“But you’re destroying every world you encounter.”
“That cannot be helped.”
I fall silent. Who am I to tell Isu that his people are not allowed to survive? But what is he going to do to me now that he has me?
“I missed you,” I tell him.
“I missed you too, but now, what has to happen…” he gives me a long, dark look, “you may not love or miss me when I have done what I must do.”
“Are you going to hurt me?”
“Yes.”
His response is immediate, and eerily calm.
“Isu…”
“Be quiet,” he says. “The less we say to one another, the better.”
“You don’t have to hurt me. Put me back in my ship. Let me leave.”
“Now you beg for escape? When I already gave you the chance to live free? You sought us out across the stars and you made yourself known. I have shown you mercy, Aspel, and every time you disobey. Tonight, there will be no mercy. Tonight, every sin will be atoned for.”
Chapter Nine
Aspel
The fires are bright, but they make the dark even darker. I stand in the center of a ring of Isu’s kind. They are silent, but I feel their eyes on me with every breath I take. He stalks around me slowly, growling softly like the predator he is.
I know he is angry. I think he might be most angry at me for being here at all. My presence has made his life difficult again. I always seem to have that effect when I come into his orbit.
We know each other so little, but there is a powerful connection between us that I do not think either of us can deny. Even now, as he prepares to make an example of me to his army, I feel that tingle between us, a recognition and a bond.
He admitted he loved me. Even after all this time. All this distance.
I’ve now lived long enough in the human world to know how rare that kind of love is. But what cost does it come at? What will he do to me now he has me in his grasp?
I tremble as he demands I relinquish my clothes and make myself naked before the eyes of his men. They will all look on me with a collective lust. I will be laid bare with nothing to hide behind.
The fire of his body meets my clothes and melts them from me. I am warm, but still I shiver, my nipples hard, my sex tingling with anticipation.
“I will try to make this easy for you,” he says, grasping my hair in his massive hand. “But if you disobey me even slightly, you will pay with pain. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I whisper. “I give myself willingly, Isu. Do what you must.”
He snarls, showing the length of his fangs. I think some part of him wants me to resist. He wants to be the monster his circumstances have made him. But I love him too. I have tracked him. Found him. I came here knowing precisely what he was, and what he might do.
“I don’t care if you kill me, Isu. As long as I’m with you. There’s nothing in that big dark universe worth anything if I cannot be with you.”
“Quiet!” He snaps the word at me, then grabs me tight as my lips part to speak again.
“This is not a game,” he growls, his fist in my hair. “You are mine, Aspel. Having been with your human kin for these last months does not change that.”
He’s right. It changes nothing. But it is not easy for me to be silent. I’ve spent the last few months talking endlessly. My world has been a babble of words, and now Isu expects me to do as he says, to become a quiet prisoner.
Anxiety rushes in where love once filled me. I am afraid that I may have made a mistake. He said he loved me, but now I look into those cold, coal black eyes and I wonder if his love is what I think of as love, or if it is nothing more than domination.
“I dreamed of you. I wanted you…”
“You do not seem to understand what silence means,” he says, almost conversationally.
I do not see where the leather comes from. Maybe one of the others handed it to him. Maybe it is part of his attire, limited as it is. All I know is that one moment I am telling him that I love him and the next leather lashes across my upper thighs.
I am not silent. I scream and I curse at him, words of hatred and anger. I feel betrayed by the memory of the man I thought he was, but Isu was never a man. He was a monster on a planet of monsters.
“Silence,” he growls, “means silence.”
I gasp and I whimper. He knows I love him. Why does it have to be this way? Why is he hurting me?