“My Sire won’t care. He knows a young male has needs.”
“What you’re doing here is basically stealing from our Clan,” Dragon pointed out. “If anyone else did that, Komendant Vizlar would have their scales plucked out and their claws chopped off!”
“Yes, but I’m his son. His only true, natural born son,” Zerlix sneered. “He’d probably do that to you—you’re just an adopted mammalian—but I’m going to be Komendant after him and lead the Crimson Blades.”
“How can you lead if you can’t even follow the rules?” Dragon asked, ignoring the barb about his adoption.
He was used to such insults from his Saurian brother. Though the bond between a Big Brother and a Little Brother was supposed to be a lifelong friendship—like the relationship between Dragon’s adoptive father, Komendant Vizlar, and his Advisor, Rep. Yariz—he and Zerlix had never developed that bond.
Maybe it was because Dragon was mammalian and Zerlix was Saurian or maybe it was just that Zerlix liked being the star of the show and Dragon had stolen his spotlight by being so different. But for whatever reason, his Big Brother didn’t like him and never had.
But that didn’t mean Dragon could avoid him. They were on the same crew, after all. And lately, it seemed like he spent most of his time trying to keep the other male from making poor decisions, like this one.
“If you keep shaking down the people we protect, they’re going to look elsewhere for protection,” he pointed out to Zerlix now. “How will it look to our Sire if a bunch of shop owners on the border between our territory and the Blood Scales turf start defecting to the Blood Scales and asking them for protection against us? Komendant Vizlar will have no choice but to wage war to get them back. You want to start a war, Zerlix?”
Zerlix scowled, his scaled face wrinkling and his nostril slits flaring briefly.
“You always look too far into the future, Little Brother. Why complicate tonight’s pleasure with tomorrow’s worries?”
“Because you can’t just live for today,” Dragon pointed out wearily. Fuck, didn’t his Big Brother ever think past his own pleasure?
Unfortunately, Zerlix had never been made to think past what he wanted at the moment. As a prince of the Crimson Blades Clan, his every whim had been indulged from an early age. The adults around him as he was growing up had known that he was destined to lead the Clan one day and they had given him the same respect that his father, Komendant Vizlar received, though Zerlix hadn’t done anything to earn it.
The power had gone to his head. By the time Dragon had been adopted into the family, Zerlix had already been a little tyrant. He had teased and beaten Dragon constantly until a growth spurt had made his mammalian brother bigger than him. Now he relied mainly on insults to try and needle his “Little Brother.”
“You’re so fucking boring,” he said now, still glaring up at Dragon. “Live a little, why don’t you? Let’s get the money and go gamble—maybe play a while in the blue light district tonight. You might find a girl you want to fuck—or even Claim—not that you ever have before. But there’s a first time for everything.”
Dragon shook his head. He wasn’t much of a gambler—at least, not like Zerlix, who would recklessly bet everything he had and lost more often than he won. He had quite a huge tab going at his favorite gambling house, the Blue Olar—a tab the management only allowed because it was known that his father would come and pay down his debts once a month.
But even The Blue Olar had their limits—from what Dragon had heard, Zerlix was cut off until his tab was paid. Which was probably why he wanted money, so he could gamble someplace else.
As for the pleasure houses located in the district, well, Dragon wasn’t much for them either. He simply couldn’t get that worked up about sex. He wondered sometimes if there was something wrong with him. Why couldn’t he lust after the smooth-scaled Saurian Pleasure Girls with their hooded yellow eyes, lined in pink and purple kohl and their vaginal slits, likewise outlined in exotic colors to accent their hidden treasures?
Maybe it was because their body temperature was cooler than his own, Dragon thought. Or possibly he was asexual and didn’t need to “sow his wild oats” the way other young males needed to. Nor did he want to “Claim” a female and bring her home to stay with him so that he could have her any time he wanted.
That was another reason Zerlix needed money, he was sure. It cost a lot to keep so many Pleasure Girls in style—it used up most of the monthly allowance their Sire gave him, for Zerlix to maintain his constantly rotating harem. Yet, that never seemed to stop him from Claiming new girls to bring back to the family compound. He kept the girls until he tired of them and got rid of them—sending them to a different Clan’s territory or selling them back to their pimpts—but he seemed to add them more quickly than he let them go.