Page 73 of I Married Amreth

“You honor us, Aku,” I said, my throat tightening as I smiled in gratitude. I still didn’t know much about their society and people, but I knew enough to realize this was not simply a polite gesture, but a rare gift.

“Let’s go home, Brother.”

Chapter 17

Ciara

Excited shouts outside had me storming out of the lab. Before the door finished opening, I jerked my head up to scan the sky. As soon as I saw Amreth’s ship making its approach, a squeal of excitement escaped me. I ran like a mad woman outside the courtyard, through the village square, and out the gates with everyone looking at me with an amused expression.

Technically, I didn’t have the right to exit the inner courtyard without an escort. But something undeniably shifted earlier after our return from the temple. That change had already been taking place gradually in a far more subtle fashion. But today, the tragedy that we helped avert completely flipped everything on its head.

Although I suspected that Kreelars from other villages would continue to eye us with suspicion and wariness, the tribemates of Bryst now fully embraced us.

Amreth landed his ship in a clearing at least three hundred meters away from the village. Although I took pride in keepingfit, I was out of breath by the time I reached the ship, constantly fearing that he would take off again after dropping Aku to go park it on the cliff where he normally kept it.

To my shock—but also pleasant surprise—I found both males walking side by side towards the village. His face lit up when he saw me, and he flapped his wings, flying barely a couple of feet above ground to close the distance between us. I threw myself into his arms, and he caught me. I crushed his lips in somewhat of a brutal kiss in which I poured both my happiness and relief at seeing him back.

Still flying close to the ground, he twirled us around before landing back down. I broke the kiss, buried my face in his neck, and deeply inhaled his scent. A sense of peace and of being at home washed over me. He wrapped his wings around me, holding me close as we quietly remained in each other’s embrace.

After a few seconds or countless minutes—I couldn’t really tell, nor did I care—Amreth opened his wings and released me. I took a step back and immediately examined him from head to toe looking for any sign of injury.

He chuckled. “I’m fine, my mate. We’re both fine.”

I continued to pat his chest and arms before stretching my neck to look for Aku, a sliver of guilt twisting my features. I looked over my shoulder to find him standing at a respectful distance to grant us some privacy. He was observing us with an air of almost paternal amusement, which was silly considering I was older than him.

“Are you okay?” I asked him although still leaning against Amreth. “Anyone injured?”

He shook his head as he approached us. “Neither of us are injured, and we were able to stop the assassins before they could contaminate the temple.”

“Where are they?” I asked, looking over his shoulder towards the ship as if I could see through its hull all the way into the brig.

“The Enforcers have them,” Amreth replied.

“What?! How?” I exclaimed.

“I will explain everything once we get back with the others,” Amreth said in an appeasing tone.

My tongue burned with the urge to bombard him with questions. I didn’t want to wait, but it also wouldn’t make sense to have him go through telling the story twice. Obviously, Mehreen and Ernst, as well as the entire village, would want to know what happened.

We ended up splitting, with Aku rounding up his people inside their gathering hall while the four of us off-worlders went inside the deployable lab. At first, it stung a little that we should not be included, considering our significant contribution in the matter. But Enre and the two other Kreelars who escorted us to Svast Temple already updated everyone about what we did there. This second update would be more about the way their leader handled the assassins and likely actions they would want to take moving forward as a people. In their shoes, I also wouldn’t want strangers to eavesdrop, regardless of how friendly our relationship had grown.

As soon as we settled inside the lab’s meeting room, Amreth gave us a detailed recounting of the events. We all sat there flabbergasted by all of those revelations, especially regarding Marilia’s involvement. And yet, I shouldn’t be this shocked. It was no secret that huge corporations often acted in highly questionable fashion when it came to increasing their bottom line or remaining the leader in their field. It was especially true in the pharmaceutical industry. Whoever came up with the first patent stood to make billions of credits. If the discovery permitted treatment across species, then the monetary potential blew up exponentially.

SS12 made Elias Jacobs and Typhoon Pharma obscenely wealthy. And this wealth was about to be siphoned—at least for Typhoon—both as punitive damages and to fund the efforts that would be required to do right by the Kreelars.

With primitive planets under the Prime Directive, it always made things significantly more complicated as you couldn’t simply dump a whole lot of credits on them as compensation or share technology. But that was a challenge for people more qualified than me in that field to sort out.

“Wow! Things are about to get seriously ugly for Typhoon,” Mehreen mused aloud. “They’re such a massive corporation with labs and research teams pretty much everywhere in our sector of the galaxy. Investigating them is going to be an insane undertaking. This could take years!”

Amreth nodded grimly. “It certainly could. But that doesn’t mean that consequences aren’t going to be felt sooner. The Enforcers will go after the lowest hanging fruits to get a swift conviction and be able to get greater access to everything so that they press further charges from previous crimes later. It just infuriates me that some of them might not be indictable due to statutes of limitation. Still, I got a sense there will be enough of them to make sure they will never taste freedom again.”

“They should have come clean rather than attempting to cover for Noah,” Ernst said. “I can understand a mother wanting to protect her child, but he was always too much trouble. At the same time, I’m not sure how much it was out of maternal love or simply greed. After all, it couldn’t be easy finding someone with the proper medical credentials willing to do that kind of shady work.”

“Either way, they’re fucked,” I said with a shrug. “But what will happen to Elias?”

Amreth pursed his lips as he reflected on the question. “It really depends. Obviously, there will be some repercussionsfor hiding what happened here. That negligence cheated the Kreelars out of the regular check-ins they would have benefited from over the following years, which would have prevented this tragedy from going on for nearly a decade. It all comes down to how much he was coerced into remaining silent. Based on the Raithean’s statement, Marialia seriously threatened Jacobs. If a crime is committed under duress, he could be exonerated.”

“But I thought that didn’t apply if it caused the death of another?” Ernst countered.

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