Princess of the Void ch 10 - Lonesome

Grant returns alone from the firing range. Hyax seems to think he doesn’t require an escort any longer; he isn’t sure whether that’s faith in his fealty, or she’s just not concerned he’s a threat any longer.

She wasn’t joking about taking the gun away from him. That’s all right. He doesn’t need to be carting a pistol around, anyway. He doesn’t hit the no-gravity turbo boost thing again, on the way up. He’d like to be alone for a while with his thoughts.

That same little rebel that wanted him to explore the greenhouse now whispers to him: pick a floor at random. Stroll around and get in the way. Or crawl around in the vents like Sykora did on Maek—Earth. Earth Earth Earth.

It turns out that a non-turbo’d lift is also a public lift. The door pings open to a stretch of verdant field, crested by an artificial sun. Two she-Taiikari, dirt on their gloves and on their cherubic faces, are talking and laughing as they push a cart loaded with root vegetables toward the lift door. They freeze as they see him.

He stands to one side. “Room for more.”

“Didn’t mean to hold you up, Prince Consort.” The woman pushing the cart gives him a bow. “We’ll take the next one.”

“It’s really okay,” he says.

She shakes her head. “We cannot be alone with you, Prince Consort.”

His brow furrows in confusion as the lift door closes. But it makes sense, doesn’t it? When you can compel someone, and make them forget. He’s the husband of their matriarch. They must be terrified to even suggest impropriety. He thinks about the flash Frelle gave him outside her daughter’s dining room. A simple lie, a simple smile. What if it had been more? As far as she knew, he’d do anything she wanted him to. Completely helpless.

This is the world in which Sykora grew up.

He hits the boost this time. He goes straight to the cabin. He presses the seal on the door and waits.

“Grantyde?” The voice on the other side is full of hope.

He bites back a smile despite himself. “Yep.”

The door slides open. Sykora is tugging a thick black ceramic crate out of a nook.

He moves to help her. “This is heavy-duty. Is this my gift?”

“It is part one of a two-part gift, actually. Thank you.” She scoots to the other side of the box and pushes while he pulls until the crate’s dragged into the center of the room. “I promise it’s nothing as scary as the packaging suggests. It’s just my team being shaky around alien artifacts.”

He steps back and dusts his hands off on his pants. “Alien artifacts?”

“I dispatched a team to Maekyon.” She clicks a pair of catches on the front of the crate. “I wanted to get you something. Well, I wanted to get us something. It’s a gift for me, too.”

“What does that mean?”

She lifts the lid of the box. There’s a guitar case inside.

Grant’s heart skips like a record.

“It’s bigger than the one you had before.” Sykora paces to the other side of the crate to give him a better look. “I don’t know these things very well. But this was what I remember. I drew them a little drawing, but you know how bad I am at those. The gals brought back a few different shapes to be certain, and I hope one of them is right, or I’ll have to reroute another infiltration team. And my Brigadier will throttle me.”

He opens the case. Sitting in its velvet is a brand new acoustic guitar, an art piece in spruce and rosewood and steel string. It is a little bigger, a triple-O rather than a parlor, and it’s gorgeous.

“Holy shit,” he breathes. This is a custom shop Martin. These guitars go for $5,000 easy.

“It’s a gee-dar, right?” Sykora peeks over the opened lid.

“It’s a guitar, all right.” And even though his tongue lags a little behind his brain when he says the word, even though the ih noise in guitar is foreign and unfamiliar to him now, his smile is so wide it aches his face. “A nice one.”

“Oh, thank God.” She’s smiling too. Smiling and blushing. He tries not to look at the horns crowning from her hair. “I’ve so dearly missed hearing you play this.”

“I’ve missed playing it.” He lifts the guitar out of the case. “Did it come with a strap?”

Her face falls.

“It’s okay. I don’t need one. It’s fine.” He should watch it, how distressed he’s started getting when Sykora looks sad. “I can just play sitting down for now. And I’m sure we can just make a strap for it out of any old thing.”

He sits at a chair from Sykora’s kitchenette and tunes up. The hem and haw of his six old friends as they shuffle into their positions in the choir.

Sykora sits across from him. She leans her chin into her hands. Her tail swishes. She says the five words every dude with an acoustic guitar longs to hear from a pretty girl: “Would you sing to me?”

“Sure,” he says. “What do you want to hear?”

“What do you think?” She mimics tapping on a glass wall and chants: “Lonesome. Lonesome. Lonesome.”

He laughs. “All right. Let me see if that language brain thing you put in me lets me sing this still.”

He starts up a cascading fingerstyle chord, clears his throat, and sings.

The words have a new, strange remove to them. But he still remembers them all, remembers their feeling and import even if they don’t come automatically to his lips with their meaning. There’s something beyond the words, anyway. Something universal.

Sykora’s eyes dance as she watches him. From his hands to his face to his mouth to his tapping foot. She sings along with him, on the last verse. Her singing voice is kind of like his, he realizes. Scratchy and warm, like an old record that still plays.

He finishes the song. There’s sweat on his back where it meets the chair.

Sykora’s gaze bores into his. “May I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“What does it mean, this song? I had so many ideas of what it meant.”

“I guess I can translate it now, huh?” He rubs his chin. “This is a weird feeling in my brain.”

Her eyebrows raise. “Don’t work too hard, dear. We don’t want to disrupt the pathways as they adjust.”

“I think I’ve got it,” he says, and he plays the song again. This time, he sings it in Taiikari. It’s odd, the ways the rhythm no longer fits and the words no longer rhyme. He keeps having to pause and reconfigure both the song and his mind.

He glances at Sykora after verse two and pauses for a different reason. Silent tears streak her cheeks. She blinks. “Keep going.”

His throat is getting a little thick. This is the second day in a row he’s made his wife cry. He clears it again and finishes the song.

“That’s so sad,” she says, softly. “I didn’t know. You always sang it like a love song.”

“It is a love song, kind of.” He plucks a ghost note. “It’s a love song for a love you can’t have. It felt just about right, I suppose, for where we were both at.”

“Does it, still?” She shifts in her seat. “Are you still that lonesome?”

“I don’t, uh…” His palm rubs his strings. “I don't know. Don't think so.”

“After you came to me,” she says, “on the worst days, when they strapped me down and cut me to see if my blood could turn invisible, or when they pumped me full of poison and forced me to run until I collapsed. I told myself: endure this for a few more hours, and tonight, Grantyde will sing to you. I’d try to listen to you in my head. Your beautiful voice. And then every time you sang that song. Do you know what I would think?”

He watches her tail slowly wagging. “What’s that?”

“I’d think: I need to get free. Not for the Pike, not for the Empire. Not even to stop the pain.” She scoots her chair forward. “I need to get out of this cell, so that I can kiss this alien.”

Use it, Hyax told him. Maybe he’s not the only one close to breaking. Maybe she’s thinking about it—the freedom he’s asking for, the reward he promised.

“I wanted to kiss you, too,” he says. “I thought you were the prettiest woman I’d ever seen. And you looked at me like…”

Like she’s looking at him right now.

“On the shuttle, you pulled away from me.” She stands up. That sinuous walk of hers, the tilt of her hourglass hips. One size fits all. She takes a step closer. “Were you afraid of me? Of what I did to escape?”

“I was,” he says. “And I tasted blood.”

Another step. “I’ve killed before. I’ve killed many people, Grantyde. And I’ll kill again. It’s the job. It’s how I keep my sector safe.” Her lips part. Her teeth gleam behind their dark, plump curves. “But there’s no blood now.”

“I see what you’re doing,” he says. “You’re going to try to kiss me so irresistibly that we fall into bed.”

“You’re a uniquely strong-willed Prince Consort,” she murmurs. They’re round and thick and subtly down-turned, her lips. It makes her resting face sensual, almost pouty, in defiance of the wisecracking woman he’s come to know. “I’d have to try very, very hard.”

“You said hands to yourself in that letter, you know.” A soft laugh creeps at the edge of his words.

“I did.” She puts her hands behind her back. She rocks back and forth on her heels. “But you didn’t.”

A piece of the hard bark inside him tears and falls away. Underneath he’s fresh and pale. Don’t, his defiance snarls. Don’t do this. Stop, Grant, you dumbass. STOP.

But that newly uncovered part of him whispers: She loves you, Grant. Everything she's done—the good and the bad—she's done because she loves you.

The rule is no sex. A kiss isn't sex. A kiss is fine. A kiss, at the very least, is what Sykora has earned from him so far. Yes, she's claiming ownership over his life, but she saved it first. She cares deeply about him. Loves him, maybe. She’s not showing it the human way, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

There is no going home. There is no undoing what he did. He can’t just ask blindly for his freedom. He has to figure out what that word even means to him now. He watches the tip of her fuchsia tongue slide a shine of saliva over those pouty lips, and draws a preliminary conclusion:

He fuchsia is no longer interested in any definition of “freedom” that demands he keep his tongue outside of Sykora’s little blue mouth.

“How about this.” He sets the guitar aside. “How about you get thirty seconds to try?”

She looks like someone just told her she won the lottery. Just for an instant, before that wry Princess smirk is back. “Forty five.”

He slips his hands between her arms and her waist, and lifts her into his lap. “Forty. That’s the best you’ll get.”

She slides closer, still with her hands folded tight behind her back. Her gaze dances down to his lips and back up to his eyes. “We’ll see about that, Mr. Maekyonite.”

She’s small and light, but she doesn’t feel delicate. There’s something solid and substantial about her, in the bold rhythm of her curves. She’s built for Taiikari males, who are at least within spitting distance of Grant’s height, and her hips are generous enough that she can fold her pillowy thighs around him and just manage to cross her ankles at the small of his back. The insides of her legs are fever-warm.

He wonders, not for the first time, what it feels like inside Sykora of the Black Pike.

He wets his lips. He starts the count.

“One, two, three…”

She lunges for him.

Grant wonders if subtlety isn’t the Taiikari style when it comes to kissing, because this is the second time Sykora of the Black Pike’s opening gambit has been to pounce him like a wildcat and shove her textured tongue down his throat.

Then he remembers what Hyax told him, as she kisses him like she’s trying to live inside his skin. About the experience thing. And he realizes this might be Sykora’s second kiss ever.

Seven, eight.

He catches the back of her neck, holds her lightly, just enough to still her ravenous forward momentum. He eases her microscopically away from him, enough that he can breathe and kiss her back. He gives her lower lip a gentle, encouraging bite. Another one of those high feminine squeaks, so at odds with her day-to-day smoothness. So undignified of you, Majesty. He could get addicted to making her do that. Fourteen, fifteen.

Her tongue is so textured. It’s setting fireworks off as it scrubs across the roof of his mouth. He shouldn’t have done this. This woman is dangerous. Nineteen, twenty.

He feels her arm move and grabs her hand, pinning it back above her tail. He holds both her wrists snug in the span of a single hand’s grip.

He breaks away for a moment. “Hands to yourself,” he murmurs.

Her head darts forward and traps him again, and now he’s abandoning prudence, taking the same drowning breaths she is, wherever he can get them between their insatiable kiss. Twenty two. Twenty three.

Their teeth click together. A little huff of laughter out of his nose, a smile curled at the edge of her mouth. Twenty five. Twenty six.

Her tail curves around his back and squeezes tight. She pulls herself forward with it, pressing against him. Her silk uniform. Her firm stomach. Her full, cushioned chest, spreading its downy warmth where it shoves onto his.

She smells like freshly cut jasmine. And something else underneath, something feral. A warm, aphrodisiac musk, primal and feminine. And intoxicating.

He really, really shouldn’t have done this.

Thirty one, thirty two.

Her heartbeat is different from a human’s. Not his lub-dub but a galloping triplet. Her fingers curl upward and squeeze into his palm. She churns her hips deeper into his lap. Warm and soft and pliant and full of need.

She groans, from deep in her little body. She’s shivering. She clings to him like she never wants him to stop. What if he didn’t stop? He doesn’t need to stop. Thirty eight, thirty nine.

God fucking dammit.

He leans backward, and it’s like he’s standing up from a hot tub into an Alberta winter. A gossamer strand of saliva connects their reddened, bereft mouths. “Forty seconds,” he gasps. “Time’s up.”

“Nooo,” she whines. She licks his jaw, kisses his neck. “Taiikari seconds are different. It’s five-to-one.”

“Count to ten, then.”

“Fine.” She sits back. “One.”

They stare at each other.

“Two.”

“Very convincing, Majesty.”

“Three.” She’s cracking up.

“All right.” He shifts. “Get off. Don’t make me compel you.”

“It would be funny to watch you try.”

“You think I can’t? Just because I don’t have laser eyes? Maekyonites have ways.”

“Like what?”

His hands snake up the side of her ribs. “Are you ticklish?”

“No.” Her arms snap tight to her sides, trapping him in place. “No we aren’t. Not at all. I don’t even know what that word—” He’s trying to get his hands further up toward her armpits. A half-stifled giggle escapes her. “I don’t know what that word means—GRANTYDE. No tickling or I’ll summarily execute you.” Her face grows thunderous. “I will count it as treason.”

He releases his hands and holds them up. “No tickling, Majesty.”

Her legs wrap tighter. “You want me, Grantyde. I know you do. I feel it.” She slowly grinds her hips closer to his waist. “You’re starving for me.”

“I am,” he admits.

“Then taste me.”

“I want to. I will. Just tell me I’m free.” His forefinger traces the base of her tail. “And I promise I’ll taste you so hard I’ll fucking choke on you.”

“Grant.” His name, in her purring, scratchy voice, sends pinprincks across his skin. Her horns nudge his jaw as she nuzzles him like a cat. “I am everything you imagine me to be. I’m more. Do you know what they say about Taiikari girls?” She grinds harder. “They say the only thing more bewitching than our eyes are our insides. That damnation lies on our tongues, and salvation between our legs. That we didn’t conquer the firmament because of our ships or our compulsion, but because you can never go back to your own species once you’ve had a Taiikari girl. Never.” Her waist is gyrating now. Her butt flexes. “That our cruelty, our capriciousness, the submission we extract. Every little bit is worth it, for the moment you wrap yourself in our bodies.”

“It would be.” He plants his hands on her waist and stills her. “I know it would. That’s why I can’t. If we go to bed now, I think I’d be done resisting. I’d be willing to let you own me, just to keep making love to you. And I can’t let that happen.”

She huffs. “I don’t understand this. This need for freedom, faced with all that your submission will give you. Do you think I’ll be cruel to you? I won’t be. I—” Her fingers draw little circles on his shoulders. “I’ll take care of you, Grant. I’ll make you happy.”

“I know.”

Her brows tilt higher, entreatingly. “Then why?”

He sighs. “I know it seems stupid to you. I mean, I’m driving myself crazy. But…” He tries to untangle his brain enough to extract something useful out of it. “I think it would always be in me if I gave up. The knowledge that you own me. The sorrow that I never had the choice to choose you back. And I think it would grow. And I’d be happy for a long time, but it would stay in there, and it would keep growing. And I don’t want to be happy with you for a long time. I want to be happy with you for the rest of my life.”

“I can pull that sorrow out at the root. Give me a chance and I swear I can.” Her tail is stroking his forearm. “I’d give you anything. I would give you your freedom. If there was a way, I would.”

“We found our way out of the last prison.”

“This one is bigger. This one stretches across the firmament. There is no way out from this one.”

Insist upon these impossibilities and make yourself miserable, or…

“I’m not asking you to overthrow the empire,” he says. “I’m willing to pretend in front of everyone, like we did before. I can keep doing that. I had fun doing it, even.”

A blinking, uncertain smile crosses her face. “You did?”

He nods. “I can be useful. That groom’s code—I can break it. Work with me as an equal partner, and we can use it. I don’t need it in writing, I don’t need an announcement, I don’t need any Empire or Empress to acknowledge it. Only you, Sykora.”

And as he says it, he realizes what it is he needs, what his freedom looks like.

“Only you,” he repeats, quieter. “You’re who counts. Just tell me, and I’ll believe it.”

“I didn’t realize,” she says. “How hard I’d have to try. How strange this would be. You’re insubordinate. You’re uncontrollable. You’re unrealistic. The wise move would be to find you some alien enclave, some place to put you, and run like hell. Every instructor I’ve ever had would be screaming at me. Screaming. But I can’t.” She lowers her face onto his chest. “I can’t let you go. I can’t do it. I’m hamstrung. I’m irreversibly weakened. And if I free you…”

She bites her lip.

“If I free you, I doom myself. If you stay, there’s a loaded gun pointed at my heart for all time, just waiting for a rival to discover it and shoot me out of the sky. A free husband-of-the-void. Free and uncompellable. A member of the Imperial family, wed to an alien she can’t control. I’d go from Princess to pariah, Grantyde. And if you go, I’ll shake apart like an unshielded shuttle.”

He shakes his head. “I’m not going.”

“You’d stay?”

“I would,” he says. His hands slide lower and rest on her hips. “You’re right, Sykora. You said there’s nothing for me on Maekyon, and you’re right. This is the only place I belong anymore.”

Her breath shakes.

“I can keep your secrets.” He runs his fingers along her spine. “I kept them from Frelle. We’re already sharing one huge lie about me. What’s another? You don’t have to own me.” He presses his hand to her sternum. “Just trust me. We’ll figure it out, day by day. Not the Maekyonite way, not the Taiikari way. Some new thing.”

He tucks a strand of her hair behind her fanned-out ear.

“You said I was worth trying for,” he says. “You’re worth trying for, too.”

“I’ll… I’ll think about it. I promise I will.” She leans into his touch. “I’m scared. But I will. Will you keep being patient with me?”

“Yes.”

She shuts her eyes. He feels her shiver under his palm.

“Maybe we can start small,” he says. “I want to wear anticomps when I’m on the Black Pike. Those dark frosted things.”

That gets her eyes open again. “You don’t need them.”

“I know. But your crew doesn’t.” He shakes his head. “I don’t want them to be terrified to be alone in a room with me. I don’t want them to look at me like I’m a lost lamb. Or a victim.”

“The anticompel glass…” She plucks stray carnelian fibers from his uniform. “It’s only for Taiikari citizens. It’s not meant to be worn in private, or by, uh.”

“By property.”

“By Husbands-of-the-void.”

“Then let’s make this the first rule we break.” He scratches the back of her head, through the silk waterfall of her hair. “Only on the Pike. Only in your kingdom. Starting small.”

“You…” She leans forward and rests her forehead against his clavicle. He lays his chin on the top of her head, his jaw framed in her horns. “You are dangerous, Grantyde.”

“I had that exact thought about you,” he says, “when I was kissing you.”

Sykora’s tail unwraps from him and slides to the floor. She slips out of his lap and presses the intercom button in the cabin. She keeps eye contact with Grant. “Chief Engineer Waian.”

A click and a beep. “Majesty. Have you thought about the gyros? You feeling that vibration under your feet? Not good.”

“Still not feeling anything, Wai,” Sykora says. “But I’ll make you a deal. I’ll get you the gyros you need, and you do a minor project for me.”

“How minor?”

“I need you to design a pair of anticomps for my husband.”

“Majesty…” A crackle on the other end. “Are you sure?”

“Are you sure we’re going to shake apart because the gyros are five cycles past their sell-by?”

“I never said we’d shake apart, but there are knock-on effects, Majesty, I told you—”

“One pair of Maekyonite anticomps, Chief Engineer. Two, actually. We’ll want a spare. Thank you.” She hits the button again. She takes a deep breath. Her hands are shaking. “There,” she says.

He’s across the cabin in two steps. He picks her up. She thrashes. “Grantyde put me down—”

He folds her into a tight embrace. She tenses and freezes, and then holds him back. Her thick tail wraps around his waist.

“Thank you, Sykora,” he whispers. He kisses the tender skin on her neck. He kisses the smooth arc of her jaw. He kisses her trembling mouth—just for a moment. Then he puts her down. Her horns have grown out far enough that there’s the beginning of a little curl at the end of them.

She swallows her excess saliva and straightens her uniform. “You are most welcome.”

“Was that forty-second kiss part two of my gift?”

“That kiss was for me, Maekyonite.” Sykora’s reassembling the pieces of her haughty camouflage. “Part two of your gift is in the hangar bay. Hide your hard-on and let’s go. I’m going to give you your first flight lesson.”

“Your horns are showing.”

“Shut up.”