Page 10 of Claim
“Oh, I hear the words,” she clarified.“Maybe it’syouwho doesn’t make sense.”
Straightening, he clasped all four hands behind his back.She wondered if he was clenching all of his fists this time.“Did I misunderstand?Are you dating secretly?Or are you like Kinsley who came here under false pretenses?”
“No,” she sputtered.She wasn’t like Kinsley at all, not bold and clever.Not like Adeline either, beautiful and poised.Not like Mary Louise and Carmen who were still happily dating among the orcs.
Even all the way out here, she was still just June.
“All the Earther women have chosen or seem nearly ready to do so,” he said.“Except you.”
She grimaced.“So you are nobly sacrificing yourself.”
He was silent a moment.“This offends you.”
“No one wants to hear they were last choice.”
He was silent so long she thought he might smite her, king style—or maybe run away.But at last he just clacked his tusks.“Sometimes, during the quietest part of the sleep cycle, I ache, here.”With one finger, he traced the glyph carved into his chest.“And I think maybe Amma was mistaken when she said I was always meant to be apex.”
June studied the restless wandering of his finger over the scar, not so unlike the way she’d traced his shape on the datpad screen: as if conjuring his own existence out of thin air.
No, there was no air in space, she reminded herself.Out of the vacuum of the void.
The toxic mix of insult and uneasiness drained from her, leaving a high watermark of reluctant empathy.“It seems like your brother was always destined to be a stone singer, but was there no one else who might have been apex?”
He dropped his hand.“Amma marked me out of the egg.Actually, before that even, when she bathed our egg in royalixir”—June’s translator glitched for a moment before repeating, “royal jelly before we hatched.”
“Doesn’t seem fair to be told what you’re going to be even before you’re born.”
“I know nothing else.If I hadn’t shared the egg with Sil, I might’ve been the largest, strongest orc ever recorded on theDeepWander.Maybe bigger and stronger than in the orc of our legends.”
She blinked at him.“Wow.Not just a king but a god.”
His antennae quivered.“I sense you are not impressed.”
“Oh no, I am overcome with awe.Might I offer you half a day-old dewdrop and cold tea by way of tribute?”
He grunted out a hard breath.“Definitely not impressed,” he muttered, more to himself, she thought.But when she nudged the plate of gnawed pastry toward him, he ate what was left in one big bite.Then he sighed.“It is late, and I think I was hungry too.”
June shook her head.This was so weird.Sharing stale sweets with a might’ve-been god, discussing whether they might mate…
Not just her translator but her whole brain glitched on that thought.
“Very late,” she said quietly.“Maybe you should go.”
He glanced up at her, and she caught a shadowy reflection of herself, just a quick flash across the facets of his so black eyes.“As you say.”He pivoted on his heel.
To her dismay, her gaze dropped to the flare of the kilt-like skirt that was most of the orcs’ clothing, from the most junior maintenance tech to the second-in-command crusher.For all their obvious differences, the orcs had surprisingly human buttocks, excessively muscular, maybe to balance their top-heavy excess arms.
“Mag,” she called, and she bit her lip when he paused at the door, because really what was she going to say?“I don’t know anything about space or kings or gods, but I do know what it’s like to…” Oh geez, was she about to insult the king on his own ship, a god in his own mythology?“I know what it’s like to wonder if you can do what needs to be done.”She glanced away from him.“What it’s like to be…anxious and unsure.”
“I am apex.I fear nothing.”For such a big, arrogant man, he moved quickly when he wanted to, vanished through her doorway like he’d been nothing more than a stale pastry dream.
June blinked uncertainly at the space where he’d been.
Had the apex of theDeepWanderreally just asked her to be his wife-mate?
Chapter 4
Had he really asked June to be his wife-mate?
