Page 111 of Sway's Peace
For a long moment, neither of them said anything. Loyalty just continued to look at him as Sway sat there, staring at nothing.
Finally, Sway broke the long silence by asking, “What happened to you?”
Loyalty made an unconcerned gesture with his hand. “Got ran out of town. I suppose you could guess that though. That day you two went to meet Veesway, the domini guards grabbed me and threw me out into the wild. I guess that’s how your people deal with undesirable problems.”
Sway frowned. Loyalty had been out here all this time, and he hadn’t noticed? Hadn’t even spared the other male a single thought. Caught up as he had been with his female, he didn’teven consider where the xenom male had gone or why he was taking so long to get back.
This time, it was Loyalty who broke the silence, continuing as though Sway had asked him a clarifying question. “It was actually pretty easy to live out here. This forest is wild, but there’s not much in the way of dangerous wildlife. At least, not to me. My home planet is much worse. Found this burrow. I’ve been working on that maintenance door for days, trying to break it so I could get in.
Just another layer of guilt. Loyalty was a good male. He was trying to help them. Really living up to his name. But Sway hadn’t spared him a single thought since he’d been gone.
“You smell like her now,” Loyalty continued, giving him a smile. “I guess she’s your female officially, eh?”
“Not yet,” he muttered.
Loyalty cocked his head, smile fading. “How long are you going to keep this up? I don’t mind youngsitting your self-pity, I just think we should probably go after Grace sooner than later.”
Anger snapped and Sway glared at him, crest starting to raise. “Youngitting my self-pity?”
“Is that not what’s happening right now?”
The urge to strike him for the insult, for the condescension, rose up in Sway’s throat.
And turned his stomach.
Violence.
Again, violence. It always came back to violence.
That creeping self-hatred swept over him, drowning him in the distant echoes of screams. Cries reaching out from the depths of his memories. All the way out here, in this dark and cold hole, there was nothing to distract him from it.
He finally had to confront the fact that he was, and always would be, a monster. And nothing he could do would ever change that.
Loyalty blinked at him. Certainly unable to miss the way Sway got heated then almost immediately deflated again. He could feel the slump in his shoulders, weighed down by his past. By the truth of who he was. And the futility of trying to change that.
“So, what happened toyou?” Loyalty turned the question around, asking him now.
Sway hesitated before answering. “They found out who I am. Who I was.”
“A killer from Rik-Vane, you mean?”
“Yeah…” He winced. The way Loyalty said it, so blunt and straightforward, hurt that much more for being completely neutral. Like he was commenting on the color of the sky, of the trees. “I should have anticipated that they’d actually search for my real identity. The crimes attached to my name aren’t exactly secret.”
“True,” Loyalty agreed, just as blunt as before.
“They’ve exiled me for it. And that’s fine. I don’t care. But they’re going to do the same to Grace. After they make sure I didn’t leave a youngling in her belly.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“Great. We can just wait until they toss her out and we’ll grab her and try to find a way off this planet. They aren’t going to hurt her. The most they’ll do is exile. They can’t really justify anything else in their warped sense of right and wrong.”
Sway frowned, finally focusing properly on him. “Warped?”
Loyalty scoffed. “I mean, isn’t it?”
“Pacifism is warped? The idea that it’s wrong to do harm onto or kill others is warped?”
