No More Heroes: In the Wake of the Templars Book Three by Loren Rhoads

yourself.”
    “My big, strong girlfriend will take care of me,” he assured her.
    “No doubt.”
    *   *   *
    Raena thought the end of the meal might be uncomfortable, but Coni wanted to hustle Mykah off to sober up and Vezali had plans for a spa visit, so Raena and Haoun were left to their own devices.
    By unanimous agreement, they tried out another hotel. This one had an enormous tub. Haoun drew the line at a bubble bath, but he made it up to Raena by exploring every inch of her. His overly long fingers were precise as they peeled away her clothing. He followed each article with his long, slightly sticky tongue.
    For her part, Raena struggled to relax and enjoy the attention. She was familiar with taking pleasure from the pleasure others took from her. However, now that she was free, to be the recipient of so much attention without being allowed to reciprocate flustered her. She wanted to be an active participant: an equal, not a plaything.
    She turned over in the tub so she could look Haoun in the face. Luckily, he wasn’t like the pocket-sized lizards she grew up with, who had an eye on either side of their heads. Like a predator, Haoun had binocular vision. She traced his hexagonal scales with her fingertips.
    “I love to watch you fight,” Haoun told her, trailing his claws lightly down her arm.
    Raena wasn’t sure if he mocked her. “Why?”
    “You look like you’re having so much fun. Today, when you came up out of the water to face those guys, you had the scariest grin. You looked like you wanted nothing more than for them to make a move, so you’d know which one to take down first.”
    Raena smiled. “You could see that?”
    “You look like you were born to fight.”
    “Not born to it, no.” She snuggled against him, enjoying his claws skimming the ridges of scars across her back. “Made for it, maybe. Certainly trained for it.” For a long time, fighting had been her favorite pastime.
    She wondered, “When are you going to show me what your people do together?”
    He gave her his barking laugh. “Aren’t you tired out?”
    “Not yet.”
    “I don’t want to hurt you,” he hedged.
    “ Please . You know I’m not going to let a little pain stand in my way.”
    He buried his snout in the base of her throat, so she couldn’t see his eyes. Raena smiled to herself and ran her fingers around the scales around his tympanic membranes. He squirmed. She wondered if she’d made him uncomfortable, but he clutched her closer.
    “Come on, Haoun. Be adventurous,” she teased.
    “You are, without a doubt, the most perverse woman I’ve ever met.”
    She took that as the praise it was meant to be. “Stellar.”
    *   *   *
    Mykah climbed dutifully into the shower to wash the ocean from his skin as Coni settled in to check the news for the galaxy’s reaction to the Messiah documentary.
    Mykah wanted desperately not to think, but this thing today troubled him. Yesterday he’d noticed that Lautan didn’t have a lot of human visitors. Until Raena found the nabe restaurant, he hadn’t seen any human food. Raena was too innocent of the modern galaxy to understand what that meant, but Mykah had believed himself to be more aware. Still, he hadn’t taken the lack of humans as a warning. He’d allowed himself to relax, to buy into being a tourist. It might have gotten him killed.
    He turned the water a notch hotter, hoping to counteract the chill in his blood. He couldn’t believe he’d allowed himself to forget. Just because he had a Haru girlfriend and his crewmates were Dagat and Na’ash and he was legal co-owner of a sweet old Imperial ship, it didn’t mean he equaled anyone else in the galaxy. Like it or not, he would always be a visible representative of a species that had committed genocide.
    Maybe the bullies today had only intended to frighten him, or beat him up a little, but the ocean could have easily taken matters out of their hands, if Raena hadn’t been there.
    She’d been