The Wildborn (Starborn #1)

Prologue

To walk the path of a morazir, I will exist in three states of being:

Untouched. My touch is destruction.

Untaken. It is I who demands surrender.

Unconquered. Both in battle and in heart.

Once armed with the Sword of Ulliel, a weapon commanding the weight of all things, I achieve the fourth state—

Unkillable.

Unless I am touched.

Unless I am taken.

Unless I am conquered—

In body or heart.

—The Morazir’s Oath, amended in the Year of Na’bi by the Blessings of the True Father

“They’re calling you the Inkbound King now,” Rhavik’s wife said from behind him, beckoning him onto their silk-clad bed.

Her fangs sank into her red-painted lips—an attempt to stifle laughter at the ridiculous, if troubling, new name.

Like stars guiding him home, her green eyes gleamed bright with desire in the dim room.

He sealed the bedroom chamber door, turned to lean back against it, and attempted a smile.

A searing pain shot across his cheek and jaw, causing him to flinch—unfortunate reminders of how his day had gone.

Branded by the Veynari he served, punishment for defying the sacred moraziri oath.

This time for refusing the Urrth mission.

“Oh.” Seldi covered her mouth, her eyes shifting from passionate hunger to distress—exactly what he hadn’t wanted.

Rhavik went to her—his goddess, who reigned over all the gentle things forbidden to them on the icy rock of a planet called Vorakon.

“A king, hmm? Who calls me that, wife?”

Seldi moved to the edge of the bed and grabbed the strip of healing gel she’d already prepared from the bedside table. Twirling one of his long braids around her finger, she pulled him close, then pressed it against the raw brand.

Rhavik winced but managed to contain the pained hiss wanting to escape. The brand’s ink was formulated to burn for years, resistant even to a regeneration chamber’s healing capabilities. Seldi brushed her lips across the skin, and by Ulliel’s grace, her touch cooled the sting just a little.

She leaned back, cradling her plump belly—their son. “Better?”

“Mmm.” He nodded. After the hundredth brand, his skin was nothing more than a net of pain constricting his every action.

But with Seldi, he bore it, learning to move despite all of it. Wanting to move so that he could have her. Like he wanted her now.

The Veynari might’ve controlled this part of the universe—by the will of the True Father and the light that guides all—and Rhavik might’ve once willingly walked the path of a morazir, the force ensuring that it did. But here, in this room, he obeyed something greater.

He grinned at her, unbuttoning his coat. “Much better.”

Satisfied with his reassurances, Seldi continued: “I heard it when I went to register our child’s status as ordered, like the exemplary Veynari citizen that I am.

” She could barely contain her glee. Here, within the walls of his inherited, if ruined, estate, she was free to mock what she wanted.

The Veynari’s Watcher system of surveillance could not operate on his estate—the vault’s locks counteracted it.

“Those idiots in the civil offices will get us killed, throwing around words like king and queen.”

Her eyes remained on him as he unbuckled his weapons harness, a lustful smile returning to her lips. How was he already getting hard, simply watching her watch him remove his uniform?

His sword dropped to the floor with a loud clang. In a few hours, he’d have to bear its weight again and return to the capital, Zarmur, where he knew he’d be branded once more. The reasons to punish him were endless.

When only his trousers remained, Seldi licked her lips and spread her knees—an order for him to please her.

Rhavik held back a groan. The healers assured him that, so close to the birthing, her insatiable appetite for him was normal.

It didn’t explain his ravenous urge to keep her bred forever, however.

Perhaps the drive was a result of a breed-matching algorithm that had worked too well, as if fate’s hand had guided her to him.

“Are you my queen, then?” He arranged her, pushing her onto her hands and knees, keeping his hands on her hips to support her heavy belly.

“I suppose I am,” she purred, grinding against his aching and repressed length. He undid his trousers, violently pushing them down.

He stroked her full breasts, taking an already hard nipple between his forefinger and thumb, knowing she’d gasp. When Seldi opened her mouth, he leaned down and covered it with his own, running his tongue across her fangs. She tasted like iilas fruit—tangy and sweet.

She pulled away, and he let his displeasure be known with a grumble.

“I do believe Inkbound King is a vast improvement over the previous name,” she said. “What was it? ‘The Veynari’s greatest mistake’?”

Rhavik knelt behind her, teasing her apart, his mouth watering at the promise of what was to come.

“Or…was it ‘the divine nightmare’? I can’t quite remember—”

He roughly pressed his mouth to her cunt—she was already so wet. “Don’t distract me, wife.” Since they had agreed to use the archaic words—punishable by death if the wrong official heard—he couldn’t stop using them. He licked her into a needy mess until she shuddered with her first release.

Giving her no reprieve, he rose above her and then pressed the tip of his cock to her now dripping entrance. They both let out a slow groan as he started moving within her, gently, carefully.

Seldi bucked against him. “Don’t treat me like I’ll break—love me like you mean it. Love me like I’m your queen.”

Rhavik nearly whimpered at her command and that word—love.

A forbidden word, but they’d found it again and made it theirs.

He pulled her close, her back against his chest, spreading his fingers across her belly.

The black curling script of the moraziri oath twisted around his fingers and arms, contrasting with her star-white skin.

Moving in and out, he built her up into rapture—reeling in a love that was so illicit that the Veynari had changed the breed-matching algorithm that had paired them so nothing like it could ignite again.

As he neared his limit, enveloped in her body, a blinding blue-green light flashed over his mind, like a supernova’s flare, blurring into something both terrifying and wonderful in its onset.

Clarity returned with a jolt.

Turquoise eyes and a stern glare. Not his own or Seldi’s, but just as familiar. An expression ravaged by grief and pain. The face of a man whose heart had been shattered. Maybe dozens of times.

Rhavik couldn’t do a thing to stop the torment of witnessing it.

My son, he thought. He knew this was his son. What’s happened to you?

Struck silent, still buried in his wife’s loving embrace, he wanted to weep from all that he didn’t understand while blessed with the impossible image of a man’s face he didn’t yet know…and still somehow loved more than life itself.

“Cheranna?” Seldi’s voice came quiet but concerned. “What’s wrong?”

His son’s grown face dissolved, leaving him overjoyed and grieving at once.

Seldi moved forward, trying to turn to him. He held her firm so as not to pull them apart.

“Nothing,” Rhavik said quickly. “Nothing is wrong.” He forced his breath to settle so his mind could follow.

Laying his hands across her belly, he caressed its prominent curve. Their child was safe.

As he dropped his forehead to her shoulder, he let out a short laugh. He’d loved his wife so hard, divinity—or madness, more likely—had found him. His ragged breath smoothed into something even and deep, and he returned to his still-throbbing cock buried in his wife.

“This is prayer, Seldi. When I take you like this.” He thrust into her, powerful strokes until he felt her tighten around him, both of their releases imminent.

He tilted her face toward him. How did this world not have a word for such a thing—what their mouths did when they wanted to taste their love?

Needing to feel paradise once more, Rhavik found the precious gem of her pleasure, circling it relentlessly with his thumb. “Cheranna…” he said over her mouth. “Obey your king and come.”

Rhavik had lulled Seldi into a grinning puddle tucked against him, her thigh draped over his stomach to ease pressure on her hips and back.

Morning sun pierced the threadbare drapes. He reluctantly untangled their limbs and got out of bed, put on his moraziri dress uniform, then sheathed the Sword of Ulliel on his belt—its weight unforgiving.

Fetching a bowl of iilas fruit from the meagerly stocked food stores, he placed it on the bedside table for when she woke.

Though they weren’t native to Vorakon, thus costing a small fortune, Rhavik happily used credits from the vault to buy a constant supply.

She’d suffered enough in her life to ever want for anything again.

Before he left the estate, opening the creaking entry door, he cast a glance up the stairwell, lingering on the long bolts of fabric Seldi had dyed—the only color in the stone walls of the estate. One of them was the same blue-green color of the man’s eyes from his maddened vision.

He stepped out into the cold. If he was late, there was hardly anywhere left on his body to brand for the infraction. Even if this time he didn’t return at all, the Veynari could never take the gift they’d given him in the form of her and the hope of a family he’d helped to build.

Rhavik considered the tense morazir sitting across from him in the groundcar, who looked like she’d rather be flung into the maw of a black hole.

Although the Veynari had relieved him of the weight of Ulliel’s sword, they’d assigned him a heavier burden—an absurdly overqualified assistant he didn’t want and a nearly impossible task of decoding Urrth’s languages.

An effort meant to drain his will to live and destroy his love of otherworldly words, a secret he evidently hadn’t guarded well enough.