Chapter 18

Double Sided Heart

Jenna slid into the dress that Ryatt suggested and rolled around what had just happened in her head.

“Maybe I didn’t need to worry about Fallcet,” Ixy said in her ear. “And maybe you aren’t as boring as I thought you were. That fight you had with Ryatt the other night was super fun to watch. I’ve never told a man to his face that he was in love with me and he could never have me. Hey, Ivy! Did you ever have that kind of confidence?”

Jenna didn’t hear how Ivy replied.

“I thought you girls were asleep during that,” Jenna said heartlessly as she zipped up the zipper on her side.

“We’re recording everything these days and Conrad told us about the brouhaha in the morning. It seems he wants to be on good terms with us and he knows what we like. We watched the video footage this morning.”

“What’s happening to those recordings?” Jenna asked, focussing on the less juicy half of their conversation.

“Oh, we’re storing them. They aren’t going to the orbital security team. They do their thing, we do ours. They’re not allowed to store recordings of you, due to Favel’s instructions, but we are due to yours.”

“Well, the only reason we got footage of the AAMC majors violating my bedroom was that Sardius hit the record button,” Jenna reflected. “We don’t need to have an incident like that again and I guess my privacy can… I don’t know… go down the drain. Whatever, you guys have probably already counted all the moles on my back. What’s left for me to lose?”

“Your celibacy,” Ixy suggested with a muffled giggle.

Jenna rolled her eyes. “Yeah, well I’m not so cheap that I can be bought for the joy of crashing a trillion-dollar spaceship.”

Ixy giggled. “It was way more fun than you realize. The pilot is sometimes not as wasted as we hoped and he tries to stop us from leaving the ship after the crash. Sometimes it would get so crazy, escaping was half the fun. Sometimes we ended up crawling through air ducts, using escape pods, stealing emergency towing ships, sneaking out in space suits, and so much more. Oh, Ivy is reminding me of all the times we even just beat the hell out of the skeleton crew so we could crash the ship without bothering to party with the pilot. You’d have fun too if you let your hair down.”

“And how do you recommend I do that?” Jenna asked as she looked at herself in the mirror and proceeded to tie her hair up.

“Well, I’d love to give you advice on how to be less of a stick in the mud, Jenna. I might even do it if I thought you’d do what I recommend. As it is, you are too much of a homegrown human to ‘jump down the pants’ of a man who has exactly the opposite kind of skeleton.”

Jenna snarled. “Who cares about that? That’s not the problem. I’m bad at trusting people. I have been taught all my life not to trust people. Without knowing it, Ryatt is a genius. At the boxing match, he said up front that if he got through the fight without splitting his lip, he wanted to kiss someone. He chose me. Nothing other than exactly what he said was going to happen happened in front of all those spectators. He took a gamble when he kissed me at the boxing gym,” Jenna still couldn’t say Clube, “but if all he wanted to do was kiss me one last time before the crap hit the fan, he chose a good time for it. Yes, it’s clear that he wants to be with me. It was from the first minute. That’s why he’s a genius. He didn’t wait for the right time. The right time was never going to come. Instead, he planted the idea that he was a good romantic partner in my head immediately.”

“So, are you going to go for him?” Ixy asked excitedly. “Slip into the exciting world of inside the pants of a boneman?”

Jenna huffed. “No! I trust him enough to let him work for me. I do not trust him enough to give him knowledge of what I’m like in bed, something he says everyone in the universe wants. How much could he sell that story for if he decided to turn on me? Good grief! He may need to hang out here for decades before he can crack me and heaven knows, he might never. I told him as much in our fight the other night.”

“If you’re going to be that much of a stick-in-the-wet-dirt, I have something to report. Your marriage certificate to Sardius just arrived,” she said with a drawl that showed she had lost interest in their conversation.

“Where is it?” Jenna asked.

“Ryatt has it. He’s scanning it like a good security drone on the front deck. I’ve been meaning to tell you, Jenna. You need to do some more renovations. The fact that you don’t have a servants’ entrance or a loading dock seems like a massive oversight. My last apartment had a much better service entrance than yours.”

“Draw me up a plan,” she said absently as she rushed to the front deck.

Jenna met Ryatt at the front of the palace. He had a scanning gun in his hand and he was scanning the metal box on a stone bench.

“Is that a package for me?” Jenna asked, realizing that it would be completely crazy for packages to be sent in brown paper in outer space.

Ryatt looked at it, looked at her, gave a disgusted snort, and continued scanning it. Then he held up the screen and read the info regarding the sender, the recipient, and the contents. He glared at the information.

“What will happen to me if I dump this in the ocean?” he asked with an arch of his eyebrow.

She crossed her arms. “Nothing. I’ll get the Octavians to fish it out of the ocean for me. It will, however, piss me off and set you back in my estimation.”

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

Ryatt huffed his breath and started unbuckling the package. “Just so you know, my selfish desire is not the only reason why you should forget all about Sardius. There are stacks of reasons. He’s a monster–”

“He’s trouble,” Jenna picked up and started saying things she thought Ryatt would say to insult Sardius. “He’s ninety years old. He’s missing an eye. He smokes dusted rat cigars. He hates his mother and he weighs as much as a starship.”

“The other things might be true, but he doesn’t weigh as much as a starship. He was in top physical form.”

Jenna tucked in her chin and laughed. “That was him! He did not like anyone even hinting that he might not be as ripped as a tiger. You really did know him!”

“I said I did,” Ryatt said gloomily. “Were you still doubting me?”

“Well,” Jenna said, wiping away an imaginary tear of mirth. “It’s hard for me to trust people and um… you haven’t told me a lot of what I want to hear about him. You won’t tell me what he looks like.”

“What he looks like isn’t important. People who do a lot of space travel have a lot of surgical augmentation. What he looks like has been changed forty times over. So what you said about having a false eye is completely possible.”

Jenna leaned in and looked into Ryatt’s eyes. “You lived like him, you’re from the same solar system as him, you were in the same prison as him, worked the same kind of job as him, and I never heard him mention you.”

Ryatt’s jaw tightened and his lips pursed.

And Jenna looked at him much closer than she ever had before. “I see.”

“What do you see?” he asked grouchily.

“One of your eyes is false,” she said with a weird little smile.

“No. Both of them are false,” he admitted as his shoulders sagged. “But one of them is a little more false than the other. I merely wear something over this eye, like a contact lens to make them look the same.”

“What color is your eye under the lens?” Jenna asked.

“Red. The whole thing is red. It’s left over from a bad chemical burn I had. I’m really lucky it wasn’t worse.”

Jenna looked in at him closer. “What color were they before that happened?”

“Blue and I could have had the same color again if I’d wanted. I didn’t. I chose this color instead.”

“Why?”

“Because my blue eyes were famous and I didn’t want to be famous anymore.”

“Ryatt, the Gambler, was famous?”

“Nah,” he shrugged.

Jenna let the moment pass. “If you were choosing your eye color off a chart, what is the color of your eyes called?”

“Murky midnight.”

She smiled. “That’s enjoyable. Now, have I soothed your ego enough for you to finish opening my package without forcing me to become the kind of monster that bites men’s heads off?”

He input the codes to unlock the security panel and finished undoing the buckles. “I don’t know what you saw in this guy.”

“I know you wish I wasn’t doing this, but I am. I want him back. I’ve often thought about plastering the universe with wanted posters just to get him down here. You know, the kind with a big juicy reward attached to it.”

Ryatt looked one thousand percent horrified as he stripped the device that was a marriage certificate with DNA authentication.

“But I think I’d just get a bunch of randos who want to marry me,” she finished vaguely as she took the device from Ryatt’s hands.

“You’d get more than a bunch of randos. You’d get every single man in the known universe on your doorstep claiming he was Sardius Veritacalus.”

The marriage certificate device was a gold-plated box. It was wide, long, and thick. On the front, it had their names embossed in looping, spiraling letters.

“His last name was Veritacalus? Sardius Veritacalus? Sounds very grand,” Jenna said lovingly.

The box had two little glass-plated containers for the DNA contribution. Jenna saw Sardius had presented a lock of hair.

“He never said he was blond,” Jenna commented, wanting to crack it open so she could touch it. It curled in a soft golden loop, like a child’s hair that had been stuffed in an envelope.

Ryatt didn’t say anything until Jenna ironically let her hair down and started raking her fingers through it looking for loose strays.

“What are you doing?” Ryatt asked in mild alarm since she had ruined her hairstyle.

“I’m getting a hair,” she said, pulling several strands free and spooling them around her fingers “Ugh, I got more than one. That’s a little gross. His hair looks all pretty.”

“Your loyalty toward that terrorist is really astounding,” he said, his voice betraying none of his disgust. “You don’t need to do this right this minute. We can get Misha to cut a piece that looks just as nice as his.”

Jenna agreed and moved to drop her unneeded strands of hair into the ocean.

“Don’t do that,” Ryatt said, grasping her hand before she had let any of them drop. “I’ll dispose of them the way all your organic material is disposed of.”

“Are you worried someone might try to clone me?” she asked in astonishment.

“I’ve never heard of anyone successfully cloning a diplomat. I don’t think there’s any benefit to doing that because they don’t have the crown. At least, I hope there isn’t and I hope no one ever tries.” He stuffed her hair into his pocket.

Jenna was surprisingly moved. “That was really sweet,” she suddenly said. “Men on my planet don’t usually do that. They would let her hair fall wherever and not care what happened to it. We don’t have problems with cloning, but hair as long as mine makes a real mess in vacuum cleaners and drains. I like things tidy and I have never seen a man do something like that in all my life.”

He smiled in a rush. “If this is the sort of thing that turns you on, I’m sure I can…”

“Shut up, Ryatt,” she said, shutting him up and running her hand over Sardius’ name. “I love his name. Do you think he’ll come back here if I wait for him?”

“No. I think he could only be with you as your personal assistant. I bet he told you that.”

Jenna frowned. What Ryatt said was true. “You sure know a lot about what he said. Were you one of the tools who was listening to his dialogue?”

Ryatt’s mouth fell open.

Jenna suddenly accused him. “Were you not a personal assistant at all and only a goon assigned to listen to him in the prison?”

Ryatt put his hands up. “You got me. Sorry, I guess I was never as interesting as Sardius.” He looked depressed as he strode back toward the palace. “Where do you want to store that thing anyway?”

“I’ve been thinking about what you suggested earlier and I think I’ll do exactly that,” she said, strolling after him and letting her skirt flare blue in the fading tropical light.

“What was my suggestion?” Ryatt asked with his hands behind his head.

“That I should drop it in the ocean,” Jenna replied with a grin.

“But I thought you didn’t want to get rid of it. I thought you were going to hang it over your bed and say your prayers to it every morning and every night,” he taunted.

She looked at him sideways. “You have a lot of weird ideas about me. It’s just that if I want to keep it safe, my palace isn’t the best place for it. You’ll see, the ocean is a locked vault.”

“If you say so,” he said as he held the palace door open for her.