Chapter 24
Queen of Mine
Lily
“Does your name mean something?”
“Yes. A flower on Earth.”
“What does it look like?”
Lily hesitated, searching for the right way to describe it, then remembered she could simply show him.
Helios had transferred everything from her Earth phone to her VoidBrace, images included.
It took only a command. With a few quick motions she selected a portrait of herself holding a bouquet of tiger lilies and shared it with Khar, the same way they had exchanged reports back when they were still pretending their work was the only thing binding them together.
Khar stared at the image, spellbound. As always, Lily tried to smother her embarrassment with words.
“My sister Camille gave me flowers on my birthday. She’s named after a flower too. Every year she picked a different color, but these were my favorite.”
When Khar still did not speak, when he kept walking without lifting his gaze from the VoidBrace, Lily nudged him with her elbow. That finally pulled the Divani out of his trance.
“That flower,” he said at last, “looks exactly like the crest of the Divani queens.”
Lily felt an irrational sting of disappointment that his attention was on the parallel between their worlds and not on her.
“The what?” she blurted. “I did not even know you had queens.”
“We do not anymore. Our society is absolute meritocracy now.” His tone shifted, more distant, as if he had stepped into a corridor of memory.
“But once, everything revolved around the queens. They began as usurping tyrants, and in the end their rule led to the Divani Golden Age. The era when we became a species capable of spaceflight.”
He fell silent for a heartbeat, then his mouth curved, the edge of something dangerous and amused.
“There is still a saying from that time. A truly cunning Divani male warrior knows exactly when to lower his horns beneath a female’s rule.”
An early conversation between Khar and Lily during Vegrun and Iroxella’s journey
Black, glossy boots that looked military.
Two thick, powerful thighs, one of them nearly as wide as Lily’s waist. A chest broad enough to catch someone comfortably, assuming you were not slamming into it at full speed.
Obsidian skin. Luminous, demonic eyes. Above them, two long horns rose high, their tips capped in gold that made them look even sharper.
Lily’s heart kicked so hard she thought it might tear free.
Khar.
He was here.
Her Khar, in commando gear, his horns fitted with guards that looked like jewelry and armor at once.
She sprang up and launched herself at him, crushing her mouth to his in a fierce kiss. The world vanished. His scent flooded her, familiar and impossible, and for one breath she could not remember how to be afraid. She had thought she would never see him again.
Her impact shoved him back against the wall. He seemed startled, his response a fraction slow, but then he caught her rhythm and met her with equal hunger.
When they broke apart, Lily stared up at him, dazed, as if the danger around them had been a story she had once heard about someone else.
Khar was here. The universe had snapped back into place. Together, they could face anything.
He set her down and scanned her from head to toe, his gaze sharp, assessing. When he spoke, his voice resonated with a slightly different timbre than the one she knew, but it still steadied her.
“Lily. Are you all right?”
She nodded, then clasped his massive hand, as if she could anchor herself with it.
“How did you get here? I’m so happy.”
He did not answer. He gave her a glance that said he had heard every word, then he was already speaking into his console.
“Lily is with me. No visible injuries. We are moving to you now.”
He cut the transmission and, gentle but unyielding, pulled her with him.
“Come. I’ll explain everything, but we have to move.”
Lily did not need more than that. She would have followed him to the end of space itself.
He led her to the hangar door where Horos and the smugglers were. Lily asked nothing. She would have handed Khar her life without hesitation. He hit the door control. The gate opened smoothly, silently.
What waited on the other side was pure pandemonium.
With Vitro’s shields down, no one dared fire plasma rounds. One stray shot could breach the cruiser’s hull and turn the hangar into a tomb. So they fought with whatever they had.
Six remaining smugglers. Horos. Two other Divani males. A bloody, brutal brawl that spattered the deck with different colors and textures of blood. Nothing was sacred. No one was gentle.
Khar hauled Lily into cover behind the crate of credits meant for Horos and pushed her down to sit on the floor.
“Stay here. We’ll handle it.”
Lily squeezed his thick arm, feeling the muscles shift beneath her palm.
“Be careful.”
Khar flashed a confident smile, sprang up, and shouted across the chaos.
“Khar, I’m here!”
Lily froze.
What.
The Divani vaulted over the crate and plunged into the fight, calling back over his shoulder.
“Khar is my brother!”
Lily’s face went so hot she thought it might combust. It was physically impossible for that much blood to rush into one human head. The floor should have swallowed her whole. Anything would have been better than facing Khar and his brother after kissing the wrong one like that.
And yet, no matter how mortified she was, she could not look away.
Most of the remaining smugglers swarmed Khar and his brothers while the cockroachlike creature who had pushed the cargo cart earlier chased Horos across the hangar.
Khar’s younger brother threw himself into the fray, tackling two aliens who had pinned down another Divani male.
Lily assumed that one had to be the third brother.
They looked so alike it was unsettling, but there were differences.
Khar kept his horns bare. The brother she hadn’t kissed wore silver guards that hugged the length of his horns like fitted armor.
While the two brothers fought the two trained attackers, Khar held off the smuggler boss alone, along with two enforcers at his side.
Both sides had adapted. If ranged weapons were suicide, close combat was a certainty. The smugglers were armed for it, and some of them could turn their own bodies into weapons.
One particularly repulsive, rounded figure kept growing bone blades out of its limbs, snapping them off and hurling itself at the Divani like a living trap. The attempt ended quickly and badly.
The gold-horned brother seized the bone-spiked creature’s arms, letting the spikes shred his own forearms to ribbons so the silver-horned brother could grab another smuggler, hoist him overhead, and drive him down onto the bone spears.
The impact snapped the bone-grower’s neck.
They collapsed in a wet, disgraceful heap.
The two Divani moved like a team that shared a mind.
But Lily’s attention belonged only to Khar.
He fought like a wrathful god, batting away three opponents as if their strikes were nothing but insects.
The smuggler boss’s gelatinous body absorbed blows that would have shattered bone, but it still could not get a hold on Khar.
Instead, it played distraction, drawing Khar’s focus while the two enforcers hunted for an opening.
They might have ranked beneath their boss, but both looked larger and more dangerous than he did. One was squat and dense, wrapped in thick brown-black fur, rows of small eyes lining the sides of its face. The other was shorter but fast, lizard-quick, doing everything it could to slip behind Khar.
It succeeded.
Khar’s arm was buried to the elbow in the boss’s sticky torso when the lizardlike smuggler drew two long, vicious daggers from a belt at its waist and threw them both.
Lily screamed, loud enough to rip her own throat.
“Khar, behind you!”
Khar twisted. One dagger missed him and sank into the smuggler boss’s chest instead. The second he knocked aside with his claws. It clattered across the deck, spinning away with a metallic chime.
Khar yanked his arm free, seized the boss by the legs, lifted him, and slammed him into the wall. The leader splattered into a snot-green smear. From Lily’s distance it looked like neither the dagger nor the impact had finished him.
The furred enforcer chose that moment to strike.
It scrambled up the wall like a spider, drew a saber with a blade edged in light, and launched itself at Khar.
Khar dipped his head in a bull’s motion, avoiding the lethal arc, and impaled the attacker on his horns.
The creature convulsed once, then stilled.
Khar tore the body off and hurled it at its comrade, but the smuggler’s shockingly white blood sprayed over Khar’s head, shoulders, and chest, turning him into something otherworldly and terrifying in his raw destruction.
Lily watched as his muscles flexed and released, as his eyes promised the afterlife to anyone foolish enough to stand against him.
The dagger-thrower barely dodged the corpse, but it was not fast enough to escape Khar.
One charge.
One slash.
Khar ripped it apart with his claws.
Now only Horos remained, the cockroachlike creature that had been keeping him at bay, and the smuggler boss, still twitching in a questionable state.
Khar’s two brothers surged toward him like bulldozers to crush the last scraps of resistance.
The boss trembled like unstable jelly as he forced himself upright and shouted at his final ally.
“Tztz. The sphere.”
The cockroach creature froze at the command, then moved, impossibly fast, toward the golden orb.
Horos, panting, scrambled to run, but Khar’s voice cracked across the hangar like thunder and stopped him cold.
“Run if you want, Horos. All you’ll achieve is dying tired.”
Lily sprang up the second she saw Horos move. Khar’s intervention gave her the opening she needed.