to suppress. When he next spoke, his rusty voice was even. "Who stabbed me?"

"A guy named Peter. Junior cargo pilot. You…" Her gaze shifted from his face and to the wall beside him. "You killed him. Your brother looked into it. He acted alone."

He doubted that. Did Orion Halen put one of his humans up to this ?

"Please let me go," the female whispered, eyes sparkling with fear and wetness. "You're hurting me."

One of her kind tried to kill him. It shoqing well should hurt.

"How many days has it been?"

Her brows furrowed. "Three. No, four…"

Shoq. The jump.

Threxin released her, eyeing with some disgust the flush of her skin as blood flooded back into the limb. A crimson outline of his fingers was left—his mark. She rubbed the spot.

"Can I please get Renza?" she begged, voice small and pleading. Pouting. The limiter ratcheted before Threxin's snarl could be vocalized. There was something perverse about hearing his brother's name from a human's lips so casually.

"Go," he grunted, turning away as the female scurried from the room.

When she was gone, Threxin picked up the noisy tablet from the bed.

Alina

Do not run.

Running would draw attention, especially at this time of night. It was 2345, and that meant a shift change. Threxin woke up at an inopportune moment .

Alina had woken hours ago from what had been meant to be a five-minute nap. How she had managed to fall into such a deep sleep with the invader clenching her in a death grip was put down to sheer exhaustion. When she had opened her eyes, Threxin was no longer squeezing the life out of her. Instead, she'd gotten wedged on her side between the wall and the alien, her face squished into his arm.

Her first act had been to check the wound. The synthskin layer was dislodged, but not too badly, thank God. She then quietly slithered off the edge of the bed and reapplied the dressing.

Finally Alina had checked the time. 2200. She'd been asleep for almost twenty hours.

Shit. She'd missed Kaia's breakfast and dinner run. Alina had started shoving her feet into her boots in a panic, then hesitated. What was the plan here? Was she gonna find Kaia with two belated meals? Kaia probably hadn't even noticed Alina's absence—if anything, she might be relieved to not be nagged with a box of food she would likely reject anyway.

Plus there might be questions. Like where had she been or—maybe worse—what did she want. Thinking better of it, Alina had moved instead to her usual spot on a pile of blankets at Threxin's bedside. She'd slid out her tablet and put on Guy Meets Girl to try to get her mind off this colossal screwup.

And then he woke up. On her way to find Renza, wherever he may be, Alina realized she had no idea what he had told everyone—both the alien occupiers and human crew—about their new commander's three-day absence.

There was another problem: Alina didn't know where she'd find him. Since it was close to midnight, wouldn't he be in his quarters? Where even was that? How was she going to get there without arousing suspicion?

Alina needn't have worried, because as she turned the corner from her cabin's passageway, Renza was right there on the other side of the hall .

"What?" Renza snapped to attention.

He must have seen the answer on her face because he was clearing the distance toward her with long strides before she could even open her mouth to answer.

Alina gave him a curt nod and hastened back to the cabin.

"He's coming," she told Threxin, who had sat up and was leaning against the cabin wall with her tablet in hand. "You're not supposed to move."

"What ship is Connor Mathews from?" The uhyre glanced up from the screen.

"Who? Oh… That's not from a colony, that's from Old Earth. It's a show, Guy Meets Girl . It's not real."

Threxin began to say more, but his gaze shifted behind her. Alina moved out of the way just in time to avoid getting shoved aside as Renza cleared the space to the bed and kneeled on his haunches.

He said something in Apthian, muttering more quietly than was necessary. She did understand some, but the words were too fast and too frequent, blending in strange ways, to grasp more than "brother," "blood," and "hunt" from Renza. From Threxin she picked up "female" as his eyes flicked to her. Alina plucked at her already pitiful finger polish and stared at her feet, trying to make herself as inconspicuous as possible. Then, realizing the man had just woken up from a three-day coma, she busied herself with retrieving a shot glass of water from her hydrastation.

"You." Threxin's voice stopped her in her tracks. Alina waited, but he simply glared at her with the blazing blue that almost swallowed his pinprick pupils, making his eyes look like solid blotches of ice. Alina looked to Renza for some instruction. Despite their unimaginable differences, she'd developed a tentative thread of reluctant familiarity with the red uhyre out of sheer necessity. He inclined his chin at her, and Alina cleared her throat, stepping forward. She held the glass out to her illicit patient. Threxin ignored it .

"Why did you not kill me?" The question sounded more like an accusation. The uhyre's rough baritone made the flesh on her arms chill and tighten.

"I didn't think about it," Alina said. "By the time I did, I couldn't."

But he had killed people. He and his brother had both killed people who were defending her ship from him, and Alina had no doubt they'd do it again. Threxin had been ready to vent every person on Colossal into space until Orion Halen tempted him with a deal. And then there were those bodies under that tarp…

"You feared the consequences. Of my brother killing you all," Threxin pressed the suggestion that should've been enough of a reason if Alina had had the guts for it.

She frowned, shaking her head. "No—I mean, yeah, but that's not why."

"Then?" he pressed.

Why couldn't he just say thanks and leave it the fuck alone?

"Maybe I'm not a murderer, okay?" Alina snapped. That was all she had, and it should damn well be good enough.

Threxin and Renza exchanged looks, and the latter cocked his head to the side in that way they had.

Alina took a steadying breath. "You should drink."

She offered the glass again, and Threxin's apertures flicked in a quick gesture she could now interpret as dismissive.

"We do not drink," Renza explained.

"Not at all?"

Renza sighed, but elaborated, "We absorb humidity through our apertures. He has been drinking. You have been hydrating him."

A strange expression flashed on Threxin's face. His chin snapped to his brother with a deadly glare .

"—stupid—reveal—female—" She caught shreds of Threxin's gurgled Uhyreish.

"She is safe, brother," Renza replied in Universal.

Renza actually trusted her? Even Kaia hadn't trusted her with anything real in the years she'd known her. Not a single intimate exchange, no request that might reveal a shred of vulnerability.

For a moment the fact that such faith came from an alien occupying her ship, threatening her and her people if she had failed him, was secondary to the flush rising beneath her ribs.

The spikes atop Threxin's scalp rose forward with a chilling crack. His apertures snapped wide open, then shut into barely visible slits. That was surprise, Alina decided with some satisfaction. She understood them… sort of.

"You should stay here another day." Renza rose to his feet. "The female will bring food and hydrate your apertures."

And just like that, the warm glow inside her shriveled. Alina had been looking forward to getting her cabin to herself again. Sleeping on the floor was doing her back in, and she had been expecting Threxin to leave just as soon as he woke up.

Threxin didn't look happy with the idea either. How much of the past days did he remember anyway? Alina batted a curtain of bangs from her forehead and downed the water she'd gotten for him just to give herself something to do.

"The jump." Threxin grunted. "The humans."

"The ship is fine, and who gives a shoq about the humans? We are five ship days from the jump. I have told everyone you are isolating, reviewing ship data to prepare."

"The riot from that night?"

Riot?

"Suppressed." Renza rattled off some elaboration in their own language.

"The sire?" Threxin pressed .

"Still looking." Renza followed Threxin's gaze to Alina, then back to his k'riar.

Threxin nodded and then, to her dismay, turned to her.

"You serve your mistress still?" he asked.

Alina frowned. What did this asshole think was going on here? Did he think she was just going to betray her people after one—very questionable—act of kindness? "Yes, that is my job. Look… I couldn't let you just die on my doorstep. But if you think I'm some turncoat that suddenly bats for the other team, you got another thing coming. Commander." Even as the biting words spilled from her lips, Alina backed up a step, realizing how she was speaking, and to whom.

"Turn… coat?" Threxin turned to Renza, whose back spikes twitched in a shrug.

"Traitor," she murmured. "I'm not a traitor."

The emotional stress was making her suicidal. She was just so tired. Of everything. Of waking up every few hours, either to check if Threxin was still breathing or from some nightmare in which he chose that night to wake up and gut her in her sleep. Of worrying about Kaia. Of this secret looming over her in her cabin.

Of course she still served Kaia. In fact, Alina needed to keep a closer watch on Kaia and her health. She'd been looking worse. And now that Threxin wasn't on the brink of death, Alina could get back on that.