The Melier: Prodigal Son Page 5

  He forcefully kicked the lash aside, taloned fingers curling in on his palms. He was a...

  A failure.

  For the entire time he’d walked this planet, from a fledgling—long before he’d gained his mature colors—he could do nothing right in the eyes of Piktiin.

  Jruviin was too soft, too pitiful, too gentle. A disappointing male. A mediocre offspring to be hatched of the specimen that was his father.

  It would be easier if Piktiin had fathered more sons, but he was cursed to sire daughters, despite his multiple pairings. Jruviin had only known one of them. His other eight siblings had been given away, sold or paired off.

  Being the only male offspring of Piktiin was, he suspected, how he’d made it this far. His father would undoubtedly have gotten rid of him and focused his efforts on another son—a better son—if he had one.

  As it stood, Jruviin was set to inherit the family business. It was just another thing that Piktiin expected from him. Another thing he was supposed to do, but couldn’t accomplish.

  Despite it all, Jruviin still needed Piktiin’s respect. He needed the respect of the crew and his people. Like a fledgling that couldn’t get it right, he tried and failed repeatedly, and he couldn’t bring himself to beat females to get it either.

  Jruviin rubbed at his tender flesh where the quills had been snatched from his head and neck. His skull was hard, as most matured Draekiins, but it still hurt.

  His acute hearing picked up the sound of booted feet. Suddenly, his door burst open hard enough to slam into the wall, causing the feathers along his spine to instantly stiffen.

  “What is happening?”

  “You will go with them,” Piktiin stated, gesturing calmly—as if he hadn’t just been incensed a handful of minutes ago.

  Jruviin was grabbed by two individuals. Anger shone in his father’s copper colored eyes. Something serious was unfolding.

  “To where?” Jruviin struggled, and a brace was swiftly clamped around his neck. A sizzling shock administered immediately after a beep.

  He yawped at the pain. Pain much worse than the ripping of quills. They dragged him through the dwelling he’d known his entire life and threw him into the back of a transport.

  Piktiin shook his head. “I sold you to Hae’deth.”

  “No...” Jruviin’s voice was barely above a breath. “Father, I—”

  “Do not embarrass me further by begging,” he seethed, talons curling at his side as if he wished to strike.

  Every Draekiin knew Hae’deth. A corporation recognized for its shady gaming arenas. His people reveled in watching, and participating in, death sport.

  “Gain your honor,” Piktiin grated, “or die.”

  The transport doors closed. His father’s final words brought Jruviin no comfort as he was taken away.

  EIGHT

  Planet Melierun

  VAL’KOY

  The hours were already dragging, and it was only midday. He lay there, sprawled upon a large cushion in the suite he shared with his brothers, just staring at the solar chandelier. The internal battle raged on: should he or should he not consult the physician?

  Once again, he failed to bed a female—his favorite concubine, no less. His eyes strayed to his flaccid annex.

  He cursed it once and cursed it again for good measure.

  It wasn’t that he couldn’t gain an erection. On the contrary, he got them all the time.

  All the time.

  The only issue: they happened when he was alone. Alone with his thoughts. His thoughts of the Therran.

  Val’Koy blinked slowly, lazily spearing a piece of fruit with a claw and dropping it into his mouth. He tasted the sweet juice and chewed with the speed of cold sap rolling over tree bark, but it held no true enjoyment.

  This was fucking with his ego.

  At present, word was spreading among the concubines about his... problem. His virility was in question. Already his favorite turned him down once.

  Last night, his annex sprang to life, and he’d run from the suite, a sheet barely wrapped around his lower half, through the familiar halls just to reach his favorite and have his erection deflate at her touch.

  “M’Oklo’s teeth,” he seethed now.

  Walking back to his room, half naked, within a span of moments was most embarrassing. He’d rather the palace occupants think he had annex woes than believe him to be a minute-male.

  Many times the thought occurred to him to revisit the curvaceous human. If she still occupied the same dwelling, that was. He didn’t even know her name to find her otherwise.

  He sat up, looking at the time. If he went to his room now, he could bring himself to release with the Therran’s underthing pressed to his nose. The scent had faded, but it worked.

  Val’Koy cared not about how disgraceful it was. Honorable was not something he’d call himself. It was better this way, otherwise his mind would be saturated with the Therran and her shapely form bouncing with every thrust of his—

  His annex hardened with a vengeance.

  Growling under his breath, he rose from the cushion and stalked toward his room.

  ****

  Once he finally seemed sane enough to emerge, he left his room only to cross paths with his brothers and their human mate. Val’Koy paused, watching with thinly veiled irritation when Val’Zun tossed a giggling Lucia over his shoulder.

  It was apparent what they were off to do. Lucia’s arousal choked the air.

  “Do you not have younglings to raise?” he bit out.

  “Jealous?” Val’Ja teased, raising the back of his finger to him.

  Yes.

  “Soren, not like that,” Lucia said in between snickering. “Like this...” and then she proceeded to flip her middle finger at Val’Koy, wagging it back and forth as her mates toted her to bed.

  Val’Koy’s feet were planted where he stood, lips barely sealed to prevent the snarl he wanted to let loose, but when Lucia’s moan touched his ears, he had to get out of there.

  He knew his complete and thorough displeasure was due to his own predicament, but that didn’t stop him from directing it at his siblings and their mate. The envy was entirely because he couldn’t achieve release with anyone but his fucking hand.

  “Give me something to occupy my mind!” he barked, bursting through the doors of the conference hall. Queen Gi’Moy sat with one of her trusted advisors and his brother Gi’Ren. All lifted their heads.

  “Greetings to you too, my son,” Gi’Moy said, raising a brow.

  “I am losing my mind,” he groaned, pacing near the end of the long, white stone table. “I would even sit and listen to petitions from the people at this point.” He had nothing on his agenda for another seven days.

  Seven days.

  In times of peace, life was extremely dull.

  “Does your sudden desire to help have anything to do with your concubine woes?”

  Val’Koy halted, his jaw slackening as he stared flatly at his mother. Her thin gold chains hung in webs over her shoulders and down her upper arms, attached to various rings upon her long, thin fingers. Fingers that tapped playfully against the stone chair. Gi’Ren chuffed with deep laughter.

  “I hear everything, Val’Koy,” she confessed, uncurling her needle-point claws. “Have you consulted the medic?”

  Val’Koy snapped out of his stupor, his upper hands grazing over his skull as he clenched his teeth. “I am fine.”

  “It sounds the opposite.”

  “My body is fine,” Val’Koy argued. “I am in perfect health.” It was his fucking mind that was addled. “Well? Do you have anything for me?”

  “The annual commerce conference is in a w—”

  “Anything before then?”

  Gi’Moy tapped her claws again, but the rhythm had changed. She was clearly irritated.

  Welcome to my life.

  “You leave tomorrow,” she tightly answered. “Gi’Ren will accompany y—”

  “What?” Gi’Ren slammed his fi
st on the table.

  “The next one of you to interrupt me will be sorry,” she growled.

  Gi’Ren’s back straightened about the same time Val’Koy’s did. They knew the creative punishments their mother was fond of. They were particularly grueling now that her offspring couldn’t be corrected with the threat of scale-thwacking.

  “You will leave tomorrow,” she repeated. “Both of you. Until then, find a way to occupy yourselves. Now, get out. I must get back to what I was doing before you rudely interrupted me.”

  Val’Koy left, his sour mood unchanged.

  “Prince Val’Koy?”

  “What?” he roared, voice echoing in the nearly empty corridor. The servant shied away under his gaze once he whirled around.

  “Y-you have a private call in your office,” she stuttered. He exhaled, rubbing the side of his skull. This servant wasn’t the cause of his unrest. He was unraveling.

  “Thank you.”

  She dipped her head, short black hair obscuring half her face in the process, before scurrying off.

  Val’Koy took a deep breath in his office before accepting the vid call. Across the room a screen lit up, revealing a representative for the Zacva.

  “Ambassador Jolissian,” Val’Koy scrubbed his jaw, “this is unexpected. Did we have a call scheduled?”

  “We did not, Prince Val’Koy.”

  His eyes narrowed, noticing Jolissian’s neck was faintly purple against his green-striped, waxy skin. It was an obvious sign of anxiety for his race, and it made Val’Koy uneasy.

  “Is everything all right, Ambassador?”

  “Forgive me,” he croaked, throat turning a bright shade. “He threatened my pod if I didn’t assist him.”

  “Assist whom?”

  The vid cut and rerouted. Within seconds, Val’Koy had an eyeful of a long-time enemy...

  Emperor Vu’Mal’Su.

  “Prince,” the Emperor rasped in the rough Trepnil tongue.

  Val’Koy stood, bracing his lower hands on the stone desk in front of him. Lips twisting into an amused tilt, he said, “You have some nerve.”

  The Emperor’s lips along his elongated, green scaled snout curled in a facsimile of a smile, but it only gave the appearance of a reptile about to open its jaws to snap at dangling food.

  “I have a request.” His tapered tongue slid over his snout and Val’Koy grimaced at the rope of sticky saliva that drooled from between his bottom row of needle teeth.

  “Let me save your time, and mine.” Val’Koy’s fingers hovered above his tablet, about to disconnect. “You have nothing that interests m—”

  “Not even this female?”

  Ping, went his CID, a compact interactive device. His suspicion grew. His CID data link was only known to a small group of individuals.

  He gripped the thin white wands, pulling them apart to reveal a flexible transparent screen that instantly went rigid and lit up with a photo.

  A photo of her. The Therran that occupied his mind and wreaked havoc on his body.

  In the photo, she stood on a city sidewalk wearing her red coat, the one she’d hugged to her shapely form on the short walk back to her apartment that single night, months ago. The sudden sight of her could drive him crazy, but this was no time for that.

  His face became immovable for a split second before he schooled his features and rumbled a laugh he’d perfected at a young age—one that implied he didn’t give a fuck.

  “You mistake me for someone who cares, Vu’Mal’Su,” he finally said, receiving a sliver of pleasure at the informal slight. The Emperor’s sickly yellow eyes narrowed. “Why would I care what you do with a human?”

  The truth of it... this Therran had invaded his thoughts and caused his body to behave in embarrassing ways. If someone he trusted had asked if she was important to him, he still would’ve said no, but he knew it to be a lie.

  After months of obsessing over their one encounter, even going as far as he had to keep her underthing, the image of her in his mind’s eye, her scent, her voice... it had taken root in his subconscious. Always there, lingering, never far from surfacing in his mind.

  It grated Val’Koy’s nerves this sorry excuse for an Emperor thought to use this female against him. “I’ll be making a call to my liaison with the Intergalactic Coalition,” he sneered. “Be prepared to lose all contact with your daughter.” Princess Beela’Su remained in protective custody. She regularly contacted Lucia due to their unconventional friendship. Vu’Mal’Su was breaking accords that granted him the meager calls he was allowed with Beela’Su.

  Fucking idiot.

  He reached for the tablet again when Vu’Mal’Su’s next words froze him.

  “What about your son?”

  Val’Koy’s eyes slowly raised back to the screen across the room.

  “Would you not care about your son?”

  “I have no sons,” he grated between clenched teeth, a trickle of doubt threading him.

  “Ahh, but you do.” The smug slant to Vu’Mal’Su’s eyes tapped on every damn nerve inside Val’Koy. “Dania mothered your offspring.”

  Dania. Was that her name? He said it multiple times in his mind. Daaaan-yaa, Daaan-ya, Dan-ya.

  “Humans and Melier cannot reproduce.” He smirked with a bravado he didn’t possess. “Clever try.”

  “Are your brothers not proof enough? Their mate is human.”

  Val’Koy knew the unique circumstances behind that. Lucia had Yadana DNA.

  Did Dania lie?

  Val’Koy recalled that night impeccably. She said she was human. Only human. His body had been confused, implanting as it did. It’d never happened before, but he wasn’t ignorant of the ways in reproduction or how his body could operate in the event of a mating.

  But his knowledge was limited to Melier breeding, not interspecies. The extent of his awareness involved steering clear of disease whenever he experimented with species he knew he couldn’t reproduce with.

  Val’Koy’s breathing grew uneven as he recalled the snippet of a conversation he’d caught between Lucia and her human physician, Dr. Trex. Something about a recessed human gene mutation and interspecies reproduction, but that was all he remembered, as he hadn’t cared. At all. Why would human-Melier reproduction concern him?

  He should’ve known better. Human and Melier interactions were new. Medical advances and discoveries were made every day—there was no end to the possibilities in biology.

  Still, he heard himself ask, “Why would I trust the word of a liar?”

  The repulsive Emperor licked his snout once more, his voice boastful, as if he’d trapped his prey. “Are you willing to risk the life of your son?”

  He wanted to disconnect, get the ugly mug of Vu’Mal’Su off his damn screen, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t, with a clear conscience, doom Dania and—Val’Koy nearly chuckled with incredulity—possibly his son to the scourge of the Trepnil Emperor.

  “I require proof.”

  Vu’Mal’Su nodded, his long snout bobbing, shaking free another ooze of drool. “I expected nothing less.”

  His CID chimed again. Pictures of Dania—just how he remembered her—came through, one after the other... holding a half-bundled infant in her arms. Its skin pale blue, lacking the extra set of arms, just like his nieces. She held the infant against her as she lay on the bed he bought her in one photo. In the other, she stood in the kitchen where they had fucked, a goofy smile on her face while holding a milk bottle.

  Photos could be doctored, though.

  As if reading his inner thoughts, a stream fed to his CID.

  “Is this—”

  “Live?” Vu’Mal’Su interrupted, his hoarse laugh more like a wheeze. “Yes. I have eyes on her even now in the event you refuse my request or try to send her aid. Know this, I can reach her at any time, Prince.”

  Val’Koy heard the threat plainly. The Emperor wouldn’t give him the chance to consult with his people or send protection for Dania.

  He watched her ru
sh from the treats store, where they had their second meeting, a bag dangling from her fingers as she cradled a bundle in her arms. The youngling.

  A foreign sensation came over him. His body tensed, his pulse thrummed, and his fingers itched with the desire to touch her and the infant she held. His lower hands curled inward, trimmed claws pressing into his palms.

  “I will do it,” he finally uttered and raised his gaze to Vu’Mal’Su. “Whatever it is you request, I will do it.”

  Val’Koy’s eyes dropped to the CID, enthralled by the sight of Dania and his... his son.

  Everything just changed.

  NINE

  VAL’KOY

  “Stop that.”

  Val’Koy’s concentration on the black expanse of space broke, his gaze tearing away from the countless stars and sliding to his brother. “Stop?”

  “Stop clicking your claws on my console,” Gi’Ren grumbled, the puckered scar along his face tightening when he scowled.

  Val’Koy looked down at the tapping hand in question and gripped the armrest instead, silencing the noise. His attention went back to the view, flicking over the orange globe known as planet Pin Lang. Normally he’d be anywhere else on the ship, not the bridge, but he found himself wanting to be near his younger sibling.

  For a little while anyway.

  And since Gi’Ren wouldn’t let anyone—not even the finest military pilots—control his precious Weqna, here he was, keeping him company while he lined up to the orbiting fuel station.

  Val’Koy huffed a breath at the sentimentality of it all. He tried to blame it on the uncertainty of his situation. He didn’t know what Vu’Mal’Su wanted from him. Could be his last day alive for all he knew. Doubtful, but possible. He wasn’t exactly able to negotiate terms.

  His imprisoned twin, Gi’Calla, briefly crossed his mind, and he tried to think of something else. Already he grew restless, he didn’t need resentment creeping up on him too.

  “I believe I will peruse the Pinian market,” he stated and unbuckled himself when the sensors indicated the ship had successfully attached. “Coming with?”