Page 8 of Claimed By the Alien Assassin
The others—his friends, his audience—they don’t move.
I turn back to Josie.
She’s on her feet now, arms crossed, eyes lit with something between amazement and annoyance.
“That was unnecessarily hot,” she says.
“I aim to please.”
Her lips twitch. “You any good with a plasma turret?”
“I prefer knives.”
“Close combat type?”
“When necessary.”
She nods, then squints at me. “You just some random good Samaritan, or you got a name?”
I don’t smile. I don’t do those.
“Dayn.”
She studies me a beat longer than is polite.
“Josie,” she says finally. “And I’ve got a problem.”
“I figured.”
“You wanna help fix it?”
I glance at the merc still groaning in the rubble of broken table legs.
“I think I just did.”
Her name shouldn’t feel like itmeansanything.
Just a word. Two syllables. Simple.
Josie.
But the moment she says it, something behind my ribs shivers like metal under stress. Her voice burns through the haze behind my eyes, clearing out all the dust and darkness I’d long accepted as permanent. I can feel the shape of her name pressing against parts of me I thought long scabbed over.
I can’t stop looking at her.
That’s dangerous.
Her mouth curls into this crooked half-smile like she knows something I don’t—like she’s amused by the universe’s attempt to throw us together and dares me to figure out the joke.
I want to look away. Ineedto. But my instincts are a storm now, lightning arcing through bone, blood pounding in strange rhythms. My skin prickles. My vision sharpens.
And my Shorcu soul starts screaming.
Jalshagar.
The word slams through me with the weight of a starship. It shouldn't be possible. Itcan’tbe. My people are dead, scattered. The old ways—forgotten by most, buried by the rest. But this? This is instinct older than memory. Recognition rooted in the marrow of my bones. I haven't felt it since I was a child—since my father warned me of what it meant.
A fated bond. A soul link. Amate.
