XAR T’KAN - HIS TO PUNISH

AN ALIEN OVERLORDS PREVIEW

TAYLOR VAUGHN

CONTENTS

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

PROLOGUE

HE HOVERS, golden and huge, his violet eyes shining as he gazes upon me lying on his sleeping mat.

I’m wearing the shift dress he gave me and I’m underneath his covers. But I feel naked.

The sound of his harsh breathing fills up the room. His nose flares and his massive chest rises and falls. He clenches his fists at his sides, as if it’s taking all of his strength to hold himself back.

He is outrageously hard, his cock straining so violently against his pants leg, I can see the imprint, down to its ridges.

Beast, the word blows into my mind, like an ominous wind. He stands on two legs, but he scans me like a seven foot predator who has spotted his prey.

And is about to strike.

He says something in clicks and hisses. His voice low and dangerous.

I don’t speak his language, but I somehow completely comprehend the words coming out of his mouth.

He is telling me I am his.

His to steal. His to take. His to breed.

Then he rips the covers away from my body.

CHAPTER ONE

Six Weeks Earlier

Zinnia

FLEETWOOD MAC SONGS don’t heal bones, but singing is the only balm I have on hand as I tend to Nova’s latest wound. A broken wrist this time. Fury surges through me along with the old planet song about going your own way.

I’m doing the best I can with what I have on hand. But I need more than bark bandages and sticks to set it right. Too bad my brother, Dan, put a moratorium on visits to the settlement doctor after the old man tried to ask Nova’s daughter, Glee, too many questions about her mother’s latest “fall.”

Dan’s escalating, I note darkly as I sing one last chorus of “Go Your Own Way,” and finish wrapping my passed out sister-in-law’s wrist in the bark bandage.

I pounded and cut these bandages myself after Dan declared Nova couldn’t go to the doctor anymore, and on my many trips out to the red woods, I’d been purposefully picking a weed us settlers referred to as Terrhan Tylenol because of its analgesic properties. I’d also started tapping the trees and collecting other plants that can only be found there to make essential oils. So far I’d been successfully using my hodgepodge medical kit to promote healing and prevent infection. But Nova is going to need more than ground up Tylenol when she wakes up.

“Zinnia…it’s broken, isn’t it?”

I raise my gaze to find Nova’s head half lifted, her tawny brown face drawn tight with the pain of waking up bruised and beaten. There are no tears in her eyes though. She never cries anymore, no matter how badly Dan beats her. I’m not even sure she knows how after a life filled with so much sorrow and pain.

I nod in answer to her question and she sighs, laying her head back on her thin pillow. “Moons, it hurts. Always thought he’d break a rib first. Guess I was wrong,” she says with a wry chuckle.

She’s laughing. Laughing at her pain. But all I want to do is scream.

I wish I could do more then set her wrist with make-shift bandages and sticks. I wish I could tell her to leave my brother, to take Glee with her and never look back. But I know that’s impossible. Where would she go?

Maybe before my parents’ deaths in the Great Storm, she could have gotten away. But my half-brother is too powerful now that he’s inherited our father’s spot on the Board of Settlement Leaders. I’d hoped his newly bestowed position would instill responsibility and a sense of duty. Instead, he’s been steadily abusing his power to become an even bigger asshole.

He’d already threatened me earlier today when I’d come home to eat my midday rations. After finding Nova unconscious and broken on our red dirt floor, I’d told him I was taking his girlfriend and her daughter to live with my best friend Kira and her parents.

He’d just sneered and laughed. “See what happens if you try to take her out of this house. You think I don’t have a say in who gets what rations? I’ll let that Kira bitch and her parents starve to death if you try to get between me and my woman. And I don’t care what the Xals are planning to do with all those swirlie girls when they come of breeding age—I’ll make sure that hybrid of Nova’s gets gone, too. You got my fucking promise about that.”

Thanks to our differently colored mothers, Dan’s skin is a much paler brown than my own near black. But though his face was flushed red with all the alcohol he’d consumed that morning while I worked in the fields, his threats came across chilling and unslurred.

All I could do was glare at him. Uselessly. Dan knew I was powerless to truly fight back. He’d just spat and left, slamming the house’s wooden door behind and leaving his crippled half-sister to tend to the woman he’d beaten senseless.

So no…I’m not going to try to convince Nova to leave him. But this can’t go on. I have to figure out how to get her and Glee away from my brother.

“Mama! Aunt Z! Guess what happened at colony school today!”

I turn and Nova puts in the effort to sit up on her good arm, when Glee bursts into the house, her usual ball of swirled emerald green and tawny brown energy. “Teacher said ruchis are vegetables, and I said, ‘no-un-uh. Aunt Z says it’s a fruit because it’s got seeds and Aunt Z says vegetables with seeds are fruits even if they taste yucky like vegetables. And teacher said, no that’s not right. And I said, un-huh, it is! Aunt Z’s smarter than you and she reads all the books you don’t. And teacher got mad at me and said I have to come home early. But it’s true, right?”

I wince. Technically speaking, yes, ruchis, a deep pink tomato like plant and one of the few Xalthurian vegetable crops that grow well on our planet, are botanically fruits, but…“Please stop telling your teacher I’m smarter than her,” I say, shaking my head at my little niece.

“But it’s true!” Glee insists, raising her chin, with a confidence a little girl wearing her dark blue hair in pigtails shouldn’t possess.

“Just because something’s true doesn’t mean it has to be said out loud,” Nova says from her position behind me on the mat.

Glee’s face falls when she sees her mother’s bandaged wrist. “What happened, Mama? You fall again?”

Glee comes over to the sleeping mats where I barely managed to place Nova after finding her crumpled on the floor beside our redwood table.

“Yes, I fell. Mama’s so clumsy,” she tells Glee with an apologetic look. “You’re going to have to help Aunt Z finish that pigeon jerky stew I was making when I…uh…fell.”

Glee looks at me, her expression not nearly as happy as when she came in earlier. I can bake like nobody’s business when the grain crops come in, but I’m a terrible cook and we both know it.

She doesn’t complain though, just quietly goes over to the walking stick I left in the middle of the floor. “Here you go,” she says, handing it to me with a somber look in the brown human shaped eyes she inherited from her mother.

“Thank you, sweetie,” I say, using it to get back up to my feet and limp over to the stone hearth. My parents built this hearth with their own hands shortly after the accord with the Xalthurians went through. When they were full of hope, because as it turned out we humans would be able to survive on this harsh red planet after all, thanks to our new alien overlords.

My bad leg is twinging even worse than usual after sitting on the floor for so long as I tended to Nova. But I smile when I look into the pot hanging from the hearth’s metal hook and see that it’s mostly already made.

“We just have to heat it up,” I tell Glee, doing my best to keep my voice light. “I just wish there was a way to make sure I don’t burn it, like the last time I tried to cook. I keep telling Kira she needs to reinvent the microwave.”

Glee doesn’t laugh like she usually does when I point out all the old planet re-inventions my tech savvy best friend should start working on to make our lives easier. Instead she says, “Don’t mess it up, Aunt Z. Not tonight,” with a somber look that makes her appear ten times her age. Five going on fifty.

Which makes it all that more guilt inducing when I do mess it up by setting the fire too high. My mom used to brag about how quickly she adjusted to cooking by fire after our colony ship crash landed on New Terrhan, but apparently her talented skipped me. Throwing Glee an apologetic look after we taste it, I add extra spices to the stew to cover up the taste of burnt meat.

She doesn’t tease me or whine, just says, “Let me take mama her bowl before Dan comes home.”

Too late. We both jerk when the door opens and Dan stomps inside. Face still flush with alcohol, I notice. The pigeons who miraculously survived our colony ship crash and somehow manage to thrive on our hostile red planet are the only source of meat left in the village now that the supplies our alien overlords give us annually have almost completely run out. A few of the seniors have been put on such strict rations, they’re barely skin and bone. But somehow Dan and other leaders manage to keep themselves flushed in alcohol, even after all the other supplies have run out.

I brace at the sight of him, not knowing who I’m going to get. Sometimes he comes in so pissed off about something that happened at a leaders meeting that Nova tells me to take Glee to an entertainment on the colony ship, because she knows there’s going to be a fight. And sometimes he reverts to the hero boyfriend who “saved her” from the village orphanage she grew up in after both her parents died in the colony ship crash.

Dan sniffs the air and asks, “Fucking moons, what’d you burn this time?”

Like I’m the burden he must bear, as opposed to the sister who’s constantly cleaning up his messes. Then, without giving me a chance to answer, he asks, “Who let her cook?”

He breaks off when he sees Nova lying on the mats. “Baby, are you seriously hurt?”

“Her wrist is broken,” Glee informs him. “Mama was really hurt.”

Her expression is the very opposite of her name, and my heart sinks as I realize, she knows…

Glee’s a very clever girl—that’s one of the many things I love about the hybrid I consider my niece, even though we’re not related by blood. Despite our best efforts to cover up Dan’s abuse, of course she’s stopped believing that her mother acquired all those bruises or her current broken wrist from being clumsy.

I’m proud of her for seeing through Dan, unlike the rest of the settlers, who’ve fallen for all his pretty boy politician lies. But at the same time, a sad Fleetwood Mac song rises in my chest as I hand her a bowl of burnt pigeon jerky stew. She’s only five years old, but her innocence is slipping away like red dust through our hands.

I guess Dan’s decided to play it contrite tonight. He rushes over to Nova and falls to his knees beside her mat, his face a mask of concern. “Baby…I’m so sorry.”

“Ahhh!” Nova cries out when he tries to hug her.

He’s jostled her wrist, but obviously that’s not his fault either. “What did you give her for the pain?” he demands, turning his head to glare at me.

“Terrhan Tylenol,” I answer. “But it’s not enough. Kira and I were planning on going to the red woods. I’ll see if I can find some fernie.”

Fernie was another medicinal plant. Not quite like the old planet version of ibuprofen, but as close as we could get to an anti-inflammatory on New Terrhan.

“Yeah, you do that. Get as much as it takes and when you come back, teach Glee how to use it just in case you become not available. The Xals will be setting down any day now.”

I stiffen at his mention of the Breeding Ceremony.

And he shakes his head at me. “Don’t you start sniveling about the BC like your friend Kira. With that legs of yours and your ugly face, a Breeding Ceremony’s the only way you’ll ever get a baby.”

I flinch inside but keep my outside from showing any reaction to his hateful words. I know he’s saying this to hurt me. Dan’s mother died years before our father stepped foot on the colony ship with his newly pregnant bride, and I honestly can’t remember a time when he wasn’t like this. Resentful that our father paid me so much attention, even though I was crippled and not nearly as pretty as his son. He’s been making fun of me since we were kids, that’s just his way.

My best friend Kira says that I’m not ugly. She insists my dark, nearly black skin is beautiful, and that Dan only insults me on the regular to keep my self-esteem low and make sure his maid doesn’t go anywhere.

Still, his words sting. I don’t respond though, and I bite down on the secret I’ve been keeping from him, about just how far Kira and I are planning to go to resist getting bred by our alien overlords.

“The Xals do things to the girls who try to run. Bad things they don’t necessarily recover from,” Jin-Hu, our High Leader’s daughter told me the other day while we were walking to the colony ship for RomCom night. “Wang-Lei got pretty serious with one of the orphanage girls before her Breeding Ceremony. They were planning on marrying, even if she did get knocked up by a Xal. But when he went to get her, they told him, she was punished for running and didn’t survive the night.”

My neighbor Jin-Hu’s words about her brother’s girlfriend ring through my head as I grab my walking stick and the bark cloth bag I made for plant and seed gathering. And my heart pounds with fear even though the Xals aren’t here yet.

Yes, we humans are technically surviving on this planet, but lately it feels like every single day is filled with relentless hard work and abject fear. Fear of starvation. Fear of Dan. Fear of Kira’s crazy plan.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be one of those twenty-one-year-old girls in the old planet entertainments. Full of hopes and dreams. More concerned with completing my university courses and hooking up with my fellow human boys than anything happening on planets, whose suns I can only see at night when the city lights aren’t too blinding.

But I’m not one of those girls, I harshly remind myself. If my parents had been even remotely capable of sending me to university, they wouldn’t have boarded that ill-fated colony ship. And not one of those carefree university girls was portrayed by a dark-skinned freak like me with a crippled leg.

Plus, Kira is my best friend. I have to go through with this…even if it might get the both of us killed.

“Glee, bring over some of that stew,” Dan commands, as I leave. Then he says, “I’m sorry Zinnia burned the stew, but it’s better than nothing. Here, you’ve gotta eat baby. Eat it for me. C’mon now.”

Dan’s soft words are the last thing I hear before closing the door behind me.

One thing’s for certain if he knew the real reason I was going to the red woods tonight, he’d call me worse things than ugly.

CHAPTER TWO

T’Kan

DUTY.

That word weighs heavy on my mind as I stand in my quarters and tie a ceremonial cloth around my waist. The ship will soon be landing on New Terrhan for this solar’s Breeding Ceremony. I should be excited at the prospect.

Our Xalthurian females were rendered infertile by the Extinction virus that swept through our system several solars ago, and our scientists have continually failed to come up with a cure. Those without male heirs like myself now have no choice but to breed the twenty-one-year-old hu’man females of New Terrhan as agreed upon in the accord between our two races. That means, I will need to implant my seed in as many hu’man females as possible after we set down on the primitive red planet we ceded to the hu’mans in the New Terrhan accord.

Before the last battle of the Three Generation War, this would have been something I looked forward to. Breeding a hu’man female will ensure my family lines continue with the birth of a male heir. I have often heard other warriors speak in hushed whispers about the sweetness between the hu’man female’s legs. Wet and hot. A wonder beyond all description.

Yet, I am unable to muster up even the barest amount of enthusiasm for the act I must perform. I look down at my dijjo, still lifeless underneath the ceremonial cloth, though many months has passed since my cousin’s death in our last great battle with the Kaidorians.

The Three Generation War is over and I have been appointed as Xar, the general of our troops. But I remain stuck in the past. Though my body is here, my realm spirit feels as dead as the cousin I swore to protect when I took him on under my command.

The blaring sound of a holo hail interrupts my spiral into these dark thoughts.

I release a heavy hiss before setting the ridges upon my nose to neutral and swiping my hand across the air to create a screen. It’s P’rm N’Ure, our Kel’s top advisor and my uncle.

“P’rm N’Ure.” Despite our familial connection, I greet him formally, placing a hand to my ridges. This is the way my uncle prefers our communications to be conducted.

His green mouth twists briefly—his version of a smile. “Greetings Xar T’Kaniteton.” He nods back without touching his ridges, an appropriate greeting for a nephew, but not for the general of Xalthuria’s armed forces. “I trust you are prepared to carry out what must be done?”

“Of course.”

Again those thin green lips twist. “I am told that though you’ve had ample opportunity to visit pleasure stations since the end of the Three Generation War, you have not. One of Xalthuria’s greatest warrior’s, a general no less, should have many females sating his needs. You, however, have shunned the comfort females on our planet, and have not visited a pleasure station since your return from the war. Of course, your cousin A’Ry will marry our Kel, but unless our scientists solve the infertility crisis, you are our only hope for a Line Neixal heir.”

I clench my fists at my side but keep my features neutral. I am the Xar, and it would not do to let him see the turmoil his words cause within me. “I will do my duty.”

My uncle narrows his diamond gaze. “Your failure to protect my son has put our family line in an untenable position. Especially since N’Thn only managed to produce a female when he participated in the Breeding Ceremony. I wanted to make sure you understood that before you were cut off from holo communications on that primitive planet.”

“I understand.” My chest tightens. He still blames me for N’Thn’s death but not nearly as much as I blame myself.

“Yes, please ensure that you don’t fail your family line this time.”

“I will not—”

He ends the holo before I can reply but there is nothing I can say in reply anyway.

He is correct. I might have been appointed as Xar. During the ceremony, my lifelong friend and fellow warrior, Kel D’Rek extolled my virtues, citing my many victories and kills. But that does not erase what I failed to do during that last great battle.

I could not save him. My cousin, the one I was raised beside like a brother. And that failure continues to haunt me to this day.

I have been a warrior on autopilot since the war. I do not fuck. I eat, not for pleasure, but to sustain my optimum warrior’s build. I sleep poorly, and when I do manage to slumber for more than an hour or two, I see N’Thn. A Kaidorian horn in his chest, his green face, deathly pale and accusing.

Nothing has given me pleasure since the end of the war, let alone my lifeless diijo. But I did not lie to my uncle. I will not fail in this task.

I reach into the bag of the uniform I brought to change into after the Breeding Ceremony. I will not serve as a member of the Xalling Collection Force during this tour to New Terrhan, but I much prefer my body armor to the ceremonial mating cloths we the males participating in the breeding ceremony are required to wear. I will change as soon as the three hours of fucking are done, and before the fucking begins…

I pull out a small black bottle of ejogi serum. This is the serum we give to males who prefer the company of other males yet still wish to participate in the ceremony to continue their bloodlines. That is not the case with me, but I slip it into the front pocket of my mating cloth, in case the supposedly irresistible scent of the hu’man females’ uncovered breeding slits fails to arouse me.

The indicator light goes off signaling we will be entering the atmosphere soon.

There will be much to do after we land. Normally the doors open, and the Breeding males are simply unleashed on the settlement. Much like a hunt, the males search the village for twenty-one-year-old females eligible for breeding under the New Terrhan accord and then drag them back to the ship for fucking. Every hunter has first rights to whatever female he finds.

But not this solar.

This solar, our newly appointed Kel will be taking part in the ceremony and he has ordered the other Breeding Ceremony males to be kept at bay, while all the females are rounded up.

He claims this is to keep the relatively frail hu’man females from being hurt in the hunt. But as his lifelong best friend, I have guessed the truth.

It has been two solars since his encounter with the hu’man female who dared to spit on him during his observation trip to New Terrhan, but he has not forgotten.

In fact, I suspect he will have the opposite problem to me this trip. I have never been aroused by any of the hu’man females during my previous tours to this primitive planet as a Xalling Collection Force soldier. The Breeding Ceremony is a chore I must undertake to gain a male heir. But as for our Kel, he is obsessed with the hu’man who defied him.

I hope for her sake she does not try to run.

CHAPTER THREE

Zinnia

“HEY, Freak show, going into the woods to make out with your girlfriend?” a voice calls out as Kira and me pass by the corner of the fields closest to the red forest.

Of course, it’s Phil Goggins. Dan’s best friend and his buddies are gathered outside the work hut he received when my brother named him the Co-Fields Manager—or as Kira puts it, The Other Overseer. It looks like they’re playing a game of dice, but Phil must not be too involved in the game. He’s way more interested in smirking at me, his arms folded across his thin chest like he’s daring me to say something back.

It sickens me now to think of the nearly lifelong crush I had on my brother’s friend, all the way up until the night of the February harvest festival.

“Who is that?” Kira demands, her dark brown eyes narrowing as she squints in the direction of the hut. Poor Kira’s mother didn’t get the proper pre-natal care before boarding the colony ship, so now she suffers from myopia, an eye condition that renders people unable to see for far distances.

“It’s nobody,” I answer, walking even faster.

“Hey Phil, double or nothing you can bang the hot, blind one, too. Bet she won’t want Freakshow no more after getting a piece of you.”

Kira jerks to a stop beside me. “What did those pigeon shits just say?”

“Ignore them,” I plead, my face burning hot with shame, as I remember how flattered I’d been when my brother’s handsome best friend had approached me at the harvest festival after years of teasing me about my limp and dark skin.

He’d said he’d always liked me, but hadn’t wanted to go there, because I was his best friend’s little sister. He’d also said he only bullied me to hide his true feelings. But now that he was the co-field manager, he could finally tell me how he really felt—makes no sense, I know. Believe me.

I still can’t believe I’d been so starved for validation, that I’d actually fallen for that crap. But the harvest had just come in and he’d poured plenty of corn liquor into my red clay cup as he complimented me on how smart I was and how he totally thought the leaders should promote me out of the fields and into the colony classroom.

I’d never had a boy talk so nice to me. Plus, all over-eighteen-year-old girls are encouraged to have sex before the Breeding Ceremony. Supposedly, it helped girls to see that sex with humans wasn’t anything like getting bred by a Xalthurian. With the corn liquor warming up my veins, it hadn’t taken much to convince me to “come see” his new work hut. Then do a lot more…

“Don’t look at my leg.” That had been my only condition before I pulled down my underwear and lifted my bark skirt high enough over my good leg for him to gain entry.

“This your first time?” he asked as he climbed on top of me.

“Yes,” I answered, more than a little embarrassed. Most girls my age had boyfriends by now, but Phil was the only one who’d ever shown an interest in me.

“Good,” he’d said, smirking under the light of New Terrhan’s two moons.

I had felt like the luckiest girl alive. But that feeling had been very, very fleeting. The sex hadn’t been good. Like, at all. Mostly awkward and drunken fumbling, until he managed to get himself inside with a painful push. He’d shot his load barely a minute after he started moving on top of me.

Then he’d jumped up and yelled out, “I did it! I banged Freak show.”

His friends had appeared in the work hut’s open window, cackling like witches, and congratulating Phil like he’d withstood ten rotations of latrine duty. I’d fled as fast as my bad leg could carry me, and I’d been too humiliated to tell anyone. Even my best friend.

“I’m tired of that pigeon shit overseer and his asshole friends,” Kira says now, trying to push past me to head toward the guys still snickering around the work hut.

“Kira, no.” I grab her arm. “Remember the plan. We can’t let them derail us.”

It’s a good point, and Kira must realize that. After expelling an angry breath, she backs down with a huffy, “Well, I guess us making out in the woods is as good a cover story as anything.”

“It is,” I assure her, with a sigh of relief. My best friend can be loyal to a fault, and there’s always a fifty-fifty chance she’s going to think with her heart instead of her brain when it comes to assholes.

In fact, part of the reason we’re enacting this plan is because she picked a fight with the wrong Reaper after her sister’s death.

“And the Xalthurians will be here any day now,” I remind her, as I redirect her toward the red woods.

Pointing that out makes Kira walk towards the trees even faster. Like we’re running out of time.

The Xals come every year during the month we New Terrhans still refer to as May, even though there are fourteen months in this system’s year to our old planet’s twelve.

It always went the same. The Xalthurian ship would land and a bunch of their males would come spilling out like animals unleashed. Half the Xals would be dressed in nothing but these loin cloths that barely covered their dicks and the other half would look just the opposite, soldiers in silver body armor that molded to their huge, jewel toned bodies.

We called the soldiers Reapers. They charged through the settlement, taking DNA samples from the female hybrid babies and ripping the male hybrid babies from the arms of their human mothers as was their right under the New Terrhan Accord.

Shortly after our crash on this inhospitable red planet, we’d been discovered by the system’s only other inhabitants, an advanced alien race, called the Xalthurians. On the brink of starvation, our human leaders had struck a deal with the race, whose own females were going through a fertility crisis. In exchange for a yearly allotment of supplies, they got to breed all of our twenty-one-year-old females. If the results of that breeding was a girl, she stayed with us in the settlement. But if it was a boy, they took him back to their planet, never to be seen again.

We called the ones in loincloths Hunters, because of the way they stalked through the settlement, checking the necks of any woman who looked to be close to breeding age. After the accord between our races was made, all New Terrhan females were required to have their birth date marked on their necks with a special stamp only Xalthurians could see without the aid of a UV light. When one of the Hunters found that the neck he was checking belonged to a twenty-one year old, he’d drag her back to the Xalthurian ship for something our overlords call the Breeding Ceremony.

But from what I’ve heard, there’s nothing ceremonious about what they do to the girls on that ship. According to Kira, who heard it from her sister, the caught females are dragged into a round room and taken by as many Xalthurians as possible in the three hours they’re allotted with the year’s “crop” of breeding age females.

The Ceremony is painful and degrading and according to Kira’s sister, severely traumatizing. But it’s what every girl in New Terrhan is raised to expect. We’re taught from the time we‘re old enough to understand that this is something we’ll have to endure for the greater good, since our food is based on our compliance.

However, that won’t be Kira and me.

We both turned twenty-one this year, but ever since Kira’s sister died trying to escape the Reapers who came to take her hybrid baby boy two years ago, my best friend has been concocting a plan to get us both out of the Breeding Ceremony.

A crazy and extremely dangerous plan. During past Breeding Ceremonies, some women have cried and a few had resisted, panicking when one of our alien overlords grabbed them with their clawed hands and threw them over their shoulder. A few have even attempted to run upon seeing the charging hunters. But no one has ever attempted what Kira and I are about to do, and it’s taken weeks of hard work to put all the pieces in place.

That’s the real reason we’ve been spending so much time in the red woods. Not to gather herbs and other medicinal plants as I’d been claiming to my brother.

I do manage to find some fernie on the perimeter of the woods—not nearly strong enough to halt the full pain of a broken wrist. But it’s better than nothing, and it’s the best cover story I could come up with for spending three hours in the woods tonight. Under the light of the two moons, I also keep my eyes out for more plants we can use. But I spend most of the three hours in hard labor, getting water out of the graves we dug for ourselves to hide in when the Xalthurians come. Again. We dug the hiding spaces months ago, but thanks to a particularly rainy growing season, this is the third time we’ve had to bail them out.

But you know what? It’s still better than hanging out at home, watching Dan pretend to feel contrite and listening to his hollow promises to change. I sing some of the more upbeat songs in the Fleetwood Mac catalog to keep Kira and me entertained as we bail out the graves.

“Holes,” Kira corrects sternly, after I tell her I think we’ve gotten the graves just bailed enough to hide in if they don’t dry out before the Xals set down.

She agrees easily enough, though. She also hooks her arm through mine, giving me something other than my stick to lean on during the half mile return walk to the village. But she doesn’t make a big deal of it.

Kira’s such a good friend. Most of the other villagers treat me like Phil and his friends, a walking freak show to be pointed at, since I’m currently our settlement’s darkest and only disabled resident.

Even worse are the folks who treat me like I’m some kind of super sad charity case. The Hunchback of New Terrhan, dragging my deformed leg around, because the ship’s only surviving doctor didn’t have the tools on hand to make a decent prosthetic if he amputated. I’m pretty sure the only reason Jin-Hu, the daughter of our High Leader, is friends with me is because she likes the saintly look being seen out in public with me gives her.

Kira’s not like that though, which is why I feel compelled to tell her what Jin-Hu told me as we walk back. That the Xals do things to the girls who try to run. Bad things they sometimes don’t survive.

But Kira remains committed to her plan and all too soon we reach the red clay house I share with Dan, Nova, and Glee. It’s about twice as big as most of the other houses in New Terrhan, but that still doesn’t make me want to go in.

My leg is throbbing after all that water bailing, and I don’t know what version of Dan I’ll find inside. Maybe he’ll be passed out. Maybe he’ll be in drunken tears, begging Nova to forgive him. Maybe he’ll be yelling at her for “making him” hurt her. His actions have become unpredictable lately.

And though I try to keep the dread out of my expression, Kira gives me a “what’s wrong” look.

So much…but too much to unload on Kira.

“Dan says the Breeding Ceremony is the only way I’ll ever be able to get a baby,” I decide to answer quietly, choosing the least of the things bothering me.

As I expected, Kira launches into a monologue about how great I am and how Dan’s a piece of pigeon shit.

According to her, the universe will one day deliver a nice guy to settle down with me and start a family. Kira honestly seems to think I’m the most beautiful woman on our planet and that I deserve much more than the Breeding Ceremony.

This is why, I think, after we exchange goodbyes and I start into the house, feeling uplifted despite what might be waiting for me inside. This is why I’m willing to risk my life to help her carry out this dangerous—.

A sudden blast of electronic sound interrupts that resolute thought.

I know what it is immediately, even before looking up to see the circular silver ship hovering in the night sky.

Dear moons…the Xalthurians.

They’re here.

“Run!” Kira screams, behind me.

CHAPTER FOUR

T’Kan

“IF YOU HAVE HELPED HER, if you have helped her defy me in any way, I will snap your necks.”

I stand at military attention outside a humble clay house, listening to Kel D’Rek threaten the parents of the hu’man he has become obsessed with breeding. Two solars ago, that very hu’man had dared to publicly lash out at him when we’d come to collect the male infants. At the time, I had been surprised that he did not kill her. Others had died for lesser offenses. And then I noticed that look in his eyes as he’d examined her neck to determine her age.

It was a look I’d seen many times on pleasure stations when soldiers were on leave for a few days. The way they would practically devour the comfort females with their eyes before even touching them. Lust.

But this is no mere lust, I decide as I listen to Kel D’Rek threaten the girl’s parents. His voice is laced through with the same elongated hisses new recruits descend to when we force them to go without food for five days as part of their training. Not merely hungry. Starved.

I recall how he reacted to the absence of the girl after we rounded up all the Breeding vessels, stalking into the village after her as if none of the other hu’man breeding age females existed. What would it be like to want someone so badly all other females disappeared? I wonder this and I stare down at my dijjo, lifeless still underneath the ceremonial cloth.

Kel D’Rek slams out of the little red clay house with a piece of clothing in his blue hand, pulling me out of my thoughts. It must be something that belonged to the hu’man in question. We Xalthurians have a keen sense of smell which makes us excellent trackers.

“My Kel, what is the plan?”

My friend brings the cloth to his nostrils and inhales deeply. His diamond red eyes narrow and his ridges bristle. “It seems there will be a hunt after all.”

WE SIGHT the defiant hu’man a short time later at the edge of the settlement’s red woods. But she is not alone. There is another female with her. She stands taller than most hu’man females and possesses skin nearly as black as the dark jewels worn by the wealthy on Xalthuria. She sees us coming and points us out to the object of my Kel’s obsession. A short discussion ensues, then the two females take off in different directions.

My Kel immediately zones in on his hu’man. No surprise there. I briefly debate whether to follow and help secure the defiant runner. However, I doubt he needs my help to capture a single hu’man female. She may be fast but he is faster.

There is also the matter of the other female. There is a chance she is of breeding age, and without exception all twenty-one-year-old females must participate in the ceremony. She must be captured, and if it turns out she is of age, of course I must deliver the mandated punishment of ten lashes. Examples must always be made to ensure compliance.

But I find my interest piqued. Was the female’s skin really the color of onyx? This planet only has two moons to Xalthuria’s three. Perhaps it was simply a trick of the interplay between shadow and light?

Either way following my sense of duty and order, I refocus my hunting efforts on the taller hu’man only to find her disappeared from view.

“Essh!”

But she cannot have gotten far, and I am one of the best trackers on my planet. My nostrils flare in an out, attempting to capture the scent of the hu’man as I follow her into the planet’s red woods.

Without a piece of clothing from her it’s not as easy to trace her. But after a few moments of careful stalking, I catch the scent of an animal not of the four-legged variety.

It is the hu’man.

She is near.

But nowhere to be seen.

CHAPTER FIVE

Zinnia

THE HEAVY FOOTSTEPS suddenly stop right above where I’m lying underneath a pile of dirt. Please, please, please don’t let him find me! I desperately mind whisper to Asa, one of the gods from my dead parents’ continent on the old planet.

A beat of silence; nothing but the pounding of my heart as I wait for the god of mercy to answer.

Then suddenly the dirt is displaced with a loud crash, as a huge hand grabs me around the neck and pulls me up, like I’m a doll he’s removing from a box. The next thing I know, I’m kicking air and dangling from something as unyielding as the village’s thick iron irrigation pipe. It’s a golden arm I find out when the red dirt falls away from my eyes. And at the end of that arm stands a Xalthurian, shimmering gold with long black hair, whipping in the wind.

His body is bare, except for one thin loin cloth, and his torso is covered in overlapping platelets that look like scales. The moons’ shadows play over the sharp curves of his heavy muscled body. And his eyes…oh moons, his eyes…they’re black where mine are white, and relieved only by a set of light violet diamond-shaped pupils.

My heart stops. I can’t breathe. And it has less to do with the hand wrapped around my neck than the alien staring at me, his eyes flat but curious. Like I’m a science experiment he didn’t expect to find lying in a dirt grave.

As he chokes me to death.

I’m caught…but not weaponless, I suddenly remember.

Then I raise my stick.

CHAPTER SIX

T’Kan

SHE STRIKES ME. Me. The general of the Xalthurian military. With her pathetic stick.

Her assault has no more impact on me than a bothersome insect. I crook my head at her, not knowing whether to feel amused or annoyed. Then I simply pluck the stick from the audacious female’s hands and toss it aside.

But when I look back after tossing the stick to inform her that she will now receive an additional lash to the mandated ten, my thoughts trail off.

Her skin really is as dark as it appeared from afar, a midnight contrast to the gold of my hand. I think of the dual-race hybrids and can easily imagine a son with a here-to-fore unseen swirl of black and gold skin.

The scrape of her pitiful talons across my hand still wrapped tightly around her neck brings me back from thoughts of the progeny I might put into the womb of this insubordinate female. Slowly, I lower her feet to the ground but keep my hold on her neck only loosening my grip enough to allow her to draw shallow breaths.

She is taller than most hu’man females, but still not nearly as tall as me. Her head is level with my torso. I stare at her face, my eyes missing nothing, from her soft dark skin and large lips to the hair plaited into rows of thin braids that hug her scalp like a crown.

She is lean, but not in the way of a Xalthurian female. No, our females are perfectly slender with only slight bumps upon their chest. However, this dark female possesses full breasts and round hips. I raise my eyes back to her face. She is…

Stunning. She is nothing less than truly stunning. Taking in her exquisite features, a feeling much like the energy pulse we use to train soldiers to withstand intense sensations shoots through me.

And my diijo fully agrees.

It stirs to life, like a beast rising from a season’s nap. Large and awake and ravenous with hunger. Hearts beating furious and fast, I drop my eyes from her to my now severely tented loincloth. This hu’man…this female…she seems to be all the serum I need.

I raise my shocked violet gaze back to her fearful brown one.

But is she of breeding age? With a press of my thumb into her chin I bend her head…

The numbers written upon her neck fill my hearts with dark anticipation.

“You are of age,” I click at her. “I will punish you, dark hu’man. Then I will breed you until your womb is filled with my babe.”

With this vow, I drop my hand from her throat. For a moment, neither of us move as we stare into each other’s eyes, her round gaze and my diamond one.

Then she once again attempts to flee.

However, this time she takes not even one step, before I catch her by the back of her beautiful braids.

“Twelve lashes,” I click at her, as I haul her into my arms and allow myself a great whiff.

Delicious. She smells delicious. My diijo quivers at the thought of all I will do to her this night.

I toss her over my shoulder and head back to the ship, ignoring her screams.

For the next three hours, she belongs to me.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Zinnia

I’VE STOPPED SCREAMING and beating my fists against the alien’s back by the time we reach the ship. I don’t think the alien can understand me anyway. Or feel my fists. The platelets aren’t scaly, like I assumed back when I’d gone my whole life without touching or being touched by a Xalthurian. They’re like leather. Not wet or slimy, but I’d probably have to stab him with something to do any real damage.

I think of Kira and the makeshift knife she’d shown me before running in the opposite direction of our hiding place. Under the accord humans are not allowed to keep anything remotely resembling weapons. Not even knives to cut our food, but she’d made a shiv like she was in a prison entertainment.

I can only hope it worked. That she didn’t get caught easily like me.

The Xals do things to the girls who try to run. Bad things they don’t necessarily recover from.

No, I’m not fighting anymore. Resistance is futile and might even make whatever punishment coming my way much worse.

There are two guards standing at the bottom of the landing strip, both wearing the Reaper’s distinct body molding armor. From my upside down position, I watch one put his long sleek photon gun in a front halter, then hold out his arms, offering to take me from my captor, I think.

But the golden alien hisses and clicks, and both guards stand aside as he walks with me up the landing strip’s wide plank. I’m unsure whether I should be relieved I wasn’t handed off or even more terrified.

When we get inside, there’s a long hallway to the left, but to the right, I nearly lose it when I see what’s happening in there.

It’s a round room, just like Kira’s sister said. But the scene is even worse than what she described. There are girls. So many girls. Girls I know, braced against walls or down on their knees, while huge jewel toned aliens viciously rut them from behind.

Some of the girls have their eyes closed. Some of the girls stare straight ahead. Some cry.

I see Jin-Hu, the neighbor who warned me about running on the other side of the room. She’s naked, on her knees, and appears to be moaning as another golden Xal pistons in and out of her. Her face is slack, her mouth hanging open in a way that makes me suspect her moans aren’t cause by pain.

Is she…is she liking it? Actually enjoying what that Xal is doing to her? Is that even possible?

The alien carrying me over his shoulder turns left and down the ship’s long hallway, abruptly cutting off my view of Jin-Hu before I can finish pondering those questions.

“Where are you taking me?” I demand when he palms open one door on the circular hallway. I ask him this, but I’m afraid to know the answer.

As it turns out, I’m right to be afraid. My eyes widen when he sets me down on the other side of the sliding door.

The dim room is almost completely empty except for a strange metal contraption, gleaming under its low light. It looks like a tilted silver X with pretty diamond cuffs attached to each of its legs. I would almost call it pretty if not for two things: One, as pretty as those diamond cuffs are, they look a whole lot like shackles. And two, even though, the contraption is tilted forward, I can tell it’s around the same height as me. Almost as if it were designed to hold a human.

No, hold isn’t the right word.

Imprison. It looks like this contraption is meant to imprison a human. Me.

Fear slices through me, and I instinctively turn to run.

But his clawed hand wraps around the back of my neck before I’ve even set one foot down in the opposite direction.

I wish I was as fierce as Kira, but I’m not. “No! No! Please don’t!” I plead as he shoves me forward toward the X, begging for mercy before I even know what he plans to do with me.

My words have no effect on him. Because he doesn’t understand my language or because he doesn’t give a pigeon shit about what I’m begging not to happen to me.

Either way his only answer to my pleas is a grim tug of my arm toward the X’s upper left cuff.

I tug back, trying to get away, but the cuff easily closes around my wrist as if I’m not offering up any resistance at all. The fight is almost laughably uneven. And he has an even easier time entrapping my other wrists and both my ankles in the other three diamond cuffs.

Before I know it, I’m lying at an angle upon the cross, completely spread eagle. I hear his heavy footsteps behind me. And that’s all the warning I get, before the sound of tearing fabric rips into my ears, and I suddenly feel cool air. On my back and entire lower half.

My skirt. He’s torn away my skirt!

Oh moons, oh moons, what is he…what is he going to do to me?

The answer to that question comes in a forceful instant. I release a choked cry as I try to process the shocking burn of being so suddenly impaled.

There is something inside of me now. Something thick and long and strange and much, much larger than Phil. It fills me up so completely, I can’t breathe, can’t think, can only panic as I push into the cross, trying to get away.

A weight falls across my back, heavy and five-fingered. His hand, I dimly realize. It’s his hand holding me down, so that I can’t fight. Can’t buck him off.

Oh moons, he’s going to hurt me. He’s going to hurt me so bad.

But then another clumsy weight falls against the side of my head and moves down the length of my long cornrows.

I still.

Is he…? Is he stroking my hair? Yes…yes, I think he is.

The cross tilts backwards, and I feel his hot breath on my neck as a bunch of low clicks and hisses float into my ear. A soft accompanying track to his clumsy strokes of my locks.

What’s he saying? Is he giving me a command? Or maybe he’s trying to soothe me? Or something else? I can’t remotely know.

But as he continues to stroke my hair and click in my ear, I feel my heart rate decrease. Slowly, gradually the burning pain ebbs away, and as promised in the sexual health texts we were required to read during our last year of colony ship school, my body begins to adjust to his invasion.

When he eventually pulls back, and pushes back in, it doesn’t hurt. Actually, it doesn’t hurt at all. It just feels strange. There’s something lining his dick. Some sort of ridging that sends strange sensations through me when the raised edges rub against my walls.

These sensations are almost…almost pleasurable. Call it pleasure adjacent, with the potential for more. Nothing like the few minutes of dry burning I experienced with Phil.

In fact, I adjust my hips up and then down with the sense I might enjoy this more at another angle.

Big mistake.

The golden Xal stills. Then he starts driving into me, wild and unfettered, his hips pistoning so fast, they feel like a machine between my thighs.

Until suddenly he stills again, the hand in my hair clamping down.

A pulsing beat…and he spills his hot semen, coating the walls of my pussy. Streaming into me for so long, it feels like it might never stop.

But eventually it does, and he pulls out with an enormous hiss.

I’m still blinking at the suddenly empty sensation, when the golden Xal reappears in front of me.

Gods forgive me, my eyes immediately drop to his dick and I see I was right. It’s covered in ridges, similar to the ones lining his nose. And it’s hanging, heavy and spent between his thighs.

Is it done then? Is it over?

I should be happy at the prospect. But for some reason my chest fills with a heavy disappointment. And my pussy…it’s clenching. Like it’s not done even though he is. Like it missed out on something and can’t accept it.

However, those confusing thoughts cut short when he moves towards the wall in front of the cross. I notice then something I hadn’t before. That it’s covered with all sorts of instruments. Most of them gleam like the cross. Alien devices made of alien materials that I couldn’t possibly recognize after twenty-one years on a red dirt planet with only the ruins of a colony ship.

But my heart seizes with fear when he pulls one of the instruments off the wall. One I recognize, after a lifetime spent watching old planet entertainments, mostly made on the continent Kira’s family hails from. It has several black ropes attached to a silver handle. And it’s not an electronic device, but a tool. A weapon.

A whip. He’s holding a whip.

He weighs it in his hand.

Then turns to face me, his violet eyes now flat and grim.

A cold dread overtakes me as Jin-Hu’s words echo in my ears….

The Xals do things to the girls that try to run. Bad things they don’t necessarily recover from.

CHAPTER EIGHT

T’Kan

THE ONYX FEMALE did not survive her twelve lashings.

This wouldn’t be the first time one of the hu’man females had died during the Breeding Ceremony, but I am responsible for the onyx skinned female’s demise so I stand with one of the translators, Feh M’Rir, as he delivers the news of her death to her brother.

This hu’man who has identified himself as Dan is also a member of this planet’s board of leaders. I study him, searching for a familial resemblance to his sister.

He is also tall by hu’man standards and slender, with a wide nose and large eyes, but that is where the similarities end. His skin is not nearly as dark as hers, sand to her black jewel. And though they share many of the same facial features, there is something about him that strikes me as avaricious. A Kaidorian in hu’man skin, I decide, thinking of our former foes, who’d made their race’s fortune pillaging their way through several systems.

He does not appear particularly disturbed by the news of his sister’s demise. The hu’mans are an emotional race. I have seen family members and lovers of these females fall to their knees, their eyes watering like babes when they received the news of their female’s death.

Dan merely twists his lips and says something to Feh M’Rir in the hu’man’s guttural throat box language.

M’Rir frowns before turning to me. “Xar T’Kan, the hu’man says, Zin’nia—that is how his sister is called—was dear to him, and that her loss will be felt deeply in his household and among the other villagers. Xar, he says that he should at least be compensated with extra rations for his loss.”

Zin’nia. So that was her name.

I stare down at the dry-eyed hu’man. Something inside of me wishes to pick him up by his thin neck and snap it. My dislike grows stronger by the second. But I do not wish to continue this interaction longer than is necessary. I give M’Rir a nod consenting to the hu’man’s request.

Once M’Rir directs the hu’man where to receive his extra rations, I turn to leave, relieved to have that part over. The translator falls behind me as I head back to the ship.

“Xar, he took the news rather well. It could have been much worse. The parents of the other hu’man female who tried to run wept greatly and it became necessary to summon their people to remove them from the landing plank. But the Leader Dan seemed more inconvenienced that anything else.”

Inconvenienced. That word makes me want to turn back around and give in to my earlier wish to snap the young leader’s neck. But the Breeding Ceremony is over, and I am once again the Xar, I remind myself with a glance toward the body armor I redonned after returning to my quarters.

I must act accordingly. I nod in seeming agreement, giving none of my inner ire away.

“About the other female,” M’Rir continues, still following close behind, “is it true?”

“Is what true?” I ask with a hard set of my ridges. “There is much to be done before we land in Xalthuria, and I have no time for riddles.”

“There are rumors that the Kel has decided to take one of the hu’mans back with him…to breed.”

I halt and turn to stare down at the green translator. “Are you trying to engage me, the Xar, in gossip about our Kel?”

Feh M’Rir’s ridges raise in alarm. “Of course not, Xar T’Kan. I was merely repeating what I had heard. I wished no offense to you or our Kel. Please forgive my lapse of judgement. It won’t happen again.”

His thin body quivers as he touches his ridges, not quite making eye contact. Like my uncle and many of the other aliens engaged in intelligence work, he was not warrior trained, and possesses a slender build.

Similar to that of the hu’man female I was duty bound to punish. But without the hips and the mammary glands…

The memory of the way her breasts had hung when I came around to the other side of the cross hits me hard. Round and trembling with dark nipples, so engorged, they looked like pebbles.

Would they be hard to the touch? I wanted to know.

And oh how tempting it had been to forget my original intent, when her eyes fell to my spent diijo and she released another spray of that intoxicating scent. It appeared to be emanating from her breeding slit. Like an invitation.

An invitation I couldn’t accept. At least not yet….

I reminded myself of my duty. And I’d turned from the sight of her upon the punishment cross, so that I wouldn’t once again find myself inside of her, rutting her like an animal, mindless and out of control.

Duty…

“See that it does not,” I say to the green translator, bringing myself back to the present.

M’Rir scurries off, and I head toward the observation deck.

But as the elevator ferries me to the top of the ship, images from the previous night once again assail my mind. The dark-skinned female’s eyes when I pulled the whip out. How they had looked at me with complete terror. How they made water as she shook her head back and forth.

“Observation Deck,” the elevator clicks, once again tearing me from thoughts of the onyx female.

Resetting my ridges, I step onto the main deck and start issuing orders.

I did not lie to the translator about there being much to do before we landed. Many of the males who participated in the ceremony, fucked themselves past the point of dehydration. The warriors in particular would need to be attended to, so that they could resume their duties in two days’ time. My Kel also bid me to oversee the transfer of his unconscious captive to a medical unit for genetic counseling and repair.

“I want her fixed and readied for my breeding as soon as possible,” he had commanded.

When we get close enough to the planet for the holo system to come back online, it is necessary to hail my uncle before he hears the news of my failed breeding from someone else. I do not abide his emissaries among my ranks, but I have a feeling his fellow green intellect Feh M’Rir will have no reservations about relaying everything he has observed on this trip.

“Is it true our Kel has taken a hu’man to breed?” he answers my holo hail as if to confirm my suspicions.

I steadily refuse to relay any information about our Kel, even to my uncle. But I must admit to feeling relieved my friend’s unorthodox actions have drawn my uncle’s attention away from my actions.

He only clicks a single disapproval about me wasting my entire breeding time on the punishment of a single female. “You will go next year and hopefully will not be distracted by our Kel’s digression next time. And I suspect with this taking of a hu’man female, next time may come sooner than later.”

I suspect my uncle is up to something. But instead of answering, I touch my ridges and vow I will do my utmost duty to secure an heir for the Line Neixal.

After that holo is done, I hail F’Syn, my second-in-command who has been standing in for me while I undertook my breeding trip. There is much to discuss about my time away and the additional two days off given to all Breeding Ceremony males.

“So you will not return tomorrow?” the purple commanding officer asks, with a surprised hiss.

I admit I have lost the ability to take time off well since the end of The Three Generation War. This will be the first time I do not return to work with only the require bare minimum of time away. It is likely F’Syn has not prepared a training regimen for the next two days, he was so certain I would return on the morrow.

The screams of the onyx female ring in my ears as I answer, “No, I have decided to spend the recommended amount of restorative time at my cabin.”

F’Syn’s ridges ripple with confusion, but he is too well-trained to question me further. As a reward for his restraint, I spend the rest of the trip running through my preferred Readiness Drills for planetary defense. With the Three Generation War over, it is unlikely the Kaidorians will ever find our planet, much less attack us, but I would rather my troops remain over prepared than under.

After landing in the palace field, I oversee the offloading of the hu’man female Kel D’Rek has taken from the planet. She is still in her medical repair unit and according to the readout now undergoing gene and cell level corrections for a degenerative eye condition.

“Our Kel would also like her to be equipped with a translation chip as soon as her medical repairs are done,” I tell the medic attending her unit.

“Of course, Xar,” he answers, swiping a hand over his ridges before setting the repair unit to float mode and charting a course toward our Kel’s suite in the royal palace.

“Xar T’Kan,” one of my officers approaches me soon after the medic disappears into the palace with the Kel’s prize. “Your trunk has been offloaded to your flyer.”

“Thank you.”

Duty done; I head to the long-distance flyer I’d ordered with my databoard as soon as I’d returned to my quarters after finishing with her punishment. Yet, my stomach continues to twist with memories of the onyx female, even as I set the coordinates to my private cabin and fly away from the city where the mansion I share with my uncle and his second marriage daughter, A’Ry, resides.

Only when I land in the cleared field beside my cabin does some of my unease drain way.

The cabin rests on the mountain I inherited shortly after my mother’s death from the Extinction Virus. Nestled among a thick forest of trees, there is much hunting to be had. And though this area is much colder than the always warm royal city, the tradeoff of no one for great distances to bother me is well worth the drop-in temperature.

I climb out of the flyer, heart lifting at the sight of the two-room cabin I built with my own hands. There’s a reason I come her when forced to take leave. Out here, I am not the general of our planet’s military force or the last in line of a prominent house because of my failure to save my cousin from dying on a Kaidorian’s horn.

Out here I am simply T’Kan, with no responsibility, or ties to duty. And this is why I much prefer to spend time at my little mountain cabin.

I pull the trunk out of the long backseat of my flyer and carry it inside of my sanctuary.

The generator fires up as soon as I enter, and I’m greeted by the clicks and hisses of the appliances I’ve acquired over the solars. The overhead lights also switch on, illuminating the cabin’s bare-minimum furniture. A table with two chairs and a large sleeping mat lined up against the back wall. Not much, but enough for my purposes.

Setting the trunk down close to the sleeping mat, I take a deep breath and open it to ensure its contents remain unharmed.

Curled into a ball, knees pulled to her chest, Zin’nia remains unconscious, her chest moving up and down thanks to the discreet holes I drilled into the trunk’s sides last eve. Still, I touch the side of her neck to reassure myself my precious treasure is still breathing.

To my relief, I find her pulse steady and strong. I lift her out of the box and place her upon my sleeping mat.

Then I kneel in front of her. Trying to reconcile her presence here in my sanctuary. Trying to fathom what I have done.

This onyx hu’man has awakened something in me that I had long thought was dead. And she may be my ruin.

But for now she is mine.

Mine to steal.

Mine to breed.

Mine to keep.

Mine.

Whoa! You have got to find out what happens next. Click here to read HIS TO STEAL and thank you so much for reading the very special preview.

Love,

Taylor Vaughn