Page 15 of Loved By the Alien King
“Oh, okay.” Pete patted me on the back while I crushed him to me, his shoes swinging freely more than a foot off the ground. “It’s just a communicator.”
“I’m sorry, Pete,” I rasped.
“For catching me?”
“For everything you’ve been through.” I set him down carefully on the mountains of glass under our feet like he might shatter there too.
“I mean…okay?” He blinked at me, and it was only then I saw it.
The heartbreak. The monstrous hole of vulnerability that flickered behind his eyes when he thought no one was really looking.
“Thanks,” he said and turned away.
The Killian nodded at me and lowered his bow. “We should go.”
Pete whirled back, his shoes crunching the glass like brittle bones, and grinned. “And thanks for, you know, saving my face and my dick. My two most important assets.”
Ah, there was that cocky veneer once again.
Outside the door, footsteps sounded, coming from all directions.
“Did you lock it behind you?” the Killian demanded of Pete.
“Of course I did. I’m not an idiot.”
Faces appeared in the window, morphing from irritation to shock to anger when they saw the state of their glass cage and the two dead officers hanging from inside the air vent. Fists banged at the door, punctuated with shouts.
As one, the three of us gazed up at the vent.
“Up or out?” the Killian asked.
The banging grew louder. Did none of them have a key? As if realizing this, several of them turned and sprinted down the hall.
“I’ll pop your eyes out and jam them up your asses so you can see firsthand how dead you’re about to be if you don’t open up,” one of the officers shouted.
There was a lot wrong with that statement. Pretty sure there was even more wrong with the guy who’d shouted it given his state of undress and bleary, sleepy eyes.
“Uporout?” the Killian asked again, louder this time.
“They could cut us off in the vents, and we may not even fit.” I flexed my hands and consciously found my center, readying for battle. “We go out.”
Could the three of us take on all of them? I mean, thetwoof us since Pete was already whining and shaking his head and moving behind us.
The Killian grinned, the malicious and deadly kind I’d seen plenty of times before. “Out it is.”
Pete groaned. “If they kill me, I will be coming back to haunt you bothso many times.”
“Heads up.” The Killian tossed me his machete underhanded.
I snatched the handle out of the air just as the sea of officers banging on the door parted for the lone woman smart enough to bring her key.
“Remember, light maiming only,” I told them. “We don’t necessarily have to kill them to get out of here.”
The Killian glanced up at the two bodies overhead. “Oops.”
“What about me? Don’t I get a weapon? Because if they’re shooting at this”—Pete gestured with too many flourishes from his head down to his feet—“then you can bet I’ll be shooting them right back.”
“Same goes for me.” The Killian swept something from inside his pants pocket and slapped it down into Pete’s palm. “And I don’t even care about my face and dick as much as you do. It’s the principle of the matter when you’re being shot at.”
