Rychor had not experienced that reaction—his own desire—with the other human females. He guessed now that it had something to do with the small human’s inquisitive nature. Her refusal to give in to herprimitivedesires. Her curiosity, that seemed to dominate even her concern for her own safety. It sparked his interest, and now he felt physical desire throbbing inside him.
He had declined mating for as long as he had been at his post. No creature had ever appealed to him until now. Which was fine: it was known that once mated, Ryvokia males were never really the same.
Or females either, he thought, thinking of Afina, whose cruelty simmered just below the surface. She paid lip service to the moral codes of conduct and the directives of their species, but if there were opportunities within those parameters to cause heartache, she seemed to latch on to them.
Now that Rychor had found a potential who did intrigue him, Afina wanted him to quash the single attribute he found appealing about her. It was hard to know if Afina was playing one of her many games, or if she simply didn’t know how Rychor felt. But it was best for him to bury his feelings about the human, Sonya, and protect her from Afina’s meddling.
Afina wanted him to mate with Sonya. He had sensed her desire though she had tried to hide it. It made sense. His genes were desirable, the human was a compatible specimen. They would mate, replace her memory, and return her to her people.
And he would live out the rest of his days with the sorrowful emptiness of losing his mate eating away at him. No small thing even when the female was of no consequence.
Until he had met Sonya, the prospect had been a mental exercise to him. He could no more believe in the bond that formed between Ryvokia males and their female mates than he could believe in their old gods.
Everything had changed now, and he could feel a connection between Sonya and himself, like a string attaching them, humming with electricity and life and pain. Her disappointment strummed this cord as strongly as Afina’s did; her happiness meant everything to him.
He knew he couldn’t turn her over to another male. A forceful, painful swell of protectiveness bloomed in his heart and turned his muscle to rigid stone whenever he thought of another male touching her. And he had given it a good deal of thought—a good deal more thought than he should be giving it.
His thinking only led him to blind alleys and impossible dilemmas.
He did not want to extinguish her unusual curiosity and spirit. Without it, she was not the same. The bond that had already formed between them wouldn’t permit him to do such a thing, anyway.
He did not want to mate with her and feel the cold, empty wind of her absence.
Above all, though, he didn’t want to train her for another male to mate with her. He didn’t want another maletouchingher.
He could voice none of these thoughts or feelings to Afina. He had to keep them from her, and from the mind space, or Afina would snatch Sonya from his care immediately.
His thoughts had become so dark, so visceral and tormenting, that he was almost running through the corridors. His fellow clan members parted for him, warily. They may not have sensed his emotions directly through their connections, but they could see that he was a man obsessed, full of emotion, and because he was a fierce warrior, they instinctively stood clear.
He moved to the outer rings of the corridor system, at the level just below the planet surface, where the water treatment workers and engineers lived and worked. The passageways were nearly empty, and the loop around the heart of the buried city was tens of miles long. He was free to walk there as quickly and as angrily as he wanted to, and so he did, for several loops, quieting his blood and his mind to the best of his ability.
He sought a solution to his problems, but none suggested itself until the very end of his third loop.
CHAPTER8
She waited as long as she could in the room without speaking. She knew she was being observed, or at least she had to assume so. The Ryvokia female, Afina, seemed to have her eyes and ears everywhere.
The temperature wasn’t unpleasant, but the nakedness was. She knew that the creatures who had captured her were probing her body constantly, measuring things like the throb between her legs, maybe even her thoughts, somehow. She didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of obtaining what they wanted easily, so she did her best to put Rychor out of her mind. And the burning on her bottom, the sting of his hand, his promises to make her submit and obey. Her own fantasies, which seemed to bubble up from the uncorked bottle of her mind, thanks to Rychor and his tests and machines.
She wasn’t able to keep her mind busy for long, and Rychor was gone for what seemed like an eternity. The room had been transformed to the clinical, white-walled room of before, and there was only the plain platform to sit on. The outline of the door was barely visible in the great expanse of white. It didn’t take long for her to become excruciatingly bored.
She gave a brief thought to this being some kind of tactic—if it was, the aliens had definitely landed on the best way to torture her into submission. Or trick her into disobedience, she added to her thoughts, as she hopped off the platform.
Well. It didn’t seem like her predicament could get much worse. If they wanted to use her body for breeding, she had to assume they wouldn’t cause her too much physical harm. And if they were really going to harp on this consent issue, then they had some kind of law and order that, hopefully, put some kind of guardrails on their treatment of her.
And since she had never heard of these Ryvokia, and there were no tales of their insane breeding program in the galactic lore, it seemed a decent bet that they planned to either eliminate her afterward, or something else, like a memory wipe.
Both of these outcomes were unacceptable to her. She amazed herself, really, finding the Ryvokia plans to wipe her memory more troublesome than their plans to breed her. But she was determined to hold out her “consent” as long as possible.
Until she had a plan for escape.
And what was the point of escaping without a trove of knowledge about these creatures? Anyway, she was bored out of her mind, and it seemed like Rychor was going to spank her no matter what she did.
She stood in the middle of the room for a moment, anticipating an alarm to go off or Afina’s voice to break in over the speaker as it had for Rychor. She bristled, waiting for the door to hiss open and a stream of burly Ryvokia to file in, all muscle and dark, probing eyes.
“Huh,” she said, almost cheerfully, when nothing happened. She approached one of the walls and leaned in close to it, tipping her head to see how the light reflected off the strange material from different angles.
The light. She craned her head and scanned the ceiling, finding no source of light. It seemed to radiate from the walls themselves. She peered at the material, closer and closer until it was right before her nose. As she got closer, she discerned, just barely, the outline of very tiny components.
