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Chapter Forty
Tayla
My head bounced against something hard, jarring me awake with a gasp. My muscles were sore, and my memory was fuzzy. It took me a minute to realize that I was moving. More precisely, I was being carried. Carried by someone with big, muscular arms and a familiar scent.
Prying my eyes open, I looked up into Adreax’s face. His hair clung to the stubble on his chin and his mouth was set in a grim, determined line. He was moving at a relentless pace, obviously unaware of how unpleasant this made the ride for me.
“Hey,” I mumbled, fighting to make my lips move the way they were supposed to. “Do you mind slowing down?”
When he didn’t stop, I closed my eyes and tried again, forcing past the frog in my throat to be heard.
“Adreax. Slow down. Please.”
I felt his steps slow to a halt, and I let my head fall back so I could look up into his face. He was so surprised he almost dropped me, but then he wrapped his arms tighter around me and pulled me into a deep kiss.
I wanted to kiss him back, but my body was still not cooperating. My extremities tingled with a strange feeling, and I was too weak to hold my head up for more than a few seconds at a time. Still, I was so glad to be in his arms that I tried, anyway.
“Where are we?” I asked with a croak.
“Inside their damned ship. We have to find a way out of here.”
I shook my head, trying to clear away the fog. If we were going to make it out of here, we both needed to be looking for an exit. I couldn’t walk yet, but I needed to stay awake and help him. Rubbing at my eyes, I tried to concentrate on dredging up the memories that were lost in whatever that alien had sedated me with.
I looked around, trying to get my bearings.
“This isn’t right. This hallway is on the interior of the ship. We need to get back to the outer halls with the windows. There were stairwells along the sides.”
Just saying those few sentences was exhausting and my voice was fading again, but Adreax was looking at me like I had just unravelled some kind of complex puzzle.
“Yes. The rain,” he said to himself, remembering something important.
Rain. I made it rain. My friends made it rain. But only time would tell if that little trick had been enough of a diversion. I screwed up my face, trying to make sense of where I was and how I got into Adreax’s arms.
“How did you get in here? I thought you were on your ship. I- I made the rain to stop them from blowing you out of the sky.”
Adreax smiled down at me again, planting a soft kiss on my forehead.
“And you’re a brilliant woman. But it was Herod you saved with your cunning, not me.”
There was a pang of disappointment in my heart, but in the end, I was glad that Adreax was with me right now, and not up in the sky. If he hadn’t come for me, I would still be in that awful man’s clutches. Or chained up downstairs, working alongside all those other women. I shuddered involuntarily at the memory of their hopeless eyes.
“I think it’s this way,” Adreax said, turning a corner and picking up the pace again.
I stared up at him, a dreamy smile reaching my lips as I watched his brow furrow in consternation with every step. My mind was still caught between the cloudy sensation of the sedative and consciousness, and I had to keep reminding myself that our situation was dire.
But damn, this was like a fairytale. I, the damsel in distress, was being carried to safety in the arms of a hunky alien hero.
“There.”
Adreax’s steps sped up to a near jog, and he bounced me around mercilessly as he headed straight for the stairs. In the stairwell he adjusted his grip on me to keep me from hitting the handrails, but didn’t slow his pace at all, hitting the bottom landing with a resounding stomp before pivoting and into the workroom.
Once again, the imprisoned women watched with disinterest as he ran between them. There was still a marked lack of guards in the room, and it appeared that nobody had alerted the Patrol that the leader of this strange ship was dead. Everything was happening so fast, I couldn't believe the only thing standing between us and freedom was the airlock.
“Help us?” The voice was quiet, a desperate plea from somewhere in the room.
“Yes, help us!” another woman called.
Soon it was a chorus, all the women begging Adreax to stop for them. He looked across the room, meeting each of their eyes before looking down to me with an unspoken question.
