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My only comfort then was that Crux wasn’t looking at me with any particular interest as he pushed me under a square thing that—that basically functioned as a shower.
Under his watch, I cleaned myself. When I was done, my arms wrapped around my middle and my legs crossed, he lifted my arm by my wrist, leaned in, sniffed my pit.
“That will do,” he said, shoving a beige dress-type thing into my hands. It was high collared and sleeveless, but I jerked it on as fast as I could, ready for this guy not to see the acute effects of terror on my dick.
Past the shower, he took me through a long hallway to a room full of beds that were bolted to the floor. There had to be more than a dozen beds, but the space was empty.
In the doorframe, I pushed back against him. A spike of fear planted my feet on the smooth floor. He was going to leave me in here, forget me. Alone.
“What is this?” I demanded.
So far, I’d been going through the motions, stunned and terrified, but as I stood there, taking in the vast emptiness, I realized this was it. My last shot to get away. With sudden, horrifying clarity, I knew that if this last door slid shut behind me, that was it. I’d be gone.
“You are a guest of Thorzan, Beau of Earth.”
I blinked at him over my shoulder. “Who’s Thorzan?”
He scoffed, pushing me forward with a firm hand. I stumbled into the room. “You will see when we have others, little one.”
I spun, expecting that he would close the door behind me and that was it, but another had approached, slightly smaller, but with silvery lines on every inch of his uncovered torso. None of these guys were wearing shirts, like they justhadto show off the efforts of their thousands of hours spent at the gym.
“The clothes,” the new guy offered, passing the bundle of my worn-out things to Crux.
He looked different, not blue, but tannish. He glanced my way, but only for a second, and it was there under his wide alien gaze that I saw he wasn’t like me at all, despite being closer to my size and having a color of skin that looked approximately familiar. Not only was the guy enormous and tattooed and scary—scary hot?—but his eyes were round blue orbs, just like Crux’s. And his skin, in places, had a bluish tinge.
As I stared, Crux took my clothes and dropped them on the floor of the room. “Your things.”
And that was it. The door slid shut, and I was alone to choose between this weird beige travesty of a dress and the ripped-up clothes I’d worn before.
With a shaky breath, I stepped forward, bent slowly, gathered my things against my chest and held them tight.
They were clean now. And in what amounted to just a few minutes. But they were still worn down, the wrong side of frayed.
Anybody who saw them would know what kind of shape I was in, and, well, this didn’t seem like the kind of situation where I wanted to flaunt my vulnerabilities.
Beige travesty won the day. I shoved my old things under a mattress, sat down on top of it, and tried to convince myself I could still breathe. Maybe even survive, if I could just take a second to calm down and not have a heart attack on the spot.
CHAPTER2
VORIAN
Crux was fuming.
It was no surprise. Crux was always fuming when he didn’t get his way.
To have weak little hybrid Prince Kaelum save his life when our ship was attacked by the Zathki so close to our own territory?
Well, it was a surprise he didn’t die of the indignity of being outstripped and saved by the hybrid warrior prince.
How many Thorzi would be better off, I wondered, if he did die of the indignity?
Yes, perhaps the race would die out without his laboratory and his gadgets, but that was no less than we deserved. Strength was supposed to be the core of the Thorzi warrior’s way of life, but what was that strength worth, if Father had to steal tiny soft-skinned humans from their homes in the dead of night because Thorzi genes were no longer capable of procreation?
I had spent years watching him in the lab, one failed attempt after another to splice together the genes of two full-blooded Thorzi. Perhaps if he knew his own machines better, he’d have managed it. Or perhaps the Thorzi race was simply dying.
They’d honed themselves into a knife, strong and sharp and oh so brittle. And now that knife was broken, unable to face another battle, another generation.
Begging the tiny, weak humans to help hold it together was no answer.
