Total pages in book: 51
Estimated words: 46803 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 234(@200wpm)___ 187(@250wpm)___ 156(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 46803 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 234(@200wpm)___ 187(@250wpm)___ 156(@300wpm)
He does not respect her. She is a thing to him.
“You’re going to kill him.” Arkan’s voice enters my mind. I notice that he doesn’t intend to stop me. Maybe he is beginning to understand the nature of the burden we have brought upon ourselves by not returning this contingent of potentially hostile humans to Earth. I have tried to tell him over and over that they will never be tameable or controllable. He didn’t listen. I wonder if he is starting to understand now.
I loosen my grip ever so slightly. This gives the human the opportunity to start talking. He wants to explain himself. I don’t want to hear a word, but I know I have to.
“You don’t understand,” Rex says, his neck straining with the urgency of every word emerging from his throat. Again, I am reminded of how easily I could crush his windpipe. I probably should. The entirety of my being is currently being directed toward the task of refraining from doing just that. He deserves to die, but he also has information I do not have.
“Make me understand.”
“Let me go…. And I’ll tell you.”
“You will talk now.”
“Let me go…”
Held in a literal death grip, this human still believes he has a position of power to bargain from. I would laugh, if I had any capacity for amusement at all in this moment — which I do not.
“If you do not explain yourself, I will kill you and get the information from one of your underlings. Someone less willing to die for no discernible reason. You are trying my patience, human.”
I feel him slump in my grasp as he gives up on trying to negotiate his release.
“That woman needs to be captured and returned to Earth,” he rasps out.
“Why?”
“Because she belongs to a very powerful man.”
“She belongs to a very powerful me,” I snarl in his face, tusk and fang slicing a fraction of a hair of an inch in front of his smooth human skin. “Do you imagine that any human man would have a greater claim to Stella than I do?”
“Her father,” the human says. “She is the daughter of Antoine, the Rex Regem Hierophant. The most powerful man on the planet. General of the Last Armies. Deliverer of the Masses. He who commands the Atomic Forces.”
He names all these titles with the gasping, rasping breaths of a desperate man near passing out, but too enamored of the one he is naming to dare miss a ridiculous syllable of any one of them.
I look over at Arkan. “Do we know this Rex Regem Whateverelse?”
“Might be a more recent political development.”
“We don’t pay enough attention to their societies. We take them without thinking. It has to stop.”
“You’re going to choke him out,” Arkan reminds me.
Once again, I very nearly forgot about the man writhing in my grasp.
When I direct my gaze to him, his lips are starting to turn blue. I drop him, not because he deserves release, but because I want to ask more questions and I am clearly on the verge of an inadvertent slaying.
He drops to his knees but quickly attempts to rise. This motion I arrest with a firm palm, pressing him back down. It is about time this human learned his place.
“Tell. Me. Everything.”
10 GUILT
Stella
It’s a long time before Kahn comes back. That means it is a very long time to think about what I’ve done. The feeling of guilt only deepens as the minutes pass into what have to be hours. I start to get a little hungry, then I stop being hungry as the guilt eats my appetite.
“Did you kill him?”
“Why did you not tell me that you were a runaway?”
I stare at him. He still has that vibe going on. That big, mad, alien vibe that makes me reluctant to say what first comes to mind when I hear that question: none of your business.
“The first step to getting away with running away is not telling people that you’re a runaway,” I say. “I wanted out of the city. I wanted out from under my father’s influence. He was using me, and he was going to trade me for power, basically. I didn’t want to be forced into marriage or made to live a life that was never mine. I wanted to be free. That’s why I ran. That’s why I’m still running.”
“You said the soldiers would kill you if they found you.”
“They may as well. It would end my life one way or another. Now they know I’m on this ship, they’re going to do everything in their power to turn it around and get it back to Earth. They will do anything to please my father. Absolutely anything. They’re obsessed with him. He’s like a cult leader. With a lot of weaponry.”
“Understood,” he says. “Is there anything else I should know?”