Page 13 of Broken Triad
She’s beautiful. Big, pouty lips, a shock of copper hair, eyes bright green as a cat, but I grew up on Colossus, surrounded by beautiful women in pleasure dresses, their naked bodies displayed as trophies by Aurelian soldiers who won their harem. None of them got more than a glance from me, as I focused on fighting and training, that I could one day win my own Mate, not emptily writhing with women who cannot bear your sons.
I slam my fist against the doorframe, letting anger surge up. This, I cannot bear. I’ve dealt with horror. I’ve waded through blood and dirt, stormed into Scorp nests, I’ve put the blade of mercy through the heart of men I fought by the side of when they lay dying, and my triad just survived the Rift that no man dares enter. I came through all that with nothing but a reinforced will to endure.
I had resigned myself to grey. Now, with this woman in front of me, I see a flash of color, color that does not belong to me.
I stare her down. She should be terrified, but she meets my gaze, staring straight back into my grey eyes. She’s perhaps twenty in human years. My first twenty years of existence were spent in Academy. From the moment I walked out of the cryo-chambers as a boy to take my sword, I fought for dominance against other young men, all of us yearning for the glory and honor that was promised to us. Twenty years. A gnat’s life, a blink of the eye.
What has she felt in her decades? I look at her face, expecting to see the flashes of bone, the laughing, grinning skull that haunts me, but all I see is life. She is pale as porcelain, white as fresh snow, so delicate, so fragile, so in need of my strength and protection, yet possessing more courage than many warriors I fought with.
She swallows, hard. Her scent is nervous, especially when her eyes flick to the brand on my chest, then to the second brand on my forehead. Fear spikes in her smell.
She steps back, despite me just saving her life, and that snaps me out of whatever spell she had on me.
“Get in line. Follow us out. You belong to Obsidian now.” I let my anger rush up. Anger is safe.
The knife’s already gone from the woman’s hand, slipped back in her dress. She’s got quick hands, and I wonder what else she has hidden in that dress of hers. I imagine searching her, my hands running down her trembling body, and I have to turn my back, snarling at my own weakness, and stomp up the steps. Let her try to dig that knife in my back if she wishes, and she’ll see what happens.
“What does it mean?”asks Khra, uncomprehending. Women should be neutral to us. They should not be able to make the Mating Rage boil up in us.
“Nothing,”I reply, my voice cold in his mind.“We are being tested. Nothing more.”
7
LOLA
“Just do as they say,” I whisper to the other women, and go first towards the stairs, summoning my courage to follow the three beastly brutes of alien warriors. It’s the broadness of them that is so inhuman, so many slabs of muscle piled on to their powerful frames it seems impossible, yet despite their huge bulks, they move with uncanny grace, and as they stalk up the stairs their bootsteps are fainter than the Scorp.
The black robes leave half of their back bare, and I see a myriad of scars crisscrossing all over their frames. They’ve got muscles I didn’t know existed, bulging out in their broad back, but the beauty of their bodies is marred by the horrific beating they endured. Whip marks. These three have endured things that should have broken them. Their minds will be alien, incomprehensible, hardened over centuries of battle.
I cannot fool myself into thinking I know these aliens…
But I know men.
I saw the way they looked at me, with a hunger so pure and ravenous I’m shocked they resisted, that they prevented themselves from claiming me right there and then, in front of the other servants. Fanatics are Aurelians without honor to bind their ruthless desires, and with everything I know of the species, I should be pressed against the ground, held down by their weight as they unleash themselves in me. I saw the robes of the three of them tented upwards as their massive alien cocks surged up with desire for me, then just like that, they turned, stomping up the stairs.
I can still smell them. The cellar is filled with their scent, this deep, masculine musk. They were fighting Scorp before they came down here, and their muscled bodies are slick with sweat. I’ve always hated the way soldiers smelled after a long shift, stinking of sour sweat, but these three are nothing like it. Their musk seems to tickle my nose, this heavy scent of man that doesn’t offend me.
I step over the broken oak shards of the door and out of the cellar. The second Scorp is crumpled, its head on the bottom step while its body is on the ground, claws splayed out helplessly.
“Keep moving!” barks out one of the Aurelians, his voice unused to the Common tongue, raspy and deep. He turns, glancing at me. His eyes may be slate-grey, but they can’t hide hatred as he looks me over, the lust replaced by wrath.
Why? Why? What did I do to them?
I stop near the top of the stairs, smoothing my white robes nervously, the cloth sticking against my sweat-soaked skin.
“You saved our lives. May I have your names, to thank you properly?”
I keep my voice as polite as possible. I’ve heard all the rumors of Fanatics. I’m more than likely to lose a tooth getting slapped for insolence than get their names, but I need to try, for all of our sakes. They need to think of us as people, not just possessions.
That starts with names. You don’t give your name to an object.
The leader grunts, and stops, turning to look at me. He runs his tongue over his teeth. He’s got a fresh bruise on his forehead that’s swelling up, and I think of the herbs in the garden I could use to rub on that bruise and make it hurt less. He’s moving with strength, but if I’m not mistaken, his black robe is a darker black near his belly. Is he cut?
Brianna filled her garden with flowers, but by good fortune, some of the most useful herbs have the prettiest flowers on Trebulous.
He’s handsome, in a beastly sort of way. He has a strong jaw that could take a horse’s hoof without breaking, intense, flint eyes that bore into your soul, marble hued skin strong as stone. Even the half-moon of darkness on his forehead suits him. It is a tattoo won by violence.
“Krazak.” He growls out the word. Then he cocks his head to the alien who wrapped his fist around the Scorp’s tail an instant before the barb plunged into my eye. “Khra.” Then he cocks his head to the last, a bull of a man with two weeks of stubble framing his anvil jaw, his neck nearly as thick as his head. “Bolden.”
