Aliens' Vice E-Book

Alexandra Norton

• Herausgeber: Alexandra Norton
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

“There was a new maturity in her dark eyes, a confidence that wavered only briefly. An urge to dismantle it—dismantle her —rose within me. Could she tell?”

Sharing your body with a controlling alien who invades your mind in fervent lucid dreams is no walk in the park.

When Kak first entered my life, I fought tooth and nail to resist his influence. Yet over time we bonded in perfect harmony: two souls in one body, synced and molded to each other’s needs and desires.

But our peace is shattered by the return of Kuthil Ash Kharn, the alien who implanted a shard of himself inside me all those years ago... The shard that became Kak. Is it even him? Or has a decade back on his Home world turned him into someone... something... else?

There’s a new darkness inside Kuthil Ash Kharn that’s impossible to ignore. It both alarms and allures me, beckoning me to the edge of an unknowable abyss. My first instinct is to run the other way and continue my idyllic life with Kak, but I can’t. Not yet. Because people are dying, and the aliens seem to be involved. Now I’ve got one last job to do, and I need Kuthil Ash Kharn’s help to do it.

Will Kak and I survive this? Or will Kuthil Ash Kharn’s haunting allure fracture what took us a decade to build?

Aliens’ Vice: A Sci-Fi Sharing Romance is a full-length steamy alien romance novel that leans dark.

Leseprobe

ALIENS’ VICE

A SCI-FI SHARING ROMANCE

SHARDS OF INFINITY

BOOK TWO

ALEXANDRA NORTON

Copyright © 2023 by Alexandra Norton

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Cover designed by MiblArt.

Edited by LY Publishing Services.

CONTENTS

Preface

December 13

1. Layla

2. Kak

3. Layla

December 14

4. Layla

December 15

5. Layla

6. Kuthil Ash Kharn

7. Layla

8. Kuthil Ash Kharn

9. Layla

December 16

10. Layla

11. Kuthil Ash Kharn

12. Layla

13. Kak

14. Layla

15. Layla

16. Kak

December 17

17. Layla

18. Layla

19. Layla

20. Kuthil Ash Kharn

December 18

21. Layla

22. Kuthil Ash Kharn

23. Layla

December 19

Chapter 24

December 21

25. Layla

26. Kuthil Ash Kharn

27. Layla

28. Kak

29. Layla

30. Kuthil Ash Kharn

December 22

31. Layla

December 23

32. Layla

33. Layla

34. Layla

35. Kuthil Ash Kharn

36. Layla

December 24

37. Layla

38. Kuthil Ash Kharn

39. Layla

40. Kuthil Ash Kharn

41. Layla

42. Layla

December 25

43. Layla

44. Kuthil Ash Kharn

45. Layla

46. Layla

December 27

47. Kak

48. Layla

49. Layla

January 1

50. Layla

51. Layla

52. Layla

January 2

53. Layla

54. Layla

55. Kuthil Ash Kharn

56. Layla

January 3

57. Layla

58. Kuthil Ash Kharn

January 10

59. Layla

60. Kuthil Ash Kharn

61. Layla

62. Kuthil Ash Kharn

63. Layla

64. Kak

65. Layla

January 11

66. Layla

Epilogue

PREFACE

If you haven’t read Alien’s Host yet, please put this book down and do that first! The novel you are about to read is an interconnected sequel, not a standalone. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

All done? Welcome! So, because you have read Alien’s Host, you’ve already learned of the dangerous act of molding between humans and aliens, and how close Layla came to throwing herself over that precipice. You’ve also gotten a glimpse of the darkness and greed that Kuthil Ash Kharn is capable of as he familiarizes himself with his human host.

Now it gets worse.

If you’re looking for a light alien romance read, please turn back now. As much as I’d love to have you here, this book is rougher and darker than the first. It features explicit, aggressive scenes, violence, and forced “molding” with aliens.

If that’s not for you, no worries—there will be other books!

Otherwise, welcome aboard, and remember, you have been warned.

Alexandra

DECEMBER 13

1

LAYLA

The winter air was crisp in my lungs as I jogged to my personal finish line: a lamppost next to a familiar green bench in Central Park. My thighs and calves were on fire as I sprinted the last hundred feet or so, stumbling to a stop.

I pressed my gloved hand against the lamppost and panted, steam billowing from my mouth in the cold. Catching my breath, I tilted my head up to the clear sky; it was a sunny winter morning. A thick wreath of needles and baubles swayed above me, strung between the posts on either side of the path. Crimson bows decorated each post, glistening faintly with overnight frost. Central Park was only beginning to see its first walkers. I smiled at a couple walking a grinning Golden past me as I bent over to touch my toes, enjoying the satisfying pull in my hamstrings. Wollmann Rink on my right was empty save for a looming Christmas tree towering in its center, a polished sheet of ice ready for blades to carve swooping patterns in its virgin surface.

After a quick cooldown stretch, I finally allowed myself to settle on the green bench. I reclined sideways, leaning against the black metal handle, stretching my legs.

I looked up toward the peaks of Manhattan. I could make out my little office from there. It was a window high up in one of the concrete mammoths reaching for the clouds. A small smile played on my lips.

Kak? You there?

He wouldn’t actually hear my thoughts. Aliens weren’t telepathic unless mid-mold or mid-dream, apparently. But he’d sense that I was thinking about him. As if on cue, a tentative tendril coiled out from my sternum.

Kak despised cardio, but he’d gotten much better at putting up with it over the years. I smirked.

I looked up in the direction of my office, a window winking in the early sun.

“Oberman Finance.” The name rolled sweetly off my tongue. Nobody actually knew the “Finance” part was bullshit. It was strange to think I was about to let it all go, but something told me it was time.

I wondered where Bob Rosey was now. I hadn’t kept up with my old colleagues since leaving Rosey Financial just a year after my “adventure” in Alabama.

There had been no good explanation for my sudden departure, so I made up some story about wanting to strike out on my own as a financial advisor. My old boss and coworkers were, of course, shocked and skeptical. I was a green amateur fresh out of college with no proper experience.

They probably thought consulting an alien went straight to my head.

Fortunately, it went to some other heads as well. When my second alien client contacted me weeks after my time at the ranch with Kuthil Ash Kharn, it was in the form of an ambush at my gym.

“You have seen us, Mrs. Layla Oberman,” the tall blonde female with golden eyes and marble-patterned skin had said. “More than any other human has.”

“It’s Miss,” I corrected her.

The female, who I would come to know as Rexa Ash Ak, would explain that aliens needed certain… guidance in our world. It turned out the aloof alien rancher, a piece of whom took up residence within me, wasn’t the only one who found it difficult to adjust to life among humans.

Soon more extraterrestrial clients came, and the kinds of services they requested evolved. My work could range from explaining different cuisines—I had a lot of learning to do—to serving as an alien’s human proxy for dealings that they didn’t want to be outwardly involved in.

The creatures were no longer just “aliens”, either. They offered no species name or label of their own, nor a planet that we could tie them back to. On the contrary, they seemed completely indifferent about what we called them. But the term soon felt like too much of a placeholder for our long-term visitors, so we humans began calling them that: Visitors.

There I was, running a Visitor concierge service and consulting business under the guise of a financial agency.

Were some of their asks questionable? Yes.

But was the work immensely rewarding in every sense, including financially? Also yes.

Plus… it got me closer to that feeling of belonging in the glimpse of their world I’d seen through Kuthil Ash Kharn.

Kak flooded my body with heat, and I batted him away.

“Not now,” I quipped.

I reached into the turtleneck collar of my running jacket to pull out a pendant on a brass chain. It was warm, sitting against my chest all morning. To anyone else, it looked like a piece of glass or a rough-cut shard of quartz, but not me. When I watched it in the light, I saw a glimpse of the place I almost lost myself to all those years ago. I clasped it tight in my black glove, bringing it to my lips before tucking it back under my shirt.

I took one last glance up at the view of my little office window and swung my feet to the pavement. It was seven in the morning, but Jessica would be there already. The woman never stopped, no matter how hard I tried to convince her to take a damn holiday.

My white padded sneakers were silent against the sidewalk as I walked the few blocks to the office on my last commute.

* * *

Nobody really knew what I did, except for the small, exclusive team I’d assembled. Now it was time for my very competent second-in-command, Jessica Choi, to take over. Having come on as my first ever staff member nearly a decade prior, Jessica had the skills and temperament to deal with a confused Visitor. She’d been my assistant originally and soon grew into an integral part of the operation.

“But why? I thought your business was doing well?” Mom had asked when I told her my plans to hand over day-to-day operations. Omar had put me through the same interrogation hours ago over lunch.

“Is this really your decision?” he’d asked.

“Whose decision would it be, Omar?”

His eyes had narrowed. “You know.”

Now I was getting the third degree from Mom. I never told her about the Visitor I hosted in my body, but she knew my character well enough to question the sudden about-face from my job.

“Why not? I don’t need to be a slave to my work. Jessica can handle it.”

I had no good explanation. Not that I needed one, but the abrupt change of heart worried even me. I prided myself on being an ambitious woman at the peak of her career. Was I having a quarter-life-crisis? Or is thirty-four years old enough to count as “mid?”

Something just told me it was time. I’d been feeling it for the past year, thinking at first that it would pass.

It wasn’t Kak influencing me, that much I knew. Or thought I knew. In fact, Kak seemed wary of the idea when I told him. He questioned me along the same lines my family did, in his own Kak way.

“Are you certain this is what you want, Layla Oberman?”

It had been ten years. He still refused to call me Layla. Just Layla. I’d given up on trying, just as he’d given up on protesting when I called him Kak instead of the mouthful that was Kuthil Ash Kharn. The diminutive suited him. It was cute.

He traced circles around my breast as we lay in bed the night I told him, in the afterglow of passionate lucidity.

“Not certain certain. But something tells me I need to do this, Kak,” I said, flipping over to rest my chin on his chest. “I just don’t know what it is. I’m… I don’t know. Restless?”

He grunted, noncommittal.

Spending a decade with the shard of an alien inside you isn’t easy. You’re trapped together—forever. Wherever you go, there he is. Over time, I learned it wasn’t smooth sailing for him either. Being jostled around on a morning jog through Central Park was just one example of things he had to put up with from his bull-headed host.

But the passion hadn’t died, even if we managed to calm our lust after a point. It just wasn’t realistic to spend every single night fucking each other’s brains out in our—my—dreams. Yet every time it seemed we’d explored every nook and cranny of each other, there was something new for both of us to discover.

In my dreams, I could be anything. Kak vibrated pleasantly as my mind drifted back to that time I’d sprouted a pair of feathered wings as we made love. I’d yanked us through my apartment window and into the star-studded sky, our bodies intertwined, his liquid tendrils bound tight around my limbs as we fucked each other into oblivion above the city.

The office elevator chimed, interrupting my sweet recollections as I arrived at the thirty-third floor of Carron House. Takeout coffee in one hand, I scanned my security card at the first of three doors on the left. We’d rented the entire floor—my clientele required discretion—but only used the one office space.

“Oh, thank God you’re here.”

Jessica Choi’s head popped up over the reception counter. I looked over the angled stone desk at her. She was kneeling on the floor, documents strewn about in haphazard piles around her.

“What’s going on?” We hadn’t used the paper system ever since I hired our IT guy—Mose—to implement some proper security and data encryption protocols. This allowed us to go digital without worrying too much about cybersecurity threats.

“Someone called. Said he was an old client, so I’ve been trying to find his file, but there’s no record of him. Sounded really weird, said it was urgent,” Jessica said, leafing through pages.

“Oh? Did this mysterious client give a name?”

“Yeah. Do you know a Kuthil Ash Kharn’?”

* * *

I sat in my corner office and stared out into space.

Jessica obviously realized something was wrong when I froze after she gave me the name of this new mysteriously “urgent” client. She let it go, a mercy for which I’d be eternally grateful.

I rocked back and forth in my brown leather chair, thinking.

I had to talk to Kak. I could try to take a nap. He’d take it from there, triggering lucidity. I was too wired to fall asleep anyway, and maybe I didn’t want to speak to him just yet.

When Kuthil Ash Kharn’s name left Jessica’s mouth, Kak had seared white hot inside me even as the rest of me felt like a bucket of cold water had been dumped over my head. He was a flurry of activity under my skin, a pang of nausea stronger than I’d experienced in a while, when he wasn’t careful enough to emerge gently. I couldn’t tell what it meant: was he excited that the physical version of him was back, or was this his protest?

I stifled him, hard, tensing my body until he felt like a rock I’d swallowed, trapped deep in my chest.

We would talk later.

I thought back to the ranch. That fucking ranch where I managed to almost break my foot and then not-almost break my head. I’d have been dead if it weren’t for that first ever alien client imbuing a piece of himself into my body—implanting me with a healing tendril that kept me alive and made him so sick that he had to leave the planet. At least that’s what I’d put together over the years, with Kak’s help.

He had held me that night, pressed tight against his chest, watching over me as I fell asleep and as the shard within me awoke in its new host. His new host.

I shook my head, confusing myself in the terminology.

That shard, Kak, had been with me for a decade. He was Kuthil Ash Kharn as far as I was concerned. The embodied version of him was gone. But that physical version was the one who started it all. The original. He had shown me his world through his eyes as he lay naked, pressed against my frail, injured body.

“Fuck,” I whispered to myself.

I forced myself to look at the scrap of paper with a number written in Jessica’s neat handwriting.

He said it was urgent.

I picked at the edge of the note with a manicured oval nail, deciding whether I wanted to call or hide. If I ignored him, would he just go away? It would make things so much simpler.

2

KAK

She hadn’t relaxed all day, and so kept me trapped in my prison in her sternum: her favorite place to coop me up.

Just wait until you fall asleep, little girl.

But she resisted. She sat at the barstool next to her kitchen island in her Manhattan apartment, espresso cup in hand. I once more threw myself against her ribs, and once more she shot me down.

She was avoiding me. I recognized this by now. It happened rarely, but it happened.

I was pleased to see she had not picked up the phone to call the number given to her. The scrap of paper was still folded in her purse.

Surely, surely she wouldn’t dare reach out to him without consulting me.

I curled in on myself, disappointed with my reaction.

My kind was designed to share. Why shouldn’t she initiate contact with my physical form?

Because she must ask!

I growled to myself, eliciting a sharp beating of her fist against her chest as she tried to shut me up.

I seethed.

She could not stay awake forever. Humans were horribly delicate creatures. I would sit, and I would wait.

3

LAYLA

After squaring away my final tasks, I came out of my office to a stumbled cheer. Balloons, streamers, and a small Christmas tree sparkled in the office lights, and shiny letters strung in an arc on the ceiling read “HAPPY RETIREMENT, BOSS!”

Mose came up and handed me a wooden cane with a red bow on top.

“Thought you might need this,” he winked.

I laughed, batting sudden tears from my eyes at the sight of my team gathered to send me off.

Soon, a champagne flute was in my hand, Christmas music was blaring, and the Karaoke machine was out. The party was in full swing.

Jessica and I perched on the edge of the reception desk.

“It’ll be all right, you know,” Jessica said, sharp eyes scanning what was soon to be her new domain. “I got this.”

“I’m not worried.”

She was nervous. I could tell. But I wasn’t.

“Why’d you hire me, boss?” she asked.

I twirled the neck of the flute, watching the tiny bubbles fizz up to the golden surface of my drink. Jessica already knew why I hired her. I could tell she just needed to hear it again.

“Remember when we met at the range?” I asked.

A curt nod. Jessica and I had both been taking our first handgun training course.

“You were way too fucking good for your first lesson,” she rolled her eyes.

“It was your first, too.”

“Yeah, and I sucked!”

I bit my lip through a wide grin, nudging her shoulder with my own. Jessica didn’t know I had an advantage.

“Well, that’s the point. You fucking sucked. No talent.”

“Wow, thanks.”

“And you worked your ass off and became the best shot in that course.”

Jessica tried to suppress a sly smile through pursed lips and failed. “Best shot after you.”

“I don’t count.” I looked back at my drink. “Trust me.”

Jessica’s questioning look was conveniently interrupted by Mose, who ambled over with two paper plates.

“Hey, Jessica,” he called over the music. “Can I steal you for a sec?”

I tilted my head, urging her to go, accepting the plate Mose was shoving toward me even as his eyes never stopped following Jessica. Now there was a not-so-secret office romance that’d been years in the making.

For the next half an hour, I distracted myself from the growing pressure in my sternum by taking turns singing badly into the karaoke machine.

The faint chime of the door barely reached my ears over Oonah, one of my consulting specialists, who was serenading us with her rendition of “I Will Always Love You.”

I padded to the office door in my stockings, having long kicked off my heels by then, and opened it mid-sip of wine—we’d moved on to wine.

My eyebrows shot up at the sight in the doorway. I glanced across the room at Jessica.

“I called Raa,” she mouthed, referring to Rexa Ash Ak by the abbreviations we often used for our clientele. Never to their faces, of course. Aliens were big on proper naming.

“Rexa Ash Ak!” I exclaimed, scanning the aliens on either side of her. “And Orin Ash Bran, Tithi Ash Shto, and Mornu Ash Arthen! And… someone new.”

Rexa Ash Ak was already glaring between Jessica and me. “You call us by acronyms when we’re not around?”

“What? Oh no, of course not. Jessica was talking about someone else,” I told Raa with a reassuring smile. She thrust a bottle of some sort of alcohol toward me. I took it in one hand by the neck, cognizant of the glass in the other, and stepped aside for them to pass.

“Thank you. Please, come.”

I felt a pang of pride at the sight of Visitors following a human custom: bringing a gift to a party. My eyes followed the newcomer, a taller-than-average male with disheveled crimson hair that flashed in the light—a common Visitor characteristic.

“Zorin Ash Rhaz,” Rexa Ash Ak introduced us. I hid my surprise well as he stepped toward me and held out a hand. Visitors did not enjoy physical contact with humans and did not, by nature, understand our greeting customs. I insisted on greeting all of my clients with a handshake, but a newcomer to my company would not normally initiate the gesture.

We shook hands in a firm grip, and I smiled. “I see you’re already used to our greeting customs. When did you arrive on Earth?”

“Recently.” His voice was raspy and held the telltale intonation of a new arrival; all alien voices had a sort of deep tonal quality that seemed to emerge from their chests instead of their throats. They could learn to speak more like humans, but rarely bothered. What was the point if their alien appearance would always prevent them from fitting in, anyway? Besides, fitting in was seldom their priority.

The karaoke petered out as my team noticed the four statuesque creatures enter the office and tried their best not to gape. Despite working with Visitors for the better part of a decade, you never really got used to their presence. These four were some of my most valued and familiar clients. I wouldn’t say we had developed a friendship over the years. The aliens were incapable of that, at least not with humans. But if nothing else, we had developed a certain rapport.

My employees were just tipsy enough to get relatively comfortable around the clients. A few minutes later, I sat at a rectangular table with a martini in my hand, feet propped up on the rungs of a tall round stool, and watched them interacting, albeit a little stiffly.

I glanced across at Rexa Ash Ak. She winced as she took a sip of her own martini, the olive swirling at the bottom of the glass.

“You don’t have to drink it, you know,” I smiled. One of her jobs for me had been informing her about different alcoholic beverages, which was at one point very important for the circles she was attempting to blend into. Not that an alien could ever “blend.” But we both learned enough to survive a business meeting at a Japanese sake bar that month.

“I like it,” she said. “The effect.”

I nodded. Aliens, I had learned, were not immune to alcohol, but metabolized it at will.

“In a way, it’s a little like…” She glanced at me. “Well, you know.”

I looked at the contents of my glass, squinting to see if I could make out something like technicolor tendrils swirling in its contents. She was wrong. It was nothing like that. I had only experienced molding once, but I knew it was nothing like that. I brushed my fingers across the pendant around my neck. Raa’s gaze followed the movement.

“Why did you come here?” I propped my elbows on the table and looked into her large, cat-shaped eyes. Over the years, I had learned to maintain eye contact with aliens, but it was never easy. But now, with Rexa Ash Ak, I felt oddly at ease. Was it because our business relationship was ending, or had I had enough to drink?

My question did not surprise her, and she knew I wasn’t asking about their presence at my goodbye party. She took the stem of the martini glass between her thumb and middle finger and swirled it a little, admiring the flowing contents. I waited.

“In your words, you might call it… purgatory,” she said, taking another sip of the cocktail.

“Purgatory?”

She nodded slowly, turning her angled face toward the window, where city lights below illuminated the night. She glanced at the sky. The city’s assault of lights on the sky made it impossible to see the stars. She’d have to drag the telescope I helped her purchase out of the city to see anything interesting tonight.

“Sometimes we are sent away from our homeworld to learn. It’s something we have to go through, experience that isolation, completely alone.”

“But you’re not alone. There are many of you.”

“In this body, everyone is alone.” Rexa Ash Ak smiled wryly.

I understood what she meant, having been granted a glimpse of the connection which was possible all those years ago.

“What did you do to get sent here?” I asked and regretted it immediately.

How tactless can you get, Layla?

She frowned and straightened. “It’s not important, and it’s not something you would understand. There were reasons. Eventually, we can go Home. We yearn for it. Which is why I didn’t believe it when…”

She paused, looked at me with a knowing gaze. She downed the rest of her martini, popping the olive between perfect white teeth.

“When what?” I pressed.

“When Kuthil Ash Kharn chose to return.”

It was my turn to look out the window, avoiding her unwavering gaze. Kak stirred.

“I don’t…”

“You don’t know if you want to meet him,” she finished for me.

I nodded.

“Is it you who doesn’t want that? Or him?”

I glanced at her. She knew what had happened. All the aliens knew somehow. I knew when she said “him,” she meant the shard of him within me.

“I don’t need his permission,” I said, more to him than to Rexa Ash Ak.

With a knowing smile, she placed her palms on the table and rose, her posture clarifying that the conversation was finished. The other Visitors appeared to gravitate toward her, somehow aware that their time at the event was at an end.

“Good luck, Layla,” Rexa Ash Ak addressed me by my first name for the first time. Not waiting for my response, the aliens took their leave. All eyes were on them, unable to resist following their unearthly beauty.

DECEMBER 14

4

LAYLA

Kak didn’t come to me that night. Part of me enjoyed the heavy, dreamless sleep after a long night of goodbyes and martinis. Another part worried. I’d been avoiding him, but he wasn’t supposed to be avoiding me.

I pushed myself out of bed with an aching head, a dry tongue, and a rock in my sternum. The heated floor was pleasant under my bare feet as I shuffled to the kitchen, holding the wall for support against my pounding headache.

Normally, Kak would be there after an especially “fun” night. He would spread through my body like syrup, coating all the parts that ached, helping the hangover dissipate faster than any on-demand IV.

That morning, he stubbornly holed himself up under my ribs, heavy and unpleasant.

I pressed a glass to the carbonated water dispenser next to my tap, rubbing the polished granite countertop with restless fingers. I took small sips as I eyed the bright kitchen-living room combo of my apartment. It was small, but almost brand new when I bought it, and already equipped with modern furnishings and equipment.

My gaze fell to the front door, then to the floorboards underneath the mail slot, usually used only for internal announcements and occasional advertising by building management and neighbors.

I padded to the door, groaning as I bent to pick up the envelope that had been pushed through it.

Sinking heavily into my couch, I lifted the unsealed flap and extracted a gold-foiled rectangle of heavy cardboard.

Equine Society New Year’s Masquerade Gala

An evening of cheer, friends, and celebration

White Tie, mask required

I flipped the invitation over a few times, running my thumb along the textured golden border. There was no name, but I knew who it was from.

Kuthil Ash Kharn loved his horses.

I realized, looking at that envelope, how stupid I’d been. Why had I been avoiding talking to Kak about the situation? We’d been together for ten years, through thick and thin. Literally inseparable. Not talking to him when his long-lost ancestor—or something—reappeared in the flesh was senseless. I didn’t even know why Kuthil Ash Kharn was back, much less feeling any lingering attachment to that version of the alien. I spent two days with that version of him before he disappeared literally off the face of the Earth. Kak did not disappear. Kak was there, always. I needed Kak to know there was no threat to his standing in my life.

“Kak.” I stretched out on the couch, head against the firm fabric armrest. “We need to talk. Please.”

I closed my eyes, mind restless, but the hangover and lack of sufficient sleep the previous night helped me drift off.

* * *

I didn’t know how long I’d been asleep before he arrived. Lucidity never came without his presence. So when I woke up in the dream, sitting on the same couch on which I’d fallen asleep, I knew he was there.

The room was not my own. A wide panoramic window looking out at spanning fields, dark wooden flooring, and a comically large Christmas tree in the middle of the space gave it away as Kuthil Ash Kharn’s sitting room at his ranch house—the room in which I first met the alien a decade ago.

The fabric couch on which I sat was the only remnant of my own apartment.

I blinked, and then he was seated on the couch across from mine. Forest green fabric shifted under his weight.

I had to take a beat and get a hold of myself because for a moment everything in me saw him. The other one. The one from back then.

The man in front of me cocked his head and looked me in the eye, unflinching.

“I am the Kuthil Ash Kharn from back then, Layla Oberman,” he said. “I am more him than the version who came back to Earth.”

I wanted to tell him it didn’t matter. I didn’t care. Kak was the one who mattered, not which one of them had more resemblance to the original.

“It does matter,” he said. He beckoned, and I slid off the couch, closing the short distance between us to sit on the warm floor between his long legs clad in black jeans. I put my cheek on his knee.

“Explain it to me again then.” I looked up at him as he put a heavy hand on my head, stroking my hair, which had adopted the same light brown tips I’d had when I first met Kuthil Ash Kharn, remnants of worn out balayage. I’ve been wearing it in its natural black since then.

Each time the topic came up, I had to gather my thoughts and arrange them neatly to understand the words. The duality, the concept of “sharding,” was still difficult for me to comprehend. It was hard to accept that the man holding me at this ranch ten years ago was the same one who’d been inside me for the past decade. The same one stroking my head now.

His thermal presence filled me with a satisfying buzz. I wrapped an arm around his calf and shifted closer against him.

“When I shared from my original host body, you took much of my essence. You were greedy.” He smiled, but his eyes looked far away as he tracked his thumb down my cheek and rested it at the corner of my mouth. “The amount of me you took… was most of me. The version of me that was left was a husk. He retreated to our homeworld to recover. But recovering means molding with others of my kind—being filled with shards of them and giving them shards of himself in return. He is not the same entity you met anymore. He never can be. He is millions of us.”

“But he remembers me.” I frowned.

“That may be all he retained: his fixation.”

Was that what I was? A fixation?

“I wanted to tell you I have no desire to see him. You are the one—”

“I know,” he cut me off. I looked up at him, and he cupped my face. “But I believe you must meet him.”

“What?” I frowned. This was the opposite of what I was intending.

“We both need to find out for ourselves who he is and why he’s back.”

“But why? Why can’t we just ignore him?” I shook my head against his palm.

“Because if he came back for you, Layla Oberman, ignoring him is not an option. He’s come too far. My kind don’t choose to leave Home. Ever. And we need to know.”

“What if I don’t want to know? And… what if he’s himself?”

A shadow came over Kak’s eyes, but passed quickly. “Then you will have some decisions to make.”

I steeled my gaze on him. There was nothing to decide. Kak was part of me. An irrevocable part. It would be Kak, only and always. I had no choice, and didn’t want one.

I sucked in a breath, preparing to protest, but he put a finger to my lips. He bent down, face inches from mine.