"Dax"

"Sshh," he repeated.

"But you didn't"

He put a finger to her lips. "Believe me, I know." He tried for some nonchalance in his shrug. "It's all right."

"But"

"Don't worry about it, snowfox. It's...something inherent in Triotians." In this one, anyway, he thought in pained ruefulness. "Besides, it was worth it, just watching you come apart in my arms."

That, he judged by the sudden rush of color to her face, had sufficiently distracted her.

"I...I've never been like that. I didn't know it was possible, to feel like that."

Dax's mouth curled in purely male gratification. He was surprised at how good he felt, in spite of the fact that his body was so achingly tight he wanted to curl up and groan. Yet despite the pain, he knew he would do the same thing again; just looking at her, soft and naked beside him, made him want to start now. He might not have reached the ultimate pleasure, but he had never felt so much in the process.

"It's supposed to be like that," he said.

She snuggled closer, a small movement that had a much bigger effect on him; strangely, it was more in the area of his heart than his groin.

"I never believed that," she admitted, still sounding amazed by the pleasure that had overtaken her. "Shaylah did. It was what she was waiting for." She paused, an odd look coming into her eyes, one almost of revelation. "I never knew what my mother was seeking, with all her matings. I only knew she never found it. I think it must have been this."

Dax was torn between that smug satisfaction that he had so thoroughly achieved his goal, the lingering throb of his unsatisfied body, and a shock at realizing this was the first time she'd ever mentioned anything about her family.

"Your mother?"

She looked at him, her expression suggesting she would take offense at the question were she not been so replete. He couldn't stop that satisfied smile from forming again.

"Even slaves have them." She sounded as if she were trying to be irritated, but the contented laziness of her expression, lashes half lowered, detracted from it a bit.

"I know. I just wasn't sure Coalition officers did."

Her lashes lifted sharply. She eyed him, as if unable to believe he'd made a joke about it. He wasn't sure he quite believed it himself. Somehow his priorities had definitely shifted; her past still bothered him mightily, but it seemed to have paled in significance beside the knowledge that a small part of his world had survived and was fighting back.

He couldn't think about that now. He'd been wrestling with it for days, closed away in here, and he wasn't any closer to resolving anything.

"Is she still alive?"

"I don't know."

Her tone was sharp enough to sting, her expression suddenly cool, and he felt as if she'd slammed a door in his face. Dax drew back a little, telling himself that just because he'd poured out his entire life to her didn't mean she was going to do the same. Nor did the fact that she'd just gone to pieces in his arms.

"I'm sorry," she said suddenly, contritely, as if she'd read his thoughts. "I don't talk about her much. I don't even think about her much."

"I'm sorry," he said, uncertain what else to say.

"Don't be." She grimaced. "It's quite mutual."

"What about your father?"

She laughed then, humoriessly. "That'swhy I don't think about her."

Congratulations, he told himself ruefully. You've surely managed to shatter the mood. "Califa, I didn't mean to"

"It doesn't matter." She lifted one slender, bare shoulder, as if to emphasize her words. The movement made the soft flesh of her breast rise as well; Dax tried to ignore the stab of heat that resulted. "I have no idea who he is. Neither did she."

Dax's brows furrowed. He was more and more wishing he hadn't pressed. She went on as if she hadn't seen his expression. As if it truly mattered little to her. Or as if she owed it to him, in return for his own confessions. He didn't like that thought.

"My mother was...the personification of the Coalition view on mating. She had many men. They never stayed long. My father could have been any one of three or four of them."

He truly didn't know what to say to that.

"When I was small, and there was one I liked," Califa said, as calmly as if what she was describing wasas perhaps it was, Dax thought, in her worldnormal, "which usually meant anyone who acknowledged my existence, I would pretend that he was the one. Then Trayon came."

"Trayon?"

She nodded, smiling, so wistfully Dax felt his throat tighten. "He was different. He liked me. He really likedme. I knew, because sometimes he would come when my mother wasn't even there, to see me."

So she'd had someone to care for her, at least for a while, he thought. An old, familiar jab of guilt prodded him; his father had been a stiff-necked, authoritarian man, but Dax had never doubted his love. Even their arguments never shook that belief. Perhaps it was why he'd left so easily, because he knew that, since his father truly loved him, they would eventually make it up. But instead, he'd wound up having to live with the knowledge that the last words they'd ever spoken had been harsh and angry.

But Califa hadn't even had that. "This Trayon," he said, his voice a little unsteady, "he was good to you?"

Her eyes glowed. "He taught me to sing."

Such a small thing, really, he thought. Yet from that look in her eyes, and the fondness in her voice, it was perhaps the brightest memory in a grim childhood.

"That's when I decided it must be him. That he had to be my real father."

"Was he?" Dax asked, feeling he already knew the answer.

The fond light faded from her eyes, to be replaced by bitter remembrance. "No. When I told my mother, she laughed and said I was very wrong. That she might not be sure who my father was, but she could be sure it wasn't Trayon. I didn't understand. I insisted that if she didn't know, it could be him. She thought I was calling her a liar."

"But you were a child," Dax protested instinctively. "You didn't know"

"Exactly. So she made certain I did know. She sat me down and told me more about the facts of mating than any child should ever know." He felt a shiver ripple through her. "Then she made me...watch. The next time she had one of her men. So I could see exactly why she could be sure."

Dax's stomach knotted painfully. The persistent ache of his arousal had faded as her grim story had come out. Shame replaced it; she had had so little, and he so much, and he had taken it for granted. And so he had lost it all. But Califa had apparently never had anything or anyone tender and loving in her young life, except the kindly Trayon.

Unable to stop himself, he gathered her up into his arms and cradled her to him, much as she had cradled him when he had been racked with a pain too great to bear alone. For an instant she stiffened, resisting, but then went pliant against him, her cheek pressed against his chest, her hand resting on his side over his ribs.

"Your mother," he said gruffly, "deserved to lose you."

Califa made a low, remorseful sound. "I'm not sure she did. In the end, I think she may have won."

"What do you mean?"

"I believed what she told me, that mating was merely a physical need, and that no one male could satisfy a woman for long. That the only way to protect yourself from hurt was never to give yourself away."

She sighed then. And she pulled away from the encircling shelter of his embrace. She faced him, but didn't look at him. As if heedless of her own nudity, or feeling modesty was unimportant compared to what she had to say, she didn't try to cover herself. When she spoke, it was in the tone of a confession, of one expecting punishment for some wrongdoing.

"I'm sorry, Dax. I should have told you this before we...mated. Perhaps you would have changed your mind. Perhaps you will regret it, now."

"I could never regret it, snowfox," he said quietly. Even though it had been agony as well as bliss, even though it complicated his life impossibly.

"You may. I've...been too like my mother. Thinking mating was as the Coalition decreed it, a casual thing, between two beings possessed of a mutual urge, nothing more. Were you to ask someone who knew Major Claxton, they would tell you she was not above sampling. Widely."

The surface meaning of her words disturbed him. It was so foreign to what he'd been raised to believe. Not, he admitted with a flash of bitter self-contempt, that he'd done much in the way of living up to those beliefs himself. But something else about the words disturbed him even more.

"Would what they would say be true?"

She looked startled. He smiled wryly. "I know a little of reputations." And, he added silently, I have a feeling yours is as ill deserved as mine. "Would what they would say be true?" he asked again.

Her answer, spoken almost embarra.s.sedly, was what he'd half expected. "I...tried to adopt my mother's view, but I...couldn't. Major Claxton gave the appearance of fully enjoying the mating freedom sanctioned by the Coalition, but..."

"Appearances can be deceptive." And who knew better than he? He lifted a brow at her. "You speak of Major Claxton as if she were someone else."

"I...She is. It's as if she is someone I knew, or was pretending to be. But then all the trappings, all the pretense was stripped away. I don't know what's left. I only know that I don't ever want to be her again."

"And there's the difference," Dax said, his voice low. "You said we were in the same straits, but...you never want to go back, and I..."

Califa lifted her head to look at him then. "And you would give anythingeverythingto go back."

He let out a long breath. "Yes. I think I would."

"You've lost so much more than I," she said.

Only, Dax thought, because I had so much more to lose. When she went on, she as much as confirmed his thought.

"The only true regret I have is Shaylah. I never...appreciated her until it was too late."

"It is...hard to lose a friend," Dax said. Califa met his gaze, then looked away, and he knew she knew he was thinking of Dare.

"But he knew how you felt, did he not? That you...cared for him?"

"He knew that I loved him as a brother," Dax said.

Califa's eyes closed for a moment, the semicircles of her lashes dark on her pale cheeks. She looked as if she were in pain, and shame laced her voice when at last she spoke.

"I never told Shaylah how I felt. We were friends, and yet..." She sighed. "You were right, when you said I was jealous. I am not proud of that. When I was hurt, and my active career ended, she kept on. She became a hero, won medals, and I...envied her."

"Envy is not the same as jealousy. You can envy someone and still like them."

"I did," Califa said, almost fiercely. "I even...loved her, I think, as the closest thing to a sister I'd ever had. But my envy kept me from telling her, and now...I've lost the truest friend I ever had, because she saw the truth about the Coalition long before I did."

"Why?"

Califa blinked. "What?"

"Why did she see it so much sooner?"

"I don't know." Califa's brow furrowed as she considered the question. "Perhaps because her parents were...different as well."

"You mean what you said about her parents being bonded." Califa nodded. "I've wondered about that You said she was Arellian, like you."

"She is."

He shook his head in surprise. "Only a few of the outworlders who request it are granted permission for a Triotian ceremony."

"I know. Shaylah told me they had to apply, and remain on Trios for observation while the council decided."

"Not many would think it worth all that."

"Her parents did. They wished to be bonded before Shaylah's birth. I think they are why she looked at things differently. She only joined the Coalition for the same reason you fought with your father. All she had ever wanted to do was fly."

Then she would be a good match for Dare, Dax thought, feeling a stabbing pang of regret for Brielle. He had long ago accepted his sister's probable death; Califa's confirmation of the fact had merely put the seal on the knowledge. But it hurt to think of her gone forever, that little tease she had been as a child, always getting himinto trouble by making faces at him until he laughed while his father lectured him, getting him into more trouble than whatever he'd done to deserve the lecture in the first place. G.o.d, she had loved Dare so much...

But if Dare had found a measure of happiness, with a woman such as Califa had spoken of, then Dax would be the last to begrudge him. Dare had more than paid the price for it. Perhaps he had already paid the ultimate price, and his Shaylah with him; He wondered if they had ever overcome the fact that she belonged to the force that had enslaved him.

"And why did you join the Coalition?" he asked, thinking perhaps there was a clue here, some answer that might help him understand her.

Califa studied him for a long moment, as if searching for any trap in the question, examining it to see what damage answering it could do. Not the response of a Coalition officer, or of a female in a trusted lover's bed. But Califa was neither of those; she had wanted him, had allowed him to mate with her, but trust was not a word for what flowed between them. No, her response was that of the slave, who had learned in the hardest of ways the cost of the wrong answer.

"I needed...to belong somewhere," she said at last.

The Coalition was all I had. It was all I ever had.

He could almost hear her saying the words that day, not as excusethere was none, she'd admittedbut explanation. And after what she'd told him today, the words now made a poignant sense. He had been surrounded by relations and friends for most of his life. What made him qualified to judge why a lonely child, subjected to a haphazard kind of emotional abuse he could never have imagined, had grown up to find comfort in belonging somewhere, even the Coalition?

And was it not one of the basic tenets of Trios that anyone, if they had compelling enough reason in the eyes of the council for a crime, deserved a second chance?

It was a thought that hadn't occurred to him before. There was no Council of Elders left. He doubted if any of them would have survived the Coalition's b.l.o.o.d.y purge "Dax?"

The tentative call from outside in the pa.s.sage came in a familiar voice. Dax felt Califa stiffen, saw a look of dismay cross her face, and suddenly became aware of what Rina would see if he didn't answer and she opened the door. They were sprawled naked on his bunk, arms and legs entwined, their clothes scattered on the floor. That was not a part of Rina's education he wanted to provide just yetand certainly not so personally. The cruelty of what Califa's mother had done struck home with even more force.

"Hold, Rina," he called. "A moment."

At the look of sudden relief Califa gave him, Dax suddenly realized all the ramifications of what had happened here. Beyond Rina's reaction to discovering them together, there was the crew to think about. Were they to learn he had taken the Coalition slave to his bed, they might consider her fair game for them all, although he supposed they would not touch her for as long as they thought she was his.

And as long as they didn't know who she really was.

He leaned forward to gently kiss her forehead. "You are free to speak or not, as you wish, about what has happened between us. I would not force you one way or the other."

She looked startled, but so was he; such tenderness was hardly his rule after another of the matings that proved so frustrating for him.

He rolled out of the bunk and reached for his pants. He bent to pull them on, then paused when a movement caught the corner of his eye. Califa had also stood up, reaching for the flight suit. Their gazes locked, and for an instant they stood there, each one openly scanning the other's nakedness, as they had not done in the heat of their joining.

"I was right," Califa muttered.