Page 45 of Alien Healer’s Mate

“You know what?” Her voice came out bright, somehow. A miracle when her heart was breaking. “Think what you like.”

She turned and walked away.

The conference hall felt cavernous as she crossed it, every footstep loud on the polished floor. Her throat was tight, and she didn’t know where she was going. Away. She just had to get away.

Behind her, she heard Kellat’s voice, pitched to someone else, low and carrying.

“Human women. Sometimes, I swear they’re more trouble than they’re worth.”

The warlady’s answering murmur was too quiet to make out, but Delilah’s stomach dropped anyway. She didn’t need to hear it. She kept walking, heading for the door at the far end of the hall. It was small, a side door she hadn’t used before, and the air changed the moment it closed behind her, cooler and staler as she stepped into the narrow corridor beyond it.

Fury carried her around two corners and through another door, not the sliding type, but the swing door type, before it ran out. Slowing, she dashed at the wetness on her cheeks and looked around.

The walls were bare conduit and composite, nothing like the polished panels of the conference hall, and the floor was unfinished metal, the cold of it striking up through her sneakers. The air smelled metallic and faintly damp, like a basement nobody had opened in years.

She frowned. Where the hell was she?

A door slammed shut somewhere behind her, the heavy click of a lock following it. Gasping, she spun around. The door was sealed, its edges flush with the wall and, even worse, there was no handle on this side.

“No.” She crossed back to it, hands slapping against the metal. She pushed, then pushed harder, then slapped the panel beside it, and nothing happened. “No, no, no—Open this door!”

Her voice was loud in the silence.

Don’t panic. There had to be another way out.

She turned. The corridor ahead stretched into darkness, the emergency strips overhead dead. Beyond the first ten feet there was nothing but darkness so thick it felt solid.

Then something shifted in the dark.

Her heart slammed into her ribs, and she backed up a step.

“Hello?”

Her voice came out thin, the dark swallowing it before it reached the far end of the corridor.

Silence.

Her eyes widened as the shadows moved. Figures detached themselves from the walls, low and dark.

Run.

11

The dismissive remark was out of Kellat’s mouth before he could think better of it.

Lady Amaelii went still next to him.

“You are an absolute fucking idiot,” she said.

His mouth opened, but nothing came out.

But Amaelii didn’t wait for him to recover his wits. Instead, she stepped closer, crowding him.

“That woman,” she said, her voice tight with anger and disdain. For him. “Just squared up to me in front of half the delegation. Me! A warlady from a species twice her size. A being with a combat form that could snap a Lathar warrior in half without breaking a sweat. She had no weapon, no backup, but she still walked across that floor and challenged a predator. For you, you bloody idiot!”

His memory replayed Delilah walking away from him with her chin up and her hands shaking. He’d seen the tremor. He’d seen the flush on her cheeks and the way she’d pressed her palms flat against her thighs, and he’d read it as hysterics.

He’d read it wrong.