Kate
Isilently follow Rune through the hidden walkways of the ship. He’s angry with me. I can tell by the way he moves and the absence of his glances. Outrage balls in his fists and keeps him ten feet in front of me.
He no longer leads me chivalrously through doorways with a warm hand to heat the small of my back, but grunts and points his curt directions.
His refusal to talk—to look at me—it claws an ache in my chest and hollows out my insides.
I stumble over my feet to keep up. “Rune, please. Can’t you slow down?”
He neither slows nor responds.
My chest tightens. I want to scream and throw something at him. My chest fills with fire despite the icy temperature in the ship.
I stop walking, and with a loud growl, cross my arms up over my breasts. “Rune,” I shout, “stop!”
His head whips around and faster than a flash of lightning he’s in front of me, taking up all the space and air around us. “Talking and stopping are a waste of time. The faster I get you to the rendezvous point with the others, the quicker you’ll be able to get back where you belong. Isn’t that what you want?” He steps closer and his jaw tightens. “Isn’t that what you’re so damn desperate for? To live on a destroyed planet as far away from me as possible?”
“That’s not fair. You’re being an asshole.”
His eyes narrow. “You want to leave here, yes? You want to get out of, what do you keep calling it?” he laughs dryly. “A tin can?”
“Yes, but—”
“And you wouldn’t care if I took another female to mate with?” he asks.
I don’t give him an answer. I don’t want to think about him touching another person the way he just touched me, but telling him that wouldn’t help this situation at all.
“Then I will take you back to Earth and leave you there.” His face is red, the veins in his neck coiled. “You women are so easily replaceable, right? That’s what you said. I can just toss you back down and pluck up some other one. Interchangeable.” He crouches lower and levels his eyes with mine. His dark hair falls past his temples, drowning the blue of his eyes in darkness. “Maybe I’ll look for one with a better disposition and a lot less curves. Definitely one smart enough to realize she would be safer with me up here in a tin can teaching me what the word love means to her.”
What. The. Fuck.
He spins his back on me and continues to storm through the narrow walkway.
I’m frozen. Tears blur my sight. I let him walk farther down the hall, feeling the divide between us with every step he takes away from me. I don’t want to feel bad about my decision. I want to help him, but staying here and just popping out babies isn’t what I want to do. Why can’t he understand that?
Maybe my feelings will change when I know Claire and Dad are safe—when they’re with me again and I can take care of them. Right now, being so far away from them and not knowing where or what they are doing, and not having the ability to get to them on my own, I feel too out of control. He’s known this all along—that I needed to get back to Claire. Nothing else matters. Rune may look human, but he doesn’t understand how to be human. I don’t know if he ever will.
I wipe at my eyes and thump my head against the cool metal of the wall. I breathe in deeply and look up ahead through the dimness of the walkway, but I can no longer see Rune.
Did he really just keep going, thinking I was still following him?
I pull myself away from the wall and meander in the direction he stalked off in, but when I reach the end of the long corridor it forks off into three separate pathways.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I mumble to myself. How am I supposed to guess which way he went?
“Rune,” I whisper into the three tunnel openings.
He doesn’t answer.
“Rune?” I say louder, my voice echoing down the empty passageways.
The silence stirs.
The air suddenly feels prickly and charged.
Something isn’t right.
I hear a soft sound behind me—a low noise like a drawn breath or a whisper. I whip my head around and Pious is there in the darkness. My breath catches. Slowly he emerges from the shadows of where we came, with the cherry-red glow of his laser-tipped finger pointing right at me. I choke on my gasp.
