Alien Brute's Captive - Aya Morningstar Page 0,13

around me is different, except for Krakon. He’s still there, except he’s not wearing his helmet, and he’s covered in bloody scratches. There’s a huge gash on the left side of his forehead, and it’s covered in a mix of fresh and crusted blood.

He grabs hold of me with both hands and tears me out of the chamber. His nostrils flare and eyes widen. He’s smelling me for the first time, I realize.

Bitter, biting cold hits me like a wall. I thought I’d just been pulled out of the chamber.

There’s snow all around us. And metal. Burning metal. There’s torn and shredded metal all around us, and a few hundred feet away there’s a huge pile of it, engulfed in flame.

“It’s going to explode,” he says. “Come on!”

He drags me.

I try to walk so he’ll let go of me, but my legs are numb. I fall into the snow.

He scoops me out of the snow and hoists me over his shoulder. He carries me away from the burning mass of twisted metal. Each step he takes, there’s a big dip. He’s limping.

Being awakened into something like this is incredibly disorienting. Not quite as disorienting as sleeping for hundreds of years and waking up on a spaceship, but this time I was expecting to wake up on a spaceship, not in the snow, surrounded by…

“Is that pile of burning metal your ship?” I ask him.

“We got lucky,” he says.

He’s dragging something behind him. It’s a big bag tied to a rope. It slides through the snow as he limps us along.

“What’s in the bag?” I ask.

“Just stop talking,” he says.

Suddenly the ship explodes.

The heat from the explosion hits my face, but we’re far enough away that the shockwaves and the shrapnel don’t come near us. The heat as the explosion surges feels nice. Maybe it’s the last heat I’ll ever feel?

I’m shivering, and I realize that the heat from Krakon is the only thing keeping me warm at this point. His muscular shoulder and back are pressed against my body. God, it feels good.

I fall asleep on his shoulder, welcoming the dreams that will come rather than the cold oblivion of the cryo chamber.

12

Krakon

My leg aches in pure agony. Cygnians heal fast, but the leg won’t heal if I’m walking on it. The cold won’t help either. Still, I’m much more resistant to cold than Catherine is, and I know I’m the only thing keeping her alive.

I need her alive, because a pirate without a ship isn’t a pirate, and selling her while cashing out my savings will just barely afford me a new ship. Not one as nice as the ship I had, of course, but one I could at least start earning money with again.

They were right. All the other smug fuckers in the swarm who told me not to do this. All of them were right. I activated a distress beacon--well, two, one in orbit before the engines fucking exploded, and one on the ground. The beacon on the ground is in the bag sliding behind me. It’s sending a coded distress signal that only the swarm will recognize. I don’t know exactly where they are right now, but it should reach them within a few days. Then, depending on where they are in the system and how much they give a shit about me, someone will come. We just have to survive until then.

My main concern should be the cold. Or the savages that surely are going to come toward the thing that fell out of the sky and exploded, or the wildlife, or any number of things on this planet that can kill me.

Instead, I find myself most concerned about that scent. Every time I inhale, it hits me. The first time I smelled it, I thought it was summer on Cygnus, despite the sub-freezing temperature all around us. I thought I’d seen flowers blooming out of the snow and the sun popping out of the clouds with a big shit-eating grin and pair of sunglasses on.

That fucking scent is what took Aria away from me. And now that it’s got me in its grip, I want to resist it. I want to hate Catherine, but even as I desperately will myself to hate her guts, I grip her waist ever so gently against my shoulder, terrified I might hurt her and jostle her too hard. I move my hands along her body, not because it feels good--but God does it feel good--but because I’m terrified