He snorted at her as he swallowed his food. "You sound like Mari."
She laughed. "He come on to you a lot?"
A slow, charming grin spread across his face. "He teases, but I think he'd have run for cover had I ever accepted."
She inclined her head to him. "Another surprise."
"What?"
"That you'd tolerate sexual harassment from a man."
His answering deep, throaty laugh did the strangest things to her stomach. "He's a Phrixian male, not a man, and I take a lot of shite in stride from all my brothers."
She paused to consider that shocking revelation. "Phrixian and he's gay? How did he ever manage to live to adulthood?"
"He's one of the fiercest warriors I've ever had at my back."
He'd have to be. Phrixians were the only race she'd run up against the Andarions for cold-blooded brutality and adherence to some rather savage laws.
Sumi fell silent as she remembered seeing a burgundy Phrixian uniform in the group that had attacked the prison. If that was Mari, Hauk was right. That male could fight. And he could take a beating without flinching.
Yeah, Mari was fierce indeed.
Hauk scowled as he noted the hot salad she'd made for him. "What is this?"
"Botanist, remember? Plants are good for you. You should try making friends with them sometime. Vary that heavy carnivorous diet of yours."
He made a face similar to the one Darice had when she'd insisted he try it. But unlike his nephew, he sampled it without audible bitching. With an adorable astonished expression, he met her gaze and smiled. "It's good."
"Best of all, it doesn't run or try to kill you when you go after it."
He laughed again. "I like the danger."
"I'm sure you do."
Licking his lips, he finished his food in silence.
Once he was done, Sumi took the plate to wash it off while he went to attend his morning needs. It'd been a strange day so far. She'd awakened unsettled and couldn't figure out why. Just a gut feeling that something wasn't quite right.
Hauk had been barely lucid when she'd approached him earlier with the blanket, but she had no doubt that had she done something he perceived as a threat, he'd have shot up like he did a few minutes ago. Ready and willing to kill.
The poor, exhausted baby had fallen asleep before she'd finished tucking the blanket around him. Knowing he needed the rest, she and the kids had tiptoed around and left him to it.
Rubbing at her neck, she scanned the terrain, looking for the source of her discomfort.
What is wrong with me?
She was anxious and jittery. Unsettled. Like someone was watching her.
Not wanting to be alone, she started for the caves, then changed course to see if Hauk was okay. The kids had the lorina with them and Darice could scream loud enough to be heard for miles if they came under threat.
Hauk should have returned by now.
Sumi made her way to the small pond that was between the oasis and the caves, where a shirtless Hauk sat sideways to her. He was already washed, with his damp hair pulled back from his face. When he picked up his knife, she thought he was going to shave with it.
Until he used it to cauterize a wound in the side she couldn't see.
"Oh my God," she breathed, rushing forward.
He drew on her, then lowered the blaster as he recognized her.
Aghast, she gaped at him. "You're wounded?"
Grinding his teeth, he returned to cauterizing the vicious knife wound across his lower left rib. "They didn't all miss last night."
"Why didn't you say something?"
He shrugged.
"Dancer!" she snapped at him. "You could have bled out."
The expression on his face said that she was the one overreacting...
As if!
"I stopped the bleeding before we left. It didn't reopen until I carried Darice."
And he hadn't said a word about it. To anyone. She stared at him in total disbelief. "Son, you can't just walk around bleeding and not say something. Hasn't anyone ever told you that?"
"No," he said simply.
Astonished, she shook her head. How hard had everyone leaned on him in his life that he accepted this without flinching? To him, this was normal.
Really?
Suddenly, the TAM label wasn't amusing to her. It seriously pissed her off. He wasn't some invincible armored tactical vehicle to carry and cover them. He was a flesh-and-blood male.
One who'd been injured protecting them.
Wanting to help him, she moved closer so that she could examine the wound he'd sealed. Alone. Without even thinking to ask for help. That said it all about how others treated him.
She winced at the sight of his injuries. The raw, jagged flesh was next to another scar from a knife wound where someone had practically gutted him.
Was that the injury from Dariana when he'd told her Keris was dead?
He frowned at her. "Why are you so angry?"
"Because you're wounded!"
"Then shouldn't I be the one who's pissed off?"
She sat back to glare at him. "Yes. Yes, you should."
And still he appeared baffled by her anger on his behalf. "I'm not. So why are you?"
"I don't know." That was the truth. If it didn't bother him, it shouldn't bother her, and yet it did. "Were you injured anywhere else?"
He twisted at the waist to show her the knife wound on his lower back that had narrowly missed his lung and kidney. From the depth and precision, it must have come from the Partini. "I can't quite reach that one."
She pulled his medical pack closer so that she could clean it. "How did you walk so far, like this?"
He shrugged nonchalantly. "It wasn't safe to stop."
Oh. Okay. That made all the sense in the Nine Worlds...
To a minsid lunatic.
Sighing, she knew better than to try and talk sense into someone insane. "You know, you really shouldn't say shit like that to me when I have a knife nearby."
His fierce features softened to that adorable expression that made her melt.
"What are you doing!"
She ground her teeth at Darice's outraged snarl as he stormed toward them. Her own fury snapping at his, she glared at him. "Your uncle is badly wounded and I'm trying to tend it."
Coming up behind Darice, Thia gasped at the sight of the jagged, awful cut Sumi was cleaning. "What do you need me to do?"
"Keep Darice back so that I don't kill him."
Darice refused to budge. Instead, he stalked forward to confront his uncle. "She shouldn't be touching you like that, Dancer. It's indecent."
His uncle glared at him as a fierce tic beat in his jaw.
"Can you treat a wound?" Thia asked him.
"No."
"Then shut up, Darice."
He pouted like a toddler. "You should tend him, Thia. It's your place, not hers."
Thia's expression called him a complete idiot. "All I know about field medicine is to call Uncle Syn or my dad or look it up... none of which I can do here."
"Then he should be left to bleed."
Stunned, Sumi gaped at the little snot. He would really rather leave his uncle here, bleeding, than allow an unrelated woman to tend him?
Unbelievable.
When Darice moved to sit in front of Hauk, he bared his fangs at his nephew. "Do you really think so little of me that you have to document and observe my treatment? You are your father's son." He sucked his breath in sharply as Sumi poured antiseptic over the deep wound. His breathing ragged, he glared at Darice. "Get out of my sight before I hurt you."
Darice looked as if Hauk had slapped him. Rising to his feet, he kicked dirt at Hauk in what she was beginning to suspect must be some kind of Andarion insult in and of itself. "You're not my father!"
Hauk let out a ferocious growl that had to have come from the deepest, angriest part of his soul. "You're damn right I'm not your father! If I were, I'd be so high right now I wouldn't feel
shit, and I'd have beat you and made you walk naked here last night, after you whined like a little bitch whelp." His entire body trembling in rage and pain, he started to rise.
Darice shot off, back to camp.
Hauk collapsed to the ground with a groan.
Swallowing in fear for him, Thia stepped forward and knelt by his side. "Uncle Hauk?"
"I'm all right, baby," he assured her in a much softer tone as he reached to touch her hand. "I just need a minute... please."
In a loving gesture, Thia buried her hand in his braids and nodded before she left them and followed after Darice.
In that moment, Sumi felt for all of them. Thia, who was terrified at the thought of losing another person she loved. Darice, who wanted to protect his mother's honor, and Hauk, who had obviously been hazed by his eldest brother. It made her wonder what nightmares had turned an innocent boy into a warrior so fierce that he could walk for miles in the dead of night with wounds this severe and not even flinch.
Aching at where her thoughts went, she returned to prepping his wound for sutures. "Did Keris ever do that to you?"
He didn't even tense as she pierced his skin with the sterile needle. "I don't want to talk about it."
"Okay. Just hold still and I'll be done in a minute."
Hauk didn't respond as he stared at the mountain range in front of them where he'd once climbed with his brother's insults ringing in his ears. Memories surged with a brutal bite.
Because of the way Keris had been conceived, their father and paternal grandmother had always been lukewarm at best toward him. And their mother had pushed Keris hard to be the ultimate soldier, so that she could show them all that her bloodline was as good as the royal lineage she had denied to the Hauk progeny. It was why she'd named Keris after their Hauk ancestor who'd founded The League.
My sons will be legends, too...
Her constant demands on his brother and incessant bitching had been such that they'd embedded a vicious cruel streak in Keris's heart. Something that had worsened anytime Keris drank or took drugs. Fain, alone, had been able to calm Keris's rages. But after Fain had been disowned, Keris's violence and cruelty had escalated. He'd acted as if he was afraid of meeting the same fate.
And he'd turned all that anger at their parents, whom he couldn't attack, to his youngest brother - as if it was somehow Hauk's fault Fain had chosen to be with a human over them.
But even before that, Keris had resented Hauk for the fact that Hauk had "shamed" them all when he'd been depledged after the pod accident that had left him scarred and humiliated by Jullien's lies.
With the exception of Fain, from that day forward, his entire family had seen him as deformed and lacking.
Useless.
Worthless.
Embarrassing.
So much so, that only Fain had visited him the entire time he'd been in the hospital's burn ward. Dutifully, Fain had watched over him as if he felt responsible for it and for Hauk.
To this day, even though Fain had never mentioned it, Hauk was sure Fain had paid for his surgeries and treatments. Had it been up to their parents, his mother would have left him to die.
Hauk didn't blame her for that. It was, after all, the Andarion way. If you weren't strong enough to survive, you were better off dead.
To this day, Keris's first words to him when he'd finally come home from the hospital were carved in the bitterest part of his heart. "I hope that hybrid bastard kissed you before he fucked you in the ass. You should have died like a warrior in that crash. Not been dragged to safety like a human bitch by a worthless mutant dog."
Fain had gone for Keris's throat. But for their mother's quick actions, Fain would have most likely killed Keris for it. But it hadn't erased the scar those words had seared into Hauk's heart.
Whenever Keris had been sober, he was the fun-loving, surly brother Hauk remembered growing up with. But the moment any drug touched his system... the stopgap was removed, and out came a monster even Dariana had feared.
Hauk had tried to use the same tactics Fain had to calm him. But that had only pissed him off more.
"You're not Fain! You'll never live to be the warrior he is. You're just a sorry excuse for a brother, and a disgrace to your name, and to every War Hauk who's come before you. It's not right that Fain was cast out while you're left to bear our badge in his stead. You're worthless, Dancer. I hate you!"
Now Sumi was staring at every bit of shame he carried. All of it. His scarred back was a road map of the minsid hell he'd survived. Of all the people who'd found him lacking and rejected him for it.
But he didn't see disgust in her eyes as she tended him. Only kindness and concern. Her gentle touch was so different from Dariana's.
Not that Dariana had ever touched him except to publicly humiliate him.
Closing his eyes, he felt Sumi running her fingers over the claw marks that covered his burn scars, and the ones left behind from his Endurance. While her touch soothed him in ways he wouldn't have thought possible, the memory of those wounds tore through him, and left him bleeding even more than the Partini's knife had.
A light frown wrinkled her brow. "What happened to cause all these?" she whispered, fingering the vicious claw scars.
Normally, he'd have never answered. But before he could stop himself, the truth come out. "Dariana."
"I don't understand."
Hauk sighed as she bandaged his sutures. "Every year, on the anniversary of Keris's death, I'm required to go to her and ask if she'll accept me as husband. And every year, she refuses unification with me."
Sumi felt sick as she realized that these scars were Dariana's annual answer to his marriage pledge. "She claws you?"
He gave a single curt nod.
"Why do you keep doing it, then?"
"I'm Andarion and I'm pledged to her," he said nonchalantly as if that explained everything.
Her heart broke over the cruelty his family forced on him. "I don't understand why she doesn't just release you."
He sighed heavily. "It doesn't matter. I won't have to tolerate it again."
"What do you mean?"
"After his Endurance, Darice will be old enough to bond marriage."
He said that as if she should understand its significance. "And?"
"Whenever a hero dies, there are three years of mourning for the spouse, to ensure the sanctity of both bloodlines and pay tribute to his life and service. After that, the widow has nine years to accept the pledge of her husband's brother, provided there are no children. When children are involved, the two are pledged until the youngest goes through Endurance. If they haven't unified by then, he's released from his pledge." He sighed in quiet resignation. "When I picked up Darice to do this, Dariana swore to me that on our return she would finally honor her pledge and accept me as her husband."
Sumi sat back as she digested that vicious little nugget.
Surely the bitch hadn't done what Thia had said. "Are you telling me that the whole reason Dariana had Darice was to keep you tied to her longer, without marriage?"
To continue denying and punishing him for as long as she legally could? Meanwhile, she got to keep the Warring Blood Clan of Hauk as her moniker, and maintain a place in their world that she couldn't have without Hauk's family?
Hauk shook his head. "She loved my brother. I'm sure she only had Darice to carry Keris's line forward and to honor him and his memory."
Then why not conceive him sooner? Why wait until the year she'd have been forced to either free Hauk or birth a child?
No. Sumi didn't believe it was a coincidence for a minute.
Thia was right. Dariana was a conniving Queen Bitch. But she bit her tongue. Let Hauk have his delusion about the honor Dariana obviously lacked.
Wishing she could save him from the whore's clutches, she leaned forward and brushed her lips against those marks of selfish cruelty.
He tensed. "What are you doing?"
She laid her cheek against the assassin's tattoo on hi
s shoulder that had another vicious scar bisecting it from an old blast wound. "I'm giving you something I don't think you've ever had."
"And that is?"
The fact he had to ask said it all. "Tender affection."
Hauk swallowed as he felt a hot tear slide from her eye and onto his skin. She was right. No one had ever touched him like she did.
Inside or out.
For the first time since that pod had crashed, he felt visible to the world.
Desirable.
Sumi brushed her hand through his hair, raising even more chills over him. "I'm done, sweetie."
That single endearment meant more to him than it should have. And it made him wonder what kind of bastard could have ever struck a woman so decent. How could anyone harm the mother of his child? It made no sense to him. But one thing became crystal clear in his mind.