Page 219 of Mates for the Raskarrans #1-6

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Sam

I want to wrap Dazzik in my arms, kiss him and tell him everything’s going to be okay.

That I was so ready to be all in with my mate, but never expected to fall so hard, so deeply in love with him so fast. But Dazzik’s bravery, his selflessness, his honour - he’s demonstrated them again and again, and I thank my lucky stars that Lina chose him to be mine.

But something he said is nagging at me.

“It was no more than you deserved? What makes you say that?”

He avoids my gaze until I force him to look at me, guiding his face to mine with my hand on his cheek. I brush my thumb over his cheekbones, trace a path down to his jaw.

“Because,” he says. “It was my fault. Nelsah.”

“How is that your fault? She got sick, Dazzik. These things happen.”

I think of my dad, sweating and shivering in his sickbed. I wanted someone to blame for that for so long, but sometimes there isn’t a reason for things, isn’t a logic to it. It’s just luck of the draw, and sometimes you’re dealt a shitty hand.

“Because,” Dazzik says, swallowing hard.

“Because I begged her. When I was recovering and she grew worse every day, I went to her and I begged her to stay. Begged her not to leave me. I begged her to live and she did, but it was not living. It was not living at all, and it was me. I asked her to endure that because I was too selfish to let her go.”

My heart breaks for him, and I draw him into my arms, holding him close for a moment, before pulling back and catching his face in my hands once again.

“I want to show you something,” I say. “Can I show you something?”

He frowns. “Of course, linasha. You do not need to ask.”

I close my eyes, summoning my childhood home.

It was bigger than my single occupancy apartment, but not by much.

Had two bedrooms branching off from the main living area.

The bed beneath us shifts and then we’re perched on the edge of my bed, and little seven-year-old me is lying there, staring up at the ceiling, covers pulled up to her nose. And from next door, the coughing.

The awful, wracking cough.

“My dad always used to say there was a bright side to everything. I can’t remember if I told you that already or not.

He was a good man. A big personality. And he liked to give me these bits of wisdom about life, and that was his favourite one.

That there is always a bright side. No matter how bleak, no matter how terrible, there’s a bright side to everything.

Something good that comes of it. He said I was the one to teach him that lesson when I was born.

When my mother died bringing me into the world, I was his bright side. The good to come from the terrible.”

“I am sorry you had to lose your mother this way,” Dazzik says, stroking a hand over my hair.

“She was already weak,” I say. “Mercenia never let us have enough of anything. Not enough food, not enough sleep, not enough freedom. Carrying me was too much for her, and when the time came, she spent her last getting me out. My father loved her very much, and it could have broken him, losing her that way. But he didn’t let it.

And he tried to teach me what he’d learned from that. ”

The coughing from next door intensifies, and even now, so many years later, it still sends a shudder through me, and I rub at my own chest, hating the lingering feeling of rawness that remains there.

It will go in a few days. I’ll get better.

I’ll take the pills from the red capped bottle until they’re gone, and then I’ll be fine.

But the memory of this night still haunts me, even now.

“When he died, I wasn’t sure what the bright side could possibly be.

With both my parents gone, I was sent to a bottom tier orphanage - a terrible place where we were looked after by matrons who would beat us if we stepped a toe out of line.

I tried so hard to follow Dad’s lessons.

I always gave people smiles, always tried to solve problems one step at a time.

They were great lessons, and they got me through so many bad situations.

But try as I might, I could never figure out what the bright side to Dad dying that way was.

But I think I understand now. I think I finally see it. ”

My younger self sighs, pushing back the covers and climbing out of bed. Tears well in my eyes to see my own shiny scalp, hair shorn off even then. I take Dazzik’s hand, and we follow after little me into my father’s bedroom.

Seeing him like he is in this memory is a gut punch, even now. His sallow skin, his sweat-soaked sheets, the short, sharp shape of his breaths. Little me trembles as she goes to him, taking the damp cloth from his bedside table and using it to mop his brow.

For a long moment, she just sits there, gently daubing his face. But then she puts the cloth down, touches a hand to Dad’s face, rousing him just a little. His eyes are open, but he doesn’t look entirely home behind them.

“It’s okay,” she whispers. “It’s okay. You can go. You can let go, Dad. You can go.”

She’s crying. I’m crying, silent tears dripping down my cheek as I watch her tell Dad that it’s okay. He doesn’t have to hold on anymore. That I’ll be okay. He can let go.

I turn to Dazzik, the bedroom around us fading back into the tent.

“He died that night. I knew he was gone when I woke up to silence.”

Dazzik’s expression is stricken, but I smile at him, try to show him that it really is okay.

“I felt terrible about it for years. Thought that it was my fault. That I’d killed him.”

“No, my Sam, no,” Dazzik says, his hands cupping my cheeks.

I laugh, and it surprises him. He steps back, looking down at me with a question in his gaze.

“You see?” I say. “You begged Nelsah to stay, and I told my father he could leave, and we both blamed ourselves for what happened afterwards, when none of it was our fault. That guilt you feel, it’s just pain twisting you up.

It was the same for me. The pain ate at me until I learned to let it go.

Dad wouldn’t have wanted me to blame myself, and Nelsah wouldn’t have wanted you to, either. ”

“And this is your bright side?” he says. “That you have learned this lesson. That you can teach it to me.”

“Exactly.” I smile at him, and after a moment, he starts to smile back.

It’s small at first, just a slight upward curve at the edges of his lips, but it grows and grows until he’s beaming at me.

And then those lips are on mine, hot and hungry, and I moan into his mouth as he lifts me into his arms, carrying me to the bed.

Afterwards, we are back where we started - me lying across his chest, him with his arms around me.

“She used to come to me,” Dazzik says. “Nelsah. I would see visions of her in dreams. But not like normal dreams. Not quite like the dreamspace, either. Something in between.”

“She came to you?”

Dazzik nods. “The first time… It was not long into my being outcast. Two seasons, I think. Raskarrans need our tribe around us, and I was suffering. The loneliness had grown too difficult to bear, and any little thing otherwise that went wrong, it broke my spirit more than it should have. I got it into my mind that I would be better off returning to my goddess. Finding a way to end my life so that my suffering might be ended with it.”

I suck in a breath, my heart constricting at his words.

“I climbed to the top of an outpost, stood at the edge of it. Like I did in our dream, I intended to jump from it. To let the fall break my body, free my spirit to return to Lina’s embrace.

But before I could do it, she came to me.

A vision of who she might have grown to be if the sickness had never come.

She talked me back from the edge, told me I had to go on. ”

His eyes grow bright with wonder as he looks at me.

“She told me she would not come to me again. The night after we first joined in the dreamspace, she told me that I would not see her, and I thought she meant that I was soon to die. With my supplies so low, the big rains almost upon me. I felt certain she meant I would die, but she told me it was because I would soon live.”

He rolls me over so I am pinned beneath him once more.

“I had thought myself alive all these seasons, but I see now what Nelsah meant. You have made me come alive in ways I had forgotten the sensation of. My heartspace is open, my spirit lifted because I can call you my linasha. You are my bright side, my Sam, and I will be thankful to my very last breath that you were chosen for me.”

He kisses me hard, reaching between us for my core.

The dreamspace keeps me feeling fresh, so when his fingers stroke through my folds, my body responds as if we hadn’t already fucked just a moment ago, heat pooling at my core, need spiraling through me.

He’s hurried in his touches this time, almost frantic with need, and he aligns himself with my entrance, thrusting deep into me with an edge of roughness that has me ready to explode.

I lie back, letting him use my body the way he needs.

The constant pressure of his mating node sliding over my clit as he fucks me has my body amping up, release soon crashing through me.

Dazzik roars as my pussy clenches around him, driving his hips into me faster and faster until I’m coming again, crying out as the pleasure overwhelms me.

“Yes,” I say to him, over and over. “Yes.”

I know when he’s close by how his whole body starts to shudder, how he moans into my neck.

I grip him so tight, my nails bite into his skin as I continue to ride the waves of pleasure he gives me.

And then he reaches his peak, bringing me with him as we both cry out each other’s names into the night.

I feel blissful when I wake the next morning, and Dazzik grins at me in such an unburdened way that I know he’s taken our conversations to heart, that he no longer holds on to his guilt and grief as hard as he used to.

Feeling mischievous, I push him onto his back, then kiss my way down his body to his cock, sucking the head of it into my mouth.

Dazzik yelps in surprise, but soon he’s gripping my hair, moaning encouragement, and I never knew I was missing out on having my hair pulled all that time I had my scalp shaved close every week by Mercenia.

Afterwards, he tries to drag me back to bed, but I tease him, darting out of his grip, wanting him to chase me.

After a moment, he does, letting me get ahead of him far enough that I’ve made it all the way to the shower room before he catches up to me, pinning me against the wall.

I jab the shower button, the water bitingly cold as it first strikes us, but warming quickly.

Dazzik pins my hands over my head, then takes me from behind, hard and demanding, and I am a puddle of pleasure by the time he’s done.

“Do you think your tribe would accept me?” Dazzik asks me in the dreamspace that night.

“Of course,” I tell him. “They might not like the look of you at first, like you said, but they’ll listen to me. I’ll tell my chieftess everything you’ve told me. She’ll make Gregar listen, trust me.”

“This Gregar is as beholden to his pretty human female as I am, then?”

“Definitely,” I grin.

“We will have to stay here until the rains are done. I would not risk making you sick again. I would not travel until the weather is turned for the better.”

Good, because I don’t want to risk that either.

“I don’t like that my friends will probably think the worst has happened to me,” I say, tracing a pattern across his broad chest. “But I don’t hate the idea of several weeks alone with you.”

Dazzik huffs a laugh. “My insatiable linasha. You like it when I mate you. When I thrust my cock deep into your pretty cunt.”

“Yes I do,” I tell him, and for the rest of the night, he makes sure I get plenty of what I like.

But after a few days of sleep, sex and food, my mind starts to wander back to the question I had when I first saw this building, this place.

What the fuck is a Mercenia building doing in the middle of the raskarran forest?

While Dazzik works to keep our temporary home clean, washing the pelts left behind by Basran’s tribe, getting rid of the last lingering scents of other raskarrans, I spend time in the security room, studying the screens, trying to work out which buttons do what.

One time, I accidentally trigger an emergency lockdown, sirens wailing as all the doors slam shut.

Dazzik comes running, banging on the security door that’s sealed between us, while I press every button in front of me in a panic until the horrible noise shuts off and the doors all open again.

Dazzik nearly refuses to let me play with the control panel again after that, but I talk him round.

There are some filing cabinets at the back of the room with folders in.

Instructions, I guess. Somewhere, encoded in the alphabet that Mercenia never taught us bottom tier folks to read, will be the means of opening the locked doors downstairs.

I’ve tried peering through the small glass windows to see if I can figure out what’s inside, but all I can really see is more storage, more machinery.

Still, it continues to tug in my chest, the feeling that I need to know why Mercenia were here.

That it’s important somehow, so I don’t stop. I keep working, keep looking.

It’s something else to keep me occupied while the relentless rain continues to fall and fall and fall.