Page 9 of Tempted By the Alien Warrior

Crystal, sitting cross-legged on her bed, scoffs. “So what? That doesn’t mean we give up.” Despite her sharp exterior, I’ve come to know Crystal well enough to hear the emotion running beneath her words.

“No one’s giving up. But…” Morgan hesitates, carefully weighing her words. “It’s been days.”

I swallow hard. No one here knows Lily is my cousin. I still haven’t told them. Not even the women I spent endless hours with in the cargo bay of the Zyfelik ship. The same women who looked after me when I was injured after the crash.

Why?

Because I can’t stand to see that look again. The pity. I saw it after my parents’ funeral, and again, years later, when we buried my grandparents. That look makes me feel small and helpless, and I’ve had more than enough of that to last a lifetime.

I stare at the ceiling, the weight of the room pressing in from all sides, while the others keep talking around me like it’s any other night.

Across the hut, Aria flops down onto her mattress with a huff. She’s been the optimist in our group from the very beginning. “But it could happen. She could be out there somewhere, just waiting to be found.” She glances at Rose, who is lying on her side with Zoe curled up against her, the little girl already asleep. “Right, Rose?”

Rose sighs, her hand smoothing over Zoe’s curls. She was Zoe’s teacher back on Earth, and they were taken together as they waited for the little girl’s foster parent to pick her up from school. Rose has always been the maternal sort with a giving, comforting nature. And now, with a baby growing inside her, a baby she learned about the same day she was abducted, she’s become the mother hen of our group.

“I hope so,” she murmurs. But she doesn’t sound convinced.

The hopelessness in her voice tightens the ache deep in my chest. They’ve already given up on her.

I press my lips together, and my nails dig into the fur blanket covering me. An image of Lily rises in my mind. Her easy, confident smile and her brown eyes laughing at some silly joke only she could make sound funny. Memories and thoughts of her flash through my mind like a slideshow.

Like when we were teenagers, and I was on the verge of backing out of a spring break trip to Panama City Beach. Because what if something went wrong? What if I embarrassed myself? What if, what if, what if… Lily had sighed and said, “Em, if you take a chance, sometimes good things happen, sometimes bad things happen. But if you don’t take a chance, nothing happens.”

My fingers tighten around the blanket. I’ve racked my brain all night to come up with a plan, and I finally have one. It’s not the best plan, but it’s better than doing nothing.

My satchel is already packed with extra clothes and supplies I think I’ll need and hidden beneath my bed. I even pocketed a knife at the evening meal, slipping it into the makeshift bra I wear made out of material the Laediriians gave us. It’s a knife I hope I won’t need, but I’m willing to use it if I have to.

I wait, my heart pounding as I listen to the quiet hum of voices fading, one by one, as fatigue pulls the other women in the hut into a deep sleep.

Finally, when the last whisper dies and only the occasional soft snores remain, I ease out of bed and tiptoe to the door. My heart is pounding so hard I worry for a second that someone might hear it and wake up. But they don’t. The sister moons spill pale light through the windows, casting everything in silver-blue shadows.

I hesitate at the door to the medic hut, glancing back over my shoulder at my friends sleeping so peacefully.

My friends are going to think I’ve lost my mind for leaving the safety of the village. Maybe I have, but I can’t just sit here, waiting for someone else to decide Lily’s fate. What I’m about to do feels like a betrayal of everything—of my friends, of the tribe that’s fed us and clothed us and kept us alive. But I have to go.

I just hope when I make it back, they’ll forgive me.

I pull my shoulders back with determination and slip through the door into the darkness beyond. As I step forward, the crunch of the pebbles under my boots sounds deafening in the silence.

The village is quiet, with only the faint hum of the night guards at the gate breaking the stillness. If I’m going to find Lily and bring her back alive, I’ll need help, and there’s only oneperson desperate enough, reckless enough, and maybe angry enough to come with me.

Vrok.

It’s risky, but right now, he’s my only hope.

I glance to the lone hut at the edge of the village where he’s being kept. No guards stand outside. There aren’t enough warriors left to post one, not with the group Draggar sent out the moment he heard about the missing human. I’d overheard the talk during the evening meal, quiet murmurs laced with doubt and resignation.

Even now, I can still hear the tribe members’ hushed voices around the fire pit, their tones heavy with grim certainty. They don’t believe the search will amount to anything. To them, it’s a wasted effort. A mission doomed to end in nothing.

But I refuse to believe that.

The hut looms ahead, bathed in the eerie silvery blue light of the moons. My steps falter as doubts assail me.

Despite my earlier defense of him, can I actually trust Vrok? Even his own people don’t.

But maybe that’s why this will work.

If there’s even a sliver of truth to the claims that he’s a traitor, he might see this as an opportunity to escape. And if he’s innocent, well, desperation has a way of making unlikely alliances.

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