23. Blobs
Blobs
T hat evening, before I made my way to Madam Garwah’s , I got a text comm from Aleksei sharing he had a late meeting he couldn’t avoid, and as such, I should have dinner without him.
Although I was bummed he wasn’t going to be home when I got there, I liked getting an everyday text from him about everyday stuff, like late meetings and dinner.
When I arrived back from class, I , with a tour guide of Comet , who seemed rather keen to show me the fullness of it (and he had a lot to say during the tour, but I was sensing his approval, many more places to find trouble) finally took a tour of the penthouse.
The back hall led to the freight elevator, along with a full complement of laundry units, and the two bots who’d unpacked me. They were shut down and plugged into their chargers.
And now I was seeing how the bed got made, the clothes were picked up from the floor, and Aleksei’s mess when he was cooking was cleaned up, because he nor I did any of that. But apparently, they were programed to slip out and take care of business when we weren’t around.
Pretty cool.
The upstairs, as noted, was his bedroom, but most of that level was taken up with his landing bay.
The rest was a cornucopia of awesomeness.
Yes, there were four fully kitted bedrooms with ensuites. And the wine room, which was large, stocked to the gills and had a sink, a small refrigerator and a full bar with all the complementary needs, like an array of sparkling clean glasses, and a drawer that opened that contained only ice.
There was also Aleksei’s more formal office, which had a state-of-the-art holographic conference table (totally going to holo the girls in there one day).
There was a library with three walls of floor-to-ceiling books (real ones!) and a comfy seating area in the middle in which to hunker down and read.
There was a room that had a billiards and a poker table (and another full bar, wouldn’t want to have to walk down the hall to grab yourself a whisky in the middle of a game).
And there was a media room with the biggest screen I’d ever seen, a massive square couch that was more like a couch-bed, a station that did have a Bev - Buddy , along with a Snack - Sensation , because if you were in the middle of bingeing a show or watching a vid, you wanted to program in the soda or popcorn you had a hankering for and not have to mess with making it yourself.
I’d camped out there with my Palm , doing some back-and-forth text comms with Monique , Gayle and Cat about the photo op, assuring them a task force was on the case about the gallery sitch (but not going into detail), and sharing the great news that my beast was stirring ( I’d had two more flutters since that morning!).
I also received some updates on their lives ( Gayle was being closed-mouthed about Sirk , which meant I’d have to take it out of a group comm to get the skinny from Cat or Mon ).
I finished it by telling them we needed a get together, because I wasn’t going to go into detail over a text comm about Aleksei and me consummating our mating, and just how phenomenal that was. That had to be face to face.
We’d almost made a date before Monique reminded me, I was now one part of a couple, and we would need to confirm after I made sure it was cool with Aleksei .
This did not bother me at all.
Truth told, it was thrilling, thinking I finally had someone in my life to check plans and schedules and leave digi-notes for.
I left them holding for confirmation, and with all three of my cats in attendance, I was munching some sour cream and cheese flavored potato blobs, sipping a grape sparkle and watching They Came in the Sunlight , a vid about the Troll Invasion that was released a few decades ago (my troll skin was going to be so much better , if I did say so myself).
I felt his arrival (gods, I loved that), but stayed where I was, because I knew he could find me easily (and I was super comfy).
So this was as I was when Aleksei entered the room.
I lost interest in the vid in favor of watching my mate wander in in shirtsleeves, the collar open, but still wearing his suit vest and trousers.
Yum.
He stood at the side of the couch-bed, gazing down at me. “ Is that your dinner?”
I looked at the blobs and caught sight of the cheese dust on my fingertips.
Comet, who had been quiet and content (for once) passed out on the back of the couch, got up and howled his displeasure at Aleksei’s late arrival.
Nova made her approach, scrunch nose first, but thought better of it, because she was female, so she turned around and shook her booty at him.
She did not go wanting, Aleksei’s long fingers scratched the base of her tail.
She lifted it further.
Yep.
Female.
Jupiter, who’d been lying at the foot of the couch-bed as far away from me as he could get, got into seated position, his tail sweeping the luxurious upholstery, his somber gaze on Aleksei .
“I was feeling lazy,” I answered.
He moved around the arm of the couch-bed, then crawled in on all fours.
I watched, avidly, and managed not to have an orgasm, narrowly.
He lowered himself to his stomach, next to my legs, and reached into the tub of blobs.
“Vid pause,” I called, before I asked, “ How was your meeting?”
“First, did Germaine get in touch with you?”
“No,” I answered cautiously because it was iffy I’d want to know why she would.
“You scored a ninety-seven percent approval rating in a poll she conducted after the pics from the photo op hit.”
So three percent didn’t approve of a woman they didn’t know a danged thing about?
“I sense, since you mentioned this, it’s important,” I remarked. “ So I hope to cause no offense when I say I’m not sure I care.”
“Mom was the highest paid and most popular screen star at the time her engagement to Dad was announced. She was beloved. And she only scored an eighty-nine percent.”
“Oh, so my score is good.”
He swallowed the blobs he was chewing and just stared at me.
“Not good?” I asked, confused.
“ Bissi , that is, for something like that, off the fucking charts.”
Oh.
I beamed.
“My last approval rating was eighty-six percent,” he shared.
I frowned.
“What’s the problem with fourteen percent of the Fall ?” I snapped.
He grinned and popped some blobs in his mouth.
“Do you do this kind of thing often?” I asked.
“All the fucking time.”
Ugh.
“What’s Timothee’s rating?” I queried.
“Twenty-two.”
That made sense, and actually, I thought it was on the high side.
Aleksei continued sharing. “ Errol is at twenty-nine. Mom is seventy-nine. Dad is seventy-one. Aleece is eighty-three.”
I smirked. “ Seems the people of the Fall don’t have a problem with me throwing myself in front of a beam for you.”
It was Aleksei’s turn to frown.
“Don’t worry, baby,” I murmured. “ That will never happen again.”
At least, I hoped not.
“My meeting was with the task force,” he announced.
Now I was interested in our conversation.
“Oh my gods, are they making headway?”
He did more staring at me, then he pushed up so he was reclining beside me, crossed his ankles and stole my tub of blobs.
“How much of this do you want to know?” he asked carefully.
“All of it,” I answered firmly.
He tossed some blobs in his mouth.
“Aleksei,” I warned.
“They found Farlay . He’s dead.”
My stomach dropped.
“Shot in the face with a PR60 , full beast stun,” Aleksei continued.
“This is…not good,” I replied.
“They already disposed of the female they used for gallery access, so it’s their MO .
When no longer of use, destroy. They put time into recruiting her.
Inspection of her comms say she met the assailant three months ago, just after your attack, which did not have the end they wanted.
They wasted no time putting a new plan into action.
It was a full-frontal love bombardment, except obviously, he didn’t love her.
Flowers . Gifts . Attention . Talk of marriage.
Pushing to move in together. He was well funded, those gifts he gave her were all high cost. Jewelry .
A new vid screen for her flat. A long weekend at the Elysium Hotel at Black Beach .
She has no history of any run-ins with law enforcement, save some docking tickets.
Friends and family are stunned she was part of this, at the same time stunned he was too.
They called it true love. As close to mates as you can get without being mates.
The team is theorizing she had no idea what she was doing when she let them in, outside getting them into the hottest ticket in town to see Terrinton’s work and hobnob with the rich, posh and trendy. ”
“Who faked her résumé?”
He shook his head. “ No clue. It was faked so deep, they haven’t gotten to the bottom of that yet. But it was uncovered he was the one who pushed her to go for it. Before , she worked as a dress minder at a boutique and lived in a flat with three roommates, and only two bedrooms.”
I didn’t know their rate, but my guess was, dress minders, who restocked the automated rods after customers tried on clothes, didn’t make a whole lot.
I could see being dazzled by jewelry and the Elysium Hotel .
But I couldn’t think on her very long, especially now that I knew she was an innocent victim in all this.
Her family and friends must be out of their minds.
I reached for more blobs. “ Anything on Buildlore and Fitzgerald ?”
“Not yet, but they’re not thinking good things.”
I was not the kind of person to wish ill on others, even if they had done me wrong.
But I way didn’t wish either of those two to turn up with a blast in the face, even if they were horrid to me.
“Weapons are illegal, Aleksei ,” I told him something he definitely knew. “ Unless you’re law enforcement, or military, or you jump through a lot of hoops to get a permit for one. But those are normally collectors or hunters. How are they getting their hands on prison issue firearms?”
“They’re tenaciously pursuing this line of inquiry and attempting to lock down who might be able to modify them in the hopes that, if they do, whoever that is can lead them to whoever is behind all of this.”
I had a big question to ask, even if I didn’t want the answer.
But it had to be asked.
“Could it actually have stopped your creature’s heart?”
“We can’t know unless someone tests it, which we won’t be doing,” he answered. “ But the stream is at an intensity that they speculate it would easily drop wolves, bears, big cats, the hardest beasts to kill. And by drop I mean drop dead. Dragons are a different sort, but they’re concerned.”
“I am too,” I admitted.
“I can’t say I’m not, darling. But they have the weapon the male we captured was carrying.
I incinerated one, but there’s enough of it left, they can tell both weapons had the same modifications.
The units are at the Royal Armory where they’re studying them, and they’re already at work on a defense weapon. ”
“A what?”
“A unit that can throw out an electronic shield that will absorb the stream. At the same time, it’ll blast through and disable the PR60 so it can’t fire, or if it already fired, it can’t refire.”
“And who would carry that?”
“RS agents. And me.”
Oh boy.
Aleksei continued. “ The good news, this takes so much power, it’s essentially a one shot. That’s why he only fired once. Because it has to recalibrate, and recharge, before another beam can fire. And it takes a full five minutes for this to happen.”
“I guess that’s good, unless whoever is modifying these things can one-up themself.”
“If they can, this will narrow the field of possibles significantly. To be able to recalibrate and recharge a weapon of that small size for that amount of power in less time is something that hasn’t been invented yet.
There are maybe five scientists in all Twenty Realms who could pull off something like that, and they’d have difficulty doing it, because first, they’d have to invent the means to do it with. ”
Well, that was a relief.
“Anything else?” I asked.
He tossed some more blobs in his mouth, chewed, swallowed and answered, “ No .”
“Have you eaten dinner?” I asked suspiciously.
He lifted the tub and smiled.
“Want to watch a vid with me?” I asked. “ I just started this one. We can go back to the beginning.”
As answer, he handed me the tub, leaned in and kissed my forehead, then angled out of the couch-bed, saying, “ I’m going to change. Program up some chocolate crackles, pop clusters and a cherry-lime sparkle, would you, darling?”
Prince Aleksei , the True Heir of Night’s Fall , was going to hang and chill, eat crap and watch a vid with me.
Seriously.
Destiny knew what it was doing.
I rolled out of the couch-bed (a whole lot less gracefully than Aleksei did) and went to the Snack - Sensation . I got his chocolate crackles, pop clusters, and added cashew-caramel spots. I then went to the Bev - Buddy and programmed in another grape sparkle and his cherry-lime.
After that, I told the screen to cue the vid back to the beginning.
I had our feast spread out when he returned.
And second-best thing to do with Aleksei , king-to-be and my mate (after sex)?
Having him claim me in a cuddle while we lounged in front a vid, ate food that was not good for us, and did not one thing else.
Just us, the cats, and home.
Perfect.