Page 106 of Saved By the Alien Hybrid
She sighed in relief.
He looked around, drinking in the glowing blue lights and the distant animal calls. “What are we doing out here?” he asked softly.
She rubbed the back of her neck as she looked up at him from beneath her lashes. The glow of the forest seemed amplified in her pale blue eyes; she looked as though she belonged in it. His heart twinged.
“I thought your first time should be somewhere nice,” she explained, setting her hands on her hips. “Not in that… industrial prison they built for you. Out here, where you can really feel it.”
“Feel what?” he asked, in wonder of her.
She breathed deep, tilting her head back and opening her arms wide. “That you’re free.”
He copied her, stretching himself tall and wide and dragging a deep breath redolent with the scent of the forest into his lungs. A thought took him then, and he looked down at her, letting his arms fall back at his sides. “My first time doing what?”
Something flickered over her face too fast for him to interpret. She cast her gaze around, then moved to sit on a low boulder, tucking one knee under her chin. “Why did you do it?” she asked abruptly.
His body was strung through with tension, just like that. They were going to have this conversation at last. He sat across from her on a fallen log. Bark crumbled beneath his fingers, giving his nervous energy somewhere to go as he spoke.
With a quavering breath, he steeled himself for the admission that would doubtless sever their fragile bond forever.
CHAPTER 44
She’d never seenRentir look so sheepish and uncertain. He looked down at his hands for a pregnant pause, fiddling with the rotting log he sat on. She wondered if maybe he was going to try to get out of the conversation; most men she’d known on Earth would have done whatever necessary to worm out of a topic this heavy.
He proved her suspicions wrong.
“I was never stationed on Yulaira,” he said, surprising her. “I served as security on board theGidalan. I only ever saw the surface in stolen glimpses, when Lord Commander Tellefan descended to check on his interests.”
“LordCommander?”
God, could they be any more pompous?
He nodded, chipping away a bit of bark beneath his thumb. “He is the one who oversees all of this endeavor. He works for another—a High Lord, I think he is called. We are not privy to much of their politics; I only know what I have gleaned from years of overhearing conversations.
“I was one of Lord Tellefan’s personal detail. Life on board theGidalan,outside of the crèche… it is different from how the hybrids live within the base. The miners mingled when theyworked, as did the teserium processors. The others, those in specialized roles, they spoke to one another in the halls at night, or through the stalls of their showers, or in the mess hall during meals.”
He pulled both of his glowing hands into his lap, tucking them between his thighs. His tail was a sad, limp thing draped over the log beside him. “I was not granted the same clemency. Once I was enlisted into the Lord’s detail… the last conversation I had with Haerune before our placement was the last conversation I had for many years that didn’t end in ‘my lord’ or a groveling apology.
“It is hard to mark the passage of time on the ship, but I think I served for at least… nine cycles? All of that time, and the only words I ever spoke to another were to affirm my obedience or demand it of another.”
The last words were strangled, and he had to take a moment to catch his breath before he continued.
“I hurt people, Cordelia,” he said, looking up at her through glowing green eyes with his chin tucked low. “That is what was asked of me. Those who resisted were to be taught a swift lesson, and I was the tool that delivered it. Even… even unto myself.” He stared down at his boots, his shoulders rounding.
“Those scars on your back…” she murmured.
Regretfully, he looked up, nodding. “They are self-inflicted. In my first few cycles, I was…resistantto the realities of enforcing Aurillon law on my fellow hybrids. Especially the younger males.” His arms wrapped around his chest. “Sometimes they panic. They see their first brother meet an early ‘retirement,’ and they get it in their head that maybe they can escape, outrun a similar fate. But they couldn’t, you see? Of course, they couldn’t. Because there I was, standing in their way.”
She heard the creak of his jacket, and she knew he was digging his claws clear through the reinforced fabric. Part of her wanted to soothe him, but she had a feeling that if she interrupted him, he might not find the courage to finish his tale.
After a wavering breath, he pressed on. “I was forced to break myself of my own weak character, and eventually I learned to stop thinking, stop feeling, be nothing but an instrument. I don’t know why I wasn’t retired for my insubordination. I suspect… well, Lord Tellefan is rumored to have certain appetites. A taste for suffering. And I suffered much in those early years.”
She sat on her hands to keep herself from crawling over to him and taking his hands in hers.
“By the time of the rebellion, I was not myself any longer. There was no Rentir who had crept into Haerune’s bunk at night and rehashed all the teachings of the day. There was nothing of the boy who had picked his sparring partners off the mat and checked them guiltily for bruises. No hopes, no dreams, no desires. I woke, and I worked, and I closed my eyes at night and tried to forget that I would have to do it all again the next day.”
He rose to his feet, planting his hands on his hips and pacing back and forth the length of the log, his tail sweeping through the air in twitchy strokes of purple light. “It sounds like an excuse when I lay it out like this, but I do not intend to make excuses for myself. The things I have done are unforgivable. I know that, Iknow.”
She couldn’t take any more. Springing to her feet, she stepped into his path and wound her arms around his middle, pressing her cheek against his chest.
