Her Viken Mates. Grace Goodwin
The doctor chuckled. “No one ever does.”
I sat up as Evon and Liam both came to a stop a few feet in front of me. Loomed over me so I had to look up. I was bigger than both of them, but the testing chair made me feel small, made me feel fucking vulnerable.
“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.
We could survive, in theory. The planet would provide, that wasn’t a concern, for we’d survived for a millennia before the Hive menace rose to unite the planets behind the warriors of Prillon Prime. It was the Prillon warriors who’d first faced the Hive and they’d fought the longest. The Hive was a menace and the IQC array, our comms and transport capabilities, were crucial to keeping the planet free of them.
What we did here was important, and every warrior assigned to the IQC had been chosen because we knew exactly what was at stake. We had all fought in the war, seen the Hive and their horrors with our own eyes. But hearing Liam agree with me didn’t improve my mood. Apparently, it didn’t improve Evon’s either.
“When I’m right, I’m going to make you both beg me to touch her.” The heated desire in Evon’s eyes made me grin.
“Is that supposed to be a threat, Evon? Because you’re such a controlling fuck, I figured that was how it would be anyway.” I laughed then, because Liam chuckled at my declaration, and he rarely laughed at all.
“He’s right, you know.” Liam’s chuckle faded to a grin, but his eyes remained all too serious. And there, in that stormy gaze, was Liam’s soul on display. Evon was the strategist, but Liam was the realist. He’d lost his family, grown up hard, the son of a VSS leader. The damn VSS. Our own internal enemy. Worse than the Hive, in a way, since they were Vikens—traitors—who wanted to see a return to civil war, to separate nations now united by the three kings. They’d already tried to assassinate the heir, the Princess Allayna, and return Viken to chaos.
Liam’s father was a leader of the Viken Sector Separatists, one of the men behind the attack on the new princess. By then, Liam was already long gone from the VSS influence. When Liam landed in prison as a teen, and then volunteered to serve in the Coalition Fleet battling the Hive, his family disowned him. He had no blood left, for even his mother hadn’t spoken to him in years. And in Sector 1, family was everything. We were his family now. His only family.
Liam lifted his hand to rest on Evon’s shoulder. “We know you, Evon. You get one look at a mate and you’ll start barking orders like we’re back on Noerzen 5 facing down Hive berserkers.”
That battle had almost killed us all, but Evon had held the team together. We’d fought like Atlan beasts because he ordered us to, because he led the charge, and we’d survived.
“I will adapt. We’ll all adapt.” Evon’s argument was weak, and we all knew it. I grunted in disagreement as Liam spoke.
“No. We won’t.” Liam shook his head and his long hair swung in a dark curtain past his shoulders, hiding the rest of his expression from me. But I could hear the desire in his voice, and the despair. “We’re too different, brother. If you really want a mate, you will have to find warriors more like you. Hell, we all have different needs. My cock gets hard thinking about my mate’s upturned ass, watching as it’s stretched open as I slide into her, one sweet inch at a time. I like to see my handprint turn pink on her pert ass cheeks.”