AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He pulled me against his chest and with a sigh I leaned into him, pressing my face against his hard pecs, overpowered by a strange sense of trust.
"You will have to pay for this." An irate-looking gray alien entered, his cheeks ballooning in anger like a blowfish. "You cost King Crough billions in—"
"King Crough will have to answer to the emperor after what I saw here," my alien warrior replied.
"King Crough doesn't need to answer to anybody, he is not part of the empire and—"
"Still has to abide by the Galactic Treaty Union's laws," my rescuer snarled, before pushing the gray alien, who was not even a quarter of his size, out of our way.
Another alien, who looked like mine, except his skin had a different metallic coloring, entered, his eyes narrowed atme for a second before they turned tohim."Are we done here?"
"We are. Free some of the new specimens. I want to take them to the emperor, Ryggs. I will meet you aboard theVyper."
The small gray alien recovered and placed a hand on my warrior's chest. "Not so hastily, Lord Protector. You will stand to answer to King Crough, now."
"Make me," the warrior snarled, nearly chuckling, and pushed the smaller alien out of the way.
"Ryggs," my savior said, and the other warrior-looking alien turned. "Let me borrow this." With those words he pulled Ryggs's fur cape off him to place it around my shoulders.
He turned to the gray alien. "And you better see to having my cape returned, or I will have to return with the imperial fleet to retrieve it."
The gray alien's cheeks puffed in and out, like a frog's.
"Come." Incredibly gently, he lifted me off my feet and cradled me against his chest. He proceeded by strutting out of the room, into the other room with the honeycomb cells, where I stared at the carnage undoubtedly wreaked by him and his men. None of the prisoners had been harmed and even as we stepped into the room of horror, I watched aliens looking like him, freeing unfortunatevictims from stretchers and even retrieving some from the cells, killing every single one of the larvae.
Undeterred by any of this, my warrior carried me to the elevators that took us up.
"You are safe now," he said.
"Thank you." I lifted my head to meet his incredible red, almost purple eyes. Well, technically they were all-black irises, with a narrow deep, dark red halo surrounding them, but the halo was so bright, it caught all my attention.
"What is your name?"
I would have laughed had the situation not been so fucked up. After all we had done together, after all our intimacy, he didn't know my name, nor I his. "Priscilla, but everybody calls me Silla."
"Silla?" He rolled my name and seemed to like it and for some reason that pleased me.
"I am Garth of Astrionis, lord protector for the empire."
"Where are you taking me, Garth?" I asked, fearing his answer as much as longing for it. Would he take me back to Earth? But the thought of not being in his presence scared me more than the thought of never seeing Earth again. I tried to reason that it was because of what the Cryons were still doing to Earth, but knew I was deceiving myself.
"To my ship, theVyper."
I swallowed, needing to know. "And then where?"
He bent his head to look me in the eyes. "To the emperor, he needs to know what is happening here."
"Will he care about what these… aliens did to my planet?"
"Probably not," Garth said with something akin to regret in his voice, or maybe it was empathy, crushing my hopes. "But he will care about what the Cryons are up to."
"Is that what they are called?"
"Vra, some call them galactic scum." He winked at me.
That gesture, more than anything, got to me. So human-like, so familiar that I leaned back into his arms, with a comforted sigh.
Cryons stopped wherever they were, whatever they were doing, to stare at us as we marched through opulently decorated hallways to enter another elevator, bringing us back up to what I recognized as the same hangar my captors' ship had landed in.
