Harem Assassins : King Sekton's Harem Planet, Book 2: A Space Opera Harem Adventure Baron Sord (good books to read for adults .txt) 📖

once on a SYFY channel New Year’s marathon. The episode was Eye of the Beholder. That’s the one where you think the woman stuck in a hospital bed with bandages covering her face will be horribly ugly when the doctor unwraps the bandages. But no, she’s beautiful! It’s the doctors and nurses who look like demon apes with melted faces!

This moment with Oia was the opposite of that.

Her face was a contorted caricature of the Oia I knew. Her swollen lips dipped over missing teeth like sad balloons. Her cheeks and jawline were puffy and stretched into a disfigured mask.

She was the demon ape with the melted face and missing teeth.

My Oia.

Even her bright blue eyes had dimmed. They floated in red pools of blood, the sclera having hemorrhaged during her recent beatings and not yet healed.

She was ghastly.

Seeing her like this hurt hard, like a mule kick to my guts.

“Can you ugh iss?” Her bloody eyes swam with crystal tears, challenging me, daring me to love the monster she’d become.

I ignored the nausea sloshing in my guts like a rusty oil barrel full of toxic sewage and said in a strained voice, “I… yes. I… I love you, Oia. No matter what.” Hardest words I’d ever said aloud to anyone. I swallowed my doubts and hammered the lid down with ten-penny nails.

Oia closed her eyes and rolled back into shadow.

I reached out for her hand again and squeezed it.

She sighed and squeezed back. “I sorry.”

“Don’t be,” I sighed as I wrestled with the enormity of the visual bomb her disfigured face had dropped in my lap. Turned out those ten-penny nails weren’t strong enough to hold my promise in place, or keep the lid on my doubts. I switched the lid over to steel and started welding.

“No, iss… I sood know better. I uh hee.”

“You’ll heal?”

She nodded. “I had worse.”

“When?”

“When I was Sekton’s concu-eye. In his Royal Ow-ass.”

“When you were a concubine in his Royal Palace? Did he… beat you?”

“And so any udders,” Oia sighed. She meant so many others. “I was one a any women he did is to.”

“I’m sorry,” I said sympathetically, hiding behind my sympathy for her to cover my own distress. It was shameful to admit I was hanging on to the hope of her healing like a life preserver. Without hope, I’d drown in the despairing red depths of bloody horror wrought by seeing her melted demon face and her unsettling bloody red eyes. Strangely, my withering despair didn’t stop my rage from exploding. Oia didn’t get disfigured by accident. I grit my teeth, “If I hadn’t already killed the last King Sekton Darkstar, I’d do it again.”

“Is done. Or get him, eye king.” Forget him, she meant. It was the first time she’d called me her king since I’d walked in here.

The significance of it was not lost on me. It was her acknowledgement of the loyalty I had promised her by showing her loyalty to me with those two words: my king. I knew from experience it was easy for people to be loyal to someone who had something they wanted. Things like beauty or money or power. It took courage and strength of character to be loyal to someone who had nothing to offer. And I was old enough to know real love was never easy. I forced a pained smile for Oia’s sake and continued my emotional welding while sneaking glances around my dark ocean of emotional despair, glancing frantically for that life preserver, hoping it would show up soon before I drowned in the shallow waters of my own shameful weakness.

“Ha you had your hearse?” Oia asked.

“Had a hearse?” I grimaced, picturing a classic death wagon with me laid out in the back, lying in an open coffin. For some strange reason, I was suddenly wondering if I had died back on the tetrahedral Space Asteroid, died when Theia’s backpack bomb had exploded inside the Space Keep before we could escape through the Chaos Gate, and only now was I finally realizing I was dead and trapped in my own personal hell, the hell where the first woman I had ever truly loved, and loved deeply — Oia — was now a melted-face and broken-toothed demon pretending to be Oia.

“Firse. Your first.”

“Oh! My first,” I said with great relief.

“Yes. Sorry. Is eye tea.” Her teeth.

“No worries.” I squeezed her hand.

“Well, has you?”

“Had my first?” I suddenly realized what she meant because Colonel Sadys had explained it the other day. Sex with another woman here on Zalaxia. “No. I haven’t.”

“Good.”

I suddenly felt like the perfect boyfriend and smiled proudly.

“Has you sought about it?” Oia asked.

Had I thought about it? My smile crumbled.

“Has you?”

“I’m surrounded by beautiful women here,” I said evasively, suddenly realizing my dark emotional ocean was covered with 1,500 floating life preservers bobbing on the gentle waves within easy reach. It would be the easiest thing I had ever done if I grabbed every one of those preservers and climbed into the arriving rescue boat piloted by a bevy of Zalaxian babes in bikinis. It would be so easy to have them whisk me away to the safe shores of the tropical and sun-kissed Sex Island, and let Oia drown alone in the dark water, leave her treading the increasingly choppy waves. Leave her exhausted and sinking slowly, sputtering and coughing up brine while my rescue boat churned up surf, spraying more briny salt water in her face while I sailed away into the sunshine with babes on both arms and more waiting on shore. It would be so easy to ditch my commitment to Oia. But I would hate myself forever if I did.

“Leave him be,” Venus whispered from the bed behind me, startling both Oia and I. Venus sounded tired and weak, but amused. “Poor Tim has a harem and he hasn’t used it yet? Such a shame. I think we brought the wrong man to Zalaxia.” Venus’ sarcasm was light and humorous. “We should return