Page 7

Jaz

By the time I made my way back to our family compound, night had fallen.

I’d spent pretty much the entire trip home with my brain on re-run, going over every instant of my Drake encounter. Why had it embedded itself so thoroughly in my mind?

Wouldn’t be so bad if it was just my brain that was involved. Maybe I needed to get laid?

Too bad there wasn’t anyone I was tempted to get laid with.

I sighed as I approached our compound—at least I wouldn’t have to contend with the anti-family.

My pain-in-the-ass half-brother was currently overseeing the loading of our orbiting freighter for a long voyage off world.

Which was one reason I’d chosen this particular evening to escape.

Both entrances to our walled compound were guarded, and therefore not suitable for me to come and go.

So, I’d developed my own route to follow.

It relied heavily on the roof of a building that ran alongside the compound wall.

There was a ten-foot gap between the two of them, but I’d perfected the technique for spanning it.

First, I needed to properly stash my disguise.

I’d hidden a trunk on the roof, and I exchanged my crazy external Drolgok fashions and fake tail for my usual dark cloak and army boots.

The boots were old but the leather had sculpted perfectly to my feet, and after wearing the clunky ones, I felt as though I could walk on clouds in them.

I’d have to replace the scarf and goggles for future ventures. I straightened, and looked out across the city. From this rooftop I could see past the dimly lit streets—to what stood, sleek and shining, in the very heart of it.

While Winnipeg slowly crumbled away at its feet, the Tazier clan compound was a glittering example of technology at its finest. Rising well above our tallest skyscraper, the metal towers gleamed with light—all acute angles, just like the features of the Drakes themselves.

Despite their graceful structure that reached for the sky, the towers made me think of a bloated parasite, slowly sucking the lifeforce from everything around it.

Certainly the Drakes had zero interest in granting us any of that technology.

They sat pretty in their shining towers while they pillaged our resources.

Of course, humans had hardly pulled together after the occupation—instead, we’d fragmented and gone to war with ourselves. The weak had perished, unsupported, while the vicious gang lords had formed alliances with the Drakes.

The Drake occupation had revealed the true darkness of the human soul.

I gave the towers a final, resentful glare before I bent to lock up the box and moved on to step two. My technique for scaling the wall wasn’t anything fancy—it involved a maintenance ladder, some careful propping, and me avoiding looking down while I crawled across it.

I tugged it free from the shadows of an ancient air conditioning unit—it didn’t look as though it had operated in eons—and laid it carefully between the parapet and the top of the concrete compound wall.

Then I gritted my teeth and imagined stars.

Planets. Sleek spaceships. Anything, in fact, other than the twenty-foot drop to the pavement below .

The thoughts always got me across safely, and tonight was no exception.

The outer compound wall was substantial, built with Drake money.

Proof that they valued the services provided by first my father, and then my brother.

It was about two feet thick, and once across, I pulled the ladder along it until it reached the storage shed about six feet below.

I’d hammered bits of wood as braces onto the roof, so that when I dropped the ladder down there, it could be wedged.

I did so now, and crawled down. After stashing the ladder on the roof, I used the junk pile behind the shed to jump there first, and then onto the ground.

A seven-foot form stood there, along the wall of the shed.

I flinched, my mind filling in every detail from past experience, right down to the gleaming eyes. My heart accelerated madly before my eyes finally made out the reality—someone had placed a pile of planks against the building, and thrown a tarp over to protect it.

What the effing hell was up with me? I was seeing Drakes—no, a particular Drake—in every corner. The fact he’d been memorable was no excuse at all.

I had more important things to do. I paused at the pile, peeling back a few old bits of wood until I found what I was looking for—worms, wriggling to bury back into the ground.

I collected them in the little plastic bag I routinely carried in my pocket.

Shoving the wriggling mess back in there, I peeked around the corner of the shed.

No one in sight. The compound had guards that patrolled regularly, but they tended to concentrate on the other side, closer to the large hangars that were busy round the clock.

They certainly weren’t here at the moment.

So I stopped skulking, pushed my hood back, and strode out into the open as though out for a midnight stroll.

Everything went according to plan until I came around the corner of our maintenance building and ran right into six feet of major asshole.

Kurt.

Dammit. Other than my effing brother, he was the last person I wanted to see. With his muscular form, chestnut hair, well-arranged features, and hazel eyes, he’d be considered handsome, if he didn’t wreck the impression by opening his mouth to reveal the rottenness within.

His eyes widened, and he grabbed me by the arm. “Where the hell have you been?”

“Out for a walk,” I snapped back, pulling my arm free.

Kurt’s eyes narrowed. “You haven’t been in the compound for the last few hours. I know, because I’ve been looking for you.”

No way I was going to admit anything to this idiot. “It’s not my fault you have such poor hunting skills.”

He glared at me. My half-brother’s friend, his second-in-command-slash-security chief, and another major pain in the ass.

There were so few available women now that you’d think we’d be revered and able to have the pick of the crop.

Instead, we were fought over and then claimed as prized possessions.

I’d like to say it resulted in the best males rising to the top of the pile, but I guessed it depended on your interpretation.

Kurt used his generally vicious nature to excel at his security detail and that, as well as his connection to my brother, scared off any of my potential suiters. He’d made it quite clear to many that he considered me his property.

Too bad for him that I had other ideas.

He was the main reason I wanted off this rock. And as his gaze fastened on my fake eartag, my stomach clenched.

“Now that you are of mating age,” he ground out, “your brother gave me permission to seek a permit. Imagine my surprise when I went to the office today, and you are not on their official record.”

It was like getting hoofed in the gut. First of all, that my brother would agree to this without consulting me, although I shouldn’t be surprised. But there was a good reason I wasn’t on the official record—because I had lied about attending the local registration office.

“They must have misplaced the records,” I said, striving to keep my voice calm.

He pulled me close, grabbed my eartag, and wrenched it loose. Which he wouldn’t have been able to do, if it were official.

I yanked my arm from his. “What the fu—effing hell—are you doing?”

Kurt waved the eartag at me. “This is a fake. You aren’t registered. You lied to Travis.”

“I refuse to be labeled like livestock,” I snapped back at him.

Kurt grabbed me again, and pulled me along with him. “Well, that is something you have no control over,” he snarled. “I’ve waited long enough to mate you. My patience is at an end.”

“I will never mate you,” I spat.

“See, that’s where you are wrong.” He pulled me into our administration complex. The lights in the offices were still on, although the day staff would have left for home by now.

To my dismay, Travis waited for us—he must have ridden one of the transport shuttles back from the freighter. He looked up as I was hauled in.

People told me he took after his mother, rather than my father. I’d never met her, but I supposed that was true, if his mother had been short and almost as wide as she was tall.

My brother wasn’t hurting for groceries. He’d clearly profited from his association with the Drakes.

Kurt tossed the eartag onto his desk. “She faked it.”

Kurt was a bully and an ass. But now, my dislike hardened into something far darker.

My half-brother stared at the tag with horror. Then he unlocked a drawer on his desk, pinched it between a thumb and forefinger to drop it in, and slammed the drawer shut. The fingers tweaking the lock closed shook as he pocketed the key.

“I am not mating him,” I told Travis.

“I am head of this family, and as such, I tell you who you will mate.” Travis’s horror had turned to fury. “Kurt is the logical match for someone of your status. And we will be lucky to escape a penalty for you registering late—nothing will help us if they find out you tried to deceive them.”

He wasn’t wrong—if the Drakes found out about the fake tag, the penalties could be extreme. Painful public displays might be the least of it.

But I’d hoped to be long gone by then… wishful thinking, as it turned out.

With his expression unusually animated, my half-brother was in full rant. “You are fortunate that Kurt is interested in mating you at all, after such defiance.”

“Kurt just wants to get laid. It’s not like he has a whole lot of choices,” I snarled back.

“There’s the beekeeper’s daughter,” he countered.

My mouth fell open. “She’s twelve .”

His gaze narrowed. “Kurt would have to wait, yes. But she doesn’t give her family the trouble that you give me.”

“Well, she can have him. I have no intention of mating your number two .”

“You will mate who I say. Or you will be out on the street, where the gangs can have you.”