Alien Brute's Captive - Aya Morningstar Page 0,38

car I’m in. I could wave to them.

We drive into one of the towns. Buildings surround either side of the road. The car stops at a big cobblestone courtyard with three-story buildings surrounding it. There’s one larger building at the edge of the courtyard and a church towers in the background, though the symbol on top of it isn’t a cross. It’s an oval with a slash through it.

The driver lets us out, and Krakon takes me by the hand into a building which I assume is a hotel of some kind.

The driver carries our bag in behind us. Krakon tips him, and a bellboy, also not pure Cygnian, takes us and our bag up to an elevator.

We’re shown into our “rooms,” which are beautifully decorated. The windows are big and open, letting in plenty of sunlight. There are three main rooms, but it includes two bathrooms and a small kitchen, as well. The first room is the “drawing room,” which has a lot of places to sit, a fireplace, and shelves full of books. The next room is a living space. It has more comfortable-looking couches, a lot of paintings, and two desks with office chairs on either side of the room. All the furniture is made of real wood, ornately carved and polished to a lustrous shine. The entire aesthetic of this place is like Old Europe aristocracy meets weird alien futuristic shit. There is a matter shaper, much bigger than the one Krakon had on Glacius, in the living space. There are screens on the walls that have text and images flashing across them--it looks like news--and yet there are frilly curtains and ornately woven carpets, oil paintings and gold frames, and all kinds of other strange and anachronistic contrasts.

That’s just my interpretation of everything, a woman from a lost time on a planet far away. To someone from this time, there is likely no strange contrast. The matter reshaper or the entire walls acting as screens likely don’t stand out to people from these times as odd. To them it’s just like seeing a laptop on a nice desk, or a cell phone in a well-manicured garden.

Krakon tips the bellboy, and he leaves.

When the door is finally shut, we check the bedroom.

It’s huge, and the bed is ornate. It even has a canopy. There’s a fireplace in the bedroom as well, though “Summer’s Breeze” never seems cold enough to even need a fire. True to its name, the weather has felt pleasantly sunny with a nice cool breeze.

“What now?” I ask.

“We don’t have a lot of time to waste,” he says. “I’d love to just...get into bed.”

We look at each other. I feel my nipples getting harder, and I know through this thin white dress he can see them. God, that’s going to be embarrassing in public. Maybe that’s the point? Showing the other rich Cygnians that your human gets aroused for you?

“But,” he says, tearing his eyes from my chest, “We need to start meeting people. The owner of the spear owns the vineyard just outside of town. We need to fall into his circle as soon as we can.”

We’re staying in this place on Thraxa’s dime. She said we have enough money to stay for a week. We don’t have a lot of time to get to know this guy and get invited to his house so that we can scan the room and figure out where the spear is.

“You like wine?” Krakon asks me.

28

Krakon

We arrive at the winery. A strikingly beautiful, pure-blooded Cygnian woman greets us. She’s wearing a dress rather than a robe, and it hugs her figure tightly. If I didn’t have Catherine by my side, if I’d never met her, I’d have had a hard time keeping my eyes off this woman. But I’ve fallen for a human, and Cygnian woman are…

God. This is what Aria felt about me? Isn’t it? She was intoxicated by that human man, and then she looked at me and saw...this? The woman is beautiful, I know it logically, but I feel she’s nothing compared to Catherine. It’s almost like what I used to feel looking at a man. I could know a man looked good, but there was no biological urge toward him. This is what I now feel when I look at a beautiful woman of my own kind.

If I looked at Aria now...I’d feel nothing?

A wave of disgust hits me, but the woman is talking to me, and I fight it back.

She