In Command, page 11
“Yes.” That was part of the reason anyway.
“I’m probably causing all kinds of problems for you.”
“No.” No, she wasn’t. She wasn’t a problem. Amihanna was a gift.
“I know that they hate me. Or at least they don’t like me much or trust me or believe that I should rule with you. I’m not sure how to change that. I know I made a promise—”
“Amihanna. It’s not you alone that has to change their perception of you. It’s—”
“No. I’m going to figure it out.” She had that impossibly stubborn tone now, and I knew it’d do no good to argue with her. “I know there’s a solution. I’m just not sure what.”
This was something I’d let her take responsibility for because she wanted it. Not because of a promise or that I even needed that from her, but because she’d wanted to do something as a ruler. It was the first time she’d wanted to take part, and I don’t think she even realized it.
So, I was letting her go with it, but I wasn’t sure if this was something that could be easily accomplished. It certainly wasn’t going to happen overnight. I hoped she wouldn’t stress or get frustrated, but I’d watch her and help as much as she’d let me.
For now, she needed a distraction. This was a date, and she was going to have fun. It was my mission.
I tugged on her hand, pulling her away from the vid screens. “Tonight might help, but I think they just need to get used to seeing you—to seeing us. They need to see you as a queen, to understand you, to get to know you. They don’t understand who you are, and you’re such an unknown. No one knows anything about you or what you experienced or how you lived while you were on Earth. And since they don’t know that, they can’t understand who you are now. Unknowns can be scary. So, I think that’s mostly what this is.”
I saw a look cross her face for a second before she shut it down, and I wasn’t sure what it meant.
“What is it?”
She blinked a few times and I knew she was about to lie. It’s what she did when she was little, but she never lied to me. It was always a look she gave her parents.
It was in that moment that I knew she was hiding something from me. I wanted to call her on it, but I was keeping something from her, too. So, it felt like I shouldn’t push, unless I was going to tell her the truth about what was happening with our allies.
And I couldn’t do that. She’d already been adjusting too much. It wasn’t fair to pile something else on top.
So, I kept my questions to myself again and led her through the market.
Tonight would be nice. We would have fun, and I was going to forget about the media and just enjoy her company because I never thought I’d ever get the chance to see her again, let alone be lucky enough have a real date with her. If they couldn’t see what an amazing ruler she’d be—if she hadn’t proven it yet—I wasn’t sure how to make them see.
I needed to be patient. I would work on that, but it was hard when I wanted so much.
I wanted the Aunare to accept her as their ruler.
I wanted our allies to join our side against SpaceTech.
I wanted her to already be my wife and queen, but that wouldn’t happen for a little bit. The people needed time, and if I was being honest, so did Amihanna.
And for Amihanna, I would do anything. I could wait forever for her.
She was here, by my side, walking with me through one of my favorite places on my home planet, and that was enough.
By the Goddess, that was more than enough.
Chapter Eleven
AMIHANNA
The deeper we got into the shopping section of Ra’mi market, the more tense I became. There was too much to see, too much to look at, and Lorne kept offering up stuff for me to buy—a painting, a decorative bowl, the blanket was nice, but why did I need any of this stuff?
Why was he so insistent?
Why did he think I needed anything more?
Why didn’t he understand that I had more than enough? I had food. I had clothes. I had a safe place to sleep—granted, there’d been some trouble with that, but I had guards to help me feel safer wherever I went. I even had go-bags with money and passports and food and everything I could ever want in them.
I had enough. I had more than enough. I didn’t need to buy anything.
I didn’t want to buy anything.
My temper was starting to fray, and I didn’t want that either. Losing my shit in public would be so much worse than losing it in the privacy of my gym. But I didn’t want to explain why I was uncomfortable either. Both would ruin our night. This was our date. Our first date. I wanted it to be perfect.
And yet, by staying silent, I was already ruining it.
I couldn’t win, and that meant the only thing I could do was fail. And it was so iced. I felt so unbelievably iced.
We passed by a stall, and Lorne paused, talking to the owner. I glanced at what was on the table.
Earrings. I touched my earlobes. I didn’t wear earrings. I didn’t have them pierced, and I’d never even thought about it. The only jewelry I wore was my engagement ring, and I never really owned anything else. I didn’t have the money for it before, and now…
And now I didn’t see the point of it. The engagement ring stood for something. It was meaningful and I loved it. But the rest were pretty but pointless.
Lorne turned to me, and pointed to a pair. “Do you like them?” He gave me a hopeful look, but I didn’t get it.
I shrugged. “They’re pretty.” I guessed. If you wanted a pair, they were small enough. Just little glints of a blue glittering stone that would sparkle in the light.
“Do you want them?”
Me? “No.” I didn’t need anything that fancy. “I’m good.”
Lorne shoved his hands into his pockets and let out a sigh. He looked so defeated as he said something quickly to the man at the stall and then started walking away.
Okay. I was going to have to say something. I had to lay it out there, and he’d just have to understand.
I took a few quick steps to catch up with him. “I’m sorry.” I figured that was the best way to start.
“There’s no sorry.” He tugged his hands through his hair, and I knew there was so much more he wasn’t saying. The man was frustrated.
I was frustrating him.
I waited for him to finish explaining, and ended up poking him in the side when he didn’t.
He gave me a smile that was mostly sad. “You didn’t want the earrings, but… I want to buy you something. Anything.” His fingers raked through his hair again. “Please, pick something out. Let me buy you something.”
Oh boy. The guy was really miserable. I took a quick glance around the market but it was too much. There were so many stalls and so much noise and people and I had no idea what to tell him to buy for me. Nothing seemed important enough that I should waste good money on it, and yet, I kept searching the stalls, hoping I could honestly point to something and say yes, please, buy me that. I need that.
“It can be something small.” His voice was so soft and pleading that it made my heart ache. “It could be something that would help you remember our first date.”
I tucked a piece of his hair behind his ear. “I’m not going to forget this. It’s not possible. I don’t need anything to help me remember it.”
He tilted his head at me, as if trying to tell if I was lying.
Did he really think that was possible? Did he think I wasn’t having fun if I wasn’t buying anything? “I’m having a really good time. I promise. I just haven’t seen anything that I need yet.” If I did, I’d buy it. Probably. If it wasn’t too expensive. We’d probably already spent a fortune on food, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. No way.
He started walking again, and I kept pace beside him. “Are you having a good time?”
“I am. I mean, I was. Until now.” Man, if Roan were here, he’d make a joke to somehow explain to Lorne why I wasn’t a big shopper, but I didn’t have that ability to make everything funny. Especially things that were decidedly unfunny.
Lorne grabbed my hand and stopped walking again.
I looked up at him, but I couldn’t find any words. I didn’t know how to tell him the truth without hurting him, and that just plain sucked.
“Just tell me. I can feel you wrestling with something inside you, and it’s making me more tense. So, just tell me. Do you want to go home?”
“No,” I said quickly. “No. I don’t want to go home. Not like this. I don’t want to fight.”
“I’m not fighting. I just want to make you happy.”
“I am happy.” I needed to say it. To be honest about how I felt. To stop being a chicken and put it out there and then deal with whatever came next. “Please don’t be angry.”
“I’m not angry.”
“Yes, you might get angry…” But I was going to say it anyway. “I just don’t feel comfortable spending money, especially when I don’t feel like it’s mine—”
Lorne’s glow lit up the market, and everything grew quiet. I could sense our guards moving to surround us, but I didn’t dare look away from Lorne.
Instead, I kept stumbling through my explanation. “—and I don’t really need anything. I mean, why do people even wear earrings?”
“Because they’re pretty.” Now he sounded outright frustrated, like he was trying to negotiate with a crazy person, but we just weren’t seeing things the same way.
I needed him to understand where I was coming from, which meant I was going to have to explain more than I wanted to. Oh man. This was going to hurt him and I hated that, but there was no more avoiding it.
“That’s the thing. I just—I’m too practical. I never bought things because they were pretty. We didn’t have money for that. We barely had money for food, and for chunks of time, we sometimes didn’t have money to have a place to sleep. It’s so hard for me to go from being so poor, so hungry, and barely surviving, to you trying to buy everything you see for me.” I reached out to him, but his hands were still shoved in his pockets. I let my hand fall to my side and shrugged. “It’s just making me…uncomfortable? That’s not the right feeling. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I don’t need anything. I promise. I’m so happy, and the only thing upsetting me right now is you being upset.”
Lorne started walking and it took me a few steps to catch up. I felt like the worst kind of jerk. Why couldn’t I just take the damned earrings? Why couldn’t I just say sure, Lorne? Those are pretty. Buy them.
But that felt like lying and I couldn’t lie to him. Sure, I could keep things from him, especially things that might hurt him somehow. But I couldn’t outright lie.
“I’m sorry. I really did have fun eating with you and trying all those things.”
He stopped then and looked down at me. There was too much swimming in his eyes that I needed to process. Love. Sorrow. Guilt. More love.
“You don’t need to apologize to me, Amihanna. I love you.” He pressed a fist to his heart. “I love you.” He let out a breath. “It hurts me to know how hard your life has been, and I know you don’t want to talk about it. I feel that from you. I know it’s not because you don’t want me to know, but because it’s hard to talk about.” He pulled his hands from his pockets and reached a hand to my face. He skimmed a finger down my cheek. “But one day, we will talk about it. Somewhere more private. I want to know everything, not just bits and pieces. I think not knowing is making me a little crazy. I want to fix what happened, but I can’t. It’s too late. So, I want to make up for it.”
“You have nothing to make up for.” When he tried to talk again, I shook my head. “And knowing everything will make you so, so angry. There’s very little good that happened to me the last thirteen years. It’s… it’s like how you didn’t want to tell me what that asshole said in the High Council meeting. It’s like that. Knowing the details would only break your heart. Don’t you think we’ve both had enough of that?” I sure thought so. “I want to finish having a nice, lovely time like we did earlier. When we were eating. I want to go back to that. Can we do that?”
Ashino stepped forward and said something softly to Lorne.
Lorne studied Ashino for a second, and then me. And then he said something to Ashino.
That was so annoying. I wasn’t going to dig my translator out for that when they knew they were being rude. “What?”
Lorne studied me again. “Ashino wants you to buy something, too, so he was trying to offer some suggestions. He’s angry about your past.”
“He is?”
“He’s been my guard for a long time.”
He had? From before Liberation Week? Ashino didn’t seem old enough for that. He didn’t have any gray in his hair and zero wrinkles. “How long exactly?”
“He remembers you, even if you don’t remember him, and he said you always liked to buy things for other people. You used to be a shopper, which is why this is upsetting me so much. This… our trips to markets used to go a lot differently.”
“Oh.” Should I apologize for another thing that I couldn’t remember?
“You bought Ashino something once,” he said before I could think of what to say.
I turned to Ashino. He was tall and thicker with muscle than the average Aunare, but that didn’t mean much. All the royal guards were built bigger. His eyes were a bright blue, his skin a little darker than mine, and his hair was jet black and long, down-his-back long. It had a few braids at the temples and then tied back in one long tail. I studied his face for a moment. The square jaw. The long nose. The thick black eyebrows that seemed to make his blue eyes brighter.
But no matter how long I stared, I didn’t remember him. At all. Not even a glimmer of a memory. “I knew you?”
He nodded. “You bought me this when you were little.” He pulled out a little knife and flicked it. The blade opened and was glowing. “I’d just joined Lorne’s guard when… but you gave me this before. You said it was for good luck.” He tucked the blade away and slid it back into his pocket. “You were always buying things when you were little. Rarely for yourself. But you liked buying gifts.”
It was a little unsettling when I realized someone knew me from before. I didn’t have memories of back then, but they did. It was like they held this secret bit of me that I couldn’t access, and I wasn’t sure how to feel about it.
“I have an idea.” Lorne’s voice pulled me out of my own thoughts. “Come on. This way.”
He wove through the stalls, quicker now than we’d moved before.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.” He kept moving—barely pausing when people bowed or called his name—until we reached a massive stall. It was so big that “stall” was too small of a word. Whoever owned it had actually taken four stalls at the end of an aisle and made a square. Each table had display cases and jars, all filled with brightly colored things of all shapes and sizes. I was sure it was some kind of food because I saw the person before us eating something from it, but I didn’t know what kind of food.
“What is it?”
“Candy.”
Holy shit. That was a mountain of sugar. “What’s that?” I pointed to a jar filled with little balls of every color I could think of, sometimes swirled together, sometimes solidly one color, some of them even glittered. Could you eat glitter?
“Guess we’ll have to buy them and see.” Lorne grinned like he’d won.
I wanted to argue that we had plenty of food and treats at the estate, but I was curious.
“Don’t worry about the money. I promise you have plenty. They can arrange payment through Roan, and if you don’t feel comfortable with Roan accessing your accounts, you can hire someone to handle just that bit for you. And even if you didn’t have a fortune in your accounts, I do.”
“I know. I know. It’s just—”
“Hard to part with it when you’re used to just surviving.”
“No. It’s not even that. I’m not hoarding it for when shit goes bad. That’s not it.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s like I forget it’s even there. I haven’t earned it, so it doesn’t feel real to me. I’m okay with the stuff at the estate. It kind of just shows up so I don’t have to think about cost all the time. But I don’t feel like I can afford the treats when I know there’s a stocked pantry at home.”
Lorne’s eyes closed for a second. I knew I’d hurt him. I was trying to explain, but I kept making things worse.
When he opened his eyes again, he seemed a little sad. “The money is there and it’s yours, but I’m trying to put myself in your spot and understand better. It’s difficult for me, but I’m trying. But just like with the food, anything we spend at the market is actually a help to the owner. Not just for the money, but for the attention it’ll bring to their stall.”
Oh shit. All the air went out of my lungs as the weight of what I’d unknowingly done hit me. “So, I was actually insulting and hurting every other stall we passed.”
“No. I gave an excuse at every stall, and I did actually buy you a pair of earrings.”
I shoved him softly. “My ears aren’t even pierced.”
“We could fix that if you want or they can go in the safe or you can give them to your mother. I don’t care. But I was done with waiting for you to pick something out.” He gave me a sheepish grin. “I couldn’t help it.”
I rolled my eyes and turned back to the candy. Lorne came to stand next to me, so close that our arms touched.
I leaned into him. “You know, if we got a bunch of things, I could give everything to Roan. And then he could tell me which ones were actually good.”
“I could tell you which ones you’d like.”
I nudged him. “Yeah, but that’s not as much fun as making Roan eat nasty stuff.”
Lorne laughed. “All right. So, we’ll get a selection?”
“Yeah. For Roan.”
“Of course. For Roan.” Lorne leaned down, brushing a kiss on top of my head. “But I’ll have him put a few for us in a separate bag.”
