CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Kade

A iden brooded all the way home. I knew he still wanted an answer to his question, but I didn’t think he’d want to discuss it where we could be overheard by the taxi driver.

When we arrived home, he opened the door and switched on the lights, illuminating the dark house as the sunlight outside faded. I moved through the house, closing curtains and turning on a few more lights. When I got back to the living room, he was still loitering in the entrance hall, apparently lost in thought.

I came to stand in front of him. “Yes, I love you,” I told him. “But I don’t know if that’s going to make a difference, if you’re going to insist on believing that the only reason I love you is because the Eumadians programmed me to.”

“They did program you to,” he replied stubbornly. “And I thought you’d managed to defy your own training to save my life at the winery. But it wasn’t that, was it? You only disobeyed my orders because you were programmed to protect me at all costs. So you’re not even protecting me because you care about me. You’re doing it because you were programmed to.”

“You’re viewing this like it’s necessarily one thing or the other,” I replied. “Love or programming. Why can’t it be both? I didn’t love you at first,” I pointed out, thinking I was probably going to shock him with that news. “When you opened my crate, you seemed so disappointed with me. You didn’t understand my skills. When we got back to the base, you gave me your surname, but you didn’t have sex with me. In some ways, you seemed to want me so much, but in other ways, you kept pushing me away. You didn’t explain a lot of things to me, about who you were, or what my job was, or what you expected of me. I was really annoyed.” His expression changed to one of bafflement, and then he looked outright offended. He opened his mouth to respond… but then seemed to think better of it.

“So what changed?” he asked, after a pause.

“You did,” I said succinctly. “You started listening to what I was saying. You stopped asking me so many questions. You started giving me better orders. You started understanding me. So I started loving you – more for your willingness to try, rather than the exact outcome.”

He stepped back and stared at me, long and hard. “I’m not the only one who changed,” he said, after giving it some thought. “You’ve just given me a fairly critical rundown of my performance as your master. That’s not something you would have done at the start.”

I laughed. “Certainly not,” I agreed. “But I understand what you want better now. You don’t want a puppet. I would have been one, if that was what you wanted. But you want a companion. You want someone to challenge you and make you look at the world in new and different ways. I can give you the illusion of that, so long as you understand that my ultimate goal is still to make you happy.” This was a thoroughly raw sort of honesty that I was giving him, and I really wasn’t sure how he was going to react. But he’d been honest with me about the fact that he was not my intended master, so I figured it was appropriate to return the gesture.

He looked away, chewing his lip as he processed that idea. “The Nwandu were going to use you to kill us,” he said, after a pause. “Does that bother you? Do you find that idea disturbing at all?”

I grimaced. I had a feeling he wasn’t going to like my answer. “It bothers me that Vendanu was going to try to break my bond with you,” I replied honestly. “I would not have enjoyed ending up as an ‘expensive ornament’, as Jethrigol put it. But the reality is that if I’d never met you and I’d bonded with her in the first place, I simply wouldn’t know the difference. I would have had no loyalty to you, so killing you would have caused me no particular distress.”

He frowned. “You don’t have a problem with being used to enslave an entire sector of people?”

I stepped closer to him and laid a hand on his chest. My expression was grave, and I hoped it would prepare him for my less than desirable answer. “You’ve used me to kill how many Geshtoch now?” I asked, my voice gentle. “There’s a possibility I could have been found by them, instead of you. If one of them was my master, I would be looking at you and thinking you were the oppressor. The same way you’re looking at the Nwandu.”

His face paled and he rocked back on his feet. “Fuck,” he muttered. He seemed to stop breathing for a moment. “Oh, fuck me,” he said, shaking his head.

“The Culrads said we can domesticate them,” I reminded him. “If that leads to peace, then it’s something we should certainly look at.” He didn’t respond, and I was concerned that I’d just created some kind of existential crisis for him. “Aiden?”

“Is that moral?” he asked, cringing at the idea. “Manipulating them into doing what we want by bribing them?”

“Isn’t that what you do with domestic dogs?” I asked. “You train them and reward them with treats and games. And you’re entirely unsurprised when they decide they love you for it. The Geshtoch seem to be on the border between people and animals. The Alliance has been treating them as people, with fairly devastating results. Would it necessarily be worse to treat them as animals, if it means we stop needing to kill them?”

“Shit,” Aiden muttered, turning away from me and pacing across the room. “Well, there’s the reality check for the day.

I snorted. “I think we’ve had about five of those.”

Aiden rubbed a hand over his face, then collapsed backwards onto the sofa. “Since when have you called me Aiden?” I’d done it about three times today, but this was the first time he’d noticed.

“Since I rescued you at the winery,” I informed him. The shift in my own mind had been sudden and noticeable – to me, at least – though the change in my behaviour had perhaps been more subtle. I still called him ‘sir’ on a regular basis, after all. “You asked me to call you Aiden back when you first met me. I just couldn’t get my head around the idea then. But that still is what you want, isn’t it?” I wouldn’t have been doing it if I hadn’t believed it was what he truly wanted.

“Yes,” he replied. “Why now, though? Why after the winery?”

I considered that, needing to figure out how to explain it to myself, before I could explain it to him. “It was the first time I actually had to disobey one of your orders to protect you. And you didn’t get the slightest bit angry about it. I suppose I thought it was worth the risk to do the things you wanted me to do, even if my training said I shouldn’t. I finally realised that your opinion was more important than the Eumadians’.”

“But you’re still ultimately doing it because that’s what I want?”

“Yes,” I replied, very confident about that part. My master’s pleasure was all that mattered.

He sighed, and I knew this was going to be an ongoing issue for him. He wanted me to be an entirely autonomous person. And that was the one thing I could never truly give him. He groaned and ran his hands through his hair. “So after all of this, you’re really okay with being stuck here with me? You wouldn’t have wanted the court case to end differently?”

I frowned at him. “Did you miss the part where I said I loved you?”

He scowled. “Yeah, but you were programmed to.”

I shrugged. “Doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

He stared up at me, taking the time to consider my words. He’d done that a few times over the past few weeks, and the usual result had been that he’d finally allowed what I was telling him to replace his own assumptions about me.

In this case, however, I wanted to make sure he really got the message. I stepped closer to him, then slowly leaned down, straddling his lap as I lowered myself onto the sofa. I toyed with the collar of his shirt. “Do you love me?” I asked him, a thoroughly daring question that a well-trained dimari should never consider asking.

“Of course. Yes. You’re amazing, Kade.”

“And do you want me to be happy?”

“Yes,” he repeated emphatically. “More than anything.”

I smirked. Then I very slowly undid the top button on his shirt, my fingertip just grazing the warm skin inside. “Then why can’t that apply to me as well? I love you, therefore I want you to be happy.”

His hands settled on my hips, then slid around to cup my ass. A smile tugged at his lips. “I thought dimari were trained not to ask for sex,” he said, as I deliberately rocked my groin against his.

“I’m not asking,” I said, looping my arms around his neck. “I’m merely suggesting.”

“Then here’s a suggestion,” he said, sliding a hand around to cup my groin. “Go into the bedroom and take your clothes off.” As he said it, his hand squeezed my developing erection. I leaned into the touch… before realising that he’d just told me to leave the room. Taking my clothes off would be heavenly, but that would mean leaving his side…

It had been a suggestion, I realised a moment later. Not an order. Fair enough. I could have some fun with that. I stood up and shrugged off my jacket, laying it neatly on the arm of the sofa. Then I undid my shirt, taking my time over each and every button. “How about I do it in the reverse order?” I asked Aiden, seeing that his eyes were riveted on my skin. I relaxed my scales and my colouring reverted to blue – I’d forgotten to do that when we’d come in the door. He sat up a little at the change, and I noticed the slowly growing bulge in his pants.

I slid the shirt off, laying it carefully over the top of the jacket. Then I undid my belt, undid the button and zipper on my pants… and then turned and started walking away. “I think I’ll do this part in the bedroom,” I said, then, on impulse, I reached around and squeezed my own ass cheek as I walked away from him. I sashayed out of the room, feeling his eyes on me the entire time.

It took only a few seconds for him to join me in the bedroom.

?? ?

Four Weeks Later

Aiden was beaming as he stepped inside his cosy villa. I followed him through the door and closed it gently. “Congratulations,” I said again, though I’d said it a dozen times in the last week alone.

“I still can’t really believe it,” he said, smoothing his hand over the rank badge on his shoulder – now sporting an extra stripe as compared to this morning.

“Commander Hill,” I said, pride heavy in my voice. “I like how that sounds.”

He snorted and tossed his hat onto the sofa. “You’d like anything that had my name in it.”

“Not true,” I corrected him. “ Aiden Hill arrested on drugs charges? No, I wouldn’t like that at all.”

“You know what I mean,” he said, wrapping his arms around my waist and kissing me lightly. “You’re my one man cheerleading squad. Not that I’m complaining,” he added, as he stepped back and stripped off his jacket. For all that he was proud of his achievement, we’d spent long enough in uniform today. “I like having a regular boost to my ego.”

“I aim to please,” I said, managing to make it sound flippant. My beautiful master was still slightly uncomfortable with excessive displays of devotion from me.

“Oh, there is some more news, though,” he said, as he headed for the bedroom. I followed him, hoping that he might be inclined to spend a little time in bed. “Henderson told me that the Culrads have officially begun negotiations with the Alliance Parliament on an agreement to join the Alliance.”

“That’s awesome,” I said, genuinely pleased. After a thorough investigation, it had been revealed that everything the Culrads had told us about the Nwandu was true. And everyone in the Alliance seemed to be breathing a collective sigh of relief that we’d avoided an all out war fighting against the Nwandu’s mind control techniques.

“That’s not all, though. The Culrads have a number of reservations about Alliance culture, one point in particular being the high suicide rates among the dimari.” He hung up his jacket, then began unbuttoning his trousers. I followed the path of his hands with my eyes, but forced my mind to concentrate on his words.

Over the last few weeks, Aiden had slowly and gently informed me of the true situation for dimari in Alliance space. And I was grateful firstly that he’d led me through it so carefully, and secondly that he’d made a firm statement – largely through our aborted court case – that he most definitely wanted to keep me. As it turned out, every single dimari on Rendol 4 was here entirely by accident, and aside from me, they were all desperately miserable, since none of their Alliance masters had a clue about how to care for them properly. Aiden and I had had several long conversations about that, each of us working hard to understand the other’s point of view. Now, weeks on from the rocky start to that particular project, I got the impression we were finally starting to get a proper handle on the situation.

“What do the dimari have to do with the Culrads?” I asked.

“The Culrads are making it a condition of their negotiations that we start teaching dimari owners how to meet the dimari’s needs. They say that there’s no point in adopting abandoned dimari if we’re just going to let them drown in misery until they kill themselves. And for what it’s worth, I totally agree. But since you and I are apparently the only happily bonded dimari-owner couple on the planet, that puts a certain level of responsibility on us. The Culrads want us to develop an instruction manual of sorts, to teach Alliance species how to look after their dimari. And furthermore, they want us to take an active role in rehabilitating those who are already here. There are dozens of dimari who are probably only weeks away from committing suicide. Our job is to stop them.” He paused, and I made a soft noise to prompt him to continue. He seemed to be waiting for a response from me. But I couldn’t quite figure out what it was supposed to be.

“So… what do you think?” he said eventually. “Is that something you’d like to help with?”

I smiled. He was still asking me what I wanted, rather than telling me what he wanted me to do. We’d come a long way, but we still had a way to go. “I’d love to help,” I told him, leaning forward to kiss him. “Where do we start?”