Page 32 of Possessed By the Dragon Alien
The cold way he said it made her skin crawl. She caught his arm before he could move. “Don’t kill him.”
His eyes met hers, and for a moment she saw something flicker there. Confusion, maybe. Like he couldn’t understand why it mattered. “I’ll do what’s necessary.”
“Madrian.” Her chest tightened. She narrowed her eyes and pinned him with her gaze. “He’s just a youth. Don’t. Kill. Him.”
“Very well,” he said finally.
She nodded and released his arm. “Go.”
What happened next took less than apik, but Nena saw every detail with crystal clarity.
Madrian moved like liquid shadow. The guard never had a chance to cry out or reach for his weapon. One moment he was standing there, the next he was on the ground with Madrian’s arm around his throat.
But then something changed. The controlled takedown became something else. Madrian’s grip shifted. His muscles bunched with lethal intent. The guard’s eyes went wide with terror and his hands clawed desperately at Madrian’s arm. Madrian wasn’t letting go. Wasn’t changing his tactics to incapacitate the guard, but leave the young male alive.
“Stop.” Nena’s voice cracked across the space between them. “Madrian, don’t do this.”
Madrian froze. For a heartbeat, she wasn’t sure he’d heard her. Then his grip loosened. He brought his free fist up and clocked the guard on the head. The young male went limp, but he was clearly unconscious, and very much alive.
Madrian straightened slowly, dragging the unconscious guard into a nearby storage compartment. When he turned to face her, his expression was carefully blank, but she caught theflash of something dark in his eyes. Something cold and foreign and chilling.
“Are you all right?” she asked, wrapping her arms around her middle.
“Fine.” He straightened his clothing, smoothing the small wrinkles and correcting the sharp lines of his uniform. “We should move.”
But Nena didn’t move. She stood there looking at him, seeing the way his hands shook slightly as he sealed the compartment door.
“Madrian.”
“I said I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not.”
He stopped pretending to check the corridor and met her eyes. “I almost killed him. Even after I told you I wouldn’t.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Because you stopped me.” His voice was rough. His eyes were a turbulent, stormy gray. “Not because Ichoseto stop.”
The pain in his words made her chest ache. She stepped closer, ignoring the way he tensed. “No, youdidchoose. You heard me, sure, but you could have ignored me. You didn’t, and that young guard is alive. That counts for something.”
“Does it?” He looked down at his hands like they belonged to someone else. “I’ve been trained to kill efficiently and without hesitation. It’s as natural to me as breathing.Morenatural, maybe.”
“It takes time to change a lifetime of training,” she said. “It’s not a switch that can be just turned off at will.”
“What if it can’t be changed? What if this is who I am?”
She thought about the way he’d kissed her in his quarters. The gentleness in his touch, the wonder in his eyes when she’d told him she trusted him. That hadn’t been the Axis weapon she’d been with. That was Madrian.
“Itcanbe changed,” she said firmly. “I know because I’ve seen who you really are.”
Before he could argue, she reached up and pulled his face down to hers. The kiss was quick, just a brush of lips, but it seemed to ground him.
“Come on,” she said. “Rien’s waiting.”
But as they moved toward the service elevator, a cold knot of worry settled in her stomach. What if the Axis conditioning ran too deep? Whatifwhat the Axis had turned him into couldn’t be undone? She’d seen the pure, emotionless ice in his eyes when his arm had tightened around the guard’s throat. It had taken her voice to pull him back, but what if next time she wasn’t fast enough? What if there was no next time for someone else?
She pushed the thoughts away. The high chancellor was not who Madrian was. Shehadto believe that, because the alternative was unthinkable. She could not bind her life to that of a male who might, at any point, calmly kill someone he didn’t like.
