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“I promised you I’d protect your servants. They are under your ownership, and therefore mine.” He stalks away, tightening his ragged robe around him, and I watch the beast of a man stride to the staircase as I stand, stunned. He barks out a command in High Aurelian.

I start as the tunnel closes in on itself, big slabs of stone and metal filling it until the entrance is completely blocked off. There’s only a thin outline of the door where I came in. I reach out, feeling his aura. He’s weaker, but still stronger than any man I’ve met.

What aliens have I Bonded myself to? How can he keep going?

I’m sealed in. Trapped. And yet, there’s a certain reassurance to it, a certain protection of a hundred feet of metal and stone that feel so secure even a Scorp would struggle to get through it.

I shiver. It’s cold, and unlike the Royal Quarters, this place doesn’t respond instantly to your body temperature. There are three more tunnels leading out in each direction, but Orr told me to stay put.

For how long? Will he come straight down with Nash and Raneeda?

I hope desperately that they are okay. In all the chaos of the attack, I didn’t even think of them. I get a pang of guilt, but I know how hard it is to think during panic. It’s on the way down the stairs and in the tunnel, when I could feel Orr’s eyes on my naked body that I should have thought of them.

He said they’d be okay. I hope he’s right.

I sit, shivering, kicking my legs back and forth on the bench. I need a shower, badly, with their seed hardening on my inner legs, but I promised him I’d stay put.

I’m worried about everyone…

But the three auras of my triad are intense and focused. It’s hard to be worried about them. They’re titans. Orr had a chunk of metal the size of forearm in his back and barely even noticed it in his single-minded focus to protect me. I’m getting flashes of a softer side of him, and when he smiled for the first time, it shocked me.

That doesn’t change his beastly nature. What would he do to me if I walked down one of the tunnels, exploring my new surroundings? I lick my lips, and there’s a pang of need that wells up. I know exactly what he’d do. He’d put me right back over his lap and teach me to obey.

I run my hands over my legs. Feeling the flashes of emotion through the cold focus of their auras while they fought was painful, the most helpless feeling in the world, just waiting for something horrible to happen to the three little lights of their being in my mind. Now they’re hard and focused again, and it’s driving me crazy to be still, sitting here safe and sound while the triad puts themselves at risk.

I jump up to my feet. The tunnel takes time to open and close, with all the armored slabs moving. I can at least explore a little and run back if I hear them coming.

Nash and Raneeda will be fine. He promised me. They’ll be fine.

I reassure myself—but fine or not, I can’t just sit here and worry. I need to move, at least a little.

I sniff the air. The scent of wine permeates. The air itself is dry and slightly stale, as if it’s been reused a thousand times.

16

Rachel

I’ve got three options. Left tunnel, nearly blocked by the intact barrel of wine. Middle tunnel, which involves stepping over a pool of wine and the remnants of the shattered barrel, or right tunnel. I don’t much enjoy the thought of squeezing myself past the barrel or daintily jumping over puddles, so it looks like the right tunnel is the easy choice.

Poor barrel. It spent centuries aging its wine, only to get thrown down a staircase and shatter. There’s a painful amount of wasted vintage on the stone floor, though at least the curved bottom of the broken barrel still cups a good ten or twenty liters of the stuff.

I grab a jagged chunk of red-stained wood. It won’t do much good against any Scorp that burrowed its way down here, but I’m butt-naked, and it’s nice to havesomethingother than a collar to protect myself with. I rub the smooth silver collar with my other hand, and a shiver goes through me. There’s a ring at the front of a collar. I’ve seen pictures of Aurelians leading their harem women around by their necks, a chain going from their wrists to the collar.

“Let’s not think about that now,” I say to myself. I can still feel those three in my head, but they’re distant, and it’s more than just the hundred feet of stone and metal above me that separates us. When they’re dealing with war things, they’re different people. They shut off all emotion, except for flashes of anger in Orr. This is when they are at their most alien.

I slink against the side of the curved stone wall, avoiding the ever-growing puddle of wine. I peek into the left tunnel past the intact barrel that’s bigger than me, but I don’t see much.

I take the right tunnel. The walls are perfectly smooth. It’s tall enough even Ra’al could walk comfortably.

I gulp, imagining the walls closing in, big slabs of metal and stone joining together to seal in a second level of defense. Is that why Orr told me to stay put? Could these tunnels close up at any moment?

I take off at a run, feeling like I used to as a kid exploring the deep recesses of the space station where we weren’t supposed to go. I get out the other end of the tunnel into a bright, airy training room.

It’s a huge gym. To the left, there are black cubes on the ground, ranging in size from a pebble to that ancient toy that still remains popular, even after tens of thousands of years.

What did they call that thing again? A ruben cube?

To the right, there is a row of twenty or so black figures, hovering in the air, without any sort of chain connecting them to the roof. They creep my out. They’re each about six feet tall, hovering a foot or so off the ground, with a blank visage that nevertheless seems to follow my movements. Their legs cut off at the heel.