Page 1 of Crown Prince's Mate

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ADRIANA

No Aurelian triads have ever penetrated our borders. They don’t stalk our streets, nostrils flared, blood thick with primal rage ignited by the scent of a potential Mate. They don’t hunt our grounds, towering like Gods hewn from marble.

Their endless hungers were sated elsewhere… until now.

The alien fleets are massed at our borders, led by the Crown Prince Doman and his brutal triad.

I’ve never met him, but I know him and his battle-brothers intimately. It’s my darkest secret. I pretended it was only a dream, lied to myself that the image of the three Aurelians was a figment of my imagination, and not my destiny.

I felt the ravenous hunger in his striking blue eyes as he drank up my naked body, the way he licked his lips and drooled as his eyes fixed on my slit, the prize he believes he owns. The deepest urge of the alpha of an Aurelian triad is to hunt down his Fated Mate and turn her into nothing more than his breeding toy.

If any representatives of the five planets found out I was marked by the Prince and his savage triad, I would have beenstripped of my position in the Administration and labeled a security threat, not even trusted to deliver communications.

Those five leaders settle into place in the meeting hall, oblivious to the coming storm.

They’re accustomed to gatherings, emergency meetings that turn into marathon debates over the endless crises that threaten the fabric of the Pentaris alliance. As I start the meeting with the customary greeting, my mind is elsewhere. I go through the rote phrases that welcome the five most important people in the system.

For the first time, I’m praying that my intelligence corp fed me false info. Yet, in the dark recesses of my mind, I’m forced to confront the inevitability of what’s to come.

I’ve spent sweaty, sleepless nights withhiminvading my mind, the walls closing in on me, tossing and turning in bed. The pure hatred he inspires in me, the arrogance that drips from his features, the core of his being standing in contrast to all I uphold and cherish as Prime Minister of Pentaris.

Crown Prince Doman, and his brutal triad of warriors. The towering monster of a man looks down on humanity like unruly children needing protection, to be brought in line under the boot of his empire. Golden blond hair and piercing blue eyes, the color of his irises marking him as one of the few aliens born of a natural birth. Unlike the rest of his species who are created in their cryo-bays, each iteration of the Aurelian warrior species an ever-fainter echo of the previous, Doman stands over eight feet tall, every lithe muscle and sinew forged for war.

His battle-brothers follow him without question, hulking brutes who go where his sword points, ripping through all who defy him.

I had prayed his war would keep him from me, that leading his legions on the frontlines would distract him from hunting me down. For Pentaris’ sake, I must hope the Mating Rage hasdriven him mad and that his designs are only for my body. That he’ll be sated by me alone, that he’ll steal me away, lock me up and leave Pentaris untouched.

For my own sake…

I have to believe this is an imperialist expansion by the militaristic species, one that we can stop with a show of force. Because if Doman and his triad have succumbed to the primal desires of their species, he won’t rest until he has me collared and bred, a trophy queen obediently at his feet.

The meeting room, with its oppressively low ceiling, is a study in monochrome, a dull, beige void that mirrors my own Prime Minister’s uniform. The blandness extends to the twelve Administrators flanking me, dressed exactly as I am. All thirteen of us are the interchangeable face of the bureaucratic machinery that has kept the alliance churning. We all swore to forsake our home planets to act impartially.

My hands flick on the holo-vid, trembling, opening up a resource report while I stall the moment only I know is coming. I’m living in the last seconds of our previous reality, a reality already shattered, but the façade of it lives on until I let the words spill from my mouth.

That Prince Doman is on our borders. That for the first time in our history, we may be plunged into war with the brutal, conquering species.

Gunnar of Frosthold can’t contain himself any longer, shattering the monotonous atmosphere as he glares at the resource report I just put onto the holo-vid projector. “We were promised grain shipments. We got half of what we need!” he erupts, the dullness of the room unable to suppress his righteous indignation as he leans forward in his seat. “You want my pilots cutting down Scorp on an empty stomach? They’re swarming like locusts.”

Gunnar is big, broad-shouldered, and he makes it abundantly clear he’d rather be piloting ships than in the conference hall. Simple brown pants contrast against the gleams of his scaled vest opened to show his abs and chest. His garment was crafted of the hide of a frost wyrm he slew himself when it went mad, attacking one of the settlements on his icy planet.

The male frost wyrms have a tendency to do that in their mating season, bull wyrms lashing out in fury at anything they can destroy.

His garb was no accident. He wants to rub it in everyone’s face that he’s a warrior, protecting us while we sit back and reap the benefits of the Frosthold fleet. His eyes, blueish and tinted darkly, have the dilated pupils adapted over eons to hunting the vast expanses of snow in his home. The genetic adaptation which evolved to pick out small game on the endless expanse of white also makes them valuable at picking out fleshy white Org-Ships against the blackness of space.

The asteroid-sized egg sacks filled with the violent species pose a constant threat to our security. The specialized eyes of the outer fleets pick out the incoming ships even before our best sensors, cutting down the majority of the creatures before they can ever land on our inner planets, releasing their deadly cargo of the reptilian, bug-like creatures that live only for blood.

Now those eyes are fixed on the representative of Virelia, but if Tabitha feels the icy chill, she doesn’t show it.

“Swarms of locusts. An interesting metaphor, considering the blights affecting Virelia,” says Tabitha eloquently. “Perhaps if we could re-route some of the shipments earmarked for Magnar…” Her voice is like the breeze through the leaves of the trees that stand hundreds of feet tall on our fertile planet, gentle and soft, offering no resistance. She is tall and willowy, and her sister Liora, sitting by Gunnar’s side, gives her a long, considering look.

“I’ve got men and women working double shifts in the factories. They don’t see the sun for six months at a time,” growls Thrain of Magnar. He’s shorter than me, under five foot tall, a thick, beefy man in his sixties nearing the end of his elected term. His people have adapted to the tight confines of underground mining and factories. He is unreadable behind his mining glasses, tinted to dull the glow of the rivers of fire under the surface of his planet. He hasn’t been a miner in near twenty years, but he never forgets his roots. “Your demands for ships are ever increasing, Gunnar.”

Gunnar turns to Thrain, apoplectic, the vein in his neck throbbing in indignation. I witness how easily Tabitha managed to turn the hotheaded warrior’s ire over to the other planetary representative.

Gunnar’s wife, Liora, runs her long fingers gently over his bicep. Somehow, she manages to look natural in the furs of the ice-planet, the necklace of bear teeth on her swanlike neck so different from the gentle green dresses she wore back on Virelia. Her olive skin has faded in the outer reaches, but she’ll never be as pale as her husband.

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