Chapter 33
The sunlight snuck through my eyelids, bringing me back to the world of waking with the soft touches of light and heat.
My head was resting on something warm.
On someone strong.
His breath lifted me up, my head, hand, and shoulder rising as he inhaled underneath me, slow and steady. I was partially on top of him. His arm was around my waist.
I listened to his heartbeat.
I kept my eyes closed, sinking into this moment, never wanting to let it go.
He came back. He stayed the night with me again.
We had talked through the things we needed to.
He was going to take care of me, protect me, cherish me - all the things he had shown through his actions he had offered with his words.
There was no denying it - words paired with action were enough to break down my walls.
This glow in my heart was unmistakable.
This was love.
I’d just never felt it before.
This was what love was supposed to feel like - the warmth of knowing my heart was safe to love. It was the certainty that this alien man was here, would be here; that he would take the time to talk to me when we had things we needed to work through, rather than run away.
This was a man I could face my fears for.
I opened my eyes.
I could see the curve of his throat, framed by a mane of translucent hair that looked almost white, its sandy blond roots barely visible against his skin.
I blinked my gaze, following the line of his mane to where it met the fur that covered the top of his shoulders.
There was a strong black stripe that stood stark against the color.
The warm glow in my heart faded into a surge of utter panic.
No, there had to be an explanation.
He had to have just dyed his hair, bleaching out all the color.
I sat up.
He opened his eyes that I loved.
I took a sharp breath.
His face was the same.
His eyes were the same.
“Your hair,” he smiled. “You changed it.”
My eyes widened as I took in the sight of the sandy blond roots of his own hair.
My heart seemed to pause in my chest for a moment as my mind processed everything I had been told. Zale was the Emperor’s errand boy. He had the same face and eyes as the Emperor. They had different fur colors. Zale had been preparing to hand me off to the Emperor before I hooked up with him.
I had been told the Emperor was going to come see me.
Was Zale the Emperor in disguise, pretending to work for himself?
A knock on the door interrupted the whirling thoughts in my mind.
“Emperor Belirious, you requested immediate notice if the video was trending,” a voice sang through the door.
“Do not disturb me further,” the silver-furred male in my bed called back, never taking his eyes off me.
“Emperor Belirious?” I asked, still held still in a long moment of waiting.
Waiting to be certain.
I felt behind me on the bed for the translator.
It wasn’t there.
“I meant what I said last night,” he sang. Then he held up his wrist unit and flicked the holographic screen open. A few more motions and a video began playing in the air between us.
It was a video of me.
I was in the weird zoo tower office with Arnina and the teenagers. I was laughing, taking the body motions I had learned and connecting them into a mini dance choreography that I repeated twice before laughing again and going back to working on learning.
He clicked on something, and another video loaded.
It was a cat elf doing the same mini-dance.
He swiped, showing me video after video of the little dance I had done to amuse myself, repeated by stranger after stranger I didn’t know.
“You are the perfect mate for an Emperor,” he purred.
My heart sank as I clung to the last tendrils of my disbelief.
The video he had spoken about last night.
It wasn’t the video screen where Zale had seen me being mistreated by lizard aliens.
It was a trending social media post of me being silly while learning the movements that went with words I couldn’t sing properly - a video that
Zale himself took, judging by the position it was taken from in the room.
But he had the same face as Zale.
If this wasn’t Zale with a dye job, then…
I rolled to the edge of the bed and fetched the translator tablet off the floor.
“Do you have doubles?” I typed out. “Do you have employees who look like you to help with security or errands?”
“Yes,” he said as he tilted his head to the side, studying my face.
A white noise rang out between my ears, the words striking my heart like a gong, muting the rest of the sound in the room.
My breath was shallow in my chest as I held perfectly still.
That guard had said Zale was an errand boy for the Emperor.
The Emperor used employees who looked like him to run errands.
Zale had prepared me to be handed off to the Emperor.
Zale had told me that he was leaving me.
I stared down at the translator as the high of my joy came crashing down around me, drowning out the rest of the world in a monotone buzz of gray.
My mind raced over everything the Emperor had said to me in the dark. He hadn’t lied to me about who he was. He had approached me very directly, telling me exactly what he wanted from me. He was upfront about everything. The glam team from earlier had all said I was going to meet with the Emperor.
The guard told me I was going to be summoned by the Emperor.
I wasn’t expecting to be approached in the dark and propositioned, which itself was on the less than cool side, but he was an Emperor of an empire that apparently spanned multiple planets at the very least - this might be the socially normal way for him to pick up a new lady for his harem.
He had clearly expected me to know who was climbing onto my bed.
I initiated things with him.
I just about force-fed him my flower.
Even with all those rationalizations for how this could be seen as okay, it still felt bad.
I was expecting to wake up next to a different alien.
I took a deep breath, riding the waves of complex emotions.
I was ice, frozen solid at this moment in time.
Zale had prepared me for the Emperor. He had to have been the one to take that video of me, the one that caught the alien’s attention.
If he was the errand boy, he likely sent it directly to the Emperor as well.
He took me out shopping for outfits to catch royal attention and made sure they would end up in the room in the Palace where I was taken to wait for the Emperor.
He arranged for the pamper team to prepare me for the Emperor.
He handed me to another alien without a word.
He had rescued me, fucked me, and given me to someone else.
I had let my heart run away with me. I’d fallen too soon, too hard, without knowing much about him, and this was the price.
Crushing betrayal and unanswered questions.
I should have talked to Zale when he tried to talk to me. Maybe this wouldn’t have happened. Maybe he would have told me everything if I had just given him the chance.
Maybe he shouldn’t have thrown me to his boss.
The compounding pain in my heart layered on top of itself, pressing my heart into a tight ball of regret, shame, anger, and self-hatred.
I didn’t have the luxury of breaking down.
A familiar numbness settled over me.
If I was going to be sold to the highest bidder, I needed to make sure I was the one who was doing the selling and getting the promised price, no one else.
Or, at the very least, I needed to make the price high enough that he would let me go.
I gripped the translator.
“I didn’t agree to be the mate to the Emperor,” I typed out.
Oh, I really wanted this to go over well.
I didn’t know what to do if it didn’t. But I knew I needed to take the risk.
I needed to take charge of this so that I wasn’t just some woman handed from one man to another.
“I didn’t know what your position was when you climbed onto my bed.
For me to agree to be your mate, I have several conditions that must be met. ”
He flicked his ears in a rapid swoop that indicated surprise and dismay.
He thought I knew who he was last night.
“Tell me,” the Emperor gestured with his hand, indicating openness and a willingness to listen.
Thank goodness for that.
Now to make sure he knew that I was an expensive bitch.
“I require a large, regular financial stipend that goes into an account that only I have access to, with the regular amount being twice that of your highest-paid employee,” I typed.
“You are not an employee, but I agree,” he nodded. “You will have your own money in your own accounts to do with as you wish - as is due to you as my mate.”
I charged ahead.
“Second, I require my own home where I can personally select the staff, with your recommendations, and where I have complete control of who is allowed entry,” I typed out. “This home must also have a large swimming pool that is kept at a warm temperature and never freezes solid.”
“I will make this happen,” he nodded. “It will be an interesting challenge for the royal engineer corps. Keeping the water in balance without the cold freezes hasn’t yet been done.”
Well, that was weird, but okay. Aliens managing to get into space without ever building a consistent temperature swimming pool - not what I expected to be a challenge for them.
“Third, my children are mine; you will not take them from me or limit my access to them in any way,” I typed.
“Of course,” he nodded. “Though, as they grow older, their education will be overseen by me. You will be welcome to add to it as well and will not be physically kept from them.”
I took a deep, steadying breath as I typed, letting the breath fill me down to my depths.
Now for the demand he was most likely to reject.
“Finally, you must be monogamous,” I typed out. “I will be your only mate.”
He was definitely going to reject that.
I would have established myself as high value and then given him a reason to reject one of my demands. Now, he would negotiate for something that would give me even more freedom, or he would let me go completely.
His ears flattened backward.
“This should already be the case,” he leaned forward, the words coming out with a tone that almost bordered on a snarl. “You have not had the opportunity to mate with anyone else. I have not allowed it. You are mine and mine alone.”
A stab of pain fluttered through my heart as I thought of Zale.
The Emperor didn’t know that I had hooked up with him.
Zale gave me away without a word about it.
The cold feeling settled in my chest.
I was the only one who could give me away.
“I am yours,” I typed. “You are mine.”
With that, I was officially a gold digger.