Rosalie
With all the enthusiasm of a puppy discovering an entire house filled with treats and toys, Dante shows me around the rest of his ship, introducing me to his crew at a breakneck speed, with a myriad of names and tails and various stages of shift which I know I won’t recall.
I’m shown the labs, the test rooms, the dining hall, the aquiums, and finally, breathlessly, we come to a halt outside a door.
My comm device chimes, and with a guarded look at Dante, I pull it out.
“What is it?” he queries.
“It is my friends, checking in on me.” I glare at him in case he has any feelings about the subject.
“What will you say?”
“I’ll say you haven’t bitten me again.” I tap out a response thanking Kerra who says all my belongings have been packed and sent over to Dante’s sector before adding the part about biting.
Maggie
I should think so. Hope you told him you’d bite back.
Scarlett
Yet
Lydia
You know we’re all here for you if you need us, Rosie.
Scarlett
Maggie wants to know if there are any new Sarkarnii butts for her gallery
I snort out a laugh at the final text message and glance at Dante. He’s drooling slightly, staring intently at me.
Plenty of new butts, but she’s not getting her hands on them.
Maggie
Damn you. My one and only joy in life
Lydia
That and ale wine
Maggie
Just because the mere sniff of it gives you a three-day hangover.
Kerra
It gives us all a three-day hangover, save for you and your iron stomach
The chat descends into insults and ribbing which I always adored. It made me feel part of something like I never had before.
And, stood in Dante’s ship, with a soggy Sarkarnii in front of me, it makes me feel less alone.
“Why are you drooling?” I ask him, pocketing the device.
“Can’t help it,” he says. “Mating mix is doing it. And you make my spines feel funny.”
“Your spines?”
Dante takes hold of his lashing tail and pulls it in front of him. “Spines,” he says, running his hand over the appendage in a way which makes my insides squirm a little.
As he does so, I see the spikes rising, not needle sharp but with rounded tips, and not all of them are present.
There are gaps, and there are some which are broken.
Unable to help myself, because Dante is the closest I’ve ever been to a Sarkarnii up until now, not counting the bite of course, I reach out and take hold of the tail, gently running my hand up the spikes.
They’re sort of soft to the touch, not hard like I was expecting, and they smooth back until they’re almost hidden in the groove down the center of the tail.
“Do all Sarkarnii have these?”
“Not all, just the warlords,” Dante says, his voice somewhat strangled. “It is a measure of our seniority.”
I lift my eyes from the tail to him because the concept of Dante being senior is somewhat hard to comprehend. He has, at least, stopped drooling.
Instead he is staring intently at me, as if his eyes could see into my soul. It suddenly dawns on me I have his tail in my hand, I’m stroking the spines, and I have no idea if either are an erogenous zone for a Sarkarnii. I let go instantly.
“I have…quarters,” Dante says, his forked tongue, like all the Sarkarnii have, poking out between his lips and wetting them. “They are adjacent to mine. They are keyed to your DNA and mine. No one else can enter.”
“Just you?”
“Just me.”
“And if I want to keep you out?”
A flicker of emotion runs over Dante’s handsome face. “You would want to keep me out?”
“I’ve already been bitten by you before. Of course I want to keep you out.”
“I bit you because you are mine.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” I retort. “Nor does it work if you bit me because you weren’t yourself. No biting and no coming in my quarters without permission.”
Dante has the good grace to stare at his boots for a brief instant.
“There are…I need to…” He lifts his head up, and those beautiful eyes spin with fire. “I am not what you think I am, little flame.”
“I don’t know what you are. What I do know is you changed everything, and I need to come to terms with it.” I walk towards the door which slides open at my approach.
“What then?” Dante asks.
“Then, maybe, we can talk.”
“What if I don’t like to talk?” he says, hands dangling by his sides, claws relaxed and half extended.
“Then you’re going to need to learn,” I reply as the doors slide shut, cutting off my view of him.
I lean against the door frame, exhaling a long, long breath. Dante has sent my emotions into complete turmoil.
In the atrium, when we were so close, so very close I thought he might…
And I wanted it. No matter what had gone before, the fact I’ve been ordered to stay with him on pain of his entire crew ending up banished to a barren moon, along with Dante—it doesn’t give me much choice, and I should be so damn angry.
But his lips, his eyes, the spicy scent of his scales, the fact we were just about to…I don’t know what we were about to do.
Whatever else I might think about Dante, about his behavior, about his desire to make things explode and damn the consequences, underneath I want to think he has a good heart.
Before I can even think about the moment in the atrium, I need to find out more about him, about what I’ve got myself into.
And most of all, how I can possibly extract myself from it…if I need to.
Something I can’t possibly let Dante know about and something I need to approach very carefully, if I’m not to have a whole ship full of Sarkarnii banished to the outer reaches of the galaxy.