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 myvoice 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 penaltyfor 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’stwelve.”
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 yournumber two.”
“You will mate who I say. Or you will be out on the street, where the gangs can have you.”
It was an empty threat. There was no way my brother wouldn’t use me to his advantage, and throwing me out on the street wasn’t in the cards. We glared at each other, and then Travis came around the desk. It was all I could do to not flinch when he took one arm, and Kurt the other.
Strung between them, they frogmarched me out of the office and down the hall to the hole we used as an admin staff lunchroom. Where they released me, and then left. I heard the lock click.
