Drakkal frowned when the terran embassy came into view through the hovercar’s windshield. The building was smaller than many of those surrounding it, and it was plainer too—the terrans seemed to have favored function over form in its construction. It was surrounded by stretches of green grass and neatly trimmed shrubbery that he assumed were from Earth. At least two dozen colorful flags flew from tall posts, the central one being the largest. For the first time, he found himself wondering what his mate’s homeworld—his daughter’s ancestral point of origin—looked like.
He made a mental note to look it up later, but there were more pressing concerns to occupy him now.
“You’re sure about this,kiraia?” he asked, well aware that he was repeating himself.
Fortunately, Shay took it in stride—even though she had every reason to be annoyed with him by now. “I’m sure. Like I said, I want her to start off right. This is where that happens.”
Drakkal nodded and followed the hovering markers toward the parking complex beneath the embassy. He trusted Arcanthus’s work as much as he trusted Arcanthus himself—unquestionably—but it was always best to avoid putting forgeries to the test whenever possible. Their ID chips would be scanned here, and those scans would be run through both Terran and Consortium systems. Even the slightest discrepancy could be enough to rouse suspicion.
He glanced over his shoulder to see Leah, smiling and wide-eyed, staring out the windows in wonder. She’d grown so much in the four months since her birth. She was still tiny, but she was on track to have doubled her birth weight within another month or two, and he couldn’t help but find her chubbiness—dubbed baby fat by Sam and Shay—adorable. Every day, she grew a little stronger, advanced a little further.
She could already push her chest up and hold her head high when she was lying on the floor. She’d be crawling before long. His pride for Leah was already immense, and it only grew along with her. Though some might’ve said she was too young to display it, Drakkal saw her mother’s strength in the little cub just as clearly as he could see the blue of her eyes.
His concerns about coming here were justified, he knew, but Shay’s concerns were equally valid. Leah deserved a chance at a normal life. Whatever Drakkal could do to ensure that was the case, he would. Right now, that meant having her officially added to the records of her people. That meant having her legally obtain her citizenship.
They entered the parking complex without incident, and Drakkal pulled the hovercar into an open spot. He turned his head and met Shay’s gaze. She smiled at him. The gratitude in her eyes made him forget his worries, if only for a few seconds.
She’d been growing stronger over the last few months, too. They were fortunate to have people around them who, despite their professions and backgrounds, were eager to help with Leah, allowing Shay and Drakkal some time to themselves.Shay had been working out regularly and often trained with Thargen—both in the simulation chambers and in hand-to-hand combat. Drakkal’s grumblings hadn’t been enough to stop the latter, but he knew Shay wasn’t in any real danger.
Thargen could be a bit unstable sometimes, but he was a good person at heart. And his friendship with Shay was rivaled only by his friendship with Urgand.
But the gym and training rooms hadn’t been the only places Shay had been exercising. Though it wasn’t always easy to find time together, she and Drakkal couldn’t keep their hands off one another when they were close. The more they mated, the more they craved one another, and sometimes the wait between those wild encounters was more unbearable than those weeks after Shay had first run from Drakkal.
He suspected it was another of his instincts at work. Once she’d healed from giving birth, Drakkal’s body seemed to have recognized her readiness to breed and had worked itself into a frenzy over it—apparently unaffected by the fact that she’d received a contraceptive shot to prevent pregnancy until they’d deemed themselves ready for another cub. That drive to mate with her hadn’t diminished even slightly.
“It’s going to be fine,” Shay said, settling a hand on Drakkal’s thigh.
Even now, her touch lit a fire in him, and he squeezed his eyes shut for a few seconds to steady himself. “I know.”
But as he killed the engines, his stresses reintroduced themselves, poking in from around the edges of his conscious mind. It had been a little more than three months since his last run-in with Vanya—three quiet months. He and Arcanthus had tried to track her down numerous times, and each attempt had come up with nothing. There was no record of her anywhere, not even on the surveillance feeds in which she should’ve appeared—the recording from the Ventrillian Mall showed Drakkalspeaking to nothing but a barely perceptible distortion in the holo.
That was troubling. There was technology that could cause such effects—that could essentially erase people and objects from surveillance feeds—but it was expensive, and it was rarely used outside of military operations and well-funded criminal organizations.
Who was Vanya working for to have had access to that kind of equipment?
The possibilities had kept Drakkal awake long after lying down in bed on more than one night, but they were too numerous to narrow down. It was most likely that she was still working as a slaver. That provided no comfort. The Inner Reach Syndicate, the powerful crime organization that had caused so much trouble and suffering for Arcanthus and Drakkal in the past, was immensely influential and wealthy, and they had several large slaving operations on their payroll.
Drakkal had no desire to tangle with the Syndicate again, especially not so soon after the incident with Vaund. Just the thought of it made his missing left arm ache.
Something was going to happen. Even if it had been twenty years since he’d lived with Vanya, he knew her well enough to understand that she didn’t make idle threats. She would act. But when, where? And what would she do?
He covered Shay’s hand with his own, giving it a little squeeze before he opened his door and climbed out of the vehicle. Shay exited on her side and collected Leah from her harnessed safety seat.
“All right,” Drakkal said as he met his females at the back of the hovercar, “let’s go be law-abiding citizens for a little while.”
Shay grinned. “The first step in a new chapter, right Kitty?”
Leah smiled up at her mother and giggled—it was her newfavorite sound and remained the sweetest thing Drakkal had heard since the first time she’d made it.
Heart swelling, he wrapped his arm around Shay’s shoulders and smiled down at his cub. “It is,kiraia.”
They walked to the elevators together and rode them up to the embassy’s main lobby, a space with a high ceiling around the edges of which hung the same flags as outside. Drakkal didn’t allow his nervousness to affect him outwardly, but he didn’t breathe easily until they’d cleared the security checkpoint and entered the embassy proper. Their IDs—including Shay’s previously untested alias—passed the terran inspection and scan, and the Eternal Guard peacekeeper working with the terran security team waved them through with a look of disinterest on her face.
One of the guards pointed Shay in the proper direction, and she and Drakkal walked down a long hallway into an office with a big waiting room. The real challenge began after Shay had checked in at the desk—the waiting.
Even though there were fewer than a dozen other people in the waiting room, hours crawled by. Soon enough, Leah was fussy and restless, and Shay had no choice but to take the cub into the corner to feed her. Drakkal loomed beside her, glaring at the few other terrans who dared eye his mate judgmentally. Those who made that mistake once did not repeat it after hearing the azhera growl.
Eventually, Leah fell asleep on Drakkal’s shoulder. He sympathized with his daughter; he was restless, but it was mixed with weariness from a long, boring wait. Not long after Leah had succumbed, Shay leaned against Drakkal’s arm, slipped an arm around his middle, and closed her eyes.