Chapter 8
Raiza
The journey back to the city was uneventful, but I allowed myself to enjoy it anyway. I should hate what he had done, that he’d killed my people with no regard for their lives, yet I couldn’t bring myself to.
They’d fired first. He’d been the one to protect me. He’d taken a bullet for me.
There was no way he’d allow them to live after that.
I knew what he was. It was his nature. He was designed for the sole purpose of military conquest. Even though his genetics were alien and human, I was under the distinct impression that the former was a far larger percentage than the latter.
How could I expect him to be merciful when it went against everything he’d ever been designed for?
He could be cruel. I’d seen it, but I also knew that somewhere beneath that alien ruthlessness was a kind man. A gentle man. A man who only seemed to come out when he was alone with me.
The feeling of his arms around me was so incredibly good and the sound of his heart beating was so soothing in its consistency.
I glanced out the window. I prayed that the rest of my camp would die quick deaths.
I didn’t wish any ill on them, but I’d never really connected with anyone out there.
My parents had died long ago, and I had no family left to speak of.
Several years ago, my best friend Sophia had been captured and taken away.
I wasn’t certain where she’d ended up or if she was even alive anymore after all that time.
I glanced at Talyn. I did understand why he’d gone after them. If they hadn’t gone forward with a plan to kill him, which I’d had the unfortunate luck of getting dragged into, they probably would never have triggered his wrath.
He was the commander of a military state. His men would expect him to answer such a threat, especially since they were also attacking and killing his men in the border camps.
I moved my head so that it was perched back on his chest and his arms hugged me tighter.
I adored how secure it made me feel. I shouldn’t, but I did. With him, I felt safe. Sure, the trips over his knee had been a punishment I had no desire to earn again, but at the same time, he’d satisfied me so thoroughly after it that I didn’t hate it either.
He was a ruthless man, but a fair one too.
I closed my eyes and drifted off to a contented sleep, still full of his magnificent cock.
* * *
Over the next several days, Talyn kept me to himself in his penthouse suite.
I put aside the fact that I was his prisoner, enjoying what felt like time just between us and forgetting the rest of the dangers surrounding us.
I learned a lot about him. For one, he enjoyed cooking.
He had access to several automated machines that would prepare a full meal for him, but he would much rather take the time and cook it himself.
He made a different meal for me every night, trying to see what I liked best, but it was difficult to choose a favorite because I’d never had so many rich meals in my life. I liked most everything he made me.
At least it wasn’t charred rat or roast pigeon. In my camp, those had been something of a delicacy. I remembered a few occasions when we’d been fortunate enough to capture and feast on boar, but meals like that had been quite rare.
Now I was indulging on lamb, duck, chicken, and even a few other things he’d described, and I’d forgotten what he’d said the names were. All of them were incredible and I had looked forward to most of the new things he put in front of me.
That morning had started the way most of them did during those days.
With the collar.
I’d woken before him, which surprised me every time it happened.
His species didn’t need much sleep, but he’d taken to staying in bed until I woke, which I’d stopped questioning on the third day when I realized that questioning it only made it harder to enjoy.
My fingers had gone to my throat before I was fully conscious.
The band was warm from sleep, smooth under my fingertips, and I lay there in the pale morning light and catalogued how much it had stopped bothering me.
He was watching me when I turned over.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning.” I’d stopped being startled by that too.
He reached over and touched the collar briefly—his thumb tracing the underside of it, checking, confirming, the particular thing he did every morning before anything else.
I held still for it. I’d learned to. It was just what he did, the way some men checked their wristwatch first thing or looked out the window at the weather.
His version of orienting himself to the day.
“I want to explain how things work,” he said.
I looked at him. “You mean your rules.”
“Guidelines.” The corner of his mouth shifted. “You are free to move anywhere within these rooms. The balcony. The library. Wherever you like, without asking.” He paused. “Beyond the main door, you come to me first.”
“And if you’re occupied?”
“Then you wait, or you ask one of the household androids to find me.” He said it the way he said most things, as if the answer were obvious and the only question was whether I’d been paying attention.
“You are not a prisoner here, Raiza. You are mine. Mine to protect. That means you don’t go anywhere alone.
If there is something you need, you tell me. ”
I turned that over in my head.
He’d said it like a fact. Like it needed no further defense or elaboration.
“What about when you’re working in here?” I asked. “Do I just—”
“You may stay near me. Read. Do whatever you like.” He watched my face. “I’ll tell you when I need quiet, and I’ll tell you when I need you close.” A pause. “You won’t have to guess.”
I didn’t say anything. It was strange how none of it was unreasonable. Stranger still how much of it sounded, stripped of all context, like someone simply explaining their household to a new resident. Here is where things go. Here is how I like things done. Here is what you can count on.
You don’t have to guess.
I had spent twenty-something years guessing at everything. Whether there would be food. Whether the weather would turn. Whether my group would still be there when I got back from a supply run. Whether I’d wake up in the morning at all.
I didn’t say any of that. I just nodded.
He got up to make breakfast and I stayed in bed because he hadn’t told me to move, which meant I was being obedient, and because the sheets smelled like him and because I was honest enough with myself, at least in the mornings, to let both of those things be true at the same time.
When I finally wandered to the kitchen, he was at the counter working on something that smelled golden and rich. He’d already set a glass of water out for me at the place across from him.
Already accounted for where I’d be.
I sat down and watched him work. He talked while he cooked.
First about a bird he’d seen on the balcony that morning, then about a recipe he’d found in the old human archive that he was going to attempt later in the week, then about nothing in particular.
It was the most ordinary conversation I’d had in years, and I caught myself listening with a feeling that wasn’t quite contentment but was shaped just like it.
He slid the pan off the heat, cut a piece of whatever it was, and turned toward me with the fork.
I looked at it. I looked at him.
“You could put it on a plate,” I said.
“I could,” he agreed. He didn’t move.
I thought about the principle of the thing. I thought about how I would feel about this in a week, in a month. I thought about what it meant and whether it was worth figuring out right now.
Then I leaned forward and took it off the fork with my mouth.
It was very good. It was going to keep being very good because he apparently didn’t know how to make things that weren’t. He stood there with the expression I’d started to recognize—not quite smug but close enough to be annoying—and cut another piece.
I let him feed me three more bites before I took the fork from his hand and finished the rest myself.
He didn’t comment on that. He simply sat down across from me with his own plate, and we ate in the kind of quiet that doesn’t need anything added to it.
Later, when I was examining it, which I tried not to do, because examining it was where the trouble started, I decided that the part that was actually dangerous wasn’t the collar or the leash or any of the rules that were really guidelines that were really just the way things worked now.
It was mornings like this one. The glass of water already at my place at the table.
The fork held out without ceremony and without an argument about what it meant.
The tail arrived on the third afternoon.
He set it on the edge of the bed, the same way he set a glass of water at my place at the table—with the quiet certainty of someone who had already decided how this was going to go.
I was sitting cross-legged on the carpet near the window, watching the city move below, when I heard the soft sound of something placed on the mattress behind me.
I turned to look.
The tail was silver-white, and long enough to brush the floor if I were standing.
The fur was impossibly fine. The plug at its base was smooth and polished, smaller than his secondary cock—which wasn’t saying nothing, but also wasn’t nothing.
He stood beside it with his hands relaxed at his sides and waited for me to take it in.
“No,” I said.
“Yes,” he replied.
He said it the way he said everything—calmly, without negotiation, without cruelty, like the answer was simply a fact being delivered.
I thought about arguing. I had a great deal to say about my dignity and the very significant difference between a human woman and an actual animal. I considered saying all of it.
What came out instead was: “Does it have to be white?”
“It matches your collar,” he said.
I didn’t have anything to say to that.