Lundric regretted his words immediately. “I’m sorry—I’m sorry. I don’t judge you. I never have. Forgive me. I know you suffer every day.”
A haunted shadow fell over Seke. “You don’t know anything,” he rasped.
“No,” Lundric agreed.
“I don’t know anything, either.” The heaviness in Seke’s tone matched his own. Lundric got the sense Seke wasn’t thinking only about his lost family, but also about Leora, the human female he’d fallen for.
“Listen,” Seke said heavily, easing back on the pressure on Lundric’s throat. “Your female has an agenda that doesn’t align with ours. If you don’t find a way to make them come together, you
’re going to be faced with a choice—your female or the fight for the survival of our species.”
Lundric scrubbed a hand over his face. “That’s a bit dramatic, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” Seke finished releasing him and walked away without waiting for an answer.
He sagged against the wall, sorrow weaving through the shards of pain in his chest, leaving him battered. Was a female who didn’t even care for him worth endangering his species?
Stars, he wished he knew the answers.
~.~
Cambry waited after Lundric’s conversation with Master Seke ended, expecting—hoping—Lundric would come back, but he hadn’t. She’d stood at her door and listened to every word, every thud of bodies crashing against the other side of her wall.
She swam in guilt for the position she’d put him in with his superiors. She didn’t want him to have to choose between her and Zandia. Despite her dislike of the Zandians’ choice to use the humans as their army, she’d developed some sympathy for their cause. She didn’t want their species to die out any more than she wanted humans to remain enslaved.
Lily claimed Zandia would be some kind of Shangri-La. A beautiful place where the humans who fought for her would be free. She still didn’t buy that story. What guarantee did they have that, even if they survived the takeover of Zandia and it was successful, they would be offered freedom?
But she didn’t care anymore. Because after hearing the way Lundric and Seke had spoken about her, something had changed.
I would vecking kill any being who touched her. Lundric had punished her himself so no one else would. That part didn’t surprise her. She’d come to believe the sincerity of Lundric’s attachment.
It was Seke’s response that made her believe all the Zandians might be as honorable as Lundric.
You think we don’t know that? No being’s going to hurt your female.
He made it sound like they recognized Lundric’s bond to her. As if it was something real and sacred. As if Lundric’s claim on her took precedence over any form of justice they might want to see served.
She wasn’t even sure how to process that, but it changed things. Everything had changed since Lundric had marched her back into the pod. As she’d flown away, she’d thought her heart would never repair from the break of leaving him. It was worse, even, than when Tal had been taken from her, sold to some other factory master. So, on some level, she’d wanted to be caught and dragged back by her giant warrior. But she’d hurt him. Badly. The Lundric she knew had retreated, and what was left was just a hull of his normal self.
At first, she hadn’t been sure which part angered him—that she’d violated his trust, or stolen the ship, or tricked him. But when he was vecking her—in his uniquely dominant way—it became clear she’d reopened the wound inflicted by his mother. She’d left.
And now he didn’t believe her feelings for him were real.
Her heart ached as if physically bruised. It was so much worse than her throbbing ass, or her well-used anus and pussy, or all the other small bruises Lundric had left from the rough vecking, which she wouldn’t trade for anything. While Lundric may have shut her out emotionally, he had been painfully direct with her physically, and she loved his honesty.
She would have to find a way to prove to him she hadn’t been faking anything with him, either—that all her responses to him were as honest as his expressions of love.
Lundric had told her not to open the door for any being but him. He didn’t say whether she could leave of her own accord. Though her stomach growled with hunger, she skipped dinner and stayed in her chamber, too raw emotionally and physically to face any being. Exhaustion, both emotional and physical, soon crept over her, and she pulled off her pants and crawled into bed to sleep.
In the middle of the night, she woke to the scrape of a knife through the door, lifting the latch. She fumbled under the mattress for the dagger Lundric had given her and swung up to sit, holding her breath as the huge outline of a Zandian appeared silhouetted in the doorway.
“It’s me,” her warrior muttered, shutting the door behind him. “I didn’t want to wake you.”
Her chest tightened. Despite his anger, he still showed such consideration of her.
I love you.
The realization of the depth of her attachment to him shouldn’t surprise her, but she’d spent her whole life believing only Tal could be trusted. Only Tal deserved her love.