Chapter 6 #2
But he didn’t see a failure. He saw anything but. He saw a female who had faced down an Emperor with shaking hands and held her ground. He saw a female who wore old boots because she needed traction in a world that kept shifting under her.
Beside them, Miranda berated a porter about the angle of her luggage. His lip curled—pure disgust he didn’t bother to hide. She was poison in a nice suit.
He held Emily's gaze. He didn’t speak—he couldn’t trust his voice not to roar—but he let his mask slip a fraction.
I see you, he thought, hoping she read it in his expression.
Her chin came up. Just a little.
Just enough.
* * *
The familiar scent hit her before the door fully slid open… Expensive perfume and chilled wine.
For twenty-nine years, that smell had meant home. It meant the click of heels on marble and the rustle of shopping bags from stores Emily wasn’t allowed to enter alone. It meant the tight, polite silence that always came right before a storm.
Now, in the corridor of an alien space station orbiting Earth, it just smelled like a trap.
Raaevik stood behind her. He hadn’t said a word since the docking bay, but his presence pressed against her back like gravity—warm, solid, impossible to ignore. He didn’t crowd her, but he didn’t give her room to fold either.
The door finished its cycle, and they stepped through.
Miranda Evans had been on Devan Station for less than three hours, and she’d already made the guest suite hers.
The standard-issue Latharian furniture—sleek, minimalist—had been shoved around like it had offended her.
The couches were angled toward the massive viewport on the far wall.
A silk shawl draped over a chair that looked like spun glass.
A bottle of wine on the low table that definitely hadn’t come out of station stores, and a crystal glass catching the blue light of Earth turning slowly beneath them.
Miranda stood at the window with her back to the door. She still wore the white suit and she’d kicked off her heels, but everything else was perfect, like she’d stepped out of a glossy ad and into their lives.
“You took your time,” she said to the window. “I expected you twenty minutes ago. Did you get lost? The layout of this place is atrocious. Circles within circles.”
“I didn’t get lost,” Emily said. Her voice sounded thin, scraped raw. “I had to change.”
She hadn’t.
She was still in the blue silk robe the attendants had shoved her into, but she’d washed her face. Scrubbed the alien oils from her skin until it burned, trying to find herself under the layers of Empress-to-be.
Turning with her wine glass in hand, Miranda's gaze flicked down, then back up to Emily’s face.
“Well. You’re here now. Sit down. You look ready to collapse, and if you faint, that enormous shadow of yours will break the furniture trying to catch you.” She waved a hand toward Raaevik and took a sip of her wine.
Emily stayed on her feet—sitting felt like giving in, and right now, anger was the only thing keeping her upright.
“I don’t want to sit, Mother. I want to know how.”
Miranda sighed, long-suffering, like Emily had asked her to solve world hunger before lunch. Crossing to the table, she set the glass down with a neat little click.
“How what, darling? How did I get here? A lovely little shuttle. Private transport. Much better than that cattle car they put you on, I assume.”
“How you signed me up to the mate program without my knowledge or consent.”
Miranda’s fingers went to the diamond ring on her right hand, turning it so it flashed.
“It was a lottery. You won.” Her voice was smooth. “You should be grateful. Most women would kill for that kind of opportunity. Literally, in some cases, if the news reports about the riots are true.”
“I didn’t enter a lottery.” Emily took a step forward. “I saw the file, Mom. I saw the source code. Clinical Sample 44-B. Reference: Dr. Allinson.”
Miranda’s fingers stilled on the ring.
“Three weeks ago,” Emily said. Her voice didn’t shake, and that was something. “That ‘preventative screening’ you were so insistent about. You said genetic disease ran in the family. You said to do it for your peace of mind.”
Her mother picked up the glass again, not looking at her.
“I thought six vials were a lot for a cholesterol check,” Emily said, quieter. “But I did it. Because you asked.”
Miranda shrugged as she took a sip. “Dr. Allinson is a dear friend. He owed me a favor.”
The room tilted sideways. She'd suspected it the second the LMP administrator pulled up her record, but hearing Miranda say it like it was nothing made bile crawl up her throat.
“You stole my DNA.”
“Oh, stop being so dramatic.” Miranda waved a hand. “I didn’t steal anything. I’m your mother. I made an executive decision for your future because you were clearly incapable of doing it yourself.”
Her eyes narrowed over the rim of the glass.
“Look at you. Really look at yourself. Twenty-nine years old, working in a shelter for drug addicts, wearing thrift-store clothes, and living in an apartment the size of my walk-in closet. You were wasting your life.”
“I was helping people! I was happy.”
“You were invisible,” Miranda snapped. “You’re an Evans, and there you were… living like a peasant. It was embarrassing. I gave you a way out. I gave you a throne, for god’s sake.”
“I don’t want a throne. I wanted my life.”
“Your life was a dead end!” Miranda snarled, showing teeth.
“Do you think I enjoyed telling my friends my daughter was a social worker?” Her voice rose, sharp with anger.
“Do you think I liked explaining why you weren’t at the gala or the fundraiser?
You were an anchor, Emily. Dragging us both down into mediocrity. ”
Turning back to the window, she stared out at Earth.
“When the Lathar announced the program,” she said, voice lowering again, controlled now, “when I saw the criteria, I knew. I just knew you’d be a match for someone important. You’ve always been… sturdy. Resilient. The kind of stock they were looking for.”
Emily flinched. Sturdy. Stock. Like she was a horse with good teeth.
“And when the match came back,” Miranda continued, softer now, “and it was him. The Emperor himself.” She smiled at the window. “Well. That was fate intervening.”
“Bullshit! It wasn’t fate,” Emily hissed, a fine tremor rolling through all her limbs. “It was you. It was a transaction.”
Her mother turned. The smile stayed, but it didn’t touch her eyes.
“Of course. Everything is a transaction, darling,” she said. “That’s the first rule of survival. You give something to get something.”
“And what did you get?”
The question was quiet.
Dangerous.
Miranda swirled her wine.
“The Latharian Mate Program pays very well for… compatible matches,” she said in a low voice. “Especially high-value ones. Priority One matches carry a… well, I don’t like to discuss money, but a significant finder’s fee.”
The air left Emily's lungs.
She’d thought it was status, maybe bragging rights at the country club, but it wasn’t. It was simpler than that.
Far simpler.
“You sold me,” she said, her voice flat.
“Of course I didn’t.” Miranda's laugh was high and tinkling as she waved a hand.
“You sold me.” The words tasted like copper. “How much? How much was I worth then, Mom?”
Miranda’s mouth tightened. “Stop. Don’t be so vulgar, Emily.”
She took a few steps forward, rounding on her mother. Her mom. The one person in life who was supposed to have her back, no matter what.
“Did you negotiate?” she demanded. “Did you haggle? Did you tell them I have a master’s degree, or did you just show them my dental records and hip and bust measurements?”
“I said stop it!” Miranda slammed her glass down. Wine sloshed over the rim, staining the white tabletop like blood.
“You have no idea what it costs to maintain our lifestyle,” she snapped. “Investments went bad, bills piled up, and your father left me a mess to deal with, Emily. A disaster. And I fixed it. I always fix it.”
Emily snorted. “By selling your daughter to aliens.”
“By securing your future!” Drawing a breath, Miranda smoothed the front of her jacket down. “And mine. Yes. The payment was generous. It secured the penthouse, cleared our debts, and bought me a position on the board of the foundation.”
She looked at Emily with flat, unblinking eyes.
“You should be thanking me. I saved us both from irrelevance. I turned a liability into an asset.”
A liability.
Emily stared at the woman who’d given birth to her and searched for something… anything. A flicker of guilt, a crack of shame.
There was nothing.
She lifted her chin, her voice steady now.
“I am not a liability.” The anger had burned itself out. What was left was a hollowness. “I am a person. I have friends. I have a cat. I had a life that was mine.”
Miranda checked her reflection in the dark glass of the viewport and smoothed one perfect strand of hair back into place. “Well, you were never going to amount to anything on your own. Playing saint in those dreadful shelters with those dreadful people. You were just wasting your potential.”
She adjusted her cuff so the diamond links caught the light.
“At least this way, you’re useful.”
Useful.
There was nothing left to say. So Emily turned and walked out.
“Emily?” Miranda called, voice edged with annoyance. “Where are you going? I haven’t told you about the seating arrangements for the ceremony yet. And we need to discuss your hair. That frizz is simply—”
Emily ignored her, Raaevik at her back as the door slid shut behind them.
Then she started walking. She didn’t know where she was going. Just away… anywhere away from the woman who’d birthed her and then sold her.
Heavy footsteps echoed behind her.
Raaevik.
She hadn’t looked at him during the argument. She hadn’t wanted him to see her like that—stripped raw, reduced to a line item in her mother’s accounts—but he’d been there anyway. Close enough to hear every word.
She turned a corner toward the observation deck, staring straight ahead as her vision blurred. She wouldn’t cry. No way, no how. Raaevik matched her pace without trying to stop her.
Stopping in the middle of a long corridor lined with viewports, she didn’t turn around. She couldn’t face him yet.
“She sold me,” she whispered.
“She is a fool,” Raaevik said.
There was no pity in his voice, which she was grateful for. Instead, the low growl was filled with anger.
“She sees a price tag,” he said. “She does not see the value.”
She closed her eyes. A tear slipped out, hot and fast, then another.
But still she didn’t turn around. She didn’t need to. He was there, a massive shadow at her back, keeping the dark from her shoulders.
And for the first time since she’d walked into that suite, she didn’t feel entirely alone.