Casey's Warriors (Bondmates) (33 page)

Lorn chuckled and reached to touch her again, but this time she let him. Instantly she felt his love and even though she didn’t understand it, his total acceptance of Nast. “I learned one Earth saying while I was there that I happen to agree with.”

Unable to resist touching him, touching both of them, she stroked her hands on their chest and they gave an almost identical rumbling growl. “And what’s that?”

“All is fair in love and war.”

Shaking her head, she couldn’t hold back her smile this time. “You’re such a dork.”

Lorn and Nast exchanged a puzzled look, their silver and red streaked blond hair blending together where it spread around them.

“Does a dork mean a man of great sexual powers? If so, than I am indeed a dork.”

That made her giggle and both men began to tickle her gently with the tips of their fingers, causing chills to skitter across her skin. “Stop that. I need to talk to you.”

With a heavy sigh they didn’t remove their hands, but stilled their touch.

She looked between them, studying their faces as she tried to put her chaotic thoughts into words. “What happens next? I mean, where do we go from here?”

Lorn and Nast exchanged a glance then, her husband smiled. “We take you home.”

Chapter Fifteen

Casey sat in the seat of what Lorn had called a planetary shuttle, basically a small spaceship big enough to carry six people, and tried to keep her fear of the unknown under control. They’d made the jump through the wormhole and were now on their way to Kadothia and her new home. Lorn was in the cabin sending some messages to the staff of his home in Kadothia while she and Nast sat in the small passenger compartment. To say she was suffering a case of nerves was a huge understatement.

The small room she sat in was comfortable containing a smoothly contoured couch and four chairs with a complicated restraint system on the other side of the room from her. It was a plain space with soft cream walls and some strange controls by the door leading to the control room where Lorn currently was, leaving her alone with Nast. The main source of her unease.

It wasn’t because he scared her, but rather because her draw to him was so strong that she was having a hard time dealing with it. This was the first time she’d been alone with the other man, and without Lorn here as a buffer between them she wasn’t quite sure how to act around Nast. Fighting the need to fully bond him was becoming increasingly hard and she felt like two people. One wanted to bring Nast into their lives as her second husband while the other was scared shitless of the rapid changes she’d gone through and wanted to cling to her old life with its restrictive rules only because it was familiar.

It didn’t help that the hard knowledge she would never see her family again, never taste her Mom’s cookies, never see Roxy marry a good man who deserved her, or watch her nieces or nephews grow up, was tearing through her. She was terribly homesick but at the same time she didn’t want Lorn or Nast to feel like she was sad because she was with them because that wasn’t true. They were the best things in her life, the anchors she could hold onto.

Nast looked up from a tablet he’d been working on with a concerned expression on his handsome face. Today his hair was back in a tight braid, as was Lorn’s, and she’d learned Warriors only let their hair down when they were in a safe place like the Reaping ship or Earth. Otherwise it could be used as a weapon against them. He was dressed in what she’d come to think of as his and Lorn’s everyday armor, a thick pair of black pants made from what looked like leather combined with a black shirt that clung to his body like it was painted on from his thick neck to his solid wrist. With his hair pulled back his sharp features were more severe and she tried to overlay the image of Nast sprawled naked beneath her in bed like a big lazy cat with the predator who now looked back at her.

His green eyes softened until they were the color of a new leaf in spring. “Casey, what is wrong?”

“Nothing.” Her lower lip quivered and she looked away, trying to shield the hot mess of her emotions from him.

A moment later he joined her on the couch. “Look at me, little bride.”

With a gentle touch he turned her face to his and made a rough sound of distress as he examined her tear filled eyes. “Why are you so sad? Did we do something to hurt you?”

“No, no.” She closed her eyes and her tears fell. “It’s just…I miss my family.”

“Oh,
alyah
.” He gathered her unresisting body into his arms, surrounding her with his warmth. “I am sorry. With everything that is going on I forgot you would miss your family. Forgive me for not caring for you as I should, my bride.”

She cuddled into him, breathing his earthy scent into her lungs. Much like Lorn’s touch, Nast’s gentle rubbing of her back helped chase back some of her sorrow as though his caress was a narcotic. “It’s okay.”

“No it is not.” He let out a soft sigh and rubbed his lips against her head. “You are giving up everything you know to be with us and I do not know how to thank you for your sacrifice. I do not want you ever to have a moment of sadness yet your heart is hurting because you have to leave behind everything you know for us.”

His understanding made her cry harder and he held her close, whispering soft words of affection while she clung to him. Lorn brushed against her mind and she opened herself fully to both men, allowing their reassurance and love to bolster her. Nast shifted so her head was cushioned against the crook of his arm.

“Tell me about your family on Earth.”

She gave a watery laugh. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything.”

She thought about it, then began to tell him about her loving but crazy mother who had more hobbies than she had time to do them and an attention span that lasted for all of an hour. Their basement was full of half-finished projects ranging from a latch hook Christmas tree skirt to a kiln her mother had bought, as yet unused, at a going-out-of-business sale at a pottery company. Then she talked about her father and how overprotective he was which led to her telling Nast about the time she maced Lorn.

He roared with laughter at that and she couldn’t help but giggle with him. “You attacked him?”

“I didn’t know it was Lorn,” she protested and sat up straighter on his lap. “I mean he didn’t, like, announce himself or anything.”

“He probably forgot you could not sense him.” Nast chuckled again. “I would have given my right leg to have seen that.”

With the amusement softening his face Casey marveled at how handsome he was. She lightly traced her fingertips over his forehead, then over the hard sweep of his cheekbones to the curve of his square jaw. His eyes half closed and a rumbling growl came from deep in his chest. Moving unhurriedly, taking her time, she had to admit it was nice to be able to take things slowly with Nast. With Lorn their relationship had happened so fast she could scarcely wrap her mind around it. While it has been glorious in every way, there was a different kind of pleasure that came from savoring each step. Looking away from his tempting lips she let her fingers trail over the scar beneath his ear and followed the thick line to where it disappeared beneath his shirt.

“How did this happen?”

He stiffened against her and anguish came through their bond along with concern from Lorn. Wanting to take away Nast’s pain from her question she leaned up and gently kissed his lips, stroking against their smooth surface while she felt him struggle against whatever dark memories that scar held. He kissed her back, softly and with a reverence she felt unworthy of.

Pulling back slightly she rubbed her nose against his. “It’s okay, you don’t need to talk about it. I’m sorry I asked.”

He turned his head slightly and brushed his lips against hers. “No, little bride, it is all right. I just have not spoken to anyone but Lorn about that day, and he was there so he understands. I do not…I hesitate to expose you to such tragedy, especially when you have your own sorrow to bear.”

Oddly enough her homesickness faded as she focused on Nast, needing to somehow make him feel better because when he hurt, she hurt for him. “If you want to talk about it I’ll listen, okay? But if you don’t that’s fine as well.”

“I think I need to tell you so you will understand me better. I know I am a stranger to you, Casey, but in my world the people a man knows he can trust absolutely are his bondmates. Even though we are not fully bonded, I need you to know I trust you, so I will share my story with you, but I warn you, it is not a pleasant one.” He gave a rough laugh that made her heart hurt. “Not many of my stories are.”

She moved so she could straddle his lap, then laid her head against his chest, wrapping her arms around him as much as she could. When it came to talking about bad things that had happened in the past she knew from experience it was easier sometimes if the person didn’t have to look at you. Back on Earth her friend Paige had suffered through horrible abuse from her asshole father after her mother died. It was only after he put her in the hospital when she was fifteen that she finally told the truth about the nightmare she’d been living and hiding from the rest of the world.

Casey had been there when Paige talked to the social worker, along with Dawn and Kimber and their mothers. Together they’d comforted Paige while she’d stared at the ceiling and talked about the beatings, being locked in the basement, not eating for days, and how her father had switched from alcohol to crystal meth. He’d been in a drug-fueled rage when he took a baseball bat to his only daughter, breaking not only Paige’s body but also her spirit. Despite all the terrible things he’d done to her in the past, up until the day he broke both her legs, her cheekbone, and a few of her ribs with his bat she’d held out hope that if she was good enough, if she tried hard enough he would love her more than the drugs. Now it was practically impossible for Paige to trust any male over the age of fourteen and Casey could understand why.

Shaking off those terrible memories she focused on the present, listening to the accelerated beat of Nast’s heart as they flew through space to her new home.

“Two hundred and five cycles ago, around five hundred Earth years, I was part of an advance party specially trained for infiltration into enemy territory. In this case into one of the outer planets where the Hive was harvesting people.”

“Harvesting people?”

“Their planet is run on slave power. They kidnap people from other planets, those too weak or not technologically advanced enough to defend themselves, and bring them to the Hive planet of Xithar. We received word one of their mercenary ships was spotted around Cuthos, a peaceful planet that was mostly an agrarian culture and supplied our army with food in exchange for protection. Cuthos was deep enough in Kadothian-held territory that they should have been safe, but most of the population was naturally pacifistic and they did not have the defenses their neighboring planets held. This made them a tempting target to the Hive.”

She watched his face as he talked, the bond between them closed down on his side so only a hint of his sorrow came through, but it was enough to make her throat close up with unshed tears.

“Our main forces were drawn to another part of the galaxy where a bitter fight was being waged, but when the desperate call for help reached us Commander Trenzent, one of our highest-ranking military officers, selected an elite company of Warriors to go and fight off the Hive with an army from a nearby planet not far behind us. While the members of the Hive will fight, they prefer to stay out of direct conflict and use their mercenaries if they can, men and women so morally corrupt they can be bought to do just about anything.”

He took a deep breath and his heart continued to slam hard enough that she swore she could feel it against her cheek. “We walked into an utter slaughter. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children dead or begging for death, their minds broken by the nightmares they had witnessed. Tortured for their pain in the most depraved manner possible, even the children…Lord of Life, the children… Entire village populations were missing, no doubt taken back to the Hive’s home base. After sweeping the planet we found the mercenaries laying siege to a naturally fortified underground city sunk deep into a mountain with only one entrance in and out. It was the Cuthosians’ last stand and they were not going to last much longer. We could not wait for backup, not if we were going to save those people.”

She stared up at him, enthralled by his tale yet sensing that the worst was yet to come. “What happened?”

“Help was not far behind us, Commander Trenzent had sent out an emergency signal that would alert all friendly forces in the area, but we did not have time to wait for them. It was a suicide mission—we all knew it—but none of us could have lived with ourselves if the Hive managed to gain access to that mountain.” A hard shudder worked through him. “Commander Trenzent is a brilliant Warrior and he devised a series of strikes that greatly weakened the enemy, but it only slowed them the smallest bit. Help began to arrive and the battle raged for days. We had not slept more than an hour as we fought and we were exhausted, but we continued to battle through a never-ending stream of enemies. I am not sure how it happened, but we ended up cut off from our forces and surrounded by a group of at least two hundred mercenaries led by a half dozen members of the Hive.”

Fright, rage, and disgust surged through her link to Nast, but she didn’t dare close her side down, struggling against his emotions to send her own reassurance and love. It must have helped because he softened slightly against her.

“Did you know the Hive live below ground in darkness? That their eyes have adjusted to see without light? When above ground they wear a mask that protects their eyes and turns them into faceless creatures from a nightmare, incredibly strong women who all look the same and almost move the same. We were dead—there was no doubt about it—and we all knew our sworn duty was to kill ourselves before they could take us, but we were determined to slay as many of them as we could.”