Page 3 of The Alien Minotaur's Bride

Gone.

The last thing I held onto, stubborn and bright and impossible to let go of, was the smell. That warm, impossible, wrong-place wrong-time, sun-baked-earth smell that had no business being on a relay station in deep space, that had made my body go quiet and still before my brain even knew there was a fight.

It smelled like soil after rain. Like summer. Like a place I'd never been.

My eyes closed.

I carried that smell down into the dark with me, and it was still there when everything else was gone.

CHAPTER 2

ABDUCTED BY A... WHAT, EXACTLY?

I woke up in a box.

That was my first thought, box, before the details resolved themselves. Padded walls, off-white, slightly curved at the corners. A low shelf built into one side with a folded blanket on it. A sealed hatch at the far end, oval, set into the wall at about knee height for a normal doorway. Warm air that hummed faintly with the sound of environmental systems.

Not a box. A containment space. Clean, well-lit, the kind of setup you'd build for transporting something fragile.

Or someone.

I lay still for a count of ten, keeping my breathing even, taking stock. I'd woken up in bad places before. Not like this, but close enough. A cargo dispute on Kepler Station when I was twenty-two, where the relief crew got delayed and I ran out of rations for three days. The month I spent in the med-bay on Outpost Gamma after the pressure seal blew. You learned, after enough of those, that panic was a luxury. Panic burned energy and made you stupid, and I was already behind on information.

So. Facts first.

I was lying on something soft, a pallet, maybe, covered in dense fabric that held heat. My station coveralls were still on, which was a small mercy. My boots were gone. I flexed my toes experimentally. No pain. No restraints. My arms moved freely when I lifted them.

I sat up.

The space was smaller than I'd thought. Maybe three metres by two, the ceiling low enough that I could have touched it standing on my toes. The walls were that same padded off-white, seamless, without visible joins. The air smelled faintly of something organic, not unpleasant, just unfamiliar. Underneath it, so faint I almost missed it, was that other smell.

Earth and musk and warmth.

My stomach tightened.

I remembered. The cargo bay. The flickering lights. That impossible scent rolling through the corridor like smoke, and my body going still and quiet in a way I hadn't chosen. The shape in the dark, the horns, the hand cupping my head so carefully. The cold sting of a needle.

Right. So I'd been abducted by a – what? A monster? An alien? Both?

Aliens. Actual, real aliens. We'd spent my whole life arguing about whether anyone else was out here, and the answer had always been a shrug. Grainy footage, conspiracy forums, the odd "landing" that turned out to be a weather drone or a hoax. Officially, humanity had never met a soul. Officially. So much for that.

"Fantastic," I said, to the empty room. "Really excellent life choices, Mara. Walk towards the scary smell in the murder corridor. What could possibly go wrong."

My voice sounded thin and flat. The padded walls swallowed the echo.

I pushed myself to my feet. The pallet shifted under me, surprisingly stable. I crossed to the sealed hatch and pressed my palm against it. Cool to the touch, smooth, no visible control panel. I pushed. Nothing. I ran my fingers along the edge, looking for a seam, a release mechanism, anything.

The hatch stayed sealed.

I stepped back and looked around the space again, slower this time. The blanket on the shelf was woven from something soft and dense, not wool, not synthetic, something in between. There was a shallow depression in the wall that I'd missed on my first scan, about the size of my hand, with a small cup fitted into it. Water, maybe. I lifted it and sniffed. Clean. Cold. I drank.

The water tasted faintly mineral, like something drawn from deep underground. It was the best thing I'd tasted in weeks. I drank until the cup was empty and set it back in its depression.

My hands were shaking.

I looked at them. Watched the fine tremor in my fingers. Fear response, delayed onset. My body catching up to what my brain already knew, which was that I was alone in an unfamiliar place with no exit, no weapon, no idea where I was or who had put me here.

Or what.