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Laura puts on cooking mitts and takes the bread out. It’s a beautiful loaf, with a swirling pattern on the top. She brings it to the table and places it reverentially on a wooden slab. Then she opens the big double doors of the fridge and brings out smoked pink fish with capers. “Light food, for your healing stomach,” she says to me, smiling with that warmth of hers that is contagious. There’s a pitcher of red fruit juice, which she pours into three glasses. I reach to do it myself, but she shakes her head with a smile, not minding serving.

“Thank you so much.”

“Anything else you need?” she asks me.

“No! Enjoy your book.”

“Thank you,” she says, and disappears, leaving me alone with the two warriors.

Damian sits next to me, bringing the silver bowl filled to the brim with strawberries. I reach in to grab one, and he wraps his hand around my wrist, his dark purple eyes glistening. With his other hand he takes a strawberry between his two fingers, bringing it slowly to my mouth.

I open my mouth, shudders of lust rushing through my body as I take the strawberry, letting my tongue slide against his fingers, and I can’t help but imagine another part of him in my mouth.

Fuck.

I’m so turned on by these two, I can almost forget everything. Tarak tears a piece of bread off roughly, and I roll my eyes at him. “Are you going to make me eat that from your hand, too?”

He chuckles. “Maybe I will,” he says, then butters the bread and slides it over on a plate. I reach out, giving a wary glance to Damian, who releases my other hand, letting me take a bite. “That’s so good,” I say, the two dig in.

They waited for me to eat before they started. It’s strange, the little things, the mix between ownership and worship.

I am their Queen…

TheirQueen.

Damian grabs a piece of strawberry, and I can’t resist. I put my hand on his wrist. I rest my fingers against the gleaming silver of his bracelet, and heat floods between my legs. I can’t even wrap my hand half around his wrist. He pauses, amused, as I take the piece of strawberry from him, and bring it to his mouth. His huge tongue comes out, and he takes the piece from me, his eyes alight. “Careful, Athena.”

“Or what?” I challenge, and he growls, low under his breath.

“What did you want to do, before your capture?” Tarak’s question cuts the moment.

I smile. “Honestly? I wanted to work on Colossus. But it’s a long road from a hopeless little station in Wild Space to there.”

“What work did you do?”

“Anything that paid. I studied to be a mining beam operator every night. Got my first job, and that’s when we got captured.”

Tarak’s eyes narrow. “There should not be Wild Space. Only tamed land. That is what we will bring to the universe.” The hot anger is rising up, and though I am sitting near them, I feel miles away.

“And you? From what I remember, Aurelians only have to serve a hundred years.”

Tarak nods as Damian butters his bread, putting smoked fish on it. He slides the piece over to me, and I take a bite. Everything is so good.

“Yes. We could have retired. Collected a harem.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“The Priests. They told us that Mates can only be earned. That of the tens of thousands of women who flock to Colossus for protection, none were ever the Mate of a triad. We believed it.”

“But that, too, was a lie,” growls Damian. “A Mate must be earned. But you…when we felt you, we knew you were deep in the Toad Kingdom. The Aurelian Empire would not approve a mission into territory that has been at peace with them since the Galactic War.”

Tarak shakes his head. “And even if they did, it would have amounted to nothing. We felt you, yes, but only a vague sense of direction. We were ready to risk the shift to…” He gets a dark look in his eyes.

“You would have risked shifting?”

Centuries before my birth, Orb-Shifting was the way to travel from system from system, instantly, instead of month or even year-long journeys dormant in cryo.

It started to degrade. From what I heard, not one voyage out of two goes successfully, and it’s only gotten worse. I watched footage from the escape of the Separatists, led by the Priests, from Colossus. I watched ships split in half, proud Aurelian warriors sucked into the atmosphere or gasping for air in the emptiness of space. I couldn’t watch more than a second.