Gravity (Dark Anomaly #1) - Marina Simcoe Page 0,9

them I’d do?”

His words had made no sense. No one would expect a person to do anything of that sort. Would they?

He glanced at me, confused.

“I promised my crew some entertainment. That’s the reason you’re still alive,” he said it as if he had done me a huge favor by bargaining with my body without my permission.

“You must know it’s illegal to force me.” I shook my head in disbelief. “You didn’t discuss anything with me. All I wanted was some assistance—”

“What you want is irrelevant.” He jerked his head to the side, impatiently. “There are over seven hundred males in here. They all want a piece of you, some literally. The trick was to convince them to want less of you. And I have accomplished that.”

Lifting an eyebrow, he leveled a stare at me, obviously annoyed at my ungratefulness and lack of appreciation for what he’d done “for me.”

Was this man for real?

“You’ve promised them what wasn’t yours to give!” I snapped, losing my patience and frustrated by his inability to see things for what they were. “How are you planning to deliver it? Surely, you don’t think I will act out your perverted fantasies?”

His jaw flexed. He folded his arms across his chest, his tail lashing against his boots.

“What choice do you have?”

“The choice not to do it.” I widened my stance.

“And who would protect you from the wrath of their disappointment? Do you know what hundreds of sex-starved males can do to one female?” He flinched.

I grimaced, too, trying not to imagine what he had implied.

Was he trying to scare me? Why?

Several interplanetary laws guaranteed my freedom and wellbeing anywhere in the Federation's territory. I could recite them all by heart.

“Why are you threatening me?” I asked.

“It’s not a threat. Just the simple truth.”

My mind flashed back to the scene in the corridor. Vrateus had shot one of his people in front of everyone, with no repercussions. Obviously, he didn’t respect interplanetary laws.

Did he want me to beg for his personal protection, then?

“I suspect next you’ll say you’ll save me from the big, bad guys out there, but there’s a price? Is that it?”

He frowned.

“I’ve already done all I can to save you. The rest is up to you.”

With another irritated flip of his tail, he left.

Chapter 4

VRATEUS

There was still so much to do before he could call it a night.

Each newly arrived ship had to be stripped for every piece of equipment that could be reasonably used as a weapon. It had to be done tonight, no matter how tired he was.

As he worked on cataloguing the items and sorting them into boxes, his thoughts kept coming back to the woman who had arrived on this ship.

What an infuriating, ungrateful female she’d turned out to be.

He had left her alone, in the relative safety of the observation capsule of the ship that had crashed on the Dark Anomaly about a decade ago. The decade as calculated here, according to the arbitrary clock he had established and maintained.

He had long suspected that time on the Anomaly did not flow quite the same as it did outside of it. It appeared to run much slower here.

Whenever a new ship crashed, Vrateus would analyze the data, weapons, and equipment it had. He would estimate the amount of time that had passed in the world outside against the age of the data and technology that he’d recovered from the previously crashed ship.

For every year on the Dark Anomaly, about three hundred years passed on a regular, inhabitable planet like Nofoi, the home of his family. Which meant he had been missing from that world for over six thousand years, now.

Not that it mattered, anyway. No one was there to actually miss him. Everyone who’d ever known his family must be long dead by now. And no one outside of the Dark Anomaly would ever see him again. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, none of the people inside the Anomaly existed.

This was a world on its own.

Suppressing a yawn, he pinched the inside of his wrist, forcing himself to stay awake and alert as he inspected the rest of the human’s ship.

Crux and Nocc stood nearby.

“To keep watch,” Vrateus had told Crux.

In truth, he wanted to have the errock close by to keep an eye on him. By having Crux close, Vrateus ensured he wasn’t out there stirring trouble among the rest of the crew.

Crux was ambitious, unpredictable, cruel, and dangerous. He was also the leader