Well, what was he going to do about it? She moved away from him and turned her attention to the ceiling. She reached up on tip toes to see if she could reach it. She could just brush it if she jumped. Okay. So in theory if there was a weakness up there, she could exploit it. She didn’t know how, but at least it wasn’t completely out of reach. She flinched again when the alien appeared beside her. Damn, that guy was quiet when he wanted to be. He still looked confused, but this time he put his hand on the ceiling above him. Of course he could reach it. He was a foot taller than her, if not more. But this was good news. She pointed excitedly at the barred hatch over the hole in the ceiling. He looked, then understanding dawned on his face. His expression darkened and he growled. This time she didn’t think he was speaking. He knew what she wanted but he didn’t want to do it. Why?
Ruth pointed again more determinedly. He growled again and moved to walk away from her. She reached out and grabbed his arm. He stiffened immediately, snatching his wrist away and whirling on her, snarling into her face. She screamed and threw up her arms to protect her face from the attack she was sure was coming, but nothing hit her. She risked a peek at him and saw him retreat, lowering his lip back down over his crazy fangs. He glanced at the hatch before walking away to slump against the wall again.
Was there something up there that was keeping him from killing her? A camera? One of the people who had taken her? She looked at the hatch. She couldn’t see anything. She glanced back at the alien, who was sitting down now, but who was still watching her carefully. Well, to hell with him. Ruth looked at the hatch, and leapt for it.
Chapter 6
Gron watched the Queen with some trepidation and more than a little guilt. He had only meant to warn her off when he snarled at her. She had to understand he would not join with her. She had taken his arm, sought to command him, and he had reacted, perhaps without thinking. He had not expected her to cower and shriek like that. The Queens he knew would have roared in his face in retaliation. He had forgotten that he was much bigger than she was. She did not appear to have anywhere near the muscle he did, and her teeth must be very small too, to fit inside that mouth.
He had watched her sit listlessly, then get up and begin examining the walls. He had figured out fairly quickly what she was doing. She was looking for a weakness in the structure, a route of escape. He had done the same thing. Granted he had done it by throwing his body against the walls in a rage, and roaring his vengeance until he was hoarse, but he knew there was no weakness, no escape. He’d tried to tell her as much, and while she had replied to him, she had not stopped. They did not understand each other. So he got up to show her. He approached her cautiously, not missing how she flinched, and pressed with all his strength against the seam of the wall. As he expected, nothing happened.
“This is not the way,” he told her. She said something back to him, but he did not understand. Then she waved her hands, causing him to retreat, fearing she would touch him. Gron still did not want to be touched by her. He couldn’t say why exactly, but it was almost a fear. He did not know what would happen. It would be inappropriate yes, and in his tribe, a male could be severely punished for touching a Queen in a way she saw unfit, but no one could argue if a Queen chose to touch a male. If a Queen selected a male for her entourage, she would begin by touching him. If she chose to Bind a male to her, only another Queen could argue.
But he did not want this Queen to Bind him, or did he? To be chosen as a consort was a great honour, one he had never expected, could never have expected in his own tribe where he was not one of the largest males nor most pleasing to the eye. It was an opportunity for him, certainly, but too much was unknown. He could not even speak with this Queen, how would her tribe receive him if they escaped and returned to them? Could he bear never to return to his own tribe and see his mother or brothers again? Was what this Queen was offering a worthy trade? And of course, their life as it stood now was too uncertain. This cell was not a den where children could be raised. They were not safe here, he could not feed them. At any time, the creatures upstairs could separate, hurt, or kill them. They could be starved and he could do nothing. Until they were free, he would not be a worthy mate for her.
Allowing the Bond to form between them was too much of a risk. He would protect her from harm, but he must remain free.
Gron continued to watch the strange one move around the cell, pausing frequently and for long periods of time. When she again came near to him, she stopped and began stomping her feet to make noise. He was concerned that their captors might hear, but nothing he had ever done had brought them to the cell when they had no other reason to be there. He thought she might be attempting to communicate with spirits, which he had seen done before, but he thought it unlikely any spirit would come to this cold grey box.
Nevertheless he was curious, and approached her again, and again she jumped away from him. Why? Did she think he might hurt her, or take her in hand? She had approached him earlier, after all! She moved away from him and began stretching to the ceiling, even jumping to touch it. Confused, he laid his hand upon it to see if that was what she wanted. It appeared to be, because her face lit up and she pointed to the hole in the ceiling. She wanted him to touch it? No, he had touched it before in his own frenzy of escape and it burned him. Knowing she could not speak his language, he growled at her to indicate it was bad. She pointed again and he repeated his warning then moved away from her.
Her hand on his arm was a surprise. Foolishly perhaps, he had turned so that he could not see her for a moment, and she gripped him from behind. He spun to warn her off. He would not be touched. He would not be Bound. She must accept that.
Now he sat against the wall, watching her again, his tail flicking guiltily in his lap. He had not meant to scare her. His behaviour would have been normal in his tribe. He wished he could explain using words but he could not. Their time together could become very uncomfortable if they continued to set each other at odds like this. But he could not apologise and he had nothing to give her to show his remorse.
He did not like the way she was standing now. She was still under the hatch, looking at it. She must have understood his warning... But who was he to tell a Queen what to do? He shifted his weight forward in anticipation.
She leapt before he could stop her and her outstretched hand grazed one of the bars. She shouted in pain and fell back, her legs buckling beneath her so that she hit the floor hard. He was there beside her in an instant, reaching for her injured hand, but she shouted and lashed out at him, pushing at his neck and shoulders as she scrambled out from under him. He let her go, ashamed. Not only was she afraid of him, she thought him low enough to take advantage of her injury. She either didn’t want his help, or didn’t believe that was what he wanted to do. Either she would rather suffer alone than take comfort or aid from him, or she thought he would make it worse.
She cowered in a far corner, clutching her hand to her chest, occasionally taking peeks at it to assess the damage. From his own experience, Gron knew any damage should be shallow and heal quickly. He watched her suffer, her body tense, her jaw clenched, alternating between looking at her hand and staring at the ceiling. It physically hurt Gron to see her suffer alone because she would not take his help. She was trapped with him, without her males, without her tribe, and he would not Bond to her. No Queen, no matter what age or strength, should be in pain without comfort. If she was home, she would be surrounded by her males right now. If he was home, and his Queen was hurt, he would comfort her. But he could not go to her because he had snarled and growled and scared her, acted so badly that now she rejected him. Her pain was better in her mind than any comfort he could give. He swallowed a whimper. If his Queen back home had rejected him like this, he would crawl to her and beg for forgiveness.
But this was not his Queen. He didn’t know why he was behaving like she was. He had been raised to treat all Queens with obedience and adoration, of course, and if he had found an injured one alone
he would have helped her, but he wouldn’t have wanted to comfort her as strongly as he did now - not lick her wounds, and brush his fur over her skin and speak soft words to her.
He must have been alone too long. Alone in this cell; it was not how his people were meant to live. He had never been alone like this before. Perhaps he would have instinctively grown attached to anything that appeared in his cell. Any species. Or even an inanimate object. Perhaps she was not the only one looking for comfort in a new tribe. That must be it. These feelings weren’t real, they were only the result of his isolation. He couldn’t afford to give into them.
He reminded himself that his captors could still be watching. They had put her in with him for a reason.
He forced himself not to follow her to where she was curled now, and instead retreated to the wall. He sat, folded in on himself, and let her sobs lash at him.
Chapter 7
Ruth tried to hold back her tears, but she couldn’t. She didn’t want to cry, but her hand really hurt! That had been really stupid. The alien had tried to tell her not to, but she thought she was smarter than him. Well, who was the smart one now? She had a painful but thankfully shallow burn about an inch from top to bottom stretching across all four fingers on her right hand, and for now at least she couldn’t close her fist. The damn bars were electrified or something! She should have guessed. If her cellmate could reach the bars, something told her he would be out of here by now unless there was something else keeping him in.
She knocked her head against the wall and stared at the ceiling to try and keep her eyes clear but it wasn’t working. She tucked her head between her knees and just let it go, trying to shut out the cell around her. More than the pain in her hand, she didn’t want to be here anymore! She wanted to go home, she wanted to be having a cup of tea at her desk at work, being perved on by the office prick while she worked her way up to taking the confidential waste to the shredder. She wanted to be by herself, she wanted to be with people who spoke English, she wanted her parents. She didn’t want to be in this over-sized lunchbox with Tarzan staring at her while she cried.
God.
Okay.
Lesson learned: from now on, listen to Tarzan. He’d been here longer than she had, he knew the ropes. But she had been startled when he’d got in her face like that. Getting electrified or whatever by the bars had distracted her to say the least so she hadn’t caught herself on the way down. Her hand hurt, and when she was able to look up, he’d just been right there, those large dark eyes of his staring at her from beneath that cliff-like brow. He’d touched her hand and she’d had to beat him away because it hurt, damn it! He’d frozen and she’d retreated to a corner to lick her wounds and now he probably didn’t think much of her. He’d told her not to do the stupid thing, but she’d done it and then freaked out. Great. Now he was back to being the broody silent type over on his side of the cell.
She’d try to avoid pissing him off again. She was supposed to be making friends. She knew now that he didn’t want to sit next to her and he definitely didn’t like being touched. And they couldn’t talk. And they couldn’t escape. Okay. Well. At this point it didn’t look like there was anything more she could do. It was a waiting game now. Waiting to be fed. Waiting to be let go. Waiting until she inevitably needed to go to the toilet, until she finally got tired enough to sleep on this bare metal floor.
People had survived worse, right? She could survive this. And then it would just be a story she would never tell anyone ever because it was insane.
If this was some kind of socialisation experiment, Ruth thought it was pretty safe to call it a failure. Maybe they’d let her go soon.
She looked at her watch. At least she’d killed some time, Ruth thought grimly. She’d been missing for over two hours now. Two hours and she’d already managed to injure herself in a room with no sharp edges or moving parts. Great.
She stayed like that for a while, but when she cried herself out she started to get stiff and bored. How had the alien survived this solitary confinement with no stimuli at all? Either he hadn’t been there for very long, or he was already mad. Or maybe there was a routine to the day that she didn’t know about yet. Maybe they would be taken out of the cell for yard-time. Maybe their purpose there would become clear. If there was a purpose, she wished the alien could just tell her what it was and put her out of her misery, even if it was gladiator fights or live bait for some intergalactic sand-worm. If she knew what she was doing here, she could make a plan. Maybe even a plan that looked like it would work.
Ruth sighed and stretched her legs. She took her jacket off and rolled it up. With nothing better to do, she decided she might as well try to sleep. She knew she would have to eventually, and what difference would it make if it was now or later? It might kill a few hours.
She hadn’t slept on a bare floor since college, and she was more used to her comforts now. She lay on her back and that was alright. There were no lights in the ceiling to glare into her face. She wasn’t really warm enough to sleep though, and she was used to the comforting weight of her duvet. It probably helped her now that she hadn’t had her coffee. She turned her face towards her jacket and drifted.
She was woken by a noise she didn’t quite understand and jerked up. Her nap had made her more disoriented than she had anticipated, or maybe it was waking up in a dark metal cell.
Some... things had fallen, or more likely been thrown, into the cell. They sat under the hatch, between Ruth and the alien. She couldn’t really tell what they were, but the alien hadn’t moved. He was sitting directly across from her, watching her. Had he been watching her sleep too? She hadn’t minded his staring at first, but it was going to get creepy pretty soon.
Why hadn’t he reacted to the presence of something new in their cell. She suddenly realised that someone must have thrown it there and leapt up.
“Hey! Let me out!” she shouted at the hatch. She couldn’t see anything through it. Had they opened it to throw whatever it was in and she’d missed it? “Hey! You can’t keep me in here! Please!” There was no response. She knew they probably didn’t speak English, and had no intention of letting her go anyway, but the fact that no faces appeared by the hatch to see what she was yelling about struck her as cruel. She could be being eaten alive down here for all they knew, unless they did have cameras watching them.
She turned back to look at the alien. The stupid loser who could actually reach the damn hatch was sitting on his butt, as usual, staring at her and not moving. Did he like being in here? Maybe. It again occurred to her that he might just be some kind of strange animal, bred in captivity, institutionalised, with no desire to get beyond the walls of this cell. Or maybe what was outside was worse and he knew it. She remembered that last time she had tried shouting for help he had growled at her, whereas this time he was silent. Maybe he’d given up on trying to help her since she’d ignored him and touched the burning hatch.
Well, whatever. She was interested in the new arrivals even if he wasn’t. She looked down at her feet. There were... some round things and some square things. Ruth knelt down to look more closely, picking up one of the round things. It looked like a giant gel capsule, like one of those things with bath oil inside, or one of those pills for sore throats. It was the size of a large melon and a pale green colour. There were four of them, two for each of them she guessed.
This must be their water. Ruth suddenly realised she was thirsty. She looked at the alien but he hadn’t moved. Maybe he knew something about them that she didn’t, and she wasn’t going to make the mistake of ignoring him again. Maybe they were drugged.
The other things were large rectangles, the size of four loaves of bread strapped together. Putting the melon-capsule down, Ruth examined one of the two. Apparently, they each only got one of these. Which was a little ridiculous given the difference in their size, but she wasn’t prepared to give hers up, just in case. It had the consistency of petrified sponge cake and was marbled red and yellow. She did
n’t want to think it, but she made an educated guess that this was some kind of nutritious mixture of their daily requirements of meat and grain, blended, compressed and dehydrated into a handy unpalatable cube. Space rations. Made sense. She took a sniff and got nothing. Maybe it smelled vaguely of bread, or her grandmother’s armchair, but she thought mostly she was projecting. She doubted any atoms were escaping this dense block to be smelt.
She wanted to try it, but again, the alien wasn’t doing anything. On the other hand, maybe he didn’t need to eat as much as she did. Maybe they only got one of these care packages once a month and he was saving it. Maybe he’d had one before she arrived and wasn’t hungry. She could starve while waiting for him, but for now, she would wait. She put the loaf down and crawled back a few steps, watching his face for any clues. He didn’t look approving, like she’d made the right choice. Rather, he frowned and looked at the ‘food’ as if wondering why she’d left it. Okay. He’d expected her to eat it. But he wasn’t having any of it and that didn’t encourage her.
Ruth decided to watch for now and retreated back to her corner. After a moment, he got up and walked over to investigate, obviously confused. When he got up, she had to avert her eyes. She didn’t know how she kept forgetting he was naked with the same obvious reproductive parts as Earth men, but she did. Maybe it was because he was so totally unabashed about it.
He approached the food and squatted down beside it, his eyes flicking over it, clearly looking for flaws, something that would make her reject it. Failing to find anything, he looked up at her again, still frowning in confusion. Then he grabbed a loaf in one huge hand and took the three steps necessary to bring him to her. He stopped well out of arm’s reach and sat cross-legged on the floor which, wow, was not good table manners in his current state of undress. If Ruth hadn’t been so focused on what he was doing and the prospect of food, she might have laughed at his total lack of shame. It was about the only amusing thing about this situation.
Ruth's Bonded (Ruth & Gron Book 1) Page 3