One breath of her scent was all it took to let my triad know that she could possibly be the one and only woman in the universe who can complete us. Tasha just smelled right.
That’s the reason we haven’t turned her entire crew over to the Aurelian Empire – and collected the impressive bounty being offered for returning those stolen Orbs. It’s the only reason we weren’t willing to let Tasha rot in an Aurelian jail cell for the rest of her natural life.
But I’m basing all this on a possibility.
An Aurelian can tell when a woman just smells right. We Aurelians have the keenest sense of smell in the universe – we can detect fear, guilt, arousal and even virginity by the scent of a woman.
The more right a woman smells, the more likely it is that she’s genetically compatible with us – the one woman out of the billions who exist, stretched all across the universe, who can bear the natural-born sons of my battle-brothers and I.
However, the more right a woman smells, the worse the disappointment when you claim her body and discover that she’s not the one. Only the act of penetration can confirm whether or not a woman is our Fated Mate – as we penetrate her, she can penetrate us; by joining our shared aura through the Bond.
But when you enter a woman’s body, but not her mind, you instantly know she’s not the one we Aurelians spend our thousands of years of life searching for. When you make that bitter realization – that she’s just another woman – it hurts.
She’s instantly transformed from the woman who could possibly have been your destiny…
…into just another woman; and a sweaty distraction in the relentless search for our Fated Mate.
Iunia paces my chambers. He’s got the same angsty eagerness as Vinicus. It stems from getting your blood up in battle and knowing you’re going to return to the fray the next day. His nerves are still attuned to the frequency of blood and battle. He’s still thinking he’s out there, in the caves, fighting for his life. Iunia craves to be back on the moon, clearing out another Scorp nest, because the pursuit of bloody victory is the closest any of us come to the satisfaction of finding and seeding our Fated Mate.
I wish I could join them. Every time they leave The Instigator and descend into the darkness of those Scorp caverns, I feel their Auras in my mind – raging in the ecstasy of pure violence.
The three of us form an unlikely combination. You don’t choose your triad, just like you don’t choose your Fated Mate. It’s a Bond formed by destiny, fate, mystery and experience.
Iunia and Vinicus are close enough in resemblance to be mistaken for twins – if such a thing was possible given the way Aurelians typically reproduce. In contrast, however, their personalities could not be more opposite – and neither could mine.
When we all started our first hundred years of service – the duty that all Aurelians owe to their Empire – we three had all hated each other.
We’d graduated top of our class. We’d competed in everything at the Academy - sprints, fencing, sparring and even our conquest of women.
I remember how good it felt to beat those two, but I also remember the bitter taste when one of them got the better of me. We were like oil, water, and fire – totally incompatible.
Or, so we’d thought. Now, we work together.
On our first day of real combat, we three had rushed the Scorp nest we’d been assigned to destroy – running into the darkness side by side like comrades, even though we were only doing so because each of us wanted to outdo the other in the number of Scorp we killed. We’d each been racing to be the one who killed the Scorp Queen and claim the honor of victory that day.
We’d pushed deep into that underground hellhole together – too deep. We’d quickly found ourselves cut off from reinforcements.
Gods – we were so green back then. Our arrogance and recklessness had left the three of us cut off, lost, and surrounded on all sides by the scuttling, snipping nightmare of the Scorp horde. By rights, we should have been dead – for our sins, we’d deserved to die…
But that was when the three of us found something we had in common – a refusal to surrender.
For two hours we fought. For two hours, with the three of us back-to-back-to-back, we’d sliced down wave after wave of Scorp warriors. We relied on each other, knowing that our survival depended on the survival of our comrades. Individually, or as a pair, we’d have been run down and killed by the endless waves or Scorp – but together, the three of us worked in unstoppable synchronicity; like the slashes and stabs of our Orb-Blades were music we were playing together.
It was music the universe heard – and as our movements became as one, so did our minds. They merged until we became one. The Bond between warriors was forged – and the rivals I’d so bitterly competed against became my most trusted allies.
Now, the auras of Vinicus and Iunia are in my mind forever. I’ll feel their thoughts and emotions until one of us dies – and only then will he wink out of existence in my mind.
Every day, now, I have to face that risk. Each day, I must sit back and watch on my screens and readouts as Vinicus and Iunia endanger their lives in the same grim caverns that forged our eternal Bond.
I’m left in the safety of The Instigator – commanding my battalion and ensuring the large-scale decisions are made while my triad works in unison together to massacre the waves of Scorp.
I’d trade places with either of them in an instant – I often wish I could – but that is not my
