Chapter 4
LOCAL ALIEN LEADER: SURPRISINGLY GOOD AT LISTENING
ERIKA
Icannot sleep.
I have been staring at the rough cavern ceiling for what feels like hours, my body exhausted but my brain refusing to shut down.
Every time I close my eyes, I see Sorn’s hand opening.
The faded fabric. The little yellow flowers.
I see twenty women crying, and I see myself standing in the middle of it all, offering useless words while an alien warrior folded himself into the shadows in grief.
So instead of sleeping, I lie in the pitch dark and mentally organize our survival tasks. It is the only coping mechanism I have left to keep the panic from swallowing me whole. Tomorrow: finish the filter weaves. Calculate the remaining dried firebloom stores.
“Erika.”
The whisper in the dark is sharp, urgent, and immediately sets my teeth on edge.
I do not open my eyes. Instead, I pull my hide blanket tighter over my shoulders. “Unless the cave is actively collapsing, Jacqui, please go to sleep.”
“I am not asleep,” Jacqui whispers, hovering right beside my mat in the near-total darkness.
I sigh, dragging my hands roughly over my face. The hide strips Kol wrapped around my knuckles catch painfully against my cheekbone, the leather stiff with dried firebloom paste. I push myself up onto my elbows.
The only light in the cavern comes from the dying embers of the central fire pit and the faint, natural glow emitting from the warriors resting on the outer ledges.
Jacqui looks completely wide awake. Her blonde hair is pulled back, and her eyes have that distinct, slightly glassy, unfocused look that means she is currently submerged in the alien mindspace.
“Okay,” I say, swinging my legs over the side of my mat and dragging my boots quietly toward me. “What.”
“I was just sitting by the fire with Tharn,” she whispers. “It was completely quiet. And then Kol just slammed a command through the entire mindspace.”
I stop pulling on my boots. A cold, incredibly sharp drop of adrenaline hits my bloodstream. “What command?”
“He’s cutting the daily water rations,” she says, her voice flat. “By a third.”
My brow furrows in the dark. “He just decided this? Without speaking to anyone?”
“He’s the dra-dam,” Jacqui mutters, leaning her weight against the cavern wall.
“He didn’t speak. He just... projected the order.
Directly into the heads of every single warrior in this cave.
Total, undeniable, absolute silence. Tharn won’t challenge it.
None of them will.” She pauses, pushing a tense hand over her face.
“I came to you because I need you to help me come up with a plan. Some way to siphon off the excess and stockpile it to take the pressure off Alex in the sick bay. The unmated women cannot survive on two-thirds of a ration, Erika.”
My jaw clenches so hard my teeth grind together. “He’s really cutting it by a third.”
“A third,” she confirms. “Zan is already hauling the excess out of the drinking pool to seal in the emergency skins.”
“Why?” I ask, my heart beginning to hammer.
“I don’t know. Kol is projecting nothing but the order. He is a complete wall.”
I stand up, my hands curling into tight fists. “There is no plan that magically creates water out of thin air. We are already drinking a baseline minimum. We cannot tighten that any further.”
The Drakav might be able to survive a month on a single mouthful of dew, but human kidneys do not work like that. A third less water means rapid dehydration. It means Alex gets immediately overwhelmed in the sick bay. It means we die.
I do not even finish tying my boots before I am marching toward the center of the cavern, walking directly toward the massive, terrifying warlord.
“Erika,” Jacqui hisses from behind me.
I ignore her.
Every single warrior around the fire stops moving the instant I cross the threshold.
Zan, who is holding an oversized hide waterskin, freezes. Haroth goes utterly still, his ears flattening back tightly against his skull. Another called Keth turns, glowing golden eyes locking onto me.
The silence that drops over the circle is so thick I can feel it pressing against my eardrums. The air in the cavern turns incredibly thick. I do not need a telepathic translator to know that the mindspace just went completely, violently still.
Kol turns slowly.
He looks down at me. From this angle, he is colossal.
A sweep of rough, tan hair falls around the severe angle of his jaw.
The thick ridges of his status markings curve over his broad shoulders, tracing the deep, muscular swells of his golden chest. He is an absolute mountain of raw power, but the brutal, fierce symmetry of his face is overwhelmingly, aggressively masculine.
His amber eyes lock directly onto my face and his glow immediately brightens.
It flares hard enough that the searing heat of it presses directly against my skin from a full arm’s length away.
My stomach does an immediate, incredibly violent flip.
All at once, completely without my permission, a liquid wave of heat rolls straight down my spine and pools thickly low in my belly. My feet actually scrape an inch forward against the stone, my entire body craving the severe heat radiating off his chest.
I lock my knees and force my spine straight. I bite the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste copper, using the sharp spike of physical pain to forcefully override the humiliating urge to walk directly into him.
“You changed the water,” I say. I mix English with the harsh Drakav syllables I’ve managed to scrape together over the last month. “S’kahn. Toral.”
Water. None.
The warriors around us go even more rigid. Kol goes completely, unnervingly still.
His nostrils flare slightly as he drags in a slow breath. He looks at me the way a starving predator looks at a very small animal.
He looks exactly like he wants to eat me alive.
“S’kahn... mine,” Kol grinds out. He forces the human words up his throat. His vocal cords sound like they are physically tearing. “I...give.”
“I am not questioning your authority,” I snap, my voice climbing higher than I want it to as I jab my finger toward his solid chest. “I am questioning your math.”
He tilts his head slightly, his brow furrowing as though the word math does not compute with survival logic.
“You cannot cut our water. We will literally die. Humans require a minimum baseline of hydration that you are currently ignoring.”
His jaw tightens. A thick knot of muscle ticks under his golden skin. He leans down until his head is exactly level with mine. The sheer wave of heat pouring off his skin hits me full in the face, drowning my senses with the scent of hot stone and spice.
He grinds out a string of harsh syllables. The translator in my ear clicks. “The dust is dry,” it says in a flat, monotone voice. “The clan shares the drought.”
“Your clan has highly evolved alien kidneys,” I shoot right back, actually fighting the urge to lean directly into his heat. “We do not. The mated women are fine. The rest of us are failing. Look at me, Kol.”
I grab the thick, rigid muscle of his bare forearm.
The skin underneath my palm is scorching hot, tough as cured hide, and pulsing with too much physical strength. The vibration of it shoots straight up my arm, but I forcefully lock my fingers around him and refuse to let go.
“Look at me,” I repeat, my voice cracking under the sheer exhaustion.
He looks. His intense amber eyes drop agonizingly slowly.
They move to my arm that is gripping him, directly to where my bandaged palm is pressed against his golden skin.
Then they slowly move back up. To my body.
My neck. My chin. He takes in the deep, exhausted hollows under my eyes, the pale color of my skin, the physical toll the planet is taking on my fragile frame.
His glow violently spikes, flaring a chaotic, aggressive gold that strobes forcefully across his chest. That does not mean he is your mate, my brain screams at me. Erika, stop it.
But then the familiar rumble starts deep inside his chest.
A thick, intensely resonant thrump-thrump grinds to life behind his ribs. Ragged. Stuttering. Aggressively fast.
The vibration rolls straight through my palm, shooting directly up the bones of my wrist. Every single hair on my body stands up. My grip on his arm tightens on its own, my fingers digging hard into his rigid muscle.
It has no business feeling that good. A sharp, humiliating flush of heat burns straight up my neck.
Five other alien warriors are standing in total silence right behind me, listening to the low, feral purr grinding out of their warlord, but I lock my jaw and refuse to break his intense, suffocating stare.
His strength is an actual wall. My anger cracks against it and falls apart. It’s the sheer exhaustion. It’s the terrifying reality of our dehydration. It’s the absolute lack of control I have over any of this.
And because my body actively hates me, my tear ducts choose this exact moment to betray my false strength.
I loathe crying when I am angry. I clench my jaw, glaring up at him with blurry vision, desperately trying to suck the tears back into my eyes through sheer spite.
Kol moves jarringly fast.
One second his arms are rigidly at his sides, and the next, his broad hand is hovering a fraction of an inch from my face. One sharp claw carefully, almost reverently, sweeps directly beneath my eyelid, catching a single, wet tear before it can fall.
He slowly pulls his hand back and stares intensely at the tiny drop of wetness shining against his claw. His brows slam together in a deep V.
“Broh-ken... eyes?” he forces out, his throat working hard around the syllables.
“I am angry crying, Kol,” I say, my voice a thick, breathless mess. I swipe blindly at his arm, which is like trying to shove a solid concrete pillar. It does not move him an inch, but it spikes the loud, frantic purr grinding in his chest. “Listen to me!”