“He doesn’t deserve her!” Zerlix exclaimed, sounding like a little boy pouting because he didn’t get the toy he wanted. “And anyway, I saw her first! You can ask any of the men on my crew—they’ll tell you it’s true.”
“I Claimed her first,” Dragon growled. He had yet to move and was still sitting quietly at the table but Bobbi could see the way his jaw was clenched and the tension in his broad shoulders. The hand resting on the table beside her was squeezed so tightly into a fist, his knuckles were white.
“I was just about to Claim her! In fact, I told her that I was going to take her back to Saurous and spike her!” Zerlix complained.
At this, the murmuring in the room rose almost to a roar and Dragon shot out of his seat, moving faster than Bobbi could see.
“How dare you use that word when you speak of my future wife?” His voice was low and dangerous and it had that strange deep echo to it as though someone or something else was speaking through him. It cut through the other noise in the room and everyone fell silent. “How dare you speak of her at all?” he growled. “Keep her name off your filthy forked tongue!”
Zerlix’s slitted yellow eyes widened, then narrowed.
“Give her to me now or you’ll be sorry, Little Brother,” he hissed at Dragon. “I’ll make you sorry!”
“That’s enough!” Komendant Vizlar’s voice cracked like a bolt of lightning in the large room. “I will not have the two of you fighting over a mere female!” he exclaimed. He looked at Zerlix. “Son, can you not see that sometimes a wise leader must yield his own desires for the good of the Clan? Dragon is your Little Brother—he may one day be your Advisor. You must keep him close—what harm is there in letting him have this one female when you yourself already have so many? Why, you could not even fertilize her eggs—you know Saurians aren’t sexually compatible with mammalians.” He pointed at Bobbi, who was still frozen in her seat. “This girl matches with your brother much better than she would with you.”
“I don’t care.” Zerlix crossed his arms over his chest, looking even more like a petulant little boy, Bobbi thought. “I saw her first and she ought to be mine! Make Dragon give her to me, Sire—she is my right and my due as the next leader of the Crimson Blades. Why, only just today I annexed a piece of land for you! I pushed back the Poison Daggers and now we can claim Old Town in the Northern district as our territory once more.”
The corners of Komendant Vizlar’s lipless mouth turned down.
“Old Town? But we worked out a treaty with the Poison Daggers only last solar month. We ceded Old Town to them and in return, they agreed that we would take the marketplace—a much more lucrative piece of property. It took Rep. Yariz and myself weeks to hammer out that deal!”
“Well now we have both Old Town and the marketplace.” Zerlix lifted his chin arrogantly. “And all thanks to me. The girl should be mine as a prize for my success.”
“This is not success!” Komendant Vizlar snarled. “Don’t you see what you’ve done? You voided our treaty! Now there will be open war between our Clans unless Rep. Yariz and I can salvage the situation!”
He shot a look at his Advisor who was already getting up from the table.
“I’ll arrange a meeting,” Bobbi heard him murmur. “We’ll explain it was all a mistake.”
Komendant Vizlar nodded stiffly and then glared at his biological son.
Zerlix looked taken aback. Clearly he had thought that his actions would be met with approval and he was surprised that his father was upset rather than proud.
“Sire—” he began but Komendant Vizlar cut him off.
“No more of this!” he barked. “I will not hear another word! You are not ready to lead if you don’t understand what a mess you’ve made of the delicate relations between us and the Poison Daggers Clan.”
“But it wasn’t my fault!” Zerlix whined. “It was Dragon—he was the one who killed the Poison Daggers crew!”
“Only because you picked the fight and then left me to kill them while you came back here to try and take my female,” Dragon growled, his bronze eyes flashing.
This seemed to make matters even worse.
“You ran from a fight?” Komendant Vizlar exclaimed, his eyes going wide as he looked at his son. “One that you started yourself? You left your crew and your brother to do your fighting because you were excited over a mere female?”
Gee, thanks, Bobbi thought wryly. As the “mere female” all this was about, she wished she could stand up and tell them all off. She wanted to say that she wasn’t a piece of property to be bartered and owned—that she was her own person and she had been kidnapped and was being held against her will.