Alien General's Bride: SciFi Alien Romance (Brion Brides) (20 page)

He wasn’t entirely sure if Urenya saw through the lie of their binding. As he entered, and the other healers bowed out of their way, leaving him alone with his friend, the look on her face told him everything.

“It is awfully nice of you,” the healer said, “to leave her be.”

“She needs time,” Diego huffed, wishing he could believe that.

“Yes,” Urenya agreed simply.

That was it?
To be honest, Diego hadn’t thought she’d support that view, but she was a healer, which in Brion culture also meant being wise in spiritual matters, so she would know.

“You think she will see our way?” he asked in surprise.

“It is the truth, after all,” Urenya said, not even lifting her eyes to look up from her work with something bubbling Diego couldn’t name. The medical bay was more brightly lit than the rest of the ship, and being there always took a toll on his eyes. Urenya seemed used to it.

“She is human,” Diego said. “She has her own ways.”

“That she may,” Urenya replied, smiling, “but we know the truth. She is your
gesha
and that is it.”

Diego nodded. He’d known that, but it was still nice to hear it confirmed. He left it unsaid that he feared Isolde might simply ignore the pull of the eternal bind between them by strength of will. It wasn’t a Terran custom, far from it. A part of him understood, at least theoretically, that she had to keep to her own culture. He had, after all.

A question tugged at his mind. Urenya would know for sure.

“Has a
gesha
ever truly refused?” he asked. “Or a
gerion
refused to admit the bond?”

He couldn’t see a reason for it, now knowing firsthand the unbearable need to be close to Isolde. Her being Terran explained mostly everything about their situation, but with the precedent they were about to set – as much in secret as possible – he was actually interested whether it really would be the first.

“Rarely,” Urenya said simply.

If Diego hadn’t been completely in control of the image he portrayed to others, as befitting a Brion general, his mouth would have dropped open. He searched for words to properly express his disbelief, but Urenya shot him a single look and continued.

“We are all surprised as well when the healer Elders tell us this,” she said. “The reasons are what you would expect – sometimes the
gesha
and the
gerion
are so repulsive to each other they simply override their instincts with pure refusal to give in, as is natural.

In the sadder cases – much more common, although altogether they both count for a marginal part of a single percent – only one of them refuses the binding. It is pretty hard to ascertain the cases where the
gerion
never even tells the
gesha
who they are, but later in their life, when they join the Elders or when the mate is dead, things like this tend to turn up.”

Diego tried to fit that information into his view of the world, but it felt like a piece of a puzzle mixed into the wrong pile. For a moment, he felt true sympathy for Isolde, for whom this whole ordeal had to feel like that.

“You mean like broken
geshas
?” he asked, intrigued. “A false binding?”

“No,” Urenya said patiently. “Broken
geshas
are a delusion of a binding, a sad case of someone thinking the binding is real when it never was. It’s a disease, plaguing those who can’t control their minds. Refusal concerns a
real
binding.”

“Why don’t we hear more of things like this?” Diego demanded. “And why are you telling me this, now of all times?”

“Firstly,” Urenya said seriously, setting aside her bubbly experiment and moving on to another console, where a body lay under a dark grey cloth, and beginning an autopsy. “It is an
extremely
private matter. I am very happy with Narath, as I should be. I cannot imagine thinking him so utterly abhorrent to me that I would have to fight my very being, or worse, him thinking that of me.

It is understandable why no one wishes to discuss this. So the Elders respect their silence. As for why you and why now…” she went on, hands deep in the dead warrior’s chest cavity, looking Diego straight in the eye. His childhood friend, who knew him better than all the others.

“You need to hear this right now. You are on the verge of being refused. I’m telling you two things. One – she is, indeed, human and clearly disapproving of all this. It would not be surprising to anyone if she became a part of the miraculously small group that never binds to her mate. Before you glare at me, Commander… two – I do not believe that.”

Diego left the med bay more shaken than he’d ever been. Urenya’s words had struck several cords that kept ringing in his mind. He trusted Urenya. A
gerion
could read his mate better than anyone, but he could not easily discard the healer’s opinion. She was a woman, and a wise woman at that. If the meeting had given her any sign of Isolde’s true feelings, he would take her word for it.

He also felt like he’d been blasted off his feet. So far, he’d lived with the certainty that fated mates always found each other in the end. He’d prepared for hardship, for Isolde’s stubbornness, for a long future full of suffering before Isolde relented and gave in to the binding.

That certainty taken from him – if Brions could rebel against the bond, why not a human who had so much more reason – Diego Grothan was left in the hands of hope alone.
 

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Diego

The next time Isolde saw her general, the change was obvious, even if she couldn’t put her finger on what exactly gave him away. Something was different; she only wished she knew what. His eyes when he looked at her were somehow more intense than ever before. Isolde found herself unable to break his gaze.

“The time has come,” Diego said. “Things have taken an ugly turn. We can no longer delay our journey to Briolina, but it is clear that the Elders will not emerge in time to put this all to order. Questions have been raised and we have to be there to answer them in person. If we arrive too late and Senator Eren has had time to secure his base, we will not get to speak a word before being shot to pieces by the orbital defense systems.”

“I thought the Brions didn’t favor long-range weaponry,” Isolde murmured.

Diego looked like someone introducing her to a really unpleasant relative. “The senators installed it,” he managed to say. “I can see… its uses. I would not have thought they would use it against their own people, but I no longer doubt they would. Eleya is buying us time, but we must make haste now.”

Isolde nodded. They’d been in space long enough for her taste. She longed to feel real ground beneath her feet, even if it was Briolina, a planet
very
hostile towards her.

“In the meanwhile,” Diego continued, “our arrangement,” – Isolde noticed how he refused to call it the lie that it was – “has to be made public to the Galactic Union. They cannot be the last to know, and I would rather not give the senators a chance to serve it up their own way. It would be better if the Brion people knew of it as well before we land.”

This is it. I am the alien bride now. Oh god, I’m gonna be in Terran gossip columns. Thank heavens that I don’t have to bring the son-in-law to dinner. I don’t think my parents would have approved.

“I agree,” Isolde said, nodding. At least this she could be certain about, if not her feelings towards Diego.

They are clear enough
, something in her protested.

“I think it’s a good idea,” she went on. “If we have any hope of wiping the Rhea situation under the carpet, the more attention on us, the better. Less on what we
do
on Rhea and more on us as a couple.”

She saw the general tense and it wasn’t a comfortable thought for her either. As days went by, it was becoming more and more difficult to ignore the burning need inside her. At least she got to retreat to her own rooms after a public performance of the alien newlywed and cool off her raging heart that wanted nothing more than to have Diego bend her over the first horizontal surface and make her scream.

He was nodding, agreeing with her. “Eleya advised that too. All attention on the inter-species couple, and perhaps the galaxy will let our inner feuds be and not look too closely at Rhea.”

Isolde wanted to roll her eyes very badly. While a larger part of her was concerned about whether Eleya was double-crossing them, a smaller mused,
It says something about galactic priorities if this works out. Some things are the same all over the universe. Scandals outshine wars and actual problems.

“So it would be wise if we no longer lived in separate rooms. You have had time to adjust to life on a Brion ship, and as you are my
gesha
now,” – the pain was audible – “you should move to my quarters.”

No. Nononono. Bad idea. Very bad. So tempting, but –
  to
live in your room? Be around you all the time? We… I… I don’t know if I can
resist
bear it.

From the look in his eyes, she guessed Diego got most of that. The lines on his face, already hardened by years of war, drew even tighter.

“In private, things will remain the same.”

Isolde didn’t believe him, not for a second. Not because she thought he’d willingly lie to her, but because the part of her that seemed to be more woman than the rest was heating up fast. And if
she
felt like someone had turned up the heat in the room by considerable measure, she couldn’t even imagine what the general must have been feeling.

She would live in his rooms, see him change if he didn’t take meticulous steps to hide from her sight. She’d get a daily, nightly dose of seeing that to die for body, how his hair looked like wet after he’d showered, feel his maddening presence. But it was what they’d agreed on, after all. Better she get practice on the ship where they could still allow themselves a few minor mistakes than on Briolina, where every set of eyes was bound to be on them.

And so Isolde Fenner the alien bride moved to her new fake alien husband’s rooms.

--

Diego’s quarters were nothing like hers.

That in itself wasn’t very surprising. He was the commander of the ship, after all. For one, his rooms were many, connected by a single greater arena-like area, where he presumably hosted guests important enough to warrant an invitation to the general’s private rooms.

Isolde walked slowly through all of them, mouth wide in shameless surprise. She’d have thought Diego’s rooms to be Spartan, or on the contrary, really lavish like some palace. In truth, they looked like a place where someone lived. Isolde’s room had seemed lifeless to her when she’d first boarded, but had come alive as she spent most of her time there.

Diego’s rooms were filled with things he liked and things he’d won – weapons displays, trophy cloaks, an instrument that made strange music, personal items Isolde steered clear of to not intrude. She wondered what she was – a thing Diego liked or a thing he’d won? At the moment, she wasn’t sure she was either.

The more she saw, the more she was amazed at how… normal it all looked.

Who would have guessed? Diego Grothan is… a person.

A person he could be, but he was also a Brion general. The walls were lined with sharp-edged weapons, some clearly recently used. Isolde didn’t know if she’d imagined it, but some seemed to still vaguely smell of blood, heavier and muskier than a human’s, but still recognizable. There were stuffed beasts that he’d killed. Isolde found herself staring at a huge bear-like but mammoth-sized muscular horror, with teeth like swords.

She didn’t even have to ask. A warrior never mounted anything in their rooms that wasn’t a personal kill or achievement, which meant that at some point in his life, Diego had faced off with the thing that looked like it could swallow Isolde whole with little trouble – and won.

The beast hardly turned her on, but Isolde could no longer deny – in fact, no longer bothered to deny – that she desired him with an almost mindless desperation. She’d read a lot about the Brions in the course of her studies, but she wasn’t willing to rule out that they left quite a few things undisclosed when it came to the binding of which humans had no firsthand experience. Was it like a drug?

Why was every second in his company harder to bear than the one before? Harder to bear when out of his arms, that was. Close to him, his skin against hers, peace came to ease all the torment. Isolde found it increasingly difficult to think around him, or do anything at all but
long
. She started to forget why she was resisting in the first place.

Remember? All those people they killed. Those cold, heartless bastards. The fact he’d have shot you as well if you weren’t his fated?