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Chapter Five

Freya

“You have to go live with your father now?”

“I don’t have a father. Why do I have to go live with someone else? Why can’t I live with you?” I asked, holding my doll with one hand and yanking on my aunt’s dress with the other.

Gloria turned around and knelt down on the floor so that we were both eye to eye. “Because I won’t be living here anymore either,” she whispered, pushing a strand of flyaway hair behind my ear. She repositioned the flower band on my head.

“I want to go with you.”

“You can’t,” she said, with tears in her eyes. “Living on the run is not safe for a little girl.”

“I can run too, auntie.”

She pressed her finger to my lips. “Sssh, not too loud. They’re here for you.” She turned back around and started stuffing my dresses into a suitcase.

I felt a tear trickle down my cheek. I wiped it away while she wasn’t looking so she wouldn’t think I was weak. “I promise I won’t be slow,” I said.

Aunt Gloria sighed and collapsed on the floor. She sat against the wall and rubbed her forehead. “Listen. You’re too young now. Too young to know what’s going on. You’ll go live with your father, but it’ll only be for a little while. I’ll come back for you. I promise.”

“I don’t want you to die like mama did.”

“I won’t die. Your mama’s pregnancy made her sick. Your auntie Gloria won’t be having any babies any time soon. I promise.” She smiled.

“I really wanted a little brother,” I said.

She frowned. “I know. But your brother is with your mama too. They’re happy together.”

“I wish I could be with them,” I replied.

“One day you will, but that will be a very long time from now. Right now, they’re going to watch over you.”

“Are you leaving because you’re fifteen?” I asked.

She nodded, tears brimming her eyes.

“You said they’d come get you when you turned fifteen. I don’t want anyone to hurt you either, auntie Gloria,” I said.

“That’s why I have to leave, but you can’t tell anyone. Okay?”

I nodded, then asked, “Who is my father?”

“His name is North. He’s a royal. You have royal blood, Freya.”

“Did he marry my mother?”

Aunt Gloria shook her head. “He already had a wife.”

I frowned. “Then why does he want to make me live with him now?”

“He’s a very important man, Freya. Don’t you get it? You’ll have so many opportunities available to you. One’s that I don’t have. One’s your mother never had as a maid. Who knows? You’ll probably be a queen one day and then you could free us all.”

“I don’t want to be a queen.”

She took my hands. “You can be anything you want.”

“Will I have to run away like you one day?”

She swallowed visibly. “No. You’re a royal, Freya, and you’ll be treated like one.”

Little did I know, Aunt Gloria was wrong.

Two men broke into the bedroom and ushered me out. That was the last time I saw my aunt.

I jolted upwardout of my dream.

My gown was drenched in sweat. I breathed raggedly as I glanced around the dorm room at my surroundings. The flicker from the lamp on my bedside reminded me where I was. I wasn’t on Earth anymore. I was on Zunator. And I had just gained another memory. I grab the crystal pendant which hung from a necklace around my neck. Meriuam had given it to me just days after the auction and I’d been wearing it for about a week now. It had been a whole week since I was given to Hvit’zark at auction, and I hadn’t heard from him or seen him since. I had learned just a bit about him from Meriuam. He was a rogue—a warrior who always strayed from formation. He was also feral—poisoned by claws buried in his flesh one too many times. He preferred hunting down beasts and sleeping outside like one.

When I swung my legs over the bed, a book fell off my lap and onto the floor. I picked it up and realized that I had sketched out a flower which reminded me of the hair bow I was wearing the day they took me from aunt Gloria.

My aunt had been wrong. Although I had North blood, I was treated like an unwanted runt. I was the illegitimate child of the governor. That didn’t stop my father from using me as a bargaining chip to gain more power. He sold me off to be wed to form an alliance. For the longest, I used to pray that my aunt would come back to rescue me like she promised. When I realized that wasn’t going to happen and that she had likely escaped the settlement to join the rebels to live a better life, I prayed and devised a plan to escape my fate.

I looked at my betrothal as a way out of my father’s reach and I was prepared to go through with it just to gain enough of my future husband’s trust in order to sway him to do my bidding. But when the aliens came to Earth, they beat me to it by destroying my father’s settlement and freeing the citizens from his rule.

Elated to have remembered something despite the pain it brought, I picked up the sketch book and began writing.