CHAPTER 25
“Stacy? Hey, yeah, it’s me. I know, your boss is a dick for calling on a Sunday at nine A.M., but I knew you’d be up with your mom’s yard sale—”
(She holds one every year on this same Sunday and has for as long as I’ve employed Stacy.)
“—and I need you to drop that for now and come sign some paperwork.”
Last night, I settled with my mom and sisters that they’d each get a share of my business; slices they could buy from each other if one or more wants out at some point.
But they’d be sharing it all with my wonder-protégé Stacy, who will be running the place.
Sal and Jason will be staying on for as long as they can and want to.
Cooper and Tansy haven’t come back, but if they do, it’s up to Stace to let them in. She’ll vet hires and handle scheduling. She’d probably love to re-welcome them to the team—and she’s going to need someone in the alien escape room, which will be so, so empty when Inara leaves.
Stacy, when she gets into work on this day off of hers with her hair in a messy knot and her face shiny with no makeup on, is dazed when I tell her what’s going to happen, but she knows Inara. Knows why we can’t stay—she gets it.
She still cries, so good thing she didn’t bother with makeup.
Being that I’m struggling with some dust in my own waterline, I’m not judging. I try for a hearty tone when I clap her gently on the shoulder. “Some or all of my sisters will be by later to chat over some stuff with you. Congratulations on becoming an eighteen-year-old entrepreneur, Stace. You’re gonna rock it.”
Inara and Stacy grab each other up in a hug like they’re sisters about to be split apart, which fucks even more with my waterline, so I head outside with the trash. I’m here and it needs taking; Sal and Jason are still blissfully enjoying the hell out of their Sunday mornings and won’t be in to do it, obviously.
The lid claps down on the industrial garbage bin, making me feel accomplished. I also feel like I’ve got myself under good control again. I turn to head back inside—and nearly run into the biggest motherfucking monster I’ve ever seen.
Seriously. He’s a monster.
In the way a cute little guinea pig looks a bit like an Amazonian, Caiman-croc-stomping capybara, this creature looks like a much larger, nightmarish version of the alien I happen to know and love. He’s more of a stone-grey blue than Inara is. And he doesn’t have her pretty stripes. Instead, he’s rough-scaled and mean-looking. And his horns. Are. Huge. Also the blades on his tail seem bigger, sharper, and more numerous than hers—yet worrisomely?
He looks a lot like Inara. As in, I have much fear that he’s not only the same type of alien, but a related one.
“Fuck,” I say up at him, because this bastard has a good two feet on me in height, a thing I’ve never experienced, and he has to outweigh me by like, a whole Clydesdale or ten.
He’s gargantuan.
“You smell like Inara,” he accuses in a voice so deep and cold, I get frostbite.
“Tell me you’re not Inara’s dad,” I say into his furious eyes.
They’re a murderous glowy fire-orange. “I’m her brother,” he grits out, the word sounding alien coming out of his scaly lips.
“Fuck,” I repeat, because yeah—that’s no better. I mean sure—you bet, it’s a bit better. But as a brother myself, I know all about crazy protective instincts, and I can sense I’m about to die.
Before I get my teeth knocked down my throat where they’ll be making all the introductions I never wanted them to make with my stomach, I meet the alien’s eyes and keep ‘em steady. “So. You must be Zadeon.”
Zadeon is Inara’s hulk of a sibling. One of the gladiators, because I couldn’t fall in love with a woman who came from a family of pacifist accountants.
The alien in front of me jerks back a little, surprised, I think, but then he’s scowling even fiercer. “No. You, human, would be dead right now if I were Zadeon.”
What I just heard was, I’m not the one you should be worrying about (whew), and I might not kill you.
This means I have a chance to live. Which is good. It means I have a chance to stay with Inara, which is the only outcome I’m gunning for. This brother of hers is going to be forced to take me out if I can’t convince him to give us his blessing.
Because #SorryNotSorry, I’m not going away.
And for damn sure, Inara is not leaving me behind.
Inara is mine.
And we’re having a baby.
Or a whole litter. It’s all still so staggering. I shake myself though and get my head back in the game. “Are you Arokh?” I try, because he’s her next-biggest brother, from the sounds of it.
“Tahmoh,” he spits.
“Gesundheit,” I say back.
“Oh CRITE!” Inara suddenly shrieks.
“Inara is my woman,” I tell Tahmoh, because it’s important to test the waters.
From the way he bares his teeth—longer, sharper-looking than Inara’s—I can’t help but see the waters aren’t settled. Not by a long shot. He’s so not down with me claiming his little sister.
Inara skids around him and sidles up to me, grabbing my hand as if this will protect me.
It might slow him down. He won’t want to rip her arm off. So I appreciate her gesture.
Tahmoh does not. “That’s my sister,” he snarls.
“Yeah? Well, this,” I haul Inara even closer to my side, “is my mate. You gotta deal.”
“You’re going to die,” Tahmoh rages.
“Figured you’d feel that way,” I say with an apologetic tip of my head.
Tahmoh tries to glare me down, fantasies of dismemberment dancing across his murderous eyes.
Normally, this is the part where the woman’s brother hauls her man out back, beats the hell out of him, and if the man doesn’t run off—or die—then the two men reach an understanding.
By surviving, her man properly demonstrates the following: I’m dead serious. I want your sister as my forever-mate—I have now proven my earnest conviction.
Her brother: You have impressed me by taking my beating. Don’t ever fucking hurt her, or I finish the job.
Unfortunately, there’s no scenario in which Tahmoh—who, according to Inara, is her ‘sweet, scholarly’ brother, by the way—can take me anywhere and give me a beating. Not without annihilating me.
I look at Inara, then her brother. For some reason, I had the real mistaken impression that he was the smallest brother. And for yet another very much incorrect impression, I just assumed that male and female Rakhii were about equal in size.
If Tahmoh and his sister are anything to go by, the disparity between the genders is extreme. It’s like looking at an elephant seal cow and an elephant seal bull, except instead of five hundred pounds of blubber, it’s easily three hundred pounds of pure muscle. Maybe more.
Yep. My funeral. If I’d known this ahead of time, I’d have encouraged my woman to ditch her ship and move with me to Greenland, where we’d live in a sod-roofed hobbit house, or something with an equally too-small door for her brothers to fit through when they came for us.