Wrage (Galaxy Gladiators #11) - Alana Khan Page 0,28

long-lost son.”

His expression is unreadable as he grabs my hand and shoulders his way through the crowd.

The shuttle disgorges us onto a long, thin walkway, and we follow the crowd into the hangar, then take the giant lift to the main floor and go to Passenger Pickup. And we wait. And wait. Until just about everyone on our shuttle has been picked up or secured a hover.

“My mother’s original comm said if she wasn’t here by now we should catch a hover,” he says as he hails one that was waiting nearby.

“Did she comm to tell you why she wasn’t coming?”

“No,” he says curtly.

I may only have three pieces of a thousand piece puzzle, but I know something’s wrong. Really wrong. First of all, his back is stiff as a piece of steel. Gone are the loose, post-orgasm muscles I got to enjoy over the last several hours.

Second, who, unless they’ve suffered a heart attack, doesn’t come to the station to pick up the son they haven’t seen in fifteen years? And even then, no comm?

And third, he’s been way too tight-lipped about this.

Unless there’s a damned good reason they’re not here, I hate his family already.

We landed on the industrial outskirts of the city and are hovering toward town, passing the suburbs and heading toward the tallest buildings of glass and steel.

“This is quite different than where I grew up,” he breathes, as interested in the scenery as I am.

“Where did you grow up?”

“It was farther out. My father was in the clergy in a small town nearby. We lived at the edge of a forest. It was beautiful. The bark on many of the trees was blue, the leaves crimson. I’d go there after school and on my free days. It was my sanity.”

This is the most he’s told me about his childhood. I’m glad he’s sharing. I store this bit of information in the back of my mind—he had to escape his house to gain his sanity.

The hover pulls up in front of a tall building with a uniformed doorman. I wonder if they’ll allow me in wearing this rumpled outfit of t-shirt and yoga pants. Wrage doesn’t look much more comfortable than me. From what he mentioned, this male’s been living in a barracks on one shithole planet or another for the past fifteen years.

We enter a five-story lobby filled with light and exotic colorful flowers and next-gen moving stairways that are lightyears ahead of the escalators back on planet Earth.

And still—no family expectantly hurrying toward us to see the prodigal son return.

I want to ask Wrage if we can turn around. If this is the way things are, I don’t want to meet these people. He checks his comm and steers us toward the lift, then presses the top button. I guess it doesn’t matter what planet you live on, the penthouse is the penthouse.

When we exit the lift, instead of spilling into a common hallway, we enter his family’s dwelling. It’s furnished in black and white with a splash of red on the couch pillows and knickknacks. It’s like something out of a dystopian movie. There’s absolutely nothing homey or warm, or even attractive about this living area.

A woman who must be his mother sweeps into the room. I’m so used to Wrage’s handsome alien features, it surprises me to see them on a female face. What looks so masculine on him—the craggy horns, vertical pupils, and startling mreen—looks masculine on females, too.

She’s wearing a colorful caftan of swirling oranges and reds, her hair in a matching turban that’s tucked between her horns.

I wait for her unpleasant face to light in a smile when she sees her son, but her eyes narrow. She couldn’t mistake him for an itinerant peddler or interloper; he comm’d her, she must have given permission for the elevator that took us directly into her living room. She has to be expecting him.

“Come in,” she says as she steps back.

The whole hover-ride here I was fondly imagining my own homecoming—how could I not? I pictured my whole family, down to aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews thronging to whatever secret black-ops Air Force Base I was taken to upon my return. I pictured hugging and kissing and tears—lots of them.

I imagined a thousand questions and a million words. And touching—lots and lots of touching as if we were confirming that I was really safe and back home.

And people would say my name—a form of praise and hope and reunion.

Crickets.

No hugging.