Free Sons of Lyra: Fight For Love by Felicity Heaton Page A

and stepped
back.

    He swung his legs around
over the side of the black padded table and pressed his palms into
the edge of it as he sat and looked at her.

    “ Why won’t you
call me by my real name?” Her constant use of his title irritated
him. She called others by their name. Everyone but him. “Call me
Remi.”

    She shook her head. “You
know I can’t. I don’t make the rules.”

    “ But you can
break them,” he reached out to her with his left hand and winced
when his shoulder grated. His other hand went to it, holding it
tight. He must have damaged it during the fight.

    “ Is it
bothering you?” she said, her voice low and concerned.

    He nodded. “All the
time.”

    “ Not the name
thing.” Her tone caught a note of impatience and then softened
again. “Your arm.”

    He looked at it when she
touched it, as light and gentle as usual.

    When he was in his
uniform, he could easily forget that it wasn’t really a part of
him, at least in the sense that he hadn’t been born with it. He’d
been given it two years ago after he’d lost his arm in an
insurgence on Varka Two. It had been his first mission. It had gone
horribly wrong. The Varkan’s had been waiting for them. Half of his
squadron had been killed. He’d been lucky to only lose an
arm.

    The fleet doctors had done
their best, replacing his arm with a fully cybernetic one. It had
taken them a whole day of surgery to attach all the nerve endings
to the sensors in the arm. He flexed his fingers. When he thought
hard enough, he could almost feel the metal joints moving beneath
the dark silvery rubber skin. The nurses and doctors had told him
it was nothing to be concerned about. It was purely a residual
memory of his old arm he was feeling, and not the workings of his
new one. He wasn’t convinced.

    Emmanuelle’s fingers
traced over the elastic rubber skin covering the metal bones of his
arm. He felt every sweep and press of her touch, as real as it
would have been if she’d touched his other arm.

    “ How does this
feel?” she said, raising his arm up and moving it around to
different positions.

    His shoulder grated again
when she pushed his arm out to the side and brought his wrist
towards his chest.

    He winced.

    She lowered his arm and
disappeared behind him. His eyes closed when she touched his back,
her hands warm against him. Her fingers pressed into his shoulder
blade.

    “ I don’t think
it’s your arm,” she breathed close to his ear.

    He sighed and then got the
better of himself. “So what is it?”

    “ Just the Lyran
body not being able to withstand a few timely blows.” She placed
her hand against his shoulder. It warmed his skin. “You must have
landed pretty hard on it.”

    He tried to look over his
shoulder to see it but all he could see was her hand, small and
slender, touching him. Her eyes spoke of concern when his met
them.

    “ Do tell
Jericho to go easier on you,” she said with a small
frown.

    He slid off the table and
grabbed his shirt. Everyone was always going easy on him. He was a
soldier. He wanted to be treated like one, as though he was just
one of the squad. He was tired of being singled out because he was
royalty. Had Balt and Acer encountered similar problems during
training? He couldn’t imagine them paying attention to any order
telling them to make the other soldiers go easier on
them.

    Putting his dark blue
shirt on, he hid the pain it caused his shoulder and looked at
Emmanuelle. She was still watching him, as though she expected an
answer to what she’d said.

    “ No,” he said
it flatly, without any emotion, and held her gaze. “I have to
go.”

    Emmanuelle watched him
leave, knowing exactly where he was going to go. It was three
months ago when she’d first noticed that he liked to think alone.
She’d stumbled across him sitting staring out through the glass
dome of the hydroponics deck of the ship. Whenever he was angry
after coming to her, she always went there to watch