“Well?” Evon asked. His family had served the Coalition Fleet for generations. Even now, he and his sister Thalia both served the IQC here in the north. Evon’s black uniform and short blond hair indicated his allegiance to Sector 2. But the red band around his biceps, around all of our arms, meant we were Royal Guard. We belonged to all of Viken now, not just our home sectors. And like other warriors on our planet who’d fought the Hive and returned, we were beyond Sector politics now. These two were my most trusted allies. We’d fought the Hive together and survived. Returned whole. They were tough as nails, hardcore killers. And they were both lovesick fools.
“By the gods, I want to punch you right now,” I grumbled as I wiped a hand over my face. Fuck, it had been so real. Her skin. The soft sounds of her surrender.
By the gods, perhaps I was as big a fool as these two.
I glanced down at the front of my steel-gray uniform, relieved that no wet spot there revealed the depths of pleasure I’d just experienced, and would be denied forever. I’d come in the dream, but no seed coated my pants like a teenager and his first wet dream. I had no idea how it was possible, but I was glad I wasn’t humiliating myself in front of the doctor and my friends. Had they had a similar experience when they were processed for the Interstellar Bride Program? We’d been told it would be mild, a hazy experience that we might not even remember.
So why did I clench my fist to lock the softness of soft skin to me? Had it affected Liam and Evon so intensely? Or was I simply a freak for wanting a mate so badly I was willing to break with centuries of tradition and follow the new order of three warriors sharing a bride, as our kings did. Evon argued that we would have a much higher chance of finding a mate together. Perhaps he was correct. But we were different, we three. And I could not imagine a mate who could accept all of us. It was little more than a child’s dream.
A mate? The possessive joy that a warrior had felt when he looked on his woman, conquered her, fucked her? That would never be mine. And now I knew exactly what I was missing. “You’re an asshole, Evon. I never should have agreed to this.”
I expected the doctor to leave the room, but he seemed occupied at the control panel, so all three of us ignored him as Evon responded. “Why?”
I looked from his pale blue, ice-like eyes to Liam’s dark blue gaze and shook my head. “This is never going to fucking work. No woman is going to be matched to all three of us.”
It was simply impossible. Liam was from Sector 1, where women were claimed in public. Sector 1 males were obsessed with public fucking and conquering and pleasuring a woman by taking her in the ass in front of everyone. In their sector, that kind of claiming was the ultimate show of submission by their women. A gift given to a worthy warrior. A gift only given through the deepest trust, the most pure consent. Love.
And then there was Evon, who always had to be in command. His sector demanded total submission from a woman, albeit in private. Bondage. Surrender. The warriors there lived for complete and total control. Evon would want a female who would submit, trust him absolutely and yield to his every desire. To place her power, her life and her pleasure into his hands and rely on him to care for her in every possible way.
Me? I cared not about any of those needs. Like most warriors from Sector 3, I simply wanted to feast on a woman’s sweet pussy before I filled her with my seed. I wanted to see her full lips wrapped around my cock as she loved me with her tongue, gifted me, allowed me to fuck her mouth just as I loved to have my fill of the honeyed nectar of her feminine heat. I was patient, could take hours working a woman’s body with my mouth, linger over her delectable scent, drive her to mindless ecstasy with my tongue over and over before I fucked her and made her mine.
“It worked for the kings.” Evon’s cold, analytical tone was one I’d heard many times, usually when we were prepping for battle. And this felt like that. The stakes were high. A matched mate? An end to our lonely existence? High stakes, indeed.
“We’re not kings. We’re not at Viken United. We’re stuck in this ice-covered nightmare of a work station. What fucking female is going to want to come here?” Liam walked to my side and leaned his hips against the exam table, facing the doctor. He crossed his arms. “Rager’s right, Evon. This was a foolish hope.”
Yes, he was correct. The Northern Station was surrounded by icy tundra for hundreds of miles. But the planet relied on the communication station to relay transport and messages from the Coalition Fleet and other member planets. The technical name was Interstellar Quantum Communications array, or the IQC. We were Royal guard, IQC officers, and this station was Viken’s link to the rest of the universe. Without it, we’d be stranded in a sea of black space with no way to contact the others, no way to send our warriors to battle the Hive, nor receive brides. No transport. No comms. Nothing but empty, blank space.