Page 50 of Fathom

I glanced around at the empty street. It wasn't a moment of peace in the middle of the busy day. Knowing my parents, they had the street blocked off to prevent my escape. My eyes drifted back to the new hire. The look on his face was eager and hungry as he stared at my new bride. His tongue snaked out to taste the air.

He wouldn't be looking at her like that unless...

"We've been told to treat you and your bride with utmost respect... as long as you're cooperative," Grathin confirmed my suspicion, providing the context with the words he didn't say.

If I fought them, they would hurt her.

"Leija," I tightened my grip on her hands. "Would you like to meet my parents?"

The bright smile on her face was an arrow through my heart. I should have moved faster. The moment the paperwork was approved, I should have taken our copy, picked her up, and run from the building straight to the spaceport. I shouldn't have taken the moment to give her the rings.

"I would love to!" she said, all excitement and happiness, not knowing that everything I had promised her was about to disintegrate around us, like bones breaking down into mush in a bucket full of lye. I couldn't tell her. If she was afraid when she met them, they would smell that fear, and it would be over.

"We will accept my parents' gracious invitation," I told Grathin.

"I don't know..." the new one said with a chuckle, stepping in closer to us. "Seems to me as if you are a bit reluctant to go."

I didn't hesitate.

I lashed out with my tail, catching him around the throat. He didn't have time to react more than a brief widening of his eyes before I tightened, twisted, and the sharp crack in the air signaled the cervical dislocation I had gotten good at over the years. The new guard fell to the ground, his body twitching with the throes.

"Idiot," Igonar said, and I knew he wasn't referring to me.

"Master Eun, if you'll be so kind as to get in the car first," Grathin said, staying well out of reach.

I didn't worry about him. The two of them, along with my uncle, had been my bodyguards for years. They would wait until I got in the car on my own, because they knew that I wasn't planning on fighting them, not unless they gave me a reason like the new guy did.

"Why did you do that?" Leija's voice was tight. She had seen me fight before. She had seen me chained to a wall in the throes of addiction, and hadn't been afraid of me then. Why was she looking at me like this now, like she had never seen me before?

"He planned to hurt you," I said, reaching out to brush her hair back from her face and cup the side of her face.

"So you killed him?" she asked.

"I will kill anyone who even thinks about hurting you," I told her, raising my voice for the benefit of the other two.

She stared up at me for a long moment, her eyes sharp and unreadable.

"Good," she said, her voice as hard as if she had been born a predator instead of prey.

NINETEEN

LEIJA

The car pulled up onto what could only be described as an old-money estate, if the British nobility had been replaced by alien royalty. The architecture was striking, strange to my eyes, but thefeelof it was unmistakable. Wealth, power, and legacy radiated from the tidy upkeep of the ancient stones. The circular drive held a massive fountain at its center, topped by a sculpted figure of a lupine alien with four arms, standing upright, arms extended, water pouring from its palms like blessings or judgment.

The house itself sprawled outward in a symmetrical maze of glass and carved stone columns, elegant and imposing, like it had grown from the earth purely to remind others of how small they really were. We’d been driving for nearly fifteen minutes since we turned onto the private road, a winding path flanked by manicured hedges and towering trees that mimicked a wild forest without any true wildness. It was acultivated nature. Beauty controlled and parcelled out into a precise format.

A lie of freedom. Control masquerading as beauty.

"This is your family home?" I asked, my voice flat as the vehicle glided to a stop. We sat in the back of a sleek, limo-like transport, complete with a glowing minibar stocked with elegantly bottled drinks and individually wrapped delicacies. I didn't touch any of them. All I could think about was the corpse in the trunk, and the way Eun had reached out and killed him as if the action was second nature to him. I knew he was violent. I'd seen him fight. I'd seen him kill before.

But the lizard alien with the red scales hadn't done anything. All he did was say something weird and take a step towards me.

I trusted Eun. I trusted him enough to sleep with him, enough to marry him... but every time he'd fought before, it was with rage, with fury to protect me.

He killed that guy like it meant nothing, like he felt nothing doing it.

But that wasn’t the thing that bothered me the most.