Many ogled the platform and the human female. Not many looked as if they would dare to defy Cerberus and try to take the female.
Regardless of what this female looked like or how broken she might be, I could not allow a brute from Cerberus legion to have her. I couldn’t let Ulza take her. She was my Hive Tech buyer, and she wasn’t going to be pleased. Fark, she was going to be beyond angry. She would hunt me down for crossing her.
Gods be damned. I was cursed. Fark. Cursed with a conscience I did not want. I should go buy my farking Spectra IV ion cannon and get out of the sector at high speed. But no. Apparently, I had not learned my lesson. But this time, it wouldn’t be my brother dying, it would me.
Like it should have been five years ago.
I risked looking up onto the platform, flicked my gaze past Jirghogis, and my heart stopped.
Rich brown hair kissed with streaks of gold hung past her shoulders. She wore plain brown pants and tunic, covering her skin from my sight, but the curves beneath the snug fabric were lush and full, and I ached to trace every contour. She wore a golden collar around her neck, the site making my cock tighten with the unwelcome thought that she should be wearing my collar around her neck. It should be my golden chain disappearing beneath her clothing. I would adorn her properly and dress her in the softest silks were she mine.
Which she was not and never would be. She was a prisoner waiting for transfer, if the manacle around her ankle was any indication. But it was her gaze that held me captive.
Blue-green eyes stared defiantly out over the crowd. She studied the room, her stare lingering on those I considered to be the most dangerous. I wondered how she knew, where she had learned to recognize and evaluate the most deadly criminals in the room?
She was a beauty beyond compare. The fire in her eyes forced a reluctant admiration to stir deep within me—where before there had been nothing but ash and sorrow, something new pulsed to life.
Hunger. Curiosity. A fierce need to protect.
Ulza moved forward, closer to the stage, and the female I was determined to save looked down her nose at her like a queen dismissing a rodent.
The blue barbarian growled. Ulza was here to deliver the human to Cerberus.
I discreetly did a weapons check. Ion blaster. Dagger. Second dagger. Poison powder. The urge to kill.
I had them all. No one was going to touch that female unless it was me.
And if she refused me?
Well, I would escort her back to her home planet...and do my damndest to seduce her every step of the way.
3
Zara, Sector Zero, Planet Occeron, Omega Dome
I looked out over the crowd that gathered at my feet, stared beyond the stage I’d been chained to like a pagan offering to the gods, and saw nothing familiar. Nothing clean. Nothing that gave me the slightest bit of hope.
I’d thought the desert tent planet was different, but this? This was where… Mad Max met the shady cantina in Star Wars. I felt like Princess Leia before Jabba the Hut, but instead of the gold bikini, I wore an ugly brown pair of pants and tunic that covered me from shoulders to knees. It effectively hid the line of the chain that dangled between my breasts, and the darker rose of my nipples. I was naked beneath. I’d never been modest, but I was grateful to be covered. It would appear that Bertok wasn’t selling me for sex.
Actually, it would appear that I wasn’t being sold at all.
A delivery, Bertok had said, handing me off to Jirghogis in trade for what I assumed was space money. What the hell I was supposed to deliver and to whom, I had no idea. But I didn’t like the looks of this place.
I knew no one here. Hell, anyone I knew was on Earth, light years away. Besides, I was human. What everyone else in the place was, I had no idea. Some were even fucking blue, and I didn’t mean they were holding their breath. Some had horns. Some had faces covered with a strange rough fur that looked almost like porcupine needles. Others looked like walking reptiles—their eyes orange or yellow, and their pupils slit like a snake’s. When the nearest whipped a forked tongue in my direction, I choked down a scream and looked away. I would not give the slime-coated monster who had nudged me out here with the end of his pseudo-cattle prod the satisfaction of screaming.
But no. Just no. This was not okay.
I had no idea what planet Bertok had transported me to. Why he’d sold me to the creepy guy with slimy scales and the hideous tail or where Bertok was now. I didn’t have a clue why I was here. How I’d get off the planet. I didn’t have a weapon. Hell, I didn’t even have shoes.
But the desire burning in my gut was pure fire.
Bertok.
I was going to survive this, and I was going to hunt the fucker down and string his guts across the desert sands of Trion for vultures—did Trion have vultures?—to tear apart. He’d killed my mate. For that alone, he deserved to die. I was not a soft, shy, innocent woman. Bertok made a mistake taking me. I’d grown up poor, on the streets, scrapping with the gangs and the pimps and the drug dealers. I knew how to survive, how to fight, how to take care of my damn self.
This place was no different. Wherever here was. I’d hoped
