Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 83946 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 420(@200wpm)___ 336(@250wpm)___ 280(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83946 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 420(@200wpm)___ 336(@250wpm)___ 280(@300wpm)
“Bothaki, please,” Selina whispers, trying to pull away from me.
I don’t let her go.
Not even a step.
In fact, I draw her even closer. Until she’s standing on her tip toes and I can bend down where I stop just a breath away from her face. More than anything, I want to taste her mouth against mine and feel how her lips will give into the demands of my own. Her fast breathing and darting, wide gaze might look like fear to somebody else, but I smell a delectable scent from my mate when she shifts under her feet and that heavy dress she wears shuffles with the movement. That smell, the taste of it hot and sweet on my tongue, tells me what others viewing from the outside cannot.
She’s not afraid of me at all.
She can’t be when she wants me.
Now we’re in more dangerous waters, and I react next in a way that I hope will protect my mate when she’s made to leave me this time.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper to Selina, understanding her kind’s words of regret and apology now. As I have yet to exchange my own in conversation with her, I use what I know she’ll hear and recognize.
Her confusion spurs me to finally let her go again.
“Bo—”
I turn on her with a snarl that she doesn’t even blink at. Not even when I tell her sharply, “Leave.”
Move.
“Go!” I roar.
All the directions that have been shouted at me repeatedly along with stand, sit, and many others. This is the first time I use the words myself, and I hate that I’m yelling them at my mate.
She doesn’t leave, though. Whether frozen in her confusion at the change in my demeanor, or something else entirely, Selina does nothing but watch me as I begin to tear apart the prison they have made me call home.
I go after the stools and metal tables first. They do nothing when they clatter and smash against the glass. That doesn’t stop me from throwing them a second time, or from ripping the toilet with the hand wash basin on the tank from the floor and tossing it into the walls, either. I even rip through the cushion they expect one to call a place to rest, leaving the insides of it scattered to the floor of my cell. I know the destruction won’t earn me a reward from the general, but it’s a distraction for him to focus his anger and irritation on me instead of directing it towards his daughter.
Or so I hope.
Still, at the end of my spell of violence, my mate hasn’t moved. She keeps watching, and I find that smell from under her gown, between her legs, remains around me. I breathe as hard and heavy as she does, but the air halts in my chest as I watch her gaze travel down my body until it stops at the bulge growing beneath my loincloth.
I’ve seen the diagrams of the female and male human bodies in the general’s special books that his soldiers attempt to compare to me. The races are not so different, hers and mine.
Not in the ways that matter.
I can’t think about it for long.
Shouts echo in the laboratory and lights turn on. I turn my security suit back on as I wonder if I’ve done too much.
Or is it just enough?
*
“Selina, I will only ask you one more time, what did that thing show—”
“His planet. The destruction. How lost he is. It was the same thing as the last time, I swear.”
I struggle to keep my gaze locked with my father’s so that he believes I’m telling the truth instead of letting my thoughts run wild with the what ifs and other questions I have about Bothaki’s current state. My father didn’t react well to the mess inside the prison where he’s keeping Bothaki, and it took everything inside of me not to scream for them to leave him alone as I was forced to leave while he was ordered back into the cage at gunpoint.
His black gaze never once left me.
Not until he couldn’t see me.
“I will write it all out again, just like the last time,” I assure my father, “but I don’t know if he will want to talk to me again.”
Another lie.
Again, my father doesn’t seem to catch it.
At the mere mention of Bothaki’s outburst earlier, my father’s expression grows pensive as he paces along the edge of my desk.
“What changed?” he muses out loud.
I don’t know if he wants an answer from me or not, so to be safe, I say nothing.
Instead, I go about pulling fresh paper and a pencil from a drawer in my desk. Head down, I’m ready to write another imaginary story about memories from Bothaki that don’t exist. Meanwhile, all I really want to do is find a way back downstairs where at least I can see Bothaki and make sure he’s safe.