Page 35 of Fate of Draga

Nash couldn’t hold his grin in anymore. “When you’re making love to her tonight, I want you to tell her something nice about me. Anything you can come up with.”

Varan’s sharp laugh eased the tension and even Kaiden smiled slightly. “I believe I could tell her you don’t smell as bad as I thought you would.”

Nash snorted. “You can come up with something better, I’m sure.”

Then Varan chuckled and tapped the scout’s encoded transmission. “We’ll be down shortly.”

“Hm, how about your cock is bigger than I assumed based on your personality?”

Nash barked a laugh and then activated his helmet. “You were looking at it long enough to know.”

Kaiden didn’t deny it. He simply smiled and activated his own helmet.

This game Nash had started…he could have handed over point to Kaiden without requesting anything at all, but it wouldn’t have made the impact he needed it to. Nash knew he had to make up for lost time – for making Adelina wait for a response to her proposal.

She’d forgiven him, but her other two mates were still working on it.

And if they were all going to spend a lifetime together then Nash needed them to start liking him. This…game, it would help.

Varan clapped him on the back as Kaiden passed. Somehow Varan knew what he was doing – the crafty bastard. And he approved.

Nash didn’t know what to think about that as he followed after the other two males.

And for the first time in his life he didn’t care that he was third.

* * *

“What do you see?” Kaiden asked – his voice barely more than a whisper.

Not that they needed to with their helmets up and the squad all using the same encrypted channel. But it was instinct to do so when their enemy was only a few hundred meters away.

Nash looked again and scanned with Kharan tech. “Nothing showing up on my scanner, but I can physically see five Neprijat on this floor. There are probably more, but how many I’m not sure.”

“Are they warriors?” Varan asked.

They didn’t move like warriors, but they had the build and muscle mass to imply they weren’t weaklings. “Maybe not to the level we’ve seen so far, but I wouldn’t expect them to go down easy either.”

Nash wondered why the Neprijat were so…fanatic. He couldn’t think of a better way to describe their obsessive intensity.

After what he’d seen so far and what he’d witnessed on the battlefields he knew there was something strange going on. Reports coming in from all over had said much the same. Nash would have to ask Kaiden how they were when they’d ruled the Hai System.

Kaiden turned to their squad of fifty warriors. “On my mark I will create cover and then we will fan out. Cover the bottom and once everyone’s reported in we will head upstairs until we’ve cleared the factory. Got it?”

Fifty warriors and Nash studied each and every single one of them. A third had wings and the rest were Dragan. Nash wondered if they’d been thieves and assassins, but it didn’t really matter to him. The sheer impossibility of this only a few months ago is what had him shaking his head.

And all for one female.

She was an extraordinary female, but Nash hadn’t thought Adelina capable of compelling so many to fight and die for her. He’d seen a glimpse of it when she’d led him on that tour around her palace when he’d first arrived.

The way the servants and other wait staff responded to her, the spidersilk factories she’d commanded…it had all been there for someone willing to look hard enough, but Adelina had hidden it all from them. She’d hidden her true beauty.

Nash wondered sometimes if they even deserved her.

He’d strive to earn the right to have a queen willing to do what she did for them all – willing to give herself up to a monster if it would save her people. If that was what they wanted from her.

“On my mark,” Kaiden murmured, watching the factory floor where the finished warships were.

The place was massive and Nash worried what waited for them in the dark corners. They could take this, he reminded himself. Ignoring how much bigger it appeared from the surface was how they’d all survive.

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