Alien Brute's Captive - Aya Morningstar Page 0,5

like me. I thought the whole “being brought back when medical technology advances” was a crock of shit, and yet here I am in the future. On a spaceship. Talking to an alien. My sister could be here, too.

“I didn’t meet anyone directly, Catherine,” he says. “I just got the order. It said your ancestors. Though I’m sure if your sister was on here, they would have ordered me to get her, too. This ship is full of humans. Humans are valuable in this system. It’s technically illegal to buy and sell them, but there are workarounds. Your ancestors found out you were on here. They want to get you off the ship before you are sold to someone. They sent me to get you. Just you.”

“And you are…”

“A freelancer,” he says.

Some kind of alarm bell starts going off in my head. It’s deep inside and barely audible because his charm is so thick. I want to like him. I want to believe him.

I liked Thad at first. And Chad. And...Krakon? God, his name almost sounds like some future alien version of “Thaddeus,” which was Thad’s full name.

“So, you are just doing this for money?” I ask.

“Well,” he says, still holding my hand, “that was the original motivation.”

He eyes me up and down, then winks at me.

My heart pounds hard in my chest. The rush of blood to my cheeks and the butterflies in my stomach completely silence the alarm bells that had just started ringing.

Krakon is actually quite a different name than Thad, when you really think about it.

6

Krakon

Let go of her hand, you idiot.

Each moment longer that I hold her hand, the harder it becomes to let go.

I laugh to myself. If Aria had shown even a fraction of the restraint I was showing now, we’d probably still be together. No. I’m doing fine. I can handle this. I am not as weak as other Cygnians. I can resist a human.

Only because your faceplate is closed, dipshit.

And it helps that she’s behind me. That I only look at her when I feel like I have to, to keep her calm. It’s really hard to look away, so I try to not look in the first place.

“Jason said the defense grid was starting up again. Is that going to be a problem?”

I stop dead in my tracks. I don’t turn to face her.

“How long did he say?”

My voice is cold. All the charm sucked dry. Her hand starts to tremble, my calming presence no longer grounding her.

“An hour,” she says. “But that was at least twenty minutes ago.”

I’m good at math. Really good. I can do complex calculations in my head without really thinking about each individual number. Forty minutes until the ship kills me and blows up my ship. Twenty more minutes until we are even getting into the ship. Then the more complex numbers come in: weapon ranges, acceleration gradients…

Two minutes to spare. Maybe.

“We need to go faster,” I say, trying to put the charm back on.

If I have to fight her, chase her, subdue her--anything like that--we might not have enough time.

I’m dragging her at this point. I almost want to ask if I can just carry her, but I get the sense she’s already not quite sure about this whole thing. The charming act I’m putting on is like a bubble. It’s nice and shiny and looks solid enough, but touch it and it will pop.

“Do we have time?” she asks.

“Plenty,” I say. “We’ll be on my ship soon enough. We do need to keep moving, though.”

In other words, stop asking so many damn questions and focus on moving.

We soon reach the last airlock, the one that is sealing out the vacuum from where I breached the hull.

“All right,” I say. “Have you ever worn a spacesuit?”

“Do you think I’m an astronaut or something? I was a secretary.”

“I don’t know what either of those things are,” I say. “So I’ll take that as a ‘no.’”

There’s an emergency suit in a box on the wall. I rip the box off the wall and unpack the suit. Shit, it’s primitive. This ship was sent from Earth well over three hundred years ago, but I didn’t realize spacesuits from that time were this bad.

“Shit,” I whisper, looking at all the damn pieces.

“What?” she asks.

“We need to get this thing on you really fast,” I say.

7

Catherine

He has to touch me all over to get the spacesuit on. I try to help at first, but I soon realize I’m doing