Alien Orc’s Prize (Starlight Brides)

18. Luna

CHAPTER 18

LUNA

G albrath and I slept tangled up in each other, neither one of us quite willing to let the other go. Only problem was I forgot to go pee afterwards, and halfway through the night my bladder woke me with a vengeance. I managed to creep out from beneath Galbrath’s heavy arm and scurry to the bathroom.

It was mid-pee that I remembered I’d left the kitchen an absolute disaster. I cringed as I wiped and washed up. Maybe my cafeteria job hadn’t been some fancy chef gig, but I’d always taken pride in the cleanliness of my workspace. I knew that nobody probably expected the high princess to clean up her own messes, least of all Galbrath, but I still expected it of myself.

After my hands (and my sticky thighs) had been cleansed and dried, I tugged on my pants and shirt. I paused in the doorway to look back at Galbrath, admiring the mountainous outline of his body on the bed. The body that had loved me so well tonight.

Loved me.

He hadn’t said it, of course. And maybe he never would. He didn’t strike me as the romantic type, and he certainly wasn’t a chatty guy, especially where feelings were involved. He was probably more likely to tell me that he loved the way my pussy smelled than he was to get all gooey-eyed and say he loved me .

But maybe… Maybe he didn’t need to. The way my body had opened for him, the way he’d so tenderly and possessively worked his knot inside me, every one of his movements as dearly familiar as my own breaths… It had felt special.

Special. Just like what he’d called me earlier.

I knew I had an idiotic smile on my face as I tiptoed out of the bedroom. I practically floated through the halls until I reached the kitchen. By the time I got there, all traces of sleepiness were gone.

I wanted to let Galbrath get some sleep after all the stress he’d been under, and I was pretty sure if I returned to the room now I’d be waking him up by straddling him. So instead, I decided to get back to work. Apparently, sex inspired me, because I jumped right back into my tasks with renewed vigour. The only problem was that I’d now run out of seaweed. I didn’t feel like stopping or going back to sleep yet, so I slipped out of the castle with a basket to go and get some more.

As I approached the lift that would take me down to the moonlit beach, I paused, a sound catching at my ears. It was a low hum. I was sure that if I were any closer to it, if it were any louder, I’d know what it was immediately, because it sounded familiar.

For some reason, I just couldn’t ignore it. I went past the lift down to the beach and walked around the outskirts of the palace, heading for slopes and fields I’d never visited before. As I walked along a path between swaying stalks, opalescent in the light, I wondered if this was the wheat Galbrath was so worried about. As far as I could tell, these stalks looked healthy enough.

The sound got louder, and all at once I realized what it was. It was one of those hovering vehicles that Galbrath and Althrop rode around on. I frowned, trying to figure out why the hell I was hearing such a sound out here, in the middle of a huge stretch of farmland where there were only narrow paths, no roads for riding.

My heart stuttered as I began backing up. The sound was so loud I was suddenly terrified of getting run over. Apparently, my instincts were dead-on, because a second later, in the place I’d been standing a moment before, a vehicle turned and raced up the path. The rider saw me, swore, and barely stopped in time before knocking all my blunt human teeth out. In my haste to back up further, I dropped my basket and fell onto my ass.

“Lana! What are you doing out here?” That was Althrop’s voice.

He sounded more harried than he had this morning and had obviously forgotten my name again. He turned off the engine and jumped off his vehicle’s seat. It was only then that I noticed that turning off the vehicle hadn’t made it any darker. There hadn’t been any lights engaged while it was on, even though he’d been flying in the dead of night.

“What are you doing out here?” I asked, standing up and brushing off the seat of my pants. I picked up my basket and held it up between us, almost like a shield.

“I… I often like to come ride out here at night. The moon. It is beautiful, is it not?” His voice had resumed its silky-smooth tone. I was sure that many women found it panty-droppingly charming.

I was not one of them.

“Yes,” I agreed, eyeing him suspiciously.

“Beautiful,” he said again, his eyes dropping to my mouth, then my tits. “Much like yourself.”

Oh, boy. Here we go.

“I need to get back.”

“What’s the hurry?”

Jesus, when had he gotten so close to me? He smiled down at me, his handsome face contorted into a leering mask.

“I’ve wanted a chance alone with you since this morning,” he added.

“I don’t think that’s appropriate,” I said icily.

He shrugged. “I’ve never much cared for what’s appropriate. Especially when inappropriate can feel so good…” His voice went husky. “I could make you feel good.”

“That’s high princess to you!” I gasped. “In case you forgot, I’m married to Prince Gal! Your cousin!”

My words didn’t have the cooling effect I’d hoped they would. Althrop merely laughed.

“Please. If you can put up with that selfish prick in bed, then you’ll marvel at what I have to offer. I’d make a far better lover than Gal. Just like I’d make a far better king. Can you imagine,” he asked, suddenly sounding almost vengefully gleeful, “what it would be like if I put my baby in the high princess’ belly the same season that the crops failed?”

“Your baby ?! But I’m already… I’m with Galbrath!”

“There’s no need to look at me like that,” he chided. “It’s not like I’d be forcing you. I have very little interest in lying with unwilling women. I’d make sure you enjoyed yourself. Immensely . And even if Gal’s already rutted you, having me knot you now would put doubt into the lineage. At least until the child is born and can be tested for paternity.”

My blood turned to ice in my veins. This no longer seemed like some horny asshole crossing boundaries for shits and giggles. This felt malevolent, far-reaching, meticulously planned.

Althrop wasn’t just trying to make a move on his cousin’s new wife. He was trying to destabilize an entire kingdom.

Fear sloshed inside me, but so did rage. Rage at what Althrop was trying to do to me, but almost even more so, I was furious over what he was trying to do to Galbrath.

“Clearly, you don’t know me very well,” I spat, “because if you think I’m going to stand here and let you use me to betray my husband, you are sorely fucking mistaken.”

Althrop’s smile dropped instantly, his gaze turning vicious.

“Why are you even protecting him?” he demanded, as if he had a right to ask anything of me at this point. “Why are you loyal to him when he doesn’t give a single sea-soaked shit about you? You’re human .” He sneered. “Gal could have had any woman on this planet. Rich, fertile, beautiful. But he turned them all down. He refused to give into his family’s meddling. It’s obvious to anyone with half a brain in their head that he only married you as a sick and twisted joke, a way to get back at them.”

His words landed like blows. They took my breath away, left me reeling. As if sensing this, Althrop’s eyes sharpened keenly and he went in for the kill. “Why do you stand by him now,” he asked with satiny darkness, “when he never even wanted you at all ?”

My eyes filled with tears of humiliation, and in the blurring veil I thought it was a trick of the light at first. The way it looked like a blade had suddenly appeared at Althrop’s throat.

But there was no mistaking that low, familiar voice, metallic with cold fury, that told Althrop to get down on his knees.

“Put the knife, down, Gal. It’s all just a bit of – ah! ”

Althrop cried out as the blade bit down. Thin lines of blood ran from beneath his chin, soaking into the fine linen of his shirt. I’d blinked away the tears, and now I could see Galbrath, a hulking, shirtless, shoeless, demonic presence behind his cousin, one meaty fist around the handle of the blade at Althrop’s throat, the other wrapped around Althrop’s braid, holding his head in place.

“On. Your. Knees.”

Althrop grimaced, then slowly lowered himself to the ground. Galbrath remained standing. In two swift strides he was beside me, then shoving me behind his back as he brandished his long blade at Althrop from the front.

“I haven’t done anything wrong, you know,” Althrop simpered, just as he’d done this afternoon. His eyes cut to me where I peeked out from behind Galbrath’s back. “I was only meeting the high princess out here as she requested. She lured me out here and then tried to seduce me and-”

A sharp twang! filled the air.

Galbrath had smacked him with the flat of his blade. Althrop collapsed to the side, and took a long time to fight his way back up to his knees. As Althrop appeared to oscillate somewhere between puking and passing out, Galbrath crouched down, shoved the point of the blade beneath his cousin’s chin, and whispered, “Put one more lie on my wife’s name and I will slit you throat to belly. You will have no trial and you will have no funeral.” He jabbed the blade forwards, creating a new, bleeding nick under Althrop’s chin.

Then, in a dizzyingly quick movement, especially for someone so big, he shot back up to his feet. With his free hand, he reached behind himself and grasped my shirt, tugging until I was nestled against his back.

“I, Prince Gal of the Orhalla Northlands, charge you, Lord Althrop, with treason.” He shoved his blade back into its place at his belt, took out a small tablet from a pocket in his trousers. “Padreth,” he snarled, “get out here. To the east fields. Ping my tablet’s location. Bring castle guards with you.”

As Galbrath snapped instructions at Padreth and stared at Althrop like he could burn him alive with his eyeballs, my mind was working about a thousand lightyears a second, spinning over questions and words and thoughts. I felt like I was about to figure something out, and something important. Treason. Althrop. The vehicle. The wheat.

I had to stop and stay at a nearby inn , Althrop had said.

I was just out at a field, down by a nearby inn, Galbrath had said. Nothing around it is affected, but out of nowhere the wheat there is suddenly dying away.

“It was him!”

Galbrath shoved his tablet back into his pocket and finally turned back to look at me. His expression was so carved with fury that I couldn’t read any other emotion there right now.

“I think it was Althrop,” I said, my words coming so fast it felt like they were sliding into one another, like people careening down a slope and landing in a pile. “The wheat. You said you don’t know how it’s spreading, right? And that this plague or whatever randomly just popped up at a field by an inn? The exact same inn Althrop just stayed at?”

Something in Galbrath’s dark gaze flickered.

“Check his bike. His… craft. Whatever you call those things,” I said, pointing to the parked vehicle. I knew I was right even before Althrop started scrambling towards the thing, as if he meant to leap up onto it and flee.

I didn’t think I’d ever get tired of watching Galbrath grab Althrop by the braid and slam him down to the ground.

“Stay there or I will pin you to the soil with my blade like the worm you are.” Galbrath’s gaze went back to me. “Luna. It matters very much to me what you think.” For a moment, it felt like it was only us two in the field, only us two in the world. “I am listening.”

“I think… I think he’s using his vehicle to spread something. Some kind of toxin or fungus or… I don’t know. But he was just riding around out here in the middle of a wheat field, alone at night, without his vehicle’s lights on. Like he didn’t want to be discovered. And he was staying at the inn beside the field you told me just started to fail out of nowhere.”

Galbrath kept his blade aimed at Althrop as he kicked the vehicle over onto its side.

“There’s nothing there…. That’s not…” Althrop whined from the ground. Galbrath ignored him, running his free hand all over the underside of the vehicle.

Then, he froze.

A soft click, and he withdrew his hand.

It wasn’t empty. It held a cannister.

At that moment, the sound of many boots tramping down the path towards us crashed through the air.

“Get this to Barrett,” Galbrath said stonily, handing a breathless Padreth the cannister. “And get that ,” he stabbed his knife towards Althrop, “to a cell.”