Mozok shook his head slowly. “I should have mentioned,” he said. “That there are punishments for lying.”
Mina narrowed her eyes. She felt herself getting huffy, if for no other reason than that Mozok had sussed out the truth—but it was the sort of truth he couldn’t possibly prove.
Why did she care so much? Why couldn’t she just bring herself to say what he wanted to hear? What did she care? Maybe she did want that, maybe she didn’t, but either way, she didn’t want it with him.
She regretted lying as soon as she had that thought. She wished she had said that to him from the get-go. “Sure,” she could have said. “I want all that. But not from you.”
“You couldn’t possibly know if I am lying or not,” she said, instead, shaking her head and forcing a smile.
“You are,” Voso said, making her jump. He had become so quiet and still, and Mozok had bothered her so much, that she had almost forgotten the presence of the Herstrakaa.
She turned toward him quickly, venom pulsing in her veins, though she couldn’t exactly say why. But when she looked at him, she saw only a profound sincerity in his features.
“You are lying,” he said gently, almost the way a therapist might have spoken to her.
She looked from one to the other, infuriated and confused. Forgetting her restraints, she pushed off the armrests of the chair, desiring to stomp out of the room—a go-to favorite move of hers back on Earth, anytime a conversation got complicated. And “complicated” almost always meant discussing relationships in a real way.
The bonds, however, would not allow her to stomp off.
Fine. Time for a joke.
She looked at the chicken, hovering enticingly in front of Mozok’s mouth, then at Voso. “Does he eat birds in front of you all the time?”
Voso’s fingers flexed, and he rolled them in a wave of stretching fingers. That was his only reply, and Mina was still making sense of it when Mozok spoke.
“Voso has an excellent sense of smell. And sight. And hearing. He can hear your lies in your heartbeat, smell them just below your skin. It is quite an irritating trait at times, if I am to be honest. And yet also very useful.” Mozok met Mina’s disbelieving eyes. “But it is always,” he added solemnly, “reliable.”
“Fine,” Mina sighed, changing tack and trying sarcasm. “I really was just waiting for an alien or two to sweep me off my feet and take care of me and all that. But I was really looking for one who would feed me, if you want honesty.”
She was laying it on pretty thick, but she figured she didn’t have much to lose. How much worse could it get? And since she wasn’t giving up, and she wasn’t about to have a heart-to-heart with her opponent, it seemed prudent to give as good as she got.
Mozok did not seem at all bothered by her sarcasm, however. He was smiling in his very smug way again, which she didn’t want to get under her skin, but it did anyway. She turned helplessly to Voso, meaning to make another sarcastic comment. But the huge alien’s eyes dissuaded her somehow, even if she couldn’t figure out what it was.
She looked back at Mozok. “Okay, fine, if that’s what you want to hear, fine. Sure. Somewhere in the back of my tiny Human mind, there is some cavewoman who wants a strong, handsome prince to sweep me away and take care of me,” she said, annoyed. “But that doesn’t happen in the real world.”
“It happens in our world,” Mozok said, tipping his head.
Mina felt a pang in her chest, a fluttering, panicky throb, a desire to believe that Mozok was sincere.
Panic of a different kind gripped her, and she quickly began to build up her walls of defense. She could feel herself hardening from the inside out as she returned to her well-practiced defenses for keeping people out.
“This is a business deal,” she stated flatly. She had to look down as she said it, because it rang untrue and sucked the conviction from her voice. She forced herself to meet Mozok’s eyes and immediately wished she hadn’t, because he seemed to see right through her. “It always was. And that’s all it ever will be.”
There was a silence, and then Voso said something in a low voice, just a few words of Herstrakaa.
Mozok smiled. “Of course,” he said to Mina. He then tipped the fork with the chicken on it toward her, moving it close to her mouth.
Mina was famished, and her stomach did her the unkind favor of growling. She supposed there was no point in pretending she wasn’t hungry, and it didn’t seem to make any difference if she ate or not, it wouldn’t make Trothplight go by any faster to starve herself.
She bit into the chicken, and then snatched it into her mouth, chewing slowly, savoring the delicious meat. She hadn’t had anything like it in such a long time. Almost everything she had consumed in the past year had been freeze-dried or so foreign to her that she hadn’t enjoyed it much.
She closed her eyes in rapture. “Oh my God,” she murmured. “I really shouldn’t tell you this. But that is so good.”
Her eyes flew open. Mozok was smiling, but this seemed more genuine and not smug. She stole a glance at Voso, who also seemed happy. Mina was glad. She seemed to have cut through the tension a little, and it came as an unexpected relief to her.
It made no sense, of course, caring about something like that.
It irked her when she had these thoughts and feelings, and she reminded herself to stay strong and remember not to sympathize with her captors. They had, after all, tricked her—or at least, allowed her to be tricked. So having any kind of positive feelings for Voso and Mozok—any real feelings—was going to knock her off course.
