The Romulan Commander had stalked away from the human's enclosure, out into the blazing heat of a planet her ancestors had once claimed as home and then abandoned. She fought to urge to brush off her clothes, as if the human had contaminated her somehow. She had been raised to hate humans. She had good reason to hate Vulcans.
It was hard to believe the blond, blue-eyed human, whose emotions has clearly shown in his face, was related to that other one – the one who almost cost her a hard-fought for career, if not her very life, but had spared her, hardly interrogated her, sent her home. The one had touched something in her soul and left her with a need to possess him that warred endlessly with a need to destroy him.
Spock.
What were you that you could do this to me?
The only conquest she had begun and could not finish, not by power play or subterfuge or her own considerable sensuality. The one thing she wanted beyond reason and could not have.
When her initial rage had cooled she had been forced to acknowledge, at least to herself, that he had never said or done anything overtly to mislead her. It was she who had been drawn magnetically to her first Vulcan. She had been indoctrinated to believe they all would prefer to be Romulan. His apparent interest had not been cause for alarm on her part. She had found him cool, remote as no man had ever been with her, but seemingly willing, as all men were with her. The combination had been electric.
Had she truly stopped to listen to anything he said she would have hesitated. As if had been, she had succumbed too easily to the richness of his voice, the heated touch of his fingers. The almost-touch of his mind teased her with the promise of the unique individual who would soon be hers to command, the prize she could bring home to the Empire.
He had humiliated her, used her own arrogance and pride against her. Even now, over a year since her fury had failed to consume her, she could easily imagine his execution. She wondered how she would stop herself from killing him long enough to return him to the Praetor for interrogation and eventual death.
His death, her redemption in the eyes of her betters.
Spock.
Was it only because she could not have him that she continued to want him? Once conquered she was certain she could just cast him aside as she did with all other men, watch his execution with a remote coolness that matched his. The first few months after the theft of the cloaking device she had filled countless hours contemplating his death and how to achieve it – slow poisons, Romulan ritual knives, or just holding him until the onset of Pon Farr and watching has he died in agony.
He had taken her prisoner, taken the cloaking device, and humiliated her. He made her blood run hot and cold, as if the gods of Vulcan and the gods of Andor took turns tormenting her. He caused conflicting emotions to boil and ferment. The very thought of him caused pain to flood her being.
And finally he had prevented her from taking her own life. He had convinced her to live, to return to the Empire.
She could forgive him that least of all. At the end of their final conversation she had ordered him out of her sight, demanded that she never had to lay eyes on him again.
He had complied.
But now she would see him again, under her terms. Her plan to assassinate him, his ship and all he held dear, had failed. But now it was back in her hands, where she should have kept it to begin with. He had fanned the flames of her hatred of all things Federation into a fever. She would have him on his knees begging for mercy, stripped of his damned Vulcan certainty, his calm shattered. She would strip him of his dignity and rank and title.
She would destroy him.