Queen of Dust, page 5
“You’ll think of me—when it’s him inside you?”
“I don’t want him,” she insisted.
His hand stopped and she twisted to grab it, moving it against her clit herself. He found the back of her neck, tugging her hair so that it tingled at the roots. His fingers slid into her again on their own accord and she let him slip out of her grasp. “Let me take care of you, Mara.”
She moaned his name and he brought her to release. He kissed her ear and let go of her hair to trail his hand down her spine as she clenched around the other.
“I’ll think of you,” he said, as if that were necessary. But Mara wasn’t jealous, she understood the need for pleasure. That he’d think of her while with another woman was flattering, sweet.
“I know you will.” With a soft, satisfied sigh she added, “I’ll think of you too.”
And Liam smiled—he believed her. He hadn’t had Jimma to teach him not to trust words coaxed from ecstasy. Because Mara had already decided: she’d rather forgo pleasure than let the Dern under her skin again.
Chapter Six
“Did he tell you?”
“I received my orders this morning.”
Calvy watched Mara closely, trying to gauge her response. At dinner last night he’d noticed the way she spoke to Pent, never concealing her enjoyment, not even of her own quick wit. Now she revealed nothing, tucking her hands into a quilted muff, covering the safety belt he’d seen buckled at her waist. Mara secured. That was his job now—her welfare. He was glad for it. For something constructive he could focus on, if she’d give him nothing else.
Since leaving Theos, everything seemed surreal, especially his first night on the ship—a wild dream that he relived whenever he closed his eyes. It had been a command, to service this Balti Temptress, and he knew where shirking orders got him—off his path, back to another. And he hadn’t wanted to disobey. Even with all those people watching, with Liam Pent watching, Calvy had wanted her. As far as orders went, it was arguably the best he’d ever gotten. A close second had come this morning, when he’d stood before Pent and heard his assignment—at attention, eyes straight ahead, not a glance at the sideboard where he and Mara had—
“You were an officer.” It wasn’t a question, jarring Calvy back to the present. He liked that—when she didn’t pretend to know less than she did.
“A captain, yes.”
“So what happened? You don’t seem to have a problem with compliance.”
“I do. When following an order will cost someone’s life.” He’d always questioned those. He’d followed most of them, sure. He’d been trained to. But he’d questioned them all the same. Questioned them more on Theos, when he’d had nothing but time to reconsider his choices.
Mara appeared unmoved by his honesty. “Not likely to happen during this assignment.”
“Unlikely, yes, you don’t need to worry about that.” Calvy tapped his knee. His mind had always been full of questions—not a great quality for a soldier—and more plagued him now. What did she think of the arrangement? Did she think that’s why he was here, to have a go at Pent’s Balti Temptress? She might not have been impressed by his honesty but he wanted her to know where he stood. “I didn’t know. What the job would be. Maybe a night watchman. In one of his factories. Not this—”
“You wouldn’t have agreed?”
Everything she said hung between them like bait. Every question a sharp-toothed trap set to ensnare him, leave him dangling by the ankle, upside-down and exposed. His pulse quickened and his palms grew hot.
“That’s exactly what I’m supposed to be learning—you don’t have to agree to follow orders.” Another question emerged in his mind. Had she requested Pent allow it? That would make things easier. He smiled slowly. “I can’t say I understand Mr. Pent’s directives, but I—I’m happy to be of use. The assignment is not without its perks.”
“It is. Without perks.” She lengthened her throat, tilting her head from side to side as though her collar were too tight.
His own neck burned. Of course the arrangement wasn’t her choice. She was the epitome of desire and as a Dern, he was assumed to be a living representation of the opposite. The two of them together was the setup of a joke he’d heard countless versions of in the barracks. In this one, the punchline was him, foolishly hoping that Mara had come up with this idea.
“I see. Well. I’ll be up for—that is, I’ll do what I’m told,” Calvy told her, suppressing a shiver as he remembered the way she had scraped her nails against his scalp after he’d released himself into her. He could still feel the soft bristle of her red curls on his cheeks, the silky tenderness his tongue found inside her. Even in his embarrassment, he knew, if the opportunity presented itself again, he’d do what she asked, not because of some soldierly compulsion to comply, but because he’d gotten a taste of her and wanted another. “If you change your mind—”
“I won’t. I don’t know exactly what Liam told you—”
Pent had told him plenty. All about Mara, that she was obstinate and could be...unappeasable. He needn’t have bothered with the warning: Mara made all that perfectly clear herself.
“He told me I was responsible for your security. And your...satisfaction. And in that regard, he told me I was to do what you asked. And to take no liberties.”
“Well. There’s nothing I can do about you being appointed bodyguard, but your other services won’t be necessary.”
Calvy exhaled. Done. That was Mara’s call. He’d put it out of his mind.
There was a part of him that was relieved. Her desire for distance made things less complicated. It was an easier job to get right if her security was his only mission. When Pent was explaining the rest of it, panic had gripped his chest. Because it couldn’t be real. And if it wasn’t real, maybe he was dreaming. Maybe he’d wake up and still be on the hard floor of that prison cell, the cold that sank into his bones emanating from the stone floor, not the empty space that surrounded the ship.
But he wasn’t there. This was real. He was on his way to Balti. One lucky son of a bitch.
Calvy nodded. “Whatever you say, right?”
“Right.”
So he’d only have to work with her. That would be easier still if she didn’t hate him so much. He tapped his knee again. He could do this. He’d done scarier things than try to make amends with a woman. “Mara, I—”
“Mara?”
“That’s your name.”
“It’s awfully familiar.”
“I thought we were.”
“Not like that. You will call me Ms. Leanor.”
The pilot’s voice crackled over the speakers then, announcing their departure in a few minutes. Calvy couldn’t see her hands inside the muff, but he imagined them folded together, the knuckles white. Mara kept her face relaxed but her furtive glances at the window betrayed her. At first he’d thought she was impatient, tired of waiting. They’d been in the shuttle for ten minutes, ready to head for the surface, waiting for clearance. But her chest rose and fell too quickly as she stared out the window. She was nervous. To go home.
“I have twin sisters,” he said, hoping to distract her. “They share a name. Differentiated by their numbers. Luca Five and Luca Six. We call them Lufee and Lucee.”
Mara turned from the window to look at him. “How unfortunate for them.”
“I could give you a nickname. You could be—” he paused and then sounded it out “—Misslee? Milean—Millie.”
“No, I couldn’t.”
“You’re not a Millie? You’re sure?” She rolled her eyes back to the window, and he must have imagined the smile that pulled at her mouth because it never surfaced. Tension tightened his forehead and he looked down at his hands before meeting her gaze again. “Mara, then? When we’re alone?”
“If you must,” she relented. “But we won’t be alone.”
“Oh, Millie, we’re alone already.”
Calvy knew immediately he’d said the wrong thing again. Her face went perfectly blank, hiding whatever thought had come to her. Was it fear? Of being left with him? She had to know he wouldn’t hurt her. Pent would—oh. They were alone because Pent wasn’t here. She missed him. The man she wanted at her side.
Calvy should have known better by now than to think conversation with her could be easy. That anything with her would be easy. Mara, for all her lighthearted redirections, was an emphatic opponent. And it had been too long since he’d seen combat. He was woefully unfit against her.
Calvy would stop trying to engage with her. He needed to keep his head down, anyway, focus on the real mission: getting back where he belonged. He hadn’t been entirely truthful discussing his reasons for joining the army at dinner with Pent. The decision had been less about following a calling and more about finding one. He couldn’t live the life of an unwanted son anymore. It didn’t matter that he was smart, dedicated, driven to serve—that he would have been a perfect prince—he was a blemish. A problem to everyone around him. People who thought he was born without a purpose. People who were wrong.
He hadn’t found it exactly in the army. But he’d gotten closer. There he’d been something else, useful and mostly anonymous—except to a few higher-ups who’d made it their personal sport to test his “royal” resolve, who’d intended to reduce him still. For all his trials and reservations, Calvy was a good soldier, gaining rank, responsibility. He’d earned a position on his merit—making him more of a target to the members of command that despised him on principle. He’d even let himself imagine rising higher, above them, all the way to the top, until he held a position that even his father had to respect, to rely on. But that hadn’t happened. He hadn’t been able to follow blindly, suppress every question, not when it meant abandoning his unit, the people who already relied on him. The people who accepted him for who he showed them he was. People who’d let him earn his own place, earn their respect.
Mara turned back to the window, but he was sure she’d memorized the pattern of the surface by now. As he had. As a boy he’d fall asleep to a screen of Balti rotating, a night-light that did little justice to the scene below him. The projection had been flat, unable to capture the wild, tossing ocean, the height of the cliffs that cut out of it, the texture of the trees, how they danced in the wind. The city grid was more intriguing in his memory, clearer. Looking down now, thick clouds blocked the map he knew by heart from view.
“You can barely see anything,” Mara complained.
“Smoke—from the factories—”
“Yes, I had deduced the cause. It reminds me of—” She cut herself off. But he could guess what she had seen. A memory layered over the present.
“What happened to you? After the bomb?”
Her response was practiced, devoid of emotion. These were the facts. “I was taken to Støsh by Rozz, the woman who found me.”
“You were lucky.”
“Lucky,” she repeated, without looking at him.
“Støsh is an affluent planet. You must have been comfortable.”
“Comfortable.”
She was impossible to speak to. Yet he kept trying.
“You must have been happy there.”
“Happy.”
She picked him apart, one word at a time, sharpening her echoes with spite. The repetition, the way she mocked him, ground his teeth together.
How he’d fooled himself again, into thinking they were alike. Both remainders. Her without a family, him systematically ignored by his. Both lucky. He’d readily admit it. In his darkest moment, he’d given up on the dream of purpose. He’d relented, and offered himself back to his father’s control, not knowing Pent would step in and he’d have another chance.
But she was closer to the spoiled courtiers that had surrounded him for the first seventeen years of his life. The way she cut through him—he recognized the blade. The weapon of those who considered themselves so much better than him, so superior. Those who had always thought him less than.
Frustration clenched his jaw; if only it held his tongue in check. “Yes, I think it’s apparent that a certain amount of comfort has always been afforded to you.”
Her head snapped towards him. “I was an orphaned refugee at six years old.”
“And still you think it’s preferable to starve than eat stale bread.”
How could it be that she seemed to tense, though her face remained relaxed. It was something in the air around her, the way she charged it with her anger. This wasn’t going at all well. He exhaled and tried again. “What I mean is: I have been hungry. I have seen men starve—”
“And I have seen a world and its entire population dissolve into mist.”
He didn’t want to argue with her. Not about that. She was entitled to her pain. So he nodded. “I remember the uproar—when we heard of the accident—”
“The accident? You don’t believe that.”
He leaned forward, his own belt tightening about his hips. “Of course I do. You can’t really think we did it on purpose—our society was outraged—”
“Outraged—how outraged? So angry that you did what in retaliation?” Another calculated head tilt, as though he were so biased he’d gone off center. “Passed stricter regulations?”
“What else would you have us do? We tried to make sure that it couldn’t happen again. Balti was already lost.”
She waved her hand at the oil rigs that studded the coast. “So you might as well capitalize on the error.”
Who was impartial now? “We aren’t the only ones. It may have been a Dern bomb, but the poison was manufactured by Pent. It’s his father who shares in the blame.”
“At least his father had the deference to die with us. Yours has continued to take.”
Falling back on rationales he’d heard and repeated before, Calvy argued, “People need the fuel. To keep warm. To—”
“It does not belong to you!”
Calvy’s jaw pushed forward. Belonging. Of course she was concerned about ownership, she shared a bed with Pent, after all. “Now, there’s a typical Balti response. Your queen was the same way—only caring about her own.”
“You think the Dern are different? Concern is the pretense you use to bring others under your control. We bothered no one here. You would have left us alone if you hadn’t seen our planet as a ripe citrin ready to squeeze.”
Calvy sat back, feeling himself losing ground, scrambling for footing in the argument. “Is that why you dislike citrin so much?”
“Who cares if I dislike citrin?”
“I thought you’d express more humility.”
She leaned forward, pressing her advantage in the face of his disorder. “I’m at the edge of my seat to hear why.”
“You said it—you were orphaned at six years old.”
“And that gives me no right to opinion? To preference? I was so lucky—nothing should ever bother me again. Here’s some advice: don’t think about me.” She was beyond facts now, fueled by as much passion as he’d ever seen, without Pent to remind her to hold any of it back. “Tell me, is it only Dern royalty who are justified in their judgments?”
“I’m not—you’re the judgmental one. You’ve looked down on me from the moment we met.”
“I looked down on you when you got on your knees. How did that feel, your majesty, divesting yourself of your Dern-sanctioned privilege? I must admit I enjoyed that aspect at least.”
Calvy had had enough. He’d do the job. He’d make it back to his unit. He’d get past Liam Pent and his Balti Tempest. But there was no need to make nice with her—it was impossible. “You can mock all you like. I don’t care what you call me. I know what I am. I know my purpose. I found my place. There are lots of things I am, Ms. Leanor, but I assure you, entitled is not one of them.”
“Is that anger I detect, your grace? Have you tried just letting go?”
The shuttle lurched, finally taking off, and Mara shut her eyes, ridges forming across her forehead.
“Liam told you to do what I say?”
“He did.”
“Then shut your mouth—don’t talk about what you’ll never understand.”
Chapter Seven
Balti was a small planet, attended by two even smaller moons. Mara could see them from her window, curved nails dug into the sky over the city. She could have seen them clearer on their descent from the ship, but she hadn’t been looking, her gaze fixed on the surface instead, all that ocean and the one long landmass rising out of it. The city took up the south of the continent, while the north was devoted to natural space—a sanctuary of sorts, for the birds that prowled the planet, raptors, all of them, known for their ability to snatch fish from the water with their sharp talons. She’d seen a pair of them on the way down—the grey-blue wings blending into the sky like brushstrokes on canvas.
The hotel was near the city center, just west of the boulevard that ran from the shuttle port to the Pearl at the land’s southernmost tip. Mara had watched the sun set, expecting the buildings to light up, like on Støsh, but most of them remained dark, the lit windows scattered like stars.
