It was the only thing that she had.
“Must hurry,” he murmured, lips pressed against her ear in a way that made her shiver. “Not safe.”
Aura followed his measured steps on the damp ground, thick with wet leaves that cushioned any sound. A small creature scampered across her foot, too quickly for her to get a good look at it. She swallowed the scream working its way up her throat while Castor continued ahead, oblivious.
She prayed that they would reach their destination soon. It was unlikely that her heart could take much more of this torture.
“Most creatures small.” His voice was whisper-soft
“Not all of them,” she grumbled.
There was a sound almost like laughter in his voice as he agreed. “No.”
Her entire body ached from the physical exertion it took to propel herself forward. She had spent the last few days lying on a bed of furs while an Alpha barked at her. There hadn’t been an opportunity for her to grow accustomed to walking around in a planet-based atmosphere. Each breath burned her lungs and her limbs grew heavier with every step that she took.
Aura wondered if he would continue without her if she collapsed. It seemed unlikely in the extreme that she could make it to the crash site on her own.
As if he could read her thoughts, she suddenly found herself wrapped up in strong arms. Castor pressed her against his chest and held her there with what seemed like relative ease. Their difference in size continued to surprise her, even with this much time spent in close proximity.
And she could feel the rumble in his chest as he held her. She wondered if he realized that he was purring for her. Her cheek pressed against his chest, marveling at the heat emanating off of his skin despite the bone-chilling wind that blew around them.
Her entire conception of the world had narrowed to whatever existed between them, even as danger threatened from every direction.
Multiple layers of fur and leather should have been enough to keep her warm, but an involuntary shiver ran through her small body. Only the tense set of his muscles alerted her to the fact that they were not out of danger.
Unbidden, tears threatened and burned her eyes when she tried to resist the urge to cry. A sharp sob caught in her throat that she had difficulty swallowing down.
Aura could not explain the sudden urge to burst into tears. The nature of her circumstances simply overwhelmed her: the dark forest full of danger, the brooding Alpha that was both her only port of safety and her greatest torment. All of it was too much to bear.
Castor glanced down at her face as a harsh breath escaped her lips and broke the silence. He did not speak and his expression remained unreadable, but he lifted her more tightly to his chest so the purr could more fully resonate against her body.
Regardless of what it meant, they were in this together.
Chapter Twelve
Even as an Alpha, Castor’s strength was not limitless. He could not carry the girl through the forest indefinitely, despite her diminutive size. They had to find the crash site soon.
And her strength was clearly lagging. Which was only what he could expect of an Omega with their limited physical prowess. Following the pace she could maintain would leave them out here and exposed for far too long.
Castor stared down at her in dismay. Her face burrowed against the leather covering his chest so he could not see her expression. But he felt the tiny shudders that ran through her body as she silently cried. He had purred for her on impulse, but now he continued because it seemed the best way to keep her quiet. The sound of her tears would attract predators to them.
But he didn’t quite want to acknowledge to himself that he enjoyed having her in his arms. It felt right, as if it were his responsibility to do for her what she could not do for herself. He had always thought taking an Omega represented nothing but another burden to bear. They could not defend themselves and were easily manipulated, or so he had thought.
The tradition for Kings in Pandora to take a harem of Omegas had always been a source of embarrassment for Castor. He had vowed from a young age to never take an Omega for a mate, despite his father’s insistence. No Omega could truly be willing when their biology compelled them to act as they did.
It simply wasn’t the same as having true free will.
He hoped that they were even heading in the right direction. Aura had seemed confused when he’d asked if she’d understood the question at all. So he followed the trail that she had been running down when he'd found her.
A path was laid out clearly through the trees and it was likely that she had taken it, as opposed to crashing through the forest. He stepped carefully through the underbrush, aware that any sound would alert the creatures stalking the night to their presence.
He had spent little time traversing the Forbidden Zone after dark, which had been a deliberate choice. The rumbling gait of over-sized night creatures as they tracked down prey through the forest had been audible every evening as he slept in the cabin. Their roars were almost always accompanied by the crunch of bone and rip of flesh as they tore into whatever prey wasn’t quick enough to outrun them.
Small hands smoothed over his chest, distracting him. He doubted that the girl intended her actions to be arousing, likely she was only seeking comfort with the nearest source. But the trace of her fingertips left trails of fire in their wake. Her breath whispered against his skin with each rise and fall of her chest. He had to resist the urge to stare down at the profile of her face, half cast in shadow, instead of keeping his attention on the dangerous terrain ahead.
The sooner that he could be rid of this girl the better.
With an audible sigh of relief, he caught the glint of metal shining under the pale moonlight from a dozen yards away. They had found the crashed ship.
Reentry burns reflected in black from where the hull had been scarred. A huge hole was ripped into the side that must have occurred after the ship entered the atmosphere. Otherwise, the girl would not have survived.
Castor nearly tripped over a body in the dark. Whoever it was wore a pressure suit that he knew would be startlingly white against the forest floor in full light. The helmet was cracked from some sort of impact but what truly made his stomach turn was the state of the body.
The suit had been torn into by sharp claws but had not been peeled away completely before whatever attacked started feeding. Flesh had been nearly picked off of the bone in places. And from the amount of blood staining the ground, it was likely the man had been alive when whatever attacked had started eating him.
Aura gasped in his arms and Castor shushed her, his gaze searching the forest surrounding them for any hint of movement. He gently set her down on her feet, hesitating with his hands on her arms to ensure she could stand on her own, then forced her to turn away.
None of the city-states on Earth were engaged in space travel, at least not to his knowledge. They had lost the technical capability to do so at the tail end of the last great war. But he simply did not believe that a more advanced alien race had coincidentally discovered this planet with a human girl from a space station with them.
Even if he believed everything that Aura had said, the chances of aliens invading this planet were too unlikely to contemplate. This body was distinctly humanoid, with all its parts in an identifiable place. That was obvious from the gaping hole in the center of the chest where a heart had been before whatever attacked had ripped it out.
Castor knelt next to the body and gripped the helmet to pry it off. It was a gruesome task, but searching the body was a necessary evil. He was looking for something.
The sound of plastic separating from sticky flesh accompanied the removal of the helmet. He grimaced as the smell of rotten flesh rose to briefly surround him before dissipating into the air.
The face that stared up at him was frozen in a paroxysm of terror, a silent scream opening the mouth wide as the eyes narrowed in pain and fear. Dark tattoos covered one side of the face, clan markings that denoted ra
nk and allegiance. This man had died horribly.
But more important than any of that was that Castor recognized where he had come from.
“Fucking Vigilians.”
It was not the first time Castor had muttered the expletive as he explored what was left of the ship while Aura watched him with worried eyes from the corner.
Scavengers had already gone through the ship, stripping it of rations and anything else of value. Even the weapons locker was empty, which worried him the most. The ship’s computer had been damaged both in the crash or later as if someone had tried to tear it apart for spare metal. But he was hoping to get it working again for long enough to contact the outside world.
What had him enraged was not the state of the ship but what it meant that the thing was here in the first place. The Forbidden Zone was territory unclaimed by any inhabited sector. It was no-man's-land, as was the airspace above it, which meant that most governments did not monitor what occurred here.
But that dead Beta outside was a Vigilian from their military corps, that had been obvious from the markings on his face. The question, however, was what a Vigilian military ship, with the capability of traveling off-planet, was doing in a segment of the Forbidden Zone that was not even adjacent to their sector.
And Castor suspected he knew the answer. The only reason to travel through the Forbidden Zone was to avoid alerting the monitoring systems that every government had installed in their sector. The ship could have reentered the atmosphere above Vigil and landed there without incident.
Which meant that whatever mission they had been undertaking was a secret even within their own government. A mission that seemed to involve the discovery of a derelict station of previously uncontacted humans and deliberately altering the population with biological weapons.
Because if the Vigilians had brought the girl here, a girl without citizenship in any recognizable city-state, they would certainly want her back.
Vigil was scientifically advanced, but also communistic. Most of their society existed within restrictive roles that were assigned practically at birth. They considered all resources to be communal, which meant that most of the population worked to the bone for bare subsistence. Doctors received the same allotment as those who collected trash, with all labor deemed of equal value by the state.
But that communal spirit did not extend to the ruling class who always seemed to have plenty while those beneath them starved. Their “elected” president, or dictator as he was more commonly considered, sat on a pile of gold that funded their science and filled his own coffers. If she were returned to them, Aura would become little more than a slave.
But that didn’t give him any more idea of what he would do with her once they were out of here.
He glanced up at the girl who watched him with a nervous gaze.
“I believe you now,” he murmured, recognizing she was unlikely to comprehend his words. “Though I truly wish I didn’t, for both our sakes.”
Aura stared at him in slight confusion but nodded as if she assumed he waited for a response. She sat on a bent chair next to a hanging web of netting, glancing at it with distaste before returning her attention to him as his hands moved over the computer’s controls.
“Can you fix it?”
Castor didn’t need to understand her words as her gaze focused on the wires he twisted between his fingers. He nodded even if it wasn’t technically the truth. The computer was mangled, and he had no head for engineering. This ship wasn’t going anywhere, and he was running out of hope he could signal for help.
But they couldn’t stay here for long. The broken hull of the ship provided little protection and with the daylight would come more Alphas tracking their scent. He wouldn’t be able to defend her here.
“Did you know them?”
Her voice was small, but it carried to him easily. Castor understood the question but wasn’t sure how to answer it.
“I know where he came from,” he answered finally, not trying for simple language as his mind whirled. “A place near here, not from the stars like you.”
Aura’s brow furrowed in confusion. “From the stars?”
“Not from the stars. Not an alien.”
He watched her try to parse that as her mouth opened and then closed on whatever she would say next. Then she spoke a long string of words too quickly for him to catch, punctuated by a hand slapping her chest. A phrase finally stood out to him, but only because she was saying it over and over again.
“Why me? Why me? WHY ME?”
“Don’t know,” he mumbled, shaking his head for emphasis to ensure that she understood. “You responded to the alterations.”
She stared at him in blank silence, obviously not understanding. He mimed the action of eating food, hoping she would comprehend what he meant.
To his surprise, her expression turned to one of deep anger. Her body vibrated with rage as he watched her come to terms with her own understanding of what had happened to her.
Aura ranted. That was the only word for it as the words spilled from her lips with endless venom. Her small hands punctuated her speech as she gestured at the netting next to her and rage twisted her features.
She had never looked more beautiful to him than at that moment, alive with fury.
Castor gave her a moment to vent, even if she was making more noise than he was comfortable with, although not quite yelling. There was a small river running nearby, and he hoped the churning current was enough to drown out her voice.
And then he picked out a few words as her emotions peaked.
“Who touched you?” he snarled, glaring around the inside of the ship as if the perpetrator would spring up out of thin air. The thought of anyone else putting their hands on her made him see red. A rage he barely recognized as his own narrowed his vision and created a rushing sound in his ears.
His obvious anger seemed paradoxically to calm her, and she answered with a steadier voice. “The men who brought me put their hands in my clothes. I told them to stop but they wouldn’t listen.”
“The dead one outside?”
She nodded and then pointed to the darkened corner at his back. “And him.”
Castor had noticed the body when they entered the ship but had ignored it, not wanting to draw Aura’s attention in case she had missed the awful display. It was obviously an Alpha, but he had been impaled on a broken piece of the hull likely during or immediately after the crash. Castor noticed with disdain that the dead man’s cock was exposed, flesh stiff from rigor mortis. Obviously, he had died during a planned sexual act and it was only the crash that had prevented him from fully violating the girl while she was their captive.
That was the only thing keeping Castor from thoroughly desecrating the dead Alpha’s body. He contented himself with spitting in that direction before turning back to the wide-eyed girl in the corner.
Whatever she might have said next was drowned out by a sharp ringing sound as the computer came to life. Aura's eyes widened in fear as he rushed to the panel. The alarm was practically a beacon in the darkness and would draw any creature in hearing to their location.
Aura tried to help him as they frantically pulled at wires and twisted knobs in an effort to silence the sound. The console finally flashed off and that terrible alarm ceased. But before it went dark, the screen had displayed the last message that had been transmitted by the system.
The ship had already sent a distress signal out days ago. If no one had responded yet, then it was unlikely that they ever would. The two of them were stuck out here, likely for the rest of their short lives.
Chapter Thirteen
Aura froze in fear as silence descended. Castor had moved away from the computer and crouched near the gaping hole in the ship's hull. He had manually secured the door, despite the lack of power. But even though the gap was serrated with broken metal, it was large enough for a determined enough creature to force its way through.
The weapon she had refused to let him tea
ch her how to use was in his hands and pointed out into the darkness. But she knew that his visibility had to be limited and anything that came crashing through the trees could only be clearly sighted when it was already much too close for comfort.
She shivered as they waited for whatever might be attracted by the noise of the alarm. Castor had abandoned the ship’s computer to stand guard, but she got the impression he had not found what he wanted even when it came to life.
Whatever he had seen wasn’t welcome news.
He seemed both desperate to be rid of her and unwilling to let her far out of his sight. The look of rage on his face when she had told him what these men did to her before they died had to be born of more than just a concern for her virtue. His eyes had filled with possessiveness before he had regained control of himself.
But he had done little more than touch her, and only in necessary ways, for the past day. She had assumed that he no longer wanted her or regretted the times their bodies had joined, but none of that had been present in his expression when he heard what those detestable men had done.
If the dead Alpha in the corner had still been alive, Castor looked ready to tear him apart limb from limb. That wasn’t the way she expected a man who didn’t care to respond, even with what little she knew of the ways of men.
Before she could contemplate that thought for too long, an angry roar broke the uneasy silence. Their eyes briefly met in charged communication before Castor lifted the weapon and pointed it out into the darkness, face close to the barrel so he could sight down it.
The sound of large bodies crashing through the trees was audible before she could see what came for them. Aura backed away from the opening where Castor stood, but not before she caught sight of the group of creatures.
It wasn’t Alphas. Instead, what she saw caused fear to rise in her throat and threatened to choke the oxygen from her body.
Alpha's Temptation Page 10