Chapter 7
“…And then he said he’d watch him die again,” Trixie recounted with ghoulish gratification.
Lishelle scrunched herself deeper into the cushions of the sunken couch in Rayna’s suites while Trixie finished repeating everything Nor and the duke had learned. The guys had marched off earlier to find Idrin, the bounty hunter, leaving the three Earther girls to hash and rehash the detailsof their abduction.
Minus the hash, sadly. She could’ve really used some mood-altering substances right now. But not alcohol, which would make her morose. Or caffeine, which would make her jittery. She had both of those symptoms going on already.
She’d slept with their abductor. Not just slept with him—snuggledwith him. And enjoyed it. The last man she’d snuggled with had been her husband.And look how that’d turned out. She couldn’t even blame Stockholm syndrome.
She would blame Tynan. Blackworm. Whatever. He’d lied to her.
Except… Nor had told Trixie that despite the corroborating DNA test, he’d been almost swayed by the story of the God of Beloveds.
While Trixie had been talking, Lishelle had read the legend on her dat-pad. There were dozens of tellings; it was a popular storylinein Thorkon media. She wondered what Tynan would think of the musical version. He did have a voice that would be perfect for singing. Like the rest of him was perfect…
She pushed down that wistful thought like she was hiding something embarrassing in the couch cushions.
Rayna said, “Lishelle?”
She jerked her head up. “What? Sorry. I was reading.”
Lips quirking faintly, Rayna tilted her head.“What are the ethics of punishing someone so obviously unbalanced?”
Lishelle closed down her dat-pad; there was nothing more to learn there. “On Earth, we’d talk about minimizing harm, maximizing the potential for meaningful rehabilitation, weighing it all against the social need for perceived justice.”
“Perceived,” Rayna murmured as she reached for her tea. Some mild grassy tea since none ofthem had wanted pixberry after hearing the story of the blindfolded wanna-be brides.
“We don’t always get what we want,” Lishelle said, as if that would come as a surprise to her friends. “We don’t even get what we think we want.”
“I wanted to destroy Blackworm,” Trixie said fiercely. “For taking us. For sacrificing those women we never knew. For shooting Nor almost to death.” She sucked ina sharp breath as if to hold back that memory, but the extra oxygen of that inhalation only inflamed the hostility in her hazel eyes. “Wediddestroy him. Sent the dreadnaught right into the singularity with him aboard. Sohowis he back here?”
“Exactly how Blackworm told you,” Rayna reminded her. “The virtual particles in the blackbody radiation that escaped the event horizon became a manifestationof what wasperceivedas lost to the singularity. Now we have that manifestation locked up in the station brig.”
Lishelle blinked at her. “You’ve been doing some reading too.”
“When I’m not doing wedding stuff.” Rayna tried for a grin, though it faltered. “I guess it’s pretty special that an actual god returned to our dimension to bless this union.”
Trixie grumbled under her breath. “I don’tsee how he went from torturing girls and being forbidden to ever touch them again to giving blessings.”
Squirming deeper into the cushions, Lishelle wondered if that was her fault. Had letting him touch her somehow…changedthe virtual particles that had manifested as this strange interdimensional amalgamation of a warlord/felon/god?
“I fucked him,” she blurted out.
Rayna stared at her, andTrixie froze with her tea cup poised at her agape mouth.
“When I thought he was just the cleric,” Lishelle continued miserably. “Oh God, that doesn’t sound much better, does it?” She keeled over on the couch, hugging one of the cushions to her belly.
Where he’d left a handprint of golden pollen.
She’d squeezed her eyes closed, so she startled when a gentle hand settled on her head.
“It’s notyour fault,” Trixie soothed. “You never saw him.”
Lishelle kept her eyes closed so she didn’t have to see her friends’ scandalized expressions.
As she hadn’t ever seen Blackworm.
“I could’ve,” she whispered. “There was one chance I could’ve seen him. But I hid.”
