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)
“The clouds and stars. I am there,” she says hoarsely. “I’m there.”
My world proceeds to be a thing of contrasts. The pain of my body warring with the beautiful visions in my mind. The quiet cries and muffled sobs of my mate versus her smiling at me as we lay on green grass. Her father’s questions are overcome by my imagination taking me home so I can hold my mate beneath the only sky I would have her under while I tell her that I’ll never let her go.
TEN
I’m in that beautiful place with Bothaki because a planet where I’ve never been or known before is so much easier to imagine than the reality unfolding in front of me. I latch onto his request, already feeling soft, petal-like grass beneath me as he lays beside me. The same green ground decorated with wildflowers and towering trees that I once saw in Bothaki’s own memories. I can still hear the laughter of him and his siblings.
Instead of my father’s continued brutality and demands for answers Bothaki won’t give, I hear happy children and the rustle of wind through each tree.
It’s like they’re talking to me.
And so is he.
I want to be there.
Stay there.
“We’re going to need further strapping around his legs and chest—another on his face, too. I want his teeth next,” I hear the cold voice of my father say.
“His teeth, sir?” someone else asks.
“Not enough to affect his speech, but we may get there.”
There’s a clang of metal against metal that snatches my vision of the perfect existence away from my mind and leaves me with the stark, horrifying picture in front of me. My father hits the edge of his scalpel against the edge of the metal table, cocking his head to the side as he eyes a brutalized, but silent, Bothaki. The general scowls with a cruel glint that tells me there is more to come yet.
More of his horror to endure.
“And if he continues to be difficult about handing over the information I require, then I’ll move onto taking proper specimens from the alien for my own research and collection. I’ll start with an eye, move onto his cock, and by then I doubt he’ll need his tongue or heart, either.”
There’s already so much blood on the floor, a crimson river like I’ve never seen and it makes the breath rattle out of my lungs with my next exhale.
I try to take a gulp of air in right after. A deep one to settle the sudden rolling twist of my stomach and the way the room spins. A familiar sensation I know will lead to nowhere good, but nothing I do stops the gag forming in the back of my throat.
“Fascinating, isn’t it?” my father asks no one in particular.
“What, General?”
“He bleeds red like we do.”
The unneeded reminder is exactly what my stomach needs to rebel. The day’s miniscule food and water comes back up and I barely turn my head enough to make sure the vomit lands on the shoes of one of the soldiers minding me and the floor instead of my own clothing. I gag on the taste and choke on the way it burns the back of my throat.
“Fuck!” Charles shouts before he lets my shoulders go and steps back.
The other soldier doesn’t.
“Selina,” Bothaki rasps.
Through tear-blurred eyes, I try to find him but a figure steps in the way. A fuzzy shadow, unfeeling and mean, that I recognize all too well.
“Look at this mess,” General Lockett hisses.
“Father, please,” I try, forcing my head up as saliva and bile drip from my chin. “Just leave him—”
He turns away as fast as he came, voice thundering around us all.
“Clean up the mess and put her in the next room down. At least then, they’ll be able to hear each other. If the alien knows what’s good for him and his precious Zawla, we won’t have further problems with him in here. Charles!”
“Yes, General?”
“Those straps I mentioned. Get them now and clean your goddamn shoes.”
“On it, sir.”
There’s a certain glee to my father’s tone when he claps his gloved hands together and says, “Good, then we can get to the fun parts. You won’t like this, alien.”
Even though he’s already vocalized his intentions for Bothaki clearly, I can’t really let my mind go there. I want to think he wouldn’t take it that far, but my heart knows differently, and it screams as the soldier remaining to hold me hostage gains a new partner to remove my straps and yank me from the chair.
“No, no!” I scream, fighting anew against my captors as if the distraction will stop my father from doing all of this. I know it won’t, and I cry out, tears falling freely as I’m dragged further and further from Bothaki. He never stops looking for me, even as I scream at my father to listen, to care.