Chapter 51
"Who is Bryan?" the love of my life asked.
Anxiety threaded through me as the old familiar panic flooded my body. For a moment, all I could hear was a heartbeat pounding in my chest, my breath was shallow and rapid.
I couldn't tell him.
How could I tell him when I couldn't even tell Arnina?
The words caught in my throat, weighed down with words that wove over me in the past.
It wasn't that bad.
I should just get over it.
It wasn't like he killed me or put me in the hospital, so what was the big deal?
Men just have their urges. It was my fault for not protecting myself better.
Tears welled in my eyes, and I opened them up wider, letting the air dry them out. I wasn't going to cry about this anymore. I had already cried enough, alone and on my own.
I thought I was over it, but hearing my mate say that name brought back all of the panic, anger, shame, and hatred inside of me.
"I…" I still couldn't say it.
It had been years, and I couldn't say it.
Zale searched my face for a long moment, watching as all my thoughts raced across my face.
"I will kill this Bryan," he rumbled, putting his hands on my shoulders. "If the problem is that he is still alive, then I will string him up and disembowel him so he will die in slow agony."
Whoa, extreme reaction.
Yet it was a reaction that heated my blood.
"What?" I gasped. "How do you…?"
How could he know?
I hadn't even said anything!
"You are acting in distress at the mention of his name and the fact that he lives. That is enough for me," he said. "You do not need to say anything. Just tell me where I can find him, and he will die."
“But I want to say something,” I said.
He went silent.
My breath caught in my throat at my own words. I hadn’t been ready to talk to Arnina, but I was ready to talk to this alien man. It was the simple difference between a person who had earned my trust and one who had betrayed it.
Yet part of me was utterly terrified.
What if I told him what happened, and he rejected me for it?
I waited for him to say something, but he didn’t, he just stood there and waited.
“It means a lot to me that you would kill a guy for me when I haven’t even said he did anything,” I replied. “And frankly, he does deserve it. I just don’t want you to kill him.”
Again, he waited, searching my face.
What if what Bryan did wasn’t a crime in Zale’s empire?
That thought swirled in my gut, mixing with the anxiety there like a toxic soup. That would be horrific. Then again, at the same time, if I were Empress, then it was something I could fix.
I couldn’t be the kind of Empress I wanted to be if I could trust my husband.
“On Earth, legally what he did was considered a crime,” I replied. “Battery and assault for when he drugged me against my will, and rape.”
That last word almost hurt to say. I hated saying it, but it was the truth.
Zale snarled, his ears pinning back, his tail lashing.
“Why do you not wish for me to kill him?” he asked. “Forcing another person into sexual acts without their explicit consent is punishable by death.”
“Death?” I asked. I agreed with him. Oh I agreed with him so much.
But a part of me surged forward, wanting to play the devil’s advocate.
“Shouldn’t they be given a chance to repent or something like that?
Your culture is into violence, I literally watched Murder Kitty take out three guys and no one even blinked an eye.
Why is sexual violence treated differently? ”
“Violence in my culture happens through formal challenges or war. Sexual violence is a different thing entirely. Once a person is willing to commit such a crime, they will do it over and over again,” he said.
“It isn’t a case of one person being physically and psychologically tortured by another.
It is the promise of a lifetime of harm being caused to those around them. ”
My heart was racing, my blood pounding in my ears.
I’d been told my entire life to turn the other cheek.
I’d been told I had to be kind, loving, and forgive those who hurt me.
Well I didn’t believe in forgiveness.
Forgiving someone who harmed you didn’t serve you or them.
Sure, letting hatred burn in you didn’t help any either, but forgiveness was a nonsense copout that put the responsibility on the victim to not feel hate.
The only thing that fixed the issue was the abuser never harming another person again in that way, in them changing to be a better person, and leaving their previous victims alone.
Zale was right.
Forgiving someone who abused and harmed others was absolute bullshit. It just meant that they would go out and hurt others.
I loved the idea of him killing for me, but it wasn’t what I wanted. What I wanted was to be strong enough to get justice for myself.
“This isn’t something I want you to do for me,” I said. “I want to have the power to deal with this myself.”
I followed that statement with a deep, shuddering breath.
In.
Out.
This wasn't something my mate could do for me.
Just the fact that he offered, just the fact that he saw my panic and immediately sought its solution, rather than getting angry at me for reacting that way or being unable to speak - that in itself was enough to put a weighted blanket on my heart.
“Yes,” he said.
Then he waited for me to speak, to elaborate.
When I elaborated, he didn’t reject me. He didn’t push me away just because a human man had decided to treat me like an object instead of a person. He didn’t let the jagged scar across my mind make him judge me. He just offered to eliminate the source of the pain.
Now, that I had rejected his offer to solve the problem for me, he was waiting for me to tell him what I wanted.
Every muscle in my body relaxed as I smiled up at him.
"Earth is mine, right?" I asked.
But what did that mean to him when it came to the little old alien me?
"Yes, it is yours to do with as you wish," he replied. "Though, if you choose to do nothing, this planet is going to become unlivable. It requires a large amount of correction from its current course."
"Why?" I asked. "I know I'm your mate, but why do this? Why commit your fleet to taking a solar system just to give me a planet?"
"It is not purely selfless," he replied. "I want to see what you will do with power. So I am giving you the opportunity to show me. How we move forward with what privileges as my mate is dependent on what actions you take when given control of a planet and an invading fleet."
"What does that mean exactly?" I asked. "What privileges?"
"Nothing that impacts your physical comfort or freedom," he said. "Just the liberties I will allow you to take with my people. If you are too gentle to rule, I will not put you in a position to."
"I don't know what I am," I said, shaking my head. "I'm just a woman from Earth who doesn't know what to do with all her rage. This responsibility is immense, and I don't know if I'm going to mess things up."
He was silent for a moment.
"I'm sure the Council of Queens will rule," he said. "The Shek'invitali are waiting at the edge of the system as I requested. If you wish to do nothing at all, they will take over. You are not responsible for this planet's well being if you do not wish to be."
I took another deep breath.
I didn't feel like I was the right person for this job.
I felt like an imposter.
I thought 400 years had passed and that Earth had gotten its shit sorted out. Instead, it was right where I left it, in the thick of a giant environmental catastrophe. He was leaving it up to me to decide, because he wanted to see what I would do.
He wanted to see how I would rule.
He wanted to see if I had what it took to be his equal.
If I wanted him to see me as an equal, I had to act like an equal.
Not in trying to physically dominate him or challenge his rule or anything stupid like that - he was a massive muscular alien who was attracted to a small, soft, feeble in comparison human, and him expecting me to be a fighting murder machine was nonsensical.
He clearly wanted me for who I was - and that person he fell in love with was the woman who would fight back, who would take a swing at an alien even when she was surrounded, naked, and utterly alone, just to get a strike in.
No, me being his equal was me being his equal in my mind.
I had to face the part of me that had spent months curled up in a ball debating my own death.
I had to address that part of me that had been crushed under the weight of my society's expectation that, as a woman, I should be grateful that some man wanted to fuck me so bad that he took away my choice in the matter.
To be an Empress, I couldn't let my old world have its way with my heart.
To be an Empress, I couldn't be afraid to take action and to speak.
It was time to be strong.
The only difference was that now I had actual power.
Like serious firepower.
I had command.
I took another slow, deep breath.
I had power, but I didn't have knowledge.
Luckily, being a ruler didn't mean doing everything yourself.
"No," I said. "I'm going to do this, but I need to hire some people from Earth."
There was a coiling in my heart.
I knew what I had to do.
This man was waiting for me to show him who I was as a person. He had me as his mate, but he wanted to know if I could also be his Empress. I had seen just snippets of their culture, but what I had seen was enough to know what kind of behavior they encouraged in their rulers.
Those who ruled did so through blood.