“Not stupid. Stupendous. It means very surprising in a pleasing way.”
“Oh.” He smiled, lighting up my heart, and my life. “Then you are stupendous.”
“Thank you. You are…” I waved my fingers in the air.
“Apparently I defy description,” he said in Drakonian.
“Magnificent,” I said in English.
“Which means?”
I realized I didn’t really know. “Deserving to be admired.”
He snorted a partial laugh. “Excellent.” The fingers he gently buried in my hair were trembling.
“Is shaking after mating a normal thing?” I asked.
He took a deep breath. And this time, his laugh boomed freely from him.
“What is it you humans say? No one else has rocked my world,” he confessed in careful English, “quite like you.”
17
Zyair
Rhodes and I landed on the outskirts of Dangos city.
From the air, it barely qualified as such. It was really more of an elaborate town that, at one time, had dreamed of grandeur.
But that would have been before the Nirzks had conquered this planet. Now Dangos was merely a gathering point for whatever the land around it could provide.
“Are we going to talk about just how badly you have handled this?” Rhodes spoke Drakonian from the folds of the cloak he was pulling over his head.
“No,” I said.
“You have really handled it terribly.”
“I think the human term would be ‘really fucked things up’, but yes, I have.”
He stared at me in the darkness. “Not sure what thatromputFucq has to do with it.” He shook his head. “Even if we get through this, we cannot just drop the female off and walk away.”
I avoided his gaze. “I promised her that is exactly what we would do.”
“But—youlockedwith her, Zyair.”
“Iknow, Rhodes.” The raw, gaping hole inside me suddenly flared with pain, and I did my best to ignore it. Instead, I focused on our task as I pulled on the boots. Even with the seams split and taped, they were going to be uncomfortable.
“You cannot recover from that,” he insisted. Rhodes could be stubborn when he believed he was right.
He was not entirely wrong. In fact, I did not know how I was going to let her go. It would be easier to cut off my arm or leg—I was finding it hard to even breathe past the ache in my soul.
True mates seldom survived the death of one member—we had only just bonded, but I felt the undeniable truth. For me, there was only one.
For Rhodes and Xandros too.
If she did not want us, I was not going to force her. By denying Fate, she had dictated mine.
I fastened the bootstraps loosely, so they would give if necessary. “I can. And I will, if that is what she wants.”
