Chain of Three

By Willa Okati

Mix two alien Marines, a human BDSM Master, and a shapeshifting Empress with a mind of her own, and what do you get? A whole lot of trouble.

Dane and Julian, ex-war heroes now in the Empress’ service, hate each other. Hate, hate, hate. Problem? Julian wants Dane almost as much as he hates him.

The Empress needs her ex-Marines, but they’re no good to her if they’re at each other’s throats. She thinks she has a way to tame the two by putting them together with Master Anubis, a refugee from Earth.

It’s a three-way battle for dominance, and the Empress knows something she’s not telling…

Note: Chain of Three follows the standalone title Chain of Thorns, but can be read by itself. This title contains elements that may be disturbing to some readers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Changeling Press
• Release date: Apr 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9780205100644

Willa Okati

Willa Okati can most often be found muttering to herself over a keyboard, plugged into her iPod and breaking between paragraphs to play air drums. In her spare time (the odd ten minutes or so per day she's not writing) she's teaching herself to play the pennywhistle. Willa has forty-plus separate tattoos and yearns for a full body suit of ink. She walks around in a haze of story ideas, dreaming of tales yet to be told. She drinks an alarming amount of coffee for someone generally perceived to be mellow.

Book preview

telling…

Chapter One

So, you’re pretending to be a human again today, are you?

Dane grunted in response. In his opinion, a stupid question didn’t deserve any kind of answer. Anyone with two, three, four or more eyes in their head -- or what they called a head -- ought to know better. Of course he’d shifted into human shape. He wasn’t stupid.

The Empress hadn’t exactly ordered Her subjects to assume the images of the humans She adored and fell passionately in love with. However, anyone who wasn’t too dumb to come in out of the rain knew they’d better wear the right uniform unless they had an itch to annoy Her.

You really, really didn’t want to annoy the Supreme Commander of a thousand-plus starships and a million trained warriors.

Besides, he’d decided to lounge by the pond in the garden of his new quarters that morning and tentacles had a nasty tendency to develop a vicious sunburn. Getting a tan the earthfolk they’d rescued from their doomed planet called this practice. They’d said it was relaxing and made them look more attractive to those they wanted to mate with.

No, those they wanted to fuck.

If Dane was going to play human, then he’d damn well get the details right. Mating and fucking were completely different concepts. One of the new traditions most of his countrymen and women liked best when it came to playing human was the idea of fucking without having to tangle themselves up in mating.

Fuck. An interesting word you could use in almost any sentence.

Dane paused for a second to appreciate the amazing range of human obscenities, otherwise called swearing, cursing, or cussin’. They worked great when a guy didn’t really know what else to say.

Speaking of which, Dane decided getting a suntan was probably a piss-poor waste of time. He couldn’t figure out why anyone would enjoy damaging the pigmentation of their skin by sitting in the sun all day, but as the earthfolk also said, what the hell? He didn’t have anything better to do. Not since he’d been honorably discharged from the military, sent back to their home planet for recuperation, and then…

Dane shuddered.

Aww. He shivered. Izza baby boy cold? Julian taunted in American English.

Raising the middle finger of his human-shaped hand, Dane pointed it where he figured Julian would be standing. Another handy earthfolk trick, cussing with hand signals.

Julian hooted. Up yours too! He made the suggestion in cheerful good humor. Probably purely for the sake of annoying Dane. He never took offense at anything Dane did. He treated every barb and sting like some big game. Prick. You’re cranky today, old man. What flew up your ass?

Dane grunted again as his only answer, deciding if that wasn’t good enough for Julian he could go screw himself.

Mmm. He really, really loved human profanity. So rich, depending on culture, and so satisfying. He and Julian both studied the underground lists of new phrases together to figure out what they meant, bitching at each other over who got to read first if they didn’t both have a copy. The time when Julian insisted son of a bitch meant the same thing as son of a motherless goat had resulted in a fight of amazing violence and duration.

In the end, the Empress Herself gave them a tongue-lashing of Her own and sent them to their rooms to stand with their noses in the corner until they learned to behave like men, not children.

Julian’s fault, in Dane’s opinion. Dumbass.

Their Empress didn’t approve of human swearing, since most of it was too raw for Her taste. But then again, She could afford to be picky and refined, couldn’t She, sitting in Her Glass Palace up on the sacred hill?

Dane felt guilty for thinking such things about his Empress, his Commander, but couldn’t make himself stop bitterly recounting the War as he’d seen it for himself.

The K’thartin, a lizard-like race with a taste for attacking and pillaging other worlds, who burned their wreckages and sowed the blood-stained grounds with salt, were vicious beasts who needed to be cut down. Dane had been on board with the Imperial decision. The Empress declared War and sent Her troops out filled with dreams of glory and honor on the battlefront. A fight for justice and freedom.

It all sounded fine and great when you were standing on a parade ground in your shiny new uniform. Everyone saluted, shouted and cheered for the Cause of the Empress, then.

Until they knew better, and the Empress didn’t look so good anymore.

She wasn’t struggling on the front lines fighting the K’thartin or standing packed in standing-room-only tight on a gunnery ship, and sure as hell hadn’t had one inch of Her delicate blue-tinged skin so much as scratched while Her people sweated, bled and died.

She hadn’t been there on the day when Dane had been sent ahead as one member of a scouting team.

She hadn’t gone face-to-face with a lunatic K’thartin. Probably tossed off his own ship to die. He’d lived long enough to corner Dane’s men in a suicide ambush. The K’thartin lurked in hiding -- damn the lizards, they knew how to camouflage themselves far too well -- and jumped them from behind, probably hopped up on one of the synth-drugs they used to make themselves crazy for battle as well as insane by nature.

One K’thartin ought to have been no match for even a search party, but the horned, scaled lizard-man got the jump on them and possessed the strength of the crazed. Despite being a castoff, he still packed a weapon and knew how to pull the trigger.

He’d slaughtered Dane’s men before they knew they were even under attack.

When they were all dead, gone in seconds, the lizard-man cornered Dane. Sure enough of his victory to take time out for gloating, he’d cackled and lolled his forked tongue out and raved about the rewards his god Thar would shower down upon him.

Thinking he had a chance, Dane acted fast, pulled his laser gun and aimed for the lizard’s scaly head.

Damn thing saw him go for his weapon, though, and it had been even faster on the draw. Before Dane could fire his first volley the K’thartin shot three smoking holes through his left standing tentacle and howled with laughter when Dane fell.

Fell, but didn’t stay down.

Dane killed the K’thartin especially dead for what he’d done and used his laser gun to chop the lizard’s body into small chunks for extra payback.

Didn’t turn back the clock, though, didn’t heal him in a blaze of glory. The K’thartin had used the highest setting on his own weapon. Dane’s leg tentacle was burned to a lump of useless meat.

Fuck him sideways, though, if he hadn’t dragged himself back to the front lines hauling his charred limb behind him and made his sorry-ass soldiers move, fight, and kill before he’d finally bled out too much to keep standing or conscious.

He’d passed out, and when he woke he was on a transport ship back home. While he sweated and swore in his medi-bunk, enduring the healing procedures without pain medications because he would not be weak enough to accept them, life as he knew it came to an end. An Admiral paid Dane a special visit via vid-link and said that while it was brave men like Dane who’d win the day, for Dane himself the War was over.

Dane gritted his human-shaped teeth at the memory. He’d saved a thousand lives, acted as the driving force in a battle that would go down in history, but because his leg had been crippled he wasn’t fit to fight anymore.

Honorable discharge. Honorable, his ass.

Pissed off to the end, Dane stood instead of kneeling in the Empress’ presence when She called him to the Glass Palace to award him, in person, his medals for courage under fire and extraordinary heroism. The insult should have made Her spitting mad, which was Dane’s goal, but after gazing at him a few minutes She flickered a quick, sly grin. She’d declared that since he could no longer be an active warrior, he would now become part of…

Dane shuddered again -- then sighed. So help him, despite whatever She had done, he couldn’t stop loving the Empress, no matter how hard he tried. Couldn’t