The Forgotten Commander (The Lost Planet 1)

I want to comfort her soul like Hadrian did in a few short moments.

“The morts around here work ’round the clock to keep things out. The beasts, the elements, the pathogens.” I stroke her soft hair that I’ve grown quite fond of touching. “I’ll keep you safe. This solar and every solar after, mortania.”

Avrell chuckles behind me. “Quite the rogstud, Commander.”

Rekking rogstud. A beast that mounts a rogcow to breed little calves. Walks around grunting with his cock always eager and ready. When he’s ready to rut on his female, he brays this mortarekking sound that’ll make you want to flatten your ears against your skull and pin them there so you don’t have to hear it anymore. It’s terrible.

I am not a rekking rogstud.

Her nose scrunches as she looks up at me. “Mortania?”

“Means beautiful female,” Avrell explains, a smile in his voice.

Grunting, I tug her with me out of the room. “See you later in the nutrition bay,” I call over my shoulder.

“Nobody will fault you if you don’t show up,” he yells out after me. “Try to keep the braying down though. Makes the others jealous.”

I glare at him over my shoulder and he flashes me the rekking horns Hadrian is always throwing my way. These morts are all losing their minds. Every last one of them.

“Why don’t we eat with the others?” Aria asks as we carry our trays to my quarters.

I swipe my new armband on the reader since I’ve seemed to have misplaced my other one. Usually Hadrian is the only one who loses his belongings around here. Perhaps I am too distracted by my new alien and behaving like a young mort again. Careless and idiotic.

“Why would we eat with them?” I’m perplexed why we would do such a thing. I’ve seen the way Hadrian eats. Makes a mess all over the place. I don’t want to see that while I’m consuming my meal. It’ll make your stomach churn.

She walks into my room and sits down at the table—a table that earlier this solar was toppled over when my mate was bored and lonely without me.

Confusing thoughts vie for space in my mind. A part of me knows she is the key to our future. She’ll be my mate and produce my young. But the other part of me wonders about the way my mother and father interacted. My mother laughed often. Father was jovial like Hadrian. Perhaps I need to work on making my mate laugh. Then, she will not give me hate eyes while I gift her my seed.

“That’s what families do,” she says with a huff. She picks up her utensil and pokes at the seared sabrevipe tenderloin on her plate. “They eat together.”

Sitting down across from her, I regard my mate. The anger and fear has bled from her features and curiosity dances there. Curiosity is something I’m familiar with and am equipped to deal with. Once, I spent an entire solar describing for Hadrian every beast that lives on the planet.

Every. Single. Beast.

In detail.

“We are a family then,” I agree as I pick up my tenderloin and bite into it. Succulent juices rush over my tongue and I groan. We haven’t had good meat in ages. For many solars, we’ve been wasting away on Galen’s green-bunches. A handful of leafy plants sprinkled with some sauce he came up with. It tastes decent, but I prefer meat. A mort was meant to eat meat. Unfortunately for us, meat is hard to come by.

I’ve downed everything on my plate, including the small portion of green-bunches which taste especially bitter this solar, when I feel her eyes on me. When I look up, her utensil is still poised in her hand but she hasn’t touched anything. Her expression is sad and her delicious tears threaten to leak down her spotted cheeks. Perhaps I’ll lick her for an after-dinner sweet.

“I already have a family,” she murmurs. Her shoulders slump forward. “Had.”

Guilt infects me as I try to imagine this family. “You had a mate?” I ask, my voice husky. I’d not considered this. Hadn’t even asked. What if she has a mate from her planet? Worse yet, younglings?

She sniffles. “No. No husband or boyfriend. But I had a mother and father. And my little sister, Limerick.”

A sister?

I don’t know what to say. My heart aches for her. Our world is so barren and empty. The solars my parents were each taken from me were so trying on my mind. I’d nearly collapsed in on myself. There was no light in my world for a long time. Just solars and solars and solars of nothing but never-ending darkness.

She’s suffering the darkness too.

My sweet mate’s heart hurts for her family.

Normally, I make decisions and lead my faction without faltering. Yet now, I am unsure what to do. At a loss of what to say.