Page 52 of Dark Gambit: The Play

Sofia's face fell. "I understand. You don't need to tell me if you don't feel comfortable sharing your past with me." She looked up at him. "Would it help if I told you more about my own life?"

"Yes, please."

"Not all of it was bad. In fact, most of it was good."

38

SOFIA

Sofia talked for what seemed like hours.

She told Marcel about her childhood growing up in the compound, about being raised by her father and her aunts, about her cousins and things they'd done together. Most of her stories included Helmi, and talking about her cousin had brought both a smile to her lips and tears to her eyes. The memories were mostly sweet, but knowing that she wouldn't have any more of them made her want to crawl into bed and cry until she fell asleep from exhaustion.

"I'd better talk about something else." She rubbed her eyes. "The university is a safer topic." She let out a breath. "I was so excited to get selected. It was a little scary to live outside the compound but not enough for me to turn the offer down." She chuckled. "Not that I had the option to say no. Igor's word is law. Thanks to my father and my aunts, I was fluent in Finnish, so language wasn't a barrier, and after the first semester, I felt at home there."

"But you still had to return to the compound once a month."

"I did, but it was no hardship. I wanted to see my family and friends, and the twenty minutes in Igor's office to reinforce his compulsion was a small price to pay."

"What about boyfriends? I'm sure you had many during your seven years at the university."

He hadn't told her about his girlfriends, so she wasn't inclined to tell him about her love life, but she didn't want to flat out refuse either.

"I dated a little, and I had a total of two serious boyfriends."

"What happened with them?" Marcel asked.

She caught his eyes glowing again and wondered what emotion had triggered the glow. He still refused to admit that they did that, but she'd noticed it was usually when he was excited, angry, or aroused.

"There isn't much to tell. It was difficult to develop meaningful relationships with guys when I couldn't tell them anything about my family or introduce them to my parents."

"You could have said that you were an orphan."

"Then they would have wanted to meet my adoptive parents. I said that I was estranged from my family and didn't provide a reason, but I don't think they believed me. They probably thought that I was embarrassed about them." She emptied her glass of wine and sighed. "It doesn't matter. I couldn't maintain those relationships anyway. At some point, I had to go back to live in the compound, and it wasn't as if I could bring someone with me."

"Yeah, I get it. It's the same in our community."

Sofia arched a brow. "No paranormal talent means no admission?"

"Something like that." Marcel refilled her glass.

They were on their second bottle of wine, and she was tipsy, bordering on drunk. Marcel seemed much more at ease and relaxed. Maybe it was because of the wine, or perhaps it was because her stories had entertained him. In either case, she liked seeing him smiling for a change.

"How did your father and aunts get to be in the compound?" he asked.

"They couldn't tell me. People never talked about their pasts before arriving at the compound, and as a kid, I thought that they were all just born there like me. Later, when I became aware that the rest of the world didn't know about the Kra-ell or live in blended communities with aliens, I started to wonder where the humans came from, and given that they were more or less slaves, I figured that they were captured and brought in against their will. I imagine that it started with the women." She grimaced. "The purebloods needed breeders because there weren't enough of them to provide genetic variety."

"You said that your father speaks fluent Finnish. He might have been brought from the outside."

She shook her head. "Not necessarily. My grandmother also lived in the compound, so she might have been the first to be brought in, or she might have been born in there as well. She died before I was born. They don't have a doctor for the humans in the compound, only a nurse, so if someone suffers a heart attack, they are not likely to survive."

"What about when they get sick?"

"For routine non-emergency stuff, they take people to a human doctor and compel their help."

"That's better than nothing."

"I know. The Kra-ell treat the humans they keep better than other humans would have treated their captives, and the Kra-ell are not kind-hearted creatures. They are brutal, and they don't believe in love. But they have a code of honor that they take very seriously."