Page 82 of Trove’s Purpose

She gasped, reeling back. He stilled. Disgust, towards himself this time, filling his belly like a sickly poison.

He’d struck her. His own mate. He’d struck her!

Chee looked at her hand, then at him, but he couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t meet her gaze. He couldn’t see the hatred that he very well deserved.

No, this wouldn’t work. This could never work. She wasn’t a prostitute that would do whatever he told her to. She’d always reach for him. He’d never have full control.

He did the only thing he could think to do.

He ran.

Chapter 26

Chee

“I love him. I just can’t stand him!” Garnet wailed, voice laced with guilt as she sobbed uncontrollably.

“Sweetie, this is normal,” Goldie continued to reassure her sister, looking very much like she was trying not to burst out laughing.

Tanin, while getting dressed that morning, had apparently moved too fast. And Garnet, in full s’skree pregnancy hormone fueled freak out mode, had taken that as a threat to her and her baby. She then threw the closest thing at hand at his face. Which just happened to be a pistol. Garnet’s pistol, in fact.

Fortunately, she hadn’t shot it. She just chucked it like a rock. And Tanin, fully prepared for his pregnant mate’s violent outbursts – it was normal for his kind, after all – had caught the gun neatly out of the air. Garnet then followed it up with a hissing roar that was absolutely not a human instinct, and only after that did her good sense return.

And now she felt terrible because she had attacked her mate, even if she hadn’t succeeded. She was also in this weird headspace where her instincts still considered him a threat. Just from moving too fast, she couldn’t stand him being near her.

Which was why he wasn’t here now. He was off doing work, helping them make their new arrival plans for Heava Yu so they could deliver the painting. They were still in subspace and weren’t due to swing out for another couple days, but it wasn’t too soon to begin planning how they were going to get that painting out when it didn’t fit in the landing shuttle.

He knew Garnet didn’t want him near her, so he was making himself scarce. Garnet had gone to her sister in the medbay because she needed the comfort. And Chee found herself caught between them because she needed to get the bruise on her hand fixed so Trove didn’t see it.

But she had just barely managed to get inside and hadn’t even gotten her request out when Garnet came running in, crying, barely able to get the story out. And naturally, the hormonal pregnant lady took precedence, so she was waiting around while Goldie calmed Garnet.

Humans carrying hybrids usually borrowed the bulk of the pregnancy symptoms from whatever the paternal species was. For human children, that was morning sickness and nesting behaviors and wild hormones and who knew what else depending on the time of the pregnancy. For other species, they tended to downplay the human symptoms, so it was rarely morning sickness, but nesting behaviors were usually ratchetted up.

And then there were things like this.

S’skree females, when carrying, were notoriously protective and violent, even against their mates. They usually didn’t even like other females around themselves. They typically nested and isolated themselves completely, barely letting their mates close enough to bring them food or supplies.

Garnet must have been borrowing heavily from human instincts, however, because she liked having her girls around her, and she liked having her mate at her side. He had scared her a few times and irritated her a few more, but nothing out of the realm of normal pregnancy hormones.

It was the first time she had physically attacked him, and no amount of reassurance from Goldie could make her feel better about this being normal for a s’skree. That Tanin expected it, and probably worse, and he absolutely did not mind that she threw a gun at his face. She just couldn’t stop the guilt of attacking her mate from eating her up.

It made Chee really stare at the mark on her hand.

Right there on the back, at the base of her thumb, a dark mark had formed overnight. It was only getting darker as the morning went on. It was decently sized, and if she moved her thumb too much it ached a little bit. Honestly, she’d hurt herself worse bumping into things on accident. On the whole, it wasn’t too bad.

But she just kept seeing that look on Trove’s face when he realized he hit her…

No, not just then. From the moment he threw himself away from her, there had been something about him that was just… terrified.

Yeah, that was the word. In the dimness of his incredibly spartan room, he’d looked at her like she was threatening everything he loved and held dear. Like a child, terrified and trembling, meeting a monster in the darkness.

She felt like a monster. He was little more than a wild animal driven into a corner, afraid for its life, and somehow she had put that look on his face. She didn’t understand it, but when she reached for him, wanting just to calm him down, he’d lashed out and left this bruise on her.

And she didn’t blame him. Like Tanin with Garnet, she couldn’t be mad because he was just so scared at the time. A primal kind of fear. The kind that went beyond reason. The kind that was so deeply ingrained, it left harsher scars than even the one across her face.

Chee had wanted to get to know him, and this was what she found. She couldn’t be mad that he had lashed out at her. That kind of fear, that kind of bone deep terror, would make a person know nothing else, know no other way to react. She just needed to figure out who that person was. Why they reacted that way.

Who was Trove, and why was he so deeply scarred?