“Today I’ll make an exception. Go.”
Panic swelled in my chest.
Daydreaming about the guy and taking action were completely different things.
“I look horrible. And I’m suffering from a breakup.”
“You do look horrible, I’ll give you that. But if you don’t join him in the line soon one of these tarts will.”
I cast an eye over the adjacent tables and noticed each of them staring openly in his direction.
Half their number sighed deeply—some even while sitting with their husbands and dreaming their own imaginings of what it would be like to be swept off their feet by the stranger who’d just entered their lives.
Others were old enough to be his mother—even his grandmother!
With so much competition, what chance did I have?
“I’m not in the mood. I need to get over Jason first. Then I can go fishing.”
For the first time since the hunk had entered the coffee shop, Isabella tore her eyes from him and focused on me.
She placed a hand on mine.
“Listen to me. Normally, I would agree with you. Even jerks like Jason can bury their claws deep inside you. You can’t fuck a guy without some sort of bond forming. But that’s over now. You can mourn over him later. And when you go fishing for someone to replace that insignificant hole he left in your heart, you can find another tiny shard of plankton like him any day of the week. But when a whale like this comes into your life, you have to grab it with both hands and take advantage of it. Otherwise, you’ll regret what could have been.”
Her words had a surprising effect on me.
She wasn’t usually this deep or thoughtful.
A flicker of hope percolated through my cloud of depression, caused by Jason’s flimsy excuse of being too busy and not having the time to give me a “proper” relationship.
My fears of this hunk turning me down wouldn’t be as painful now as a day when I felt at my best.
So what difference would approaching him make?
None, I realized.
I couldn’t sink much lower.
I peered over at the hunk and checked out his awesome tight ass waving at me as if to say hello.
I found myself drifting up out of my chair and floating toward him.
I might have been controlled by a puppet master.
Perhaps I was—Isabella.
I drew up behind him in the line, the curve of his chin peering at the menu board, scanning the items.
Well, there was something new on the menu, not yet advertised.
Me.
And I didn’t have to cost a dime.
I shut my eyes and shook my head.
Isabella’s thoughts had become my own.
Heaven help me.
Kayal
I knew it wasn’t going to be a good day.
I knew it from the moment I glanced out the window as I sailed through Earth’s atmosphere.
The clouds were a dull grey, and in the distance, flashes of lightning and thunder nipping at its heels.
Every time something bad happened in my life, it happened during a thunderstorm.
But they weren’t always domestic storms on a planet’s surface, but solar storms that operated in space.
Each time they happened, the direction of my life changed dramatically.
Today would be no different if, as I expected, I would locate my fated mate.
I sat my ship down on a small clearing of grass in an otherwise built-up section of the city.
It’d been a long journey and I was in no mood to waste time now.
I marched outside without even considering the weather.
My mind was somewhere else.
I was halfway to the pulsing beacon of my fated mate’s location before I realized I was soaked through.
It was only water.
It didn’t matter.
What mattered was my recollection of the first major storm I saw as a child.
It was a solar storm, a rare event on my home planet.
At least, I thought it was.
I’d been removed from it from a tender age and couldn’t recall what the cyclical events were like.
But I did remember that storm.
The bolts of savage purple lightning never made landfall but lit up the sky in nature’s greatest firework display.
Cords of angry pink and yellow trailed the lightning.
I was no older than five years old, precocious, and clutching my mother’s hand, my face pressed to the thin folds of her green cardigan.
I’d been a shy child, rarely opening up to strangers.
The Shadow military training soon hammered that out of me.
It was the only way to survive it.
The storm erupted for five whole days and I recalled celebrating it with dancing, food, and drink.
The storm was said to symbolize a major turning point in our species’ history.
Sometimes it was for the better, sometimes for the worse.
In this case, it was for the worse, not that we were to know that just yet.
But we soon would.
As the storm dissipated, blowing itself out after five days of activity, a new and forbidding force appeared.
The Shadow.
Thousands of alien vehicles descended.
They brutalized us, forcing the adults into slave labor, the children into military training camps.
Each soul was harvested for a single purpose:
To join the Shadow Empire and make them an even more formidable force.
It was a dark day in our history.
Perhaps the darkest, because on many levels it was the end of our civilization.
We were adopted, unwillingly, into the Shadow Empire.
Occasionally, during fitful nights when the blissful darkness of sleep refused to visit me, I thought back to those moments.
I found myself on the farm, in those final few days before the dark curtain descended on us.
Those moments of happiness and celebration were a total contrast to what happened immediately afterward.
It twisted every happy moment, making it dark and sinister.
Poisoning it.
I sometimes remembered things I’d long since forgotten, whispered secrets that I never shared with anybody.
Odd things, like a strong stranger turning up at our farm one day alongside a female alien that I’d had a crush on even at that young age.
But their features were lost to me.
Only their influence remained.
Their names were Froah and Nem.
Froah and Nem.
They were kind, good people.
They helped my parents bring in the harvest in exchange for food and board.
I had always felt comfortable around
