Chapter 34
The Emperor had left, and the glam team had come in and swirled me back up before sending me out the door.
Two guards escorted me back to the throne room, which was now spotless.
The three chairs had been removed from the dais, and some of the more nauseating artistic displays had been turned off.
The room was now much less visually intense.
The Emperor was standing there with a small cluster of people around him. Yreta was one of them. He looked up as I entered, his eyes catching mine. He walked straight through the group around him, and they parted like water as he swept towards me.
He leaned down over me, his hand reaching toward my cheek.
I leaned into his touch, smiling at him as I put my own hands on his abdomen.
He was ripped under the stylish white and gold outfit he had on. I could tell how fit and muscular he was last night from us rolling around. It was part of why I was so certain that he was Zale. That and his voice seemed similar - or maybe I just wanted it to be.
I pushed that thought away.
Last night was not my fault.
At the very least, the Emperor should have knocked and been all like, yo, I’m the Emperor, and I want to bang you senseless; you want to be my wife? Or even Zale being like, I’m leaving because I actually was only preparing you to meet the Emperor, and sorry, we shouldn’t have hooked up.
I took a deep breath and tried to push away the bitterness of my thoughts.
I made my own choices.
I didn't blame anyone for my own decisions.
I chose this going forward, and I needed to give it my all. This was my path forward, and I was absolutely down to be pampered by a rich, powerful alien who I already knew was great in bed and was down to be all mine.
I licked my lips, parting them as I stared up into his eyes.
I needed to make this cat elf feel like I desired him more than anyone.
More than Zale.
I heard a noise and turned to see Arnina striding into the room like she was the Queen surveying her army. That image was intensified by the fact that she had massive tentacles emerging from her back like extra arms.
“Neen, you look like Ursula and Kerrigan had a love child,” I said, ditching the Emperor to make a beeline for her. She was clearly more important in this moment.
“Did that man do science experiments on you? What is that?”
She opened her arms and wrapped me in a hug.
“It’s an STS,” she whispered.
What.
“What the heck is that?” I demanded. “Are you serious?”
“Sexually transmitted symbiote. Makrus said it wasn’t going to hurt me at all - at least, other than when it went through my back.
It does transmit from full penetrative intercourse, but it has to choose you or something.
He said it is going to lengthen my lifespan quite a bit.
Apparently, all of his species have it.”
Oh! That made sense with what the Emperor had said.
I had no idea it could stick out of our backs like the arms of a mutated space marine.
But if she had them, where were mine?
“But why is it sticking out of your back like you are about to start controlling the zerg?” I asked. “Wasn’t his on his… you know?”
“He said I can decide where it goes,” she replied. “And all I could think of was, well, Kerrigan, actually, and this is what happened.”
I was not ready to octopus it up yet.
Hopefully, my osae would wait - if they even were in me. Maybe my body was a toxic environment to them, which was why I hadn’t turned into Cthulhu.
“Do you think you can climb things with it?” I asked.
I really needed to get myself checked out.
The Emperor would probably be super down for me to hit up his medical team.
Another bonus was being the wife of Mr. Rich and Powerful, which meant I was going to get great healthcare. I might even get my own dedicated medical team to see to my every twitch, especially since he seemed real down to have half breed babies with me.
Except he wasn’t the only one I’d been with recently.
“I think so,” she said. “But they seem to be connected to my musculoskeletal system, so I’m betting I’m going to have to train my back muscles to be able to do anything super cool.”
“Check her,” the Emperor called out, and another cat elf alien started walking towards me, holding something in his hands.
“Check me for what?” Arnina sang out.
Arnina was using the translator a lot differently than I was. Instead of letting it talk for her, she was using it to teach herself the words and then singing them out herself.
That was cool.
“They can speak?” the Emperor asked, giving me a cheeky grin. “The other one only used the translator to communicate. I thought their vocal chords were not fully developed.”
I rolled my eyes at him.
The Emperor was teasing me - maybe?
Maybe he actually didn’t know we could sing.
Well, Arnina could sing. There was no we in the singing department.
The alien stopped a short distance away and pointed the device in its hands at me.
“Rude. We can talk fine. It’s you who hasn’t answered the question,” Arnina sang back.
“To be fair, I was going full mermaid on the bosshole here,” I said under my breath.
“Body language and all that works fine when your singing voice is more like a seagull.”
“You don’t sound like a seagull,” Arnina murmured back.
“You’re too nice for your own good,” I bounced back at her.
“The medic will not harm you,” the Murder Kitty said. “She is scanning you for-”
“The alien is with child,” the device holding the alien called out. “Judging by the readings, she has only just been seeded, but it has anchored within her.”
Arnina was pregnant?
“What?” Arnina gasped. “I thought it would take weeks… it takes years for some people!”
So, at least she knew it was a possibility. That was good.
The fact that the device could detect it that quickly was kind of cray cray, though.
I narrowed my eyes.
The alien with the mobile pregnancy detector went over to the armored bosshole and sang something quietly to him, nodding to me as he spoke.
Wait a second - did he scan me, too?
The Emperor said that it was hard for his species to have children… but if Neen was already pregnant after a really short period of time, then maybe…
My breasts had been aching weirdly yesterday.
I could already be pregnant.
“Shit, Neen, I think I fucked up,” I said.
Her Murder Kitty wrapped her in his arms and pulled her away from me.
“The osae chooses correctly,” he purred to her. “You are the mate of my heart and of my body. Our children will have the best of everything.”
He couldn’t give us even two seconds with each other. I crossed my arms, both mad and understanding at the same time. He just found out he was going to be a dad.
“You really want this?” Arnina asked him. “You really want me, want us?”
“Yes,” he crooned. “You are my mate, and you have made us a family. You are bearing the heir to the throne if they so choose to follow in my footsteps.”
“What if it is a girl?” she asked.
“I don’t understand,” he replied.
“Your mom didn’t become queen, did she?” She asked. “Do only males inherit the throne?”
He shook his head.
“No, that is not sensible,” he replied.
“His mother was not the heir,” the Emperor interrupted. “I gave her the choice to reinforce her temporary rule until Makrus came of age, and she decided to let the conglomerate take it. We agreed they would be less of a threat if they were handed what they wanted.”
“It is a decision I came to regret,” Aurora sang out from the doorway to the throne room. She moved across the floor and bowed deeply to the Emperor. “I am grateful to my liege for giving me that choice, and I wonder if things would have gone differently had I made a different choice.”
“We live with the choices we make,” the Emperor replied, nodding his head to her bow.
“And the best choices are the ones that let us live to make more. The Conglomerate likely would have staged an accident for you after I left. They were not honorable. The choice you made to back off and let them take power and come live in security at the capital city was one that kept you and your son alive.”
She bowed her head again and made a strange face at the ground.
“Mother,” Murder Kitty said. “My mate and I will be having a young one.”
“She…” his mom looked up in shock as she glanced over at me. “The hoomons are actually compatible?”
“Humans,” Arnina sighed.
“HUMANS!” I said at the same time.
“It's pronounced humans,” Arnina added to soften our intense response.
“The osae changes what it wills,” Murder Kitty said. “My human mate is compatible.”
“This will be a change,” Makrus’s mom agreed as she placed her hands over her heart, glancing quickly over at the Emperor and then at Arnina. “A beautiful one, a welcome one, but one the population will have to be coaxed into supporting.”
Arnina pushed away from the Murder Kitty and came over to me.
“What is going on?” she asked. “What did you need to tell me?”
“When you got… your symbiote… what did it feel like?” I asked.
“I’m not sure, but once I decided where I wanted it to go, it really hurt,” she replied. “I was kind of having too good of a time to notice what it felt like when it was doing its thing before that.”
“And are you sure they aren’t lying that you could be pregnant?” I asked. “They are aliens. They shouldn’t be able to knock us up. They’re, like, a different species.”
“Well, Makrus did try to show me a sex ed diagram explaining pregnancy, so I’m pretty sure he kn-” she switched sentences mid go as she looked at my face. “Lorelei, what did you do?”
I might as well tell her.
“Well, you were gone for some time, and you know… I like… made a deal,” I said.
“Tell me who,” she demanded.
“I fucked the Emperor,” I said. “And also-”
“What Emperor?” She cut me off.
“This one is coming with me.” The Emperor swooped me off the ground.
“HEY!” Arnina shouted, and suddenly tentacles were wrapping around my arms and legs.
Super weird.
She was touching me with her symbiote.
“She has control over her osae?” the Emperor asked.
Did he not have control over his?
Maybe that was why Zale had tried to keep my flower petals away from his tentacles.
Once they grabbed hold, everything was definitely going to get plucked.
“You can’t just grab someone and try to leave with them without asking their permission!” Arnina snapped.
She was so feisty.
For a moment, I forgot all of the pain and strife in our past and admired her for who she was at that moment.
She may not always be aware of me and what I was going through, and she a hundred percent would choose to hang out with her Murder Kitty over me, but when she came through, she came through.
The problem was her being aware that she needed to.
“I’m the Emperor,” the Emperor replied.
“Well, I’m the Queen of the Zerg, and if you don’t watch it, you’re going to have to deal with a rush,” Arnina sang back.
I grinned.
The Emperor glanced around the room.
“All I see is my guard. There are no so-called zerg here,” he replied, then looked down at me. “But I am gracious. Small hoomon, you will come with me. Yes?”
“I’m going to go with him,” I said.
“What? Why?” she asked.
I didn’t reply.
Sometimes it was so hard to communicate, to get the words out when there was so much behind them; it would take a novel's worth of communication to spill the fullness of the truth from my heart.
“You need to talk to me,” she pleaded. “Just tell me what is going on.”
I smiled at her.
The audacity of this woman.
I owed her nothing.
She had ghosted me for two years when I needed her the most, just so she could hold onto a fantasy version of her monster of an ex. All she had to do was ask me and wait in silence for me to spit it out.
But she never even asked me what really happened.
Instead, she just believed him.
“Do I, Neen?” I asked. “Beg me again to talk to you. I dare you.”
There was a sharpness to the silence.
She knew exactly what I was being so spicy about.
“I'm so sorry,” she said. “I should have listened to you. You were a good friend, and I didn’t honor that. I was stupid, and the fact that you were still there for me after I broke up with him… you are a good friend. Please let me be a good friend to you.”
I opened my mouth to speak.
“The ship we will embark on, the Darting Sabaxl, I gift to you,” the Emperor interrupted. “It is yours. You may use it at any time to return to your friend or visit the hoomons from the Shek’invitali homeworld. It will be transferred to you as the owner for you to do with it what you want.”
Oh, heck yeah, an entire spaceship?
Wait, who were the Shek’invitali?
“That’s part of the reason,” I shook my arms to try to get rid of her tentacle grip. “Now stop holding me back, 'cause baby, I’m a gold digger.”
She let me go.
The Emperor turned and carried me away.
“You tell me the real reason soon, okay?” She called out after me. “Promise you’ll call me?”
“I do what I want!” I yelled back.
That bitch still needed to apologize properly.