Taken to Nobu (Xiveri Mates, #2)

by Elizabeth Stephens

To women. Our untold power and unsung resilience.

I’d believed her then. And then I grew up and I was hunted by aliens, viciously claimed by the worst of them, left for dead, and Mama tried to remind me that the stars were still there, still watching…but I know the truth. The stars don’t care about us.

The stars don’t care about us.

There are no aliens here. Just a cactus and its bloom, and a pressure in my chest right below the beat of my heart that tells me one thing: Death will have to wait.

pace. I thought I was a warrior, but I’m realizing that even if I could outfight either of the females with me, they were born in this place. Or at least they know it like a parent, and they treat it like kin. Even when the white powder falls in our path and we sink into it up to the knees, they just calmly wade through it, like the cold white is nothing more than dry leaves dancing in a summer breeze.

Even caked in pink mire and the copper blood of my kind, the sight of her catches me. I stumble. I am my nation’s Okkari and yet, I stumble before my queen like an infant.

Warriors far larger and more fearsome than she have withered beneath the coming of the Okkari. I am known. But she does not know me. So she fights me without context, without history. A fight I have not fought since I was a kit. Since I was Kinan. I am impressed, proud and above all else, grateful.

Deep indigo desire, blue pleasure, canary uncertainty, a darker shame.

I am lost to her. Completely. Nothing more than driftwood, washed up onto paradise’s shore.

I pull her against me and onto my lap and I clutch her to my chest so tight so that she might know that she is a part of it and I would no sooner strike her than I would my own flesh.

“I don’t hate you.” Startled, I have no answer for her. She blinks up at me. “I hate me.”

the one who calls himself mine even though I know nothing about him. Nothing but the oasis he takes me to, that impossible cane-and-root breeze.

White for surprise. Red for rage. Yellow for shame. Grey for grief. Blue for happiness. Purple for desire…

“Enough,” he says and there is so much in that one word that it hollows out my insides. I close my eyes. I follow his deep, even breath with my breath. “He cannot harm you. Nothing can.”

“And I will have your name, Okkari. Eventually.” “Do not make me wait. I wish to hear it on your tongue,” he says, breath forming clouds in the cold. “And I do not wish to wait long.”

“Is it acceptable for me to ask you a question?” In the mirror’s gaze, I stare into hers, watching as her alien eyes blink. I tell her something I should have told her solars ago, the day that we met. A small crack of truth in the veneer of my hate, paper thin yet capable of unraveling the entirety of it. “You are my equal. You don’t ever have to ask.”

Sand swirls softly around my ankles. My head tilts to the side onto mama’s thigh. I’d fall asleep if she wasn’t tugging on my hair something fierce. But every time she calls me brave, I’m reminded that I am and don’t cry.

We are not leaders, not right now. Right now, we are merely Kiki and Kinan.

“Because I will never fuck you. You are too precious for that. Tonight I will breed you and I will do it as Kinan for this is my slave name and I am nothing if not a slave to you.”

“I cover your flesh with my flesh. I cover your heart with my hearts. I am claiming you. You are my servant, you are my king, you are my blade. And I am your Xiveri, Xhea to your people, future mother to your kits. With this union, I promise to be your shield. I promise to honor you. Forever.”

“Hexa. You have lost many fights and you will lose many more. But you will not lose this one.”

“He will attempt to humiliate you. Control your anger, bottle your pride, find his weakness, and when he laughs, remember the truth. That he is nothing.”

That was another male, another me, another history. This one I write myself.

Fear is what hurts us. Blood is nothing.

“You are Peixal, the worthless. And that is all you will ever be known as to me. And you can be sure that I will be the last soul alive who remembers you. I will never speak of you to anyone and when I die, you will be forgotten. It will be like you never even lived.”

“Yeah. I’m your Ziv-whatever. Your mate. You’re not fighting today, and you’re not going into exile.”

This still sends me