Page 59 of Alien’s Retrieved Mate

The lead Saurok's weapon snapped toward me, then its muzzle charge shifted from lethal white to a pulsing blue lattice. Capture setting. He fired. I dove, and the field locked an overturned chair to the floor where my legs had been. He slung the rifle, ripped a restraint loop from his belt, and charged me. Not Kel, not Zhara. Me. His orders were clear: retrieve the human alive.

I did something stupid and brave and probably both. I didn't run. I waited until he was close — too close, close enough that I could smell the reptilian musk and see the membrane flicking over his dead eye — and drove the locked multitool blade into the exposed, soft-skinned seam under his arm where the armor plates parted.

He screamed. A sound like tearing metal. His arm swung at me and I ducked — barely — and the bottle in my other hand smashed across the side of his face. Glass burst across his good eye and he reeled, blinded for one crucial second.

I was not thinking about the morality of stabbing an alien. I was thinking about survival. About the people in this cantina. About the fact that this creature had come here to drag me back into a cell and sell me, and I was NOT going back.

The Saurok staggered. I scrambled backward, slipping on debris, and Kel was there. Between me and the wounded Saurok in a heartbeat, finishing the fight with a precision that was simultaneously terrifying and comforting.

The last two hunters went down. One to Kel. One to Zhara, who shot with the casual accuracy of someone who'd done this before and would probably do it again.

Silence. Settling dust. The acrid smell of weapons discharge and the metallic tang of alien blood.

I was standing in the wreckage of a cantina, holding a broken bottle and a bloody multitool, breathing so hard my vision pulsed. My hands were shaking now — the adrenaline crash coming hard and fast.

Kel turned to me. His markings were blazing, not the warm glow or the arousal glow. The warrior glow, bright and fierce. His eyes swept over me, checking for injury, cataloging damage. His terror poured into me — not for himself, never for himself, but for me. The raw, screaming fear that he'd been too late.

"You came," I said. My voice broke on the second word.

What was left of the bottle slipped from my hand and rang against the floor. I looked down at the bloody multitool and could not make my fingers release it. The room tilted. A second ago I'd been all cold arithmetic; now every possible version of what could have happened arrived at once.

Kel closed the distance carefully, as if I were something injured that might bolt. He covered my clenched hand with his until my fingers opened, took the multitool out of them, folded the blade closed, and clipped it back onto my belt himself. Only then did he pull me against him.

The warrior mask went, all at once, and underneath was just Kel: scared, relieved, in love. His markings shifted from hard to warm.

I let him. I buried my face in his neck and shook and his arms were around me and his markings were warm against my skin and the bond between us was a roaring, open thing full of fear and relief and love — his and mine, tangled together, indistinguishable.

"I'm sorry," he said into my hair. "For all of it. Every piece of information I held. Every time I chose silence over trust. I'm sorry."

"I know." I pressed closer. "I'm still angry about the old silences. I'm the one who paused that conversation — I needed to know what I felt was mine before we finished it. It is. We'll finish it when I'm ready."

"You have every right to be."

"I needed space. If those hunters had come five minutes earlier⁠—"

"Then Zhara would still have been beside you. You asked for room and you were right to ask; giving it was the one thing I did correctly today." His arms tightened. "What I am sorry for is older than this morning — every time I decided for you what you could know and when you could carry it. That fault is mine. Do not try to carry it for me."

Zhara approached, stepping over debris. She looked at us, looked at the wreckage, looked at the downed Saurok, and said: "We should leave before more arrive. This team was only the first through the door — Draxis doesn't stop at one."

She was right. We moved. But I held Kel's hand the entire way, and he held mine, and his markings glowed steady and warm, and neither of us let go.

24

KEL

She had faced a Saurok hunter with an Earth multitool and a broken bottle.

I was replaying it through the resonance — the echo of her fear, her fury, the cold clarity with which she'd identified the gap in the hunter's armor and driven a finger-length blade into soft tissue to make him flinch. Then the bottle. The glass across his eye. The single impossible second she had bought before I reached her.

She had stood up from behind the bar. Alone. While five armed Saurok hunters searched the cantina. She had stood up and said "come get me" and she had meant it.

The bond pulled tight around my ribs until every breath carried two incompatible imperatives: draw her closer; lock her somewhere nothing could ever reach her again. We moved through the outpost's back corridors, Zhara navigating, Taylor's hand in mine.

The outpost was in chaos. Word of the Saurok attack had spread and the station's traders and drifters, mechanics, the various beings who made their living on frontier worlds, were either locking down or arming up. Vel'kari Station had survived worse, Zhara assured us. But we couldn't stay.

"Docking bays are sealed," Zhara said, checking the scanner strapped to her wrist as she walked. "Local security has every approach beacon jammed and every pad under weapons lock. No second Saurok team lands without the whole station knowing."

"Communications relay is still operational," she went on, leading us through a maintenance corridor. "You need to contact your Authority. Tell them about the attack. Draxis committing an armed assault on a neutral trading outpost is an act of aggression that even the most bureaucratic government can't ignore."