Chapter Forty-Five
The gentlemale-ly thing to do would be to ride back to Caldwell with Denne to make sure she got there safely.
But as Allhan stepped out of her truck, he didn’t trust himself to let her go when they got back to town.
He was not right on the inside, and instinctively, he knew that he was on the cusp of throwing logic to the wind just to keep them together.
Given everything she’d said—and all she hadn’t spoken—he’d figured she was tied to another, and he was well familiar with the disaster of arranged matings.
But she’d seemed sure that the male was going to treat her well, and he told the protective side of himself that that had to be enough.
It was certainly all he was going to get.
Holding the door open for her, he offered her his hand, and when she took it, she didn’t look at him. Not because she hated him. He knew it that was the opposite of that.
And he was the same.
As he pulled her against him, their bodies fit perfectly, her head on his pecs, her smaller torso lost in his heavier arms. It so happened that he was facing the view and the stars, and as he regarded the night sky, he knew he was paying for his scheming here.
Without everything he’d done, maybe he could have fought for her. He had been a catch, once. From a good family with prospects and money. But his solution to his father had locked him into this nightmare he could never have imagined.
And locked him in with Carmen, too.
Allhan inched back. He wanted to tell Denne to call him if she needed him, if she needed anybody. Except he knew that he was the last person she should reach out to.
“I wish you all of the very best in life,” he said hoarsely. “You deserve nothing less.”
The only peace he could find was doing right by her and never, ever seeing her or contacting her again.
He was not going to get out of the deal with the lesser alive.
“Before you go.” She stroked his face. “Can I ask you one question?”
He nodded. But as there was so much he couldn’t answer for her, he hoped she reconsidered.
“When were you born?”
His brows lifted. “Ah… July fifth.”
She pressed him for the year, and he gave it to her. “And I remember the time,” he tacked on. “Eleven eleven. In the evening. Why do you ask?”
Denne took a deep breath, like she was trying to relieve the very suffocation he was feeling. “I don’t know, I was thinking about doing your astrological chart. But it doesn’t matter, actually.”
The wind blew around them, and he stepped back into her to insulate her with his body. And maybe so he could catch one last moment of feeling her against him.
Then he kissed her on the forehead, and leaned around to open the driver’s-side door of the now-silver truck. “Be careful on the way home. The roads are slippery.”
She nodded. Got behind the wheel. Started that big, throaty engine.
He stepped back so she could turn the truck around, her headlights flaring across him as she re-angled everything and faced the road’s descent down the mountain. There was a moment of suspension, the red taillights glowing brightly, curls of steam coming out of the tailpipes.
Then the brakes were released, and she was off.
Allhan stayed where he was as she disappeared from view, feeling as though his heart was being crushed inside his chest.
Closing his eyes, he told himself he had to go, and began the process of trying to calm things down so he could ghost out.
Just as he felt the shift in his molecules, his phone vibrated in his hoodie pocket.
Thinking it was her, that she’d hit a deer, that a miracle had happened and neither one of them was living the lives they were—
It was his burner going off. And as he went to open the text, he gritted his molars and felt like he was going to scream.
That all went away as he saw the photograph.
It was his sister, standing in front of the glass sliders of her kitchen, staring out at the Hudson River.
Tick-tock was all the lesser wrote.
Denne drove back to the cabin just outside of the Territory in a blur.
She had no memory of going down the zigzag of the mountain, no clue how she got on the Northway, no recollection of riding I-87 back toward Caldwell and bailing early so she could rural-road to where she changed those robes out every night.
And after she pulled up to the little structure, she sat in the truck’s warm interior and stared out over the hood.
Well, shit. She’d meant go park the truck in its garage at her bolt hole.
Whatever.
There was absolutely no motivation in her at all when she finally got out, and while she walked through the snow to the door, the fact that her body ached in all the right places was just a bitch.
As she entered the cabin, she took off her parka, and instead of keeping her clothes on, she quick-ditched all of them in case there were any scents on them—oh, who was she kidding.
Al was all over her, and she wanted it like that.
She loved the dark spices on her skin, inside of her body, and she was going to need a hot, bracing shower and a whole lot of soap to get that marking of his off of her.
God, all she could think of was the way Al had touched her. But she needed to let that go.
Over at the robe rack, her hand automatically went to the navy blue one, and that tripped her up for a minute. Mourning. Grief. Pain.
No shit.
It took everything in her to force the royal purple one on, but she couldn’t not wear that color.
Welcome to the rest of your life, she thought.
From out of nowhere, that scene from the ancient second Star Trek movie came back to her: The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
“Fuck you, Spock.”
Back in the snow, she closed her eyes and was not surprised it took forever to ghost out. Eventually, she did manage to scatter, and then re-form in front of the royal palace, but all she really wanted to do was turn away and go back to…
“What,” she said bitterly. “What are you going back to.”
Looking up at the nothing-special black glass building, she thought about how smart it was for the s’Hisbe to fly under the radar.
Considering how invasive a species humans were, the more you could hide among them the better, using what they could do for you while at the same time staying out of their way.
Her mother was so good at navigating that boundary.
And yet staying true to the old ways.
It was that legacy of smart leadership that Denne kept in mind as she entered and proceeded down to check in with her parents.
Something monumental had happened in her life, and even though she couldn’t tell them any of the details, the rebounding pain inside her chest made her seek them out.
It was a throwback, she supposed, to the way she’d cleaved to her mother and father as a young.
No more scraped knees now. Everything was so much more serious.
When they weren’t in, she went to t’On’s private quarters next, but only because she was girding herself for the future and hoping that maybe, just maybe, there would be a shred of comfort to be had from him.
Which was stupid on so many levels, and arguably disrespectful considering she’d just slept with a male.
But when you’re heartbroken, it was an any-port-in-the-storm kind of situation.
The Tretary wasn’t home, either.
Ending up at her own place, she tried to grab a snack from her fridge, except there was a big rate limiter on that.
She never put anything in the damn thing.
Hungry, tired, and aching, she headed over to her bed and sat down.
It was a twin, and as she looked around her room, she realized she didn’t have much in terms of material possessions.
Just the black clothes she wore to the restaurant, and the robes she put on to go in and out of the s’Hisbe.
There wasn’t even any furniture in here other than a dresser for underwear.
And the fridge she didn’t use.
Actually, that was an appliance, not a piece of furniture, wasn’t it.
“But I do have my truck,” she said aloud.
And she would never again see it and not think of Allhan—
How in the hell was it possible to fall in love with someone you didn’t know, and had barely met?
Unless kismet actually existed—and had picked her as a beneficiary for some reason—she clearly was having a psychotic break.
Either that or the pressure of mating someone she didn’t give a shit about to save the goddamn world was really getting to her.
No, that wasn’t it. Her feelings might have been ill-timed, and arguably misplaced, but they were real. Even without t’On in the picture, she would have had these emotions for Al.
And the sad thing was, as she looked around the bare walls of her room, she hadn’t realized until now how utterly unconnected she was.
To everything and everyone. It was as if for her entire life, she had been waiting for something, a door to be opened, a light to shine, an interior to be revealed.
And what was fucked up? All those things, those possibilities, were right in front of her when she was with Al.
Idly, she wondered about his sister. Then her thoughts went back to the straining, desperate passion they’d shared in the truck.
She had been his first.
And when he’d sent her off, the vibe around him had been so dark, it was like he expected her to be his last. That had to be her craziness talking, though. Right?
“Right.”
As she fell silent, it was hard to pinpoint exactly when she decided to get up, but kind of like when she’d been going home, she wasn’t aware of the travel, only the destination.
And the fact that she eventually found herself standing in front of the Constellation Room’s entrance wasn’t really a surprise.
Stepping inside, she closed the door behind herself.
In the low lighting, the white circle in the center was like some kind of mystical firepit, the glow sending something back out to the cosmos that arched over the glass dome.
Taking off her boots, she left them by the door, and then proceeded to the focal point. She did not go inside the circle. That felt like an intrusion into her mother’s territory.
Or like that would somehow hasten bad things happening.
Instead, she walked around the focal point and went over to the door of the chart room.
She hesitated before she opened the way in.
Unease, coupled with a searing pain she feared she was going to have to get used to, made her very sure the better idea was to turn her ass around and go back to her room.
The next thing she knew she was inside, and standing at the wall of slots into which all of the rolled charts had been slid.
Names, written in careful script, identified whose was whose, but the order was fucked up.
You had to know what you were looking for to find it, and she felt as though she was doing something wrong as she searched for her own.
Turned out it was easy to locate. She was right by her parents, who had purple wax seals in front of their apertures. As the Queen and the Prince Consort, their charts were only accessible under prescribed circumstances.
And hers had been sealed up that way now, too.
So had t’On’s.
As she touched the purple wax over her own, it was soft. Freshly melted. t’On’s was the same.
Prison, she thought. Her life was a prison.
Pivoting around, she went over to the black marble desk. The bench beneath it slid out easily on the smooth stone floor, and she sat on the hard seat. With a sense that she was being totally fucking inappropriate, she opened the slip drawer and took out the slim laptop.
Among her mother’s modernizations, the computer was one t’On really didn’t approve of.
There was a library of constellations elsewhere in the royal palace, in the great room where t’On—like the other Tretarys who had served before him—did his nightly recordings of the evening sky.
If someone wanted to consult what the stars’ alignment had been on any given night in history, they were supposed to go there.
But her mother had insisted on having the charts scanned in, shipping the huge tomes over to Vishous at the Black Dagger Brotherhood so that the Brother and his team could digitally record the magnificent, hand-done maps.
Opening the laptop, Denne didn’t have to worry about any sign-in or anything. There was nothing proprietary on it.
All she had to do was click the single icon in the center of the deep-blue screen and then she was in.
Feeling like she was stealing something, she entered…
July 5, and the year, and 11:11 p.m.