Page 196 of Gladiators of the Vagabond Boxset

“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing,” he murmured, his hand reaching out to curl around the back of my neck, his thumb rubbing over my bare throat. His eyes dropped to my lips, and he added with a husky groan, “I can’t get the taste of you out of my mind. Soon, Noa, very soon.”

With that promise, he took my hand and urged me to follow him away from the huge resort dome.

This landscape was barren and bleak, black rock in twisted, melted formations its main feature.

It offered little cover initially, but occasionally, Luka would point at a streak of pink or silver striations.

Once, there was a whole flat clearing of yellow, sparkly stone, which, sadly, stunk to high heaven. Pretty-looking sulfur, no doubt.

I looked over my shoulder after we’d gone an hour and realized that we were dipping into some kind of valley, and the landscape had obscured everything but the uppermost portion of the resort dome.

It might not feel like there was much cover to be had, but we’d made much progress in the dark of the night; we couldn’t be spotted from the ground any longer.

The rock below my feet was sharp, though; some stretches we walked on almost appeared to be shards of black glass.

Luka explained that it was obsidian, and I was tempted to pick up a larger piece just because it shimmered so prettily.

The stuff was cutting up my shoes, the simple slippers not suited for this kind of rough terrain.

“Luka,” I said when a shard cut through my shoe into my foot.

I couldn’t go on like this, but I didn’t know how to solve the problem.

He turned around to look at me the moment it happened, almost faster than I’d said his name.

His mirror-black eyes slid from my eyes down to my feet.

He kneeled down, placing one of my hands on his shoulder for balance.

He picked up the injured foot and, with eerie precision, pulled the shard free from my sole.

I flinched, and then saw how that made his brows lower into a fierce frown.

“I’m sorry. I should have realized your footwear was not adequate for this kind of hiking. ”

I rolled my eyes, my fingers digging into the firm muscle of his shoulder. “Are you kidding me? Where were you going to find me anything better? It’s not like we had time to go shopping.” I smiled when that made him chuckle, his fingers gliding over my ankle, delicately touching my skin.

“That is a fair point. I just wish I could take better care of you,” he said, and then he rose, swinging me up into his arms without warning. I made a tiny squeak that I managed to quickly suppress, but I caught his devious little smirk—he’d heard me alright.

“Next time, warn me, babe,” I told him. Not that I was going to complain about the lift.

I was happy to curl my arms around his neck and let him carry me for a while.

I’d had one hell of a day; I was exhausted from everything that had happened.

Luka had mostly been sitting on his ass for the past three weeks—he could do a little of the work.

“Babe?” he said, his head tilted at an angle as he gazed down at me for a moment.

Then his eyes flicked back up to intently survey our surroundings as he walked.

There were flakes of ash clinging to his long lashes, his anthracite skin having lost its luster with the dirt now smeared on it.

I imagined I looked even worse; my blonde hair had probably gone ash gray at this point.

“Yeah, babe, that’s a pet name Earthlings say to each other,” I clarified, waving my hand to redirect a particularly large flake of ash from landing on my nose.

Pato was smart—hiding out beneath Luka’s shirt.

I could feel his little monkey butt press against my shoulder, and sometimes I caught a tuft of his white hair tickling the edge of Luka’s throat.

“I have heard of this. Camila says it to Thorin,” Luka said.

He nodded as if it all made sense to him.

“They are mates. You may call me ‘babe.’” I shivered, hearing the implication in those words and trying to wrap my head around it.

I knew I’d just had thoughts about Luka babies, but really, that was just a tiny little fantasy.

I wasn’t actually thinking of having those for real.

Mating sounded so permanent. People didn’t do that kind of thing anymore these days—at least, not on Colony Four.

So I snarked, “Romance is dead. It’s just all about procreation nowadays.

Don’t you know?” My own mother had struggled to raise me on her nursing salary and long hours all by herself.

I’d been left with the neighbors most days, and that lady had four kids of her own.

She had no time for me or her children, only for the endless male visitors who came and went, supporting her for a time before dropping her like a brick.

Luka tilted his head so I saw the patient smile on his face, his stride steady as he kept moving through the desolate landscape. He wasn’t even out of breath after carrying me for a while. I had noticed that we were now starting to climb. I could already feel my calves burn in sympathy.

“Maybe UAR humans no longer practice matings,” he said, then narrowed his eyes in concentration.

“Marriage,” he added triumphantly, somehow finding the correct word for it in my own language.

“But I know that’s not true for the human females my friends have mated, so you can be convinced otherwise.

Once we are safe, we have all the time in the world to figure things out, Noa. Do you wish to go home?”

The words brought on a pang of homesickness for some of the nicer parts of Colony Four, like the communal park where people would go picnicking in droves on national holidays, the scent of the food stalls that lined Mainstreet, and the glimmer of the skyscrapers to the north where the rich lived, which looked like a crystal palace painted pink and gold in the morning sunlight.

Then I thought of the rich and how hard life was down there for the poor, like myself.

How my mother’s death at the hands of a rich drunk driver had meant that from sixteen and up, I’d had to fend for myself, with no chance at an education to improve my status.

Nope, that’s when I’d very quickly decided never to rely on a man—for food, like my neighbor, or for love, as my mother had.

But I also felt no real urge to go back. Good food could be had anywhere, even in a suite room with Luka while I was still trapped. My fingers trailed up my throat again, but the slave collar was really gone. How had he known how to take it off? Weren’t these things supposed to be tamper-proof?

“Hard question, huh?” Luka murmured. “Don’t worry, you can think about it. From what I understand, though, the UAR isn’t the best place to live. You’d be welcome on the Vagabond with my friends. We’ve got five human women living with us by now—you’re practically invading the ship.”

I tried to picture what it would be like to live entirely on a spaceship, but I’d never really seen one up close.

For my abduction, I had just gone into a medical center for a mandated vaccination shot and woke up at the Jihari Resort.

Luka was right—the UAR had sold me, and that abduction had been staged by someone in power on the planet.

I was certainly not the only one taken; they’d probably done it plenty of times before and would again in the future.

It was a good way to earn money and control the population growth. I shivered at the unfairness of it.

“You’re safe now, Noa. I won’t let any harm come to you,” Luka murmured, and I realized he’d been responding to my emotions while I hadn’t said a thing—comforting me, drawing the right conclusions somehow to say things that might make me feel better.

He paused in his walking, glanced around, and then set me down on a nearby smooth rock.

His expression was serious as he looked at my no-doubt suspicious one.

He nodded. “Go ahead, ask. I know you want to,” he said with a smirk, a sharply pointed canine tooth peeking out on the left side of his mouth when that lip curled up a little more.

“Are you reading my mind?” I demanded, confused and a little concerned that he might do such a thing. My thoughts were private, and often a little nuts. The baby fantasy, for example, was definitely not something he needed to know.

He shook his head, one palm curled around the slight bump Pato made beneath his shirt.

His hair was turning sort of white from the ashes clinging to it, and with how long it was, it was starting to look like a mess, yet he still looked gorgeous.

It was all in those sharp cheekbones and that killer jawline, I bet.

“I’m an empath, much like most Aderians.

We sense emotions, often only to a lesser degree, but my gift is very strong,” Luka explained.

He turned his back on me then and stared back the way we’d come.

Our footsteps—or rather his, as I hadn’t been walking—had already been obscured, if he’d even made any on the hard rock.

An empath, so not my thoughts—just my feelings.

He was good enough at it that he could make educated guesses about what I was thinking based on our conversation.

I shivered. I wasn’t sure if I liked it when he knew precisely what I was feeling, either.

But at least it could be said that he was just really good at reading facial expressions.

Oh, did that mean he could tell if someone was lying?

Then I wondered about the first part of his statement—that Aderians generally all had some kind of empathic gift.

That made zero sense to me. The Dragon had no empathy, and neither did Mikasul; both ladies were the very definition of a sociopathic bitch.

And what about the Dumb Duo? They weren’t the rainbows-and-flowers type either.

“So what am I feeling right now?” I asked him, curious to see how he’d respond. And why was he looking back at the Resort dome? Why wasn’t he looking at me? I wanted to know what he was thinking and feeling—damn it, he had an unfair advantage if this was true.

He didn’t hesitate at all when he answered, “Disbelief, curiosity, a bit of apprehension. Am I close?” He was spot on, of course, and I was certain he knew it.

This could still be an educated guess—what I was feeling now was kinda obvious.

I was inclined to believe him, given his earlier eerily accurate responses to what was going on in my head.

“I struggle to believe every Aderian is like you,” I said, thinking of his mother and the others of his species I’d met.

I understood that I hadn’t exactly met prime examples, but still, if the four I’d met could do this, why should I believe the rest weren’t like that?

Didn’t a gift for empathy mean they were more likely to abhor slavery?

Now Luka turned around and looked at me with an expression so mournful that I wanted to leap off this rock and hug him.

He probably sensed something like that because he approached, leaning his fists on either side of my hips.

We were under a rocky overhang, sort of out of the wind, so the ash falling here was minimal.

I reached up to wipe a little from his cheek, then rubbed my thumb over his bottom lip.

“My mother was a powerful empath once, with a head for business. Then she and my father crashed their spaceship when I was sixteen. My dad was instantly gone; my mother sustained severe injuries, including to her head…” He explained it quietly, just the facts, but I could hear the pain, see it in his midnight eyes.

I pressed a kiss to that soft bottom lip.

“I’m sorry, Luka. That sounds horrible. I lost my mom when I was sixteen, and…

it’s just horrible. I’m sorry you went through losing a parent at that age as well.

” I couldn’t really fathom what it was like to have a father in my life, but it was obvious that Luka had had one, as was much more common for the rich and privileged on Colony Four.

He sighed, stole another kiss that I was more than willing to give, and then pulled back.

“No, I’m glad my father didn’t live to see what my mother turned into.

The brain damage eradicated her empathic ability.

Really, I think it destroyed her ability to feel much of anything.

It’s part of why I went into medicine. I thought I could fix her somehow. ”

Everything about him said that he no longer believed that.

His mother couldn’t be fixed. The person the Dragon was now—that was not his mom.

He was saying he knew she didn’t even have the capacity to love him any longer.

How terrible was it to lose your father and then discover your mother had turned into a monster?

I couldn’t think of anything to offer him except a hug, so I curled my arms around him, and when he stepped between my thighs, I curled my legs around him too. A full monkey-body hug. It was nice to put my head on his shoulder and just be with him for a little while.