“You are not identical though, are you?” Apex lay back on the grass and propped himself up on his elbow. His long legs stretched out gorgeously. The space between his hips looked like the perfect pillow, and I couldn’t help but think how nice it would be to lay my head in his lap. Maybe I would have, if we didn’t have to be constantly wary of who might be watching. “I saw Savannah on the ship that took her to Lunaria. Her hair was so dark, but yours…”
“Yeah. Pink. The sectors hated that. So did my mom.” I plucked a lock of my hair from my shoulder and held it up in the sunshine. “I probably shouldn’t have dyed it, but it was like… I needed to do something to prove that we weren’t the same person. Savannah was always so obedient. Never wanted to stir the pot. I was the awful rebellious one. I guess the pink hair was my way of showing them that.”
“It does not look dyed. Even at the roots…”
I laughed. “Perma-dye. It’s…hard to explain. The colorist altered something in my DNA. It’ll always grow in pink now. If I was going to make such a big change, I didn’t want to make it easy on my keepers to change it back.”
“You and your sister aren’t so different after all, then.” Apex smirked and raised his wine glass to me. “Perhaps Savannah was the obedient one once, but no longer.”
“Because she’s pregnant with an alien’s baby, you mean?” I knew Savannah was shacked up with a bunch of rebel lords on Lunaria, but that didn’t really seem like disobedience to me. We’d both always wanted to fall in love and have babies someday. We just hadn’t been happy with the fact that our future husbands would be chosen by someone else—or the fact that they wouldn’t really love us. Not any more than men like the politicians in the sectors loved an expensive painting or a prized racehorse.
“Because she became pregnant in direct defiance of the life that had been chosen for her,” Apex explained. “Your sister was chosen by Lady Idria. She was supposed to become King Brixta’s bride. If she had gone through with it, she would have been forced to use her status as, I believe you were called, influencers? To encourage other females from your planet to enter the slave trade. But after a night or more of pleasure with her mate, Coplan… I suppose you could say that she chose him instead.”
“She got pregnant to avoid marrying someone she didn’t want to marry?” I couldn’t help but laugh. I loved Savannah, but that seemed very much out of character for her. “She’s changed a lot since we were taken, I guess.”
“It is not unusual to change under duress.” Apex shrugged, then sipped at his wine. “I often used to wonder who I would have become, if I had not been forced through the trails to become a specter.”
“Yeah? What conclusion did you come to?” It was rare to hear Apex open up like this. Most of the time, he seemed like a book that had been locked away in a chest and thrown into the ocean, never to be read again.
But the uncanny moment of openness had already passed.
“It does not matter now, I suppose. We cannot undo the choices we make. Any alternative futures die the moment that we choose our path—just as Savannah’s future as King Brixta’s bride died when she became pregnant with Coplan’s cub. It was clever of her, really. Pregnancies on Lunaria…with the low birthrates our population has faced in the last few generations, they are more sacred than any vow. Once she carried the future of our race, the cub of another male in her womb, no other Lunarian man could claim her. Not even one who would become king.”
“I used to imagine different futures for myself too, you know,” I admitted. “Falling in love. For real—not some kind of fake performance for the sake of whatever man I was doomed to marry. I always imagined that he’d whisk me away to somewhere where my parents and the sectors couldn’t reach me. We’d have a family together, see the world…” My voice fell flat as I saw the way Apex was looking at me. It wasn’t a bad look, but it was intense enough that it made me second-guess what I was revealing to him. Just because he’d made me come didn’t mean I needed to go waffling around about my hopes and dreams. Being kidnapped might have changed Savannah, but it hadn’t changed me. Not that much. “Like you said, though. It doesn’t matter now.”
“Doesn’t it?” Apex arched a dark brow. “You do not even know your own future yet, Atlanta. How can you be so certain that you have already chosen your path?”
“I’m not, I guess.” I took a gulp of my wine, just to calm myself down. Being looked at the way Apex stared at me never failed to make my stomach flutter and my heart race. “I don’t know what’s in store for me. If you keep your promise, I guess I get away from this stupid palace and the awful planet it was built on. But beyond that…you’re right. I don’t know.”
“Would you like to?” Apex straightened and shifted closer to me. His fingers brushed along my jawline. Everywhere he touched burned, even after his fingertips
