Page 32 of Healing His Mate

Her questions are valid. Though that last one paints an amusing image. “Varrek with your translucent, delicate skin? With his silver mane? He would look ill. Just . . . terrible.”

Cloh-ee takes no offense to this. She just laughs. “I’d love him no matter what he looked like, but I see what you mean.”

She walks ahead the rest of the way to my door and spins on her heel. “Can we not dwell on this bizarre fountain of youth thing? Because I have good news for you, lady.” She swings the door open and guides me over to our shared worktable.

“Do you?” I ask.

“I do indeed.”

CHAPTER 16

NALBA

“What is this?” I ask as Cloh-ee, Waldric, and I stand in the middle of my shop. Cloh-ee swipes at the screen pad in her hands. It looks like a list of some kind. It must be in her Earth language because I can read none of it.

“I was able to get Varrek to tell me everything he knew about the weapons you were working on before your head injury,” she says, adding a scribble to it. “These are my notes.”

“Fantastic! Can you read it to me?”

Cloh-ee’s notes are rambling and somewhat vague, though that could have easily been the way Varrek described my projects. He is prone to rambling.

The majority of projects on the list are concepts in the early stages, and Cloh-ee was not able to connect them with anything she remembers me tinkering with before the battle. Except for one. The idea is an explosive that operates as a handheld device set off manually and detonating on impact. “Like a grenade,” she says. She draws one, but it does not look like anything I have seen before.

This kind of weapon is not new among our kind. The innovative tweak I had come up with, apparently, was an attached heat scanner that would guide the path of the explosive to a previously specified location. “I would program the target location into the scanner, and upon release of the explosive by the user, the bomb would continue through the air en route to a certain part of the body on the intended target, yes?”

“Um, yeah,” Cloh-ee says. “I think so. I remember you saying something about it landing on a target’s neck, sticking to the skin, then blowing off their head. Or sticking to the target’s chest in order to guarantee the most damage done to the heart. Something like that. You thought it could be useful to protect Ekoya with the assassination attempts she’s been dealing with. We should call it a sticky bomb!”

That stops me in my tracks. “Wait, Ekoya? Someone tried to assassinate my sister?”

Cloh-ee clenches her teeth as if ashamed she revealed a secret. “Yeah, Ekoya told Varrek that some of the older males who were loyal to his father as king are still peeved about having a female in charge.”

How very archaic. Though, I am not surprised to learn that King Muryk’s pitiful followers are still holding tight to their prejudices. It is the only thing they have ever excelled at. That insidious mindset is part of why we left Trovilia and came here.

“Should I be worried about her? Is she in immediate danger?” Images of Ekoya being murdered in her castle fill my mind, and my hands begin to shake. “I should send her a comm. Or Varrek . . . yes, Varrek needs to send some of the crew to Trovilia. To protect her.”

“Nalba,” Waldric wraps his arm around my middle and as soon as I register his warmth, I sink back into him, letting him take all my weight. He guides me over to the stool next to Cloh-ee and sits me upon it. Then he steps away briefly before returning with water.

“Drink.”

I do as he says.

Once the mug is empty, he says, “Now breathe.”

Cloh-ee takes my hands in hers and squeezes. “Ekoya is safe, I promise you. She has her own crew of warriors, and she has Cruvo. Those assassination attempts were nowhere near close calls. They were epic failures, in fact. I bet those morons knew that before Ekoya’s men killed them. Their hearts stopped beating as they suffocated under a cloak of shame.” Cloh-ee smiles, her expression filled with warmth, despite the vicious words she just spoke. “Feel better now?”

“I do,” I say honestly, returning her grin. Despite her delicate human body, Cloh-ee’s heart has the strength of a thousand waterfalls. She can tap into a level of brutality that resonates with me. Especially when it comes to keeping Ekoya safe. “I truly do.”

“Good. Now, let’s get back to work, shall we?” she says, showing me her sketches of thissticky bombas she guides me through her notes once again.

“It does sound effective. Also, quite savage . . . no?” Though, knowing Ekoya’s crew will use this to defend her, I wonder if there is something we can add to make it more so.

Cloh-ee tilts her head to the side and gives me an indecipherable look. “I’ve said that to you before. Your response would always be, ‘If we do not create it, our enemies will. And they will use it against us.’”

Her impression of me is depressingly accurate, but she is right. Or I suppose I am right since I am the one who said it.

We spend the next several minutes looking through boxes for weapon components. The fact that Old Nalba shoved explosives into boxes with food scraps and various tools rattles me to the bone. Who is she? Why did she do such reckless things?

We put everything we find in a pile at our worktable, and I begin putting them in order of when they will be needed during the assembly stage. Cloh-ee makes her scribbles as I move things around and begin fastening them together. My hands move of their own accord as if I have done this thousands of times. I do not know how much time passes, but suddenly, Waldric is walking over with two plates of food, and my stomach growls at the sight.

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