To The Princess Bound (43 page)

“Stay here,” Victory told her Praetorian.  “I’m going to go see if I can find the Emp.”

“Wait!” Lion cried.  “Now is your chance, Princess.  Set the two of us free, and we will deal with the natives for you.”

Victory hesitated, glancing into the bedroom, where she suspected he kept the rest of his keys.

“Just stay here,” she said.  “I’ll be back.”  She left to the dismayed shouts of her Praetorian.

An Open Heart

Dragomir was seated beside the creek, allowing the smooth flow of energy there to calm him, when he heard footsteps at his back.  Immediately, he shielded himself, not wanting to deal with Thor’s anger at this point.

“I’m not gonna go swinging from a tree, if that’s what you’re worried about, Thor,” he growled, without looking.

The footsteps stopped, but Thor did not reply.

“That girl…”  Dragomir’s voice cracked.  “That
princess
needs me.”  He dropped his head to stare at his lap.  “She’s my soul-half, you know.”  He made a disgusted sound.  “And she hates my guts.”  Flipping a hand at the trail behind him, he said, “Hell, she’s probably back at the house right now, freeing her Praetorian.  Didn’t hide the key that well—just under the sack of potatoes, ‘cause you and I
know
how much she loves those—but she’s smart.  Probably won’t take her long.”  He felt a sob welling up from within before he fought it down again.  “She hates me, Thor.  She’s the other half of my spirit and she can’t even see that I’m trying to help her.”

Silence.  Not even a snort.

Dragomir sighed.  “She asked me to check her past lives.  I thought it was a mistake, but it’s her.  I just haven’t been able to
feel
it because her damned
ramas
are blocked, and each one I get open just makes me more and more horny…  Like a toad-licking teenager.  I feel that energy within her and my heart sings.”

Thor continued to wait, his disapproval clear.

“So no,” Dragomir growled, “I’m not going to go swinging from a tree.  I got that first rama opened and I got scared she was gonna be another Meggie.  I can’t take a hurt like that again, Thor.” 

Thor said nothing, waiting. 

“But I realized something,” Dragomir said, watching the creek.  “She’s not like Meggie, Thor.  She’s much, much worse.  If I get her ramas open, and anything happens to her, it’s going to shatter my very soul.”  He picked up a rock and threw it into the churning water.  He felt his own misery welling up from within.  “All that, and I don’t even have a guarantee that she’s going to like me afterwards.  Hell—” he snorted.  “She doesn’t even like me
now
.  Every chance she gets, she tells me I’m an uncouth peasant
cad
.”  He snorted.  “She thinks I’ve abducted her, and she’s constantly complaining about everything—as if I could somehow wave my pretty green Emp magic wand and make the food taste less plain, or the floor to be stone, instead of dirt, or there to be more blankets in the house.”  He lowered his head again, the misery beginning to hurt.  “I can’t give her what she grew up with, Thor.  If you gave me a thousand years to work towards it, I can’t give her that.”  He drew a shuddering breath at that fact.  “She’s a princess.  I’m a pauper.  Once I open her ramas, she’s going to move on.”

Thor had nothing to say.

“And yet, the moment I open the rest of her ramas, I’m going to lose myself in her.  There’s a soul-connection there, Thor.  I checked.  Bigger than anything I ever thought possible.  It’s why we keep finding each other.  But I heal her and it’s going to take on a life of its own.  It’s dormant now, but if she’s fixed…  That link’ll go active, Thor.  And for an Emp, that’s…”  He swallowed, hard.  “I’m going to lose myself in her, and she’s going to walk away.”

Silence.

“And it’s going to be bad, Thor,” Dragomir said.  “There’s so much hurt stored in her heart rama…  It’s gonna be worse than all the others put together.”  He threw another rock into the creek.  “If she even lets me do it.”

“I’ll let you do it,” Victory said softly.

Dragomir froze, his spine suddenly on fire.  He watched the creek for several minutes, praying that he had somehow misheard.  Very slowly, he turned to look at his visitor for the first time.

Victory stood there, watching him.  At his accusing look, she gave him a sheepish grin.  “My father taught me that silence was often a person’s best tool in a discussion.”

Dragomir grunted and turned away, embarrassed and ridiculously joyful at the same time.

To his surprise, she came to sit beside him.  Willingly.  Not more than two feet away.

Gingerly, Dragomir released his shields so he could feel her.

She was happy…and scared.

Instinctively, he fed energy to her
au
and her womb rama—but
not
her core.  The only time an Emp could ever do that,
ever
, without taking a huge black mark in his Karmic tablet, was if she were his mate, and already utterly devoted to him.  Which, Dragomir thought bitterly, was a
long
ways off, even in his wildest dreams.

“Thank you,” she whispered, once he had finished calming her
au.

“It’s what I do,” Dragomir said, returning his attention to the stream.

They sat there together for a moment before she said, “I’m sorry I complain.  I’ll try to stop.”

Dragomir sighed and glanced down at the riverbed between his knees.  “Princess, that still leaves us with the fact that your home is a palace, and mine is a stone-and-sod cottage a couple hundred miles from any major road.”  He hurled another stone, irritated.  “I
need
to help you.”  He turned to look at her.  “…but the moment I finish helping you, I’m going to be lost.”

She met his gaze, her green eyes beautiful.  They were warm with understanding.  “You could come back to the palace with me.”

Dragomir’s heart sang at that simple offer, but he stifled it violently.  “And be what?  Your manservant?  Your
slave?
”

She grimaced and looked away.

Softly, Dragomir said, “Princess, once I get your last rama open and I have direct access to your soul, I’m going to make a connection of my own.  I won’t be able to help it.  We’ve had too many lives together for me to fight the instinct.”  Even then, he could feel the wisps of energy drifting from their ramas, twining down that massive dormant connection, reaching for each other, but with her ramas closed, it was like wisps of smoke trying to knot together.  Once she opened up to him, though, the gods themselves wouldn’t be able to stop that massive cord that would snap into place between them.

When she looked up at him, frowning, he continued, “It will be like your brother’s, but stronger.  A
thousand
times stronger, at least for me.  You will become my entire world, the other half of my soul.  I’d be willing to die for you, in an instant.”  He hesitated, scanning her eyes.  “You, not being an Emp, might not even feel it.”  He made a disgusted laugh and flopped backwards on the creekbank.  He tucked his hands under his head to stare up at the sky.  “So there’s my dilemma.  You need my help.  I’m afraid of giving it.”

“Well,” Victory said softly, “So far, you’ve been the only man whose presence I can continuously withstand.  If I—”

Dragomir shook his head.  “No.  That’s what I’m going to fix.”  He twisted his head to look at her.  “Believe me, Princess, you’d be free to fall in love and make babies with any Royal out there…  And it would break my heart.”  He grunted and turned back to face the sky.  “But what can a peasant do about something like that?”

“Nothing,” Victory whispered.  Whether she was saying it to him or herself, it wasn’t clear.

“I’m going to help you,” Dragomir said.  “I can’t
not
help you.  It’s what I’m here to do, this life.  Just, when I
do
do it, don’t expect me to stick around for long.”

And, by the way her eyes widened, she knew that he wasn’t talking about simply walking off to go cool down beside a stream.

Victory had hesitated, hearing him address her as his brother, but had found his admissions too tempting to resist.  She had stayed silent, shamefully, and listened to him pour out his deepest worries to what he thought was his brother.

Now she was sitting beside him, still aglow with the warm energy he had wrapped her in, and he was telling her that he could not only alleviate her fears, but was going to end his own life, once he had.

After several minutes of her silence, Dragomir sighed and got to his feet.  “I’ll finish with your ramas soon, Princess.  Not today—I’m still exhausted from opening your womb rama—but soon.  Until then, I’m gonna take those blankets the Cooper boys left and make you a nice bed on the couch.”

Then, without another word, he turned to depart.

Victory wanted to call out to him, wanted to say something to reassure him, but she could find nothing.  She could promise nothing.  She was a Royal Princess of the Imperium.  She couldn’t make such promises to a peasant.

She sat, watching the stream, wondering why that disturbed her so much.  A month before, she couldn’t have cared less about the life of a peasant.  After all—it was the peasants, in their hatred and ignorance—that had dedicated six years of their lives to hurting her.

But now…

Now, it bothered her beyond reason.

She spent another hour at the stream, picking at the stones, before she finally sighed and got up to go back.  She meandered, stopping to look up at big trees, to pluck blades of grass, to kick at dead leaves.  Through it all, she tried to think.  She knew there had to be a way to satisfy both of them.  Yes, he was beautiful, both in body and—she was beginning to think—soul.  But a
mate
for her?  She just didn’t see it.  She couldn’t picture herself sharing that bond with a man.  It wasn’t…necessary.

She was a royal, after all.  Royals couldn’t afford the same emotional attachments as peasantry.

When Victory finally rounded the last copse of trees, she saw the dark shape of a ship squatting behind the stone cottage.  It carried no markings, and for a heart-fluttering moment, she thought it belonged to her brother.

Then she saw Thor and Dragomir kneeling in the yard, their fingers laced behind their heads.  The three men gunmen behind them were
not
of her brother’s service.  These were dirty, bronze-skinned natives, wearing motley colors and showing very little discipline.  One of the three gunmen was picking something out of his teeth with one hand, his gun limp in the other.

They made the brothers put their hands behind their backs, then cinched them together with double bands of zip-ties.  They pushed them forward, chests to the ground, and put their muddy boots between their shoulder-blades.

As Victory watched, a fourth gunman emerged from the inside of the cottage, dragging Whip behind him, hand fisted in her short black hair.  As soon as she saw the fourth man, her knees lost their strength.  Victory’s stomach twisted with the memories of being chained to that post, and it was everything she could do not to turn and run at the sight of his piggish face and powerful build.

You have to do something,
Victory thought, watching the man drop Whip down in front of the two brothers, on her knees.  He walked slowly around her kneeling form, grinning as he sized her up like some expensive cow.  Victory knew what would come next.  She had experienced it herself, more times than she could count.  Quickly, before she could convince herself better of it, she started looping around back, staying out of sight of the men in the yard, creeping up to the gaping, open windows at the back of the house.