Page 10 of Loved By the Alien King
The suddenness of it made me jump since I hadn’t seen that happen in a while. A brief memory slid like fog across my mind, of Lucy giggling hysterically when Rain made some of the orange cubes fall at Lucy’s feet and bounce crazily. I shut that down fast.
“I admit it’s circumstantial, but it sure hints at something…not right. Something dark,” she said.
My gut twisted, making me grimace. Even if she told me the sea was blue, I didn’t trust Rain for shit. But the weight of her words, the unspoken promise that I wouldn’t like what I saw, the way her hands shook as she flashed them over the holographic keys stabbed all sorts of doubts into my veins like a flood of toxic chemicals.
She pulled something up on the viewscreen—an email exchange, it looked like—and swiveled the screen so I could read it.
The first email was from Earth Space Fleet’s headquarters with the subject Problem.
Will she be one if she finds out?
And Mike’s reply:I better meet with you.
It was dated one day after Lucy’s death.
…if she finds out…They were talking about me. What would happen if I became a problem? WhywouldI become a problem? Only if I found out some big, dark secret I wasn’t supposed to know.
A cold sweat broke out over my skin, leaving me shaking to the marrow of my bones. I noted the Level 10 classification seal in the background of the email, which meant only a handful of people knew about this secret. People at my employer, which I’d dedicated my whole life to for years.
What had they done? What did they not want me specifically to know about? That they now hired secret assassins like Emjay even though that had never been in their MO before? That they were fighting a war with the Faid on a rocky planet that really existed as a jungle/ocean planet?
Surely it was much more sinister than that if it invited so much secrecy.
But I just couldn’t handle sinister right now. Like, at all.
“I can’t. I can’t do it,” I said on a sob while my entire foundation crumbled. “It’s too much. I can’t take any more.”
Rain nodded and twitched her eye to disappear that message and her computer. “I’ll be right here if and when you’re ready to hear more, Nera.”
I wished I could’ve stayed. I had a thousand more questions, none of which I wanted the answers to, but all of them I needed to hear. My body, mind, and soul had been wrung out with shock after shock at seeing Rain again though. I was done listening to her, could barely tolerate being in the same room with her, hated every single one of her pathetic tears.
And yet, I wished I could’ve had the emotional capacity to stay.
Instead, I was a drunk-on-too-many-emotions mess of a woman at odds with herself when I stumbled out of the ancient ruins. Hardly in any state to hike down a cliff in the dark and row herself back to shore, but somehow I did it. I don’t remember any of it, but I do remember searching for Maxx on the beach, wishing I was in his arms while I told him that it felt like my whole world had been ripped out from under my feet again.
But he wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere.
When I finally staggered through the back door of the beach house, Miekil did a double take from his seat on the couch in front of the TV. The giant green horns on his head had lengthened and swelled and were currently spinning in place. Next to him, Bling straightened her sparkly sequined top, her cheeks flaming pink.
I’d obviously interrupted something here.
“Captain?” Miekil said, rising from the couch. His horns stopped spinning.
Bling shot up and rushed over. “What happened? What’s wrong?”
“Uhh…” Too many things to list right then. “Have you seen Maxx?”
“We thought he was with you.”
I shook my head. “He said he’d be back in five minutes. He promised me. That was, like, an hour and a half ago.”
“I’ll go look for him, but…” Miekil strode over and touched my arm gently, his thick green brows drawn tightly with concern. “Are you all right?”
“Not without him,” I admitted, my voice hitching. I blew out a slow breath to try to wrangle all my tears and squash them under my walls, so carefully constructed of sarcasm and wit and tacos. “He probably just fell into another snack hole, on purpose, planning a summer home there with our little caterpillar friend.”
I must’ve looked and sounded like a total crazy mess because they both stared at me like I’d taken a blowtorch to my own brain.
“So anyway, if you wander into the jungle, look out for orange quicksand,” I told them.
