Page 19 of Owned By the Hvrok

And then he moved.

Fast. So fast she barely registered it. One moment, he stood across the room. The next, he was there, right in front of her. Towering. Imposing. She flinched, instinctively stepping back, heart pounding.

But he didn’t raise a hand. Not like that.

Instead, he reached out, fingers closing around the collar at her throat—the old one, the one that had been there since her capture.

With a sickening crunch, he crushed it. The tech sparked and twisted beneath his armored grip, mangled into scrap. It split open with a hiss and clattered to the floor in ruined pieces.

Sylvia gasped, swallowing hard.

Then, to her surprise, he brushed the broken shards from her skin. Carefully. Gently. His touch, even through the armor, was measured and precise. Like he was… being delicate with her. Like she was fragile.

Because she was.

Her breath caught again as he raised the jeweled collar. Slowly, almost reverently, he clasped it around her neck.

It fit. Too well.

Warm, smooth, impossibly light—and far too intimate.

She hated it. She hated how soft it was, how it hugged her skin like silk. She hated the idea that it had been made for her, sized to her exact dimensions. That it was beautiful. That it looked good.

That it felt like it belonged there.

He said something in his own language then. Just a word. Deep and gravelly, vibrating from somewhere in his chest. She didn’t know what it meant.

But she knew what it felt like.

Final.

Then his eyes—if she could even see them behind the helmet—dragged over her. Slow. Measuring. Possessive. She felt it like a brand.

Naked.

He didn’t touch her again. Didn’t have to.

He simply turned. Gestured. That same motion again. Follow.

Her collar shimmered faintly in the starlight.

And she followed.

Not because she wanted to.

But because now… she had no idea what choice meant anymore.

CHAPTER 14

This was messed up.

Sylvia stared at the ornate collar in his hand—beautiful, alien, glittering with soft-blue gemstones that shimmered under the light spilling from the view of space beyond the window. It looked like it belonged in a royal treasury, or a museum, or maybe around the neck of some alien aristocrat, not on her.

And yet… that was exactly where it was about to go.

He was giving her a choice, in the most twisted way possible. This, or the ugly, heavy, too-tight collar that still chafed her skin and reminded her of the slavers. She could keep wearing the symbol of her captivity, or she could willingly take the thing he offered—the one that screamed ownership in an entirely new way.

She didn’t like either option.

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