Page 69 of Command

Threxin leaned back and shoved the back of his arm to his mouth to wipe it off, conscious of the way her terrified eyes followed the movement.

She was still crying.

“It is okay,” he offered gruffly. “You are safe.”

The words did not seem to make her feel any better. Instead, Alina Argoud’s wet eyes turned to flint, flashing.

“Can’t you find some other… some other…” her chest seized as she tried to force the words, “…pest… to study and fuck with? Why me? What the hell did I do to you?”

She thought he was doing this on purpose. He had let herthink that. No, he hadmadeher think that. Threxin was cognizant of the thrum of the limiter inside him, forcing his heartbeat to settle and his mind to emotionless clarity, trapping him beneath a sheet of ice. And yet something in him railed against it harder than it ever had, battering at the cage. His head throbbed as the limiter overpowered it.

“I lied,” he said flatly, fighting to keep himself down, to see reason. Failing.

She leaned forward, clutching the sheet in her fists. “What does that even mean?”

Threxin retreated, reaching for distance. He needed all the distance he could get, because if he did not leave now, he feared he may never make it out.

Threxin should not have arranged to interrogate Orion Halen’s human sire that evening. He had miscalculated. Misjudged. Misbehaved.

“Take him away. I will do this later,” he told Renza in the receiving area of his quarters. Orion Halen's sire was apparently outside, in his suite’s entrance lobby.

Renza stood infuriatingly still, his expression and mannerisms betraying nothing for several long ticks.

“I think you want to talk to him now,k’riar,” his voice was low. “He has been waiting for this, and… what he told me sounds compelling.”

Renza immediately recognized the state of him. Shoq, any idiot would see it. Threxin sat on the firm cushion, apertures throbbing and groin hard as the surface of Apth Alpha. Perhaps a human could miss the way his apertures pulsed subtly or the way his taut spikes stood erect on his skull and spine. But not one of his, and definitely not his shoqing brother.

Threxin’s limiter hummed incessantly in his skull, fightingto rip connections between some synapses and recreate others. It churned at the inner meat of him until he wanted to bash his head against the fucking wall to make it stop.

“What happened?” Renza asked.

Threxin desperately wanted his brother to assume whatever encounter he just had involved one of his cohort. Silarra or Keltha. Shoq, any of them would have him—some had been trying. But Threxin saw it in his brother’s eyes that he stood there and he knew.

“Nothing,” Threxin growled, fighting to keep his cool even as the limiter worked exhaustively. “Bring him in.”

“Brother, you?—”

Threxin’s skin flared, apertures snapping shut. “Bring in the damn human, Renza, if he is so compelling.”

He shook his head viciously at the spike of dulling pain clattering through his head, bouncing off the walls of his skull. When he opened his eyes, Renza was retreating, opening the door, and dragging in an old male.

“Wait outside,” Threxin told Renza once the man who was presumably Orion Halen’s father was positioned in the seat across from him.

He glared at the human before him, attempting to focus. He swallowed it away and adjusted in his seat, wincing as his erection chafed against his pants. Resting his elbows on his knee, Threxin cocked his head to study the old man.

“You are my human-kin’s sire,” Threxin said.

“Per Halen.” The man nodded.

He looked weak and old, and yet his face was barely lined and his body was not overly bent. His eyes were glassy, but held a shrewdness Threxin supposed he'd best not ignore.

“Your age?”

“Three hundred and fifty-seven Old Earth years,” Per Halen said.

Threxin was impressed. He did not think theElysian’slife extension technology could keep one in such condition for solong, even if the ancientness of him did seep through his eyes and his air. This was perhaps the first in-person evidence he had seen ofColossal’stechnical superiority in this regard.

“I’ve been waiting for you to call on me,” he said.

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