Page 1 of Havik: Warlord Brides
Part 1
Chapter 1
Thalia
Three Years Ago
Lie down with dogs,you get fleas.
Never wound a snake, kill it.
Believe people when they show you who they are.
Thalia’s mother had a hundred old sayings for any situation, mostly for when the dumb things that Thalia did came back to bite her in the ass. Not that her mom did anything to stop said dumb things, but she sure did love cackling with glee about being right.
Yeah, Mom had been a real charmer. All that woman had ever done after dropping Thalia into the world was give less than a rat’s ass about her child’s wellbeing. There had been booze to drink, and men to fuck for rent money. Finding enough food to stay alive and enough clothing to not be naked had been Thalia’s responsibilities when she understood that none of the adults in her life would do anything.
Footsteps approached down the hall. Thalia held her breath. How much did it suck that she wanted her useless, drunk mom right now? Life hadn’t been great, but she felt that when it mattered, she could trust her mother. She raised Thalia with all the social niceties of a free-range gremlin, but she never actually tried tosellThalia. That might have changed when Thalia got older, but aliens invaded and blew up the city and millions of people died in the attacks or from disease, and her mom had been one of them.
Thalia scraped by in the ruins of what had been a major East Coast city. People still lived there, but municipal services and the population had been scaled way back. Ports, roads, and railways still existed, which kept the battered city clinging to relevance. Half of the buildings weren’t fit for human habitation, but that didn’t stop anyone. Free rent was free rent. Water and power were nice to have, but not everyone could afford those luxuries.
The footsteps stopped outside her door. Thalia looked around the room for anything that could be used as a weapon, not that Nicky let her have anything that could be considered a weapon. No convenient vases or heavy bookends in her room, as if they would do her any good against a gun.
She grabbed her medical bag, dumped it out on the bed, and grabbed the pair of surgical scissors. Still not much use against a gun but it was sharp and very stabby. And if the goon lurking outside her bedroom door wasn’t there to put a bullet in her brain, they probably needed to be stitched up, so the upended medical kit gave the impression of preparing supplies and not plotting to stab a bitch in the eye.
If you play with fire, you’re going to get burned.
In the chaos of the Invasion, it had been easy for kids to disappear and fall through the cracks. No one came looking for Thalia, so she had to fend for herself, which wasn’t too different from her life before the Invasion, only now she did it with a group of likewise homeless kids. They begged and stole and damn near starved to death until Nicky took them in. He taught them the art of pickpocketing and general thieving. Being underfed and looking young for her age totally worked out in her favor. Scrawny, malnourished kids were bendy and slim enough to wiggle their way into most places.
The whole situation was downright Dickensian—yes, she knew stuff. Just because she never went to school regularly didn’t mean she failed to pay attention on the days she went—but you have to do what you have to do to survive. Nicky took care of his kids—food, a clean place to sleep, and, fuck, even a tutor now and then— if you pulled your weight and did the work.
Still, some had it worse.
Her mother never uttered those words, but had she survived the aliens, she would have embraced that bit of philosophical stoicism with zest. Orphaned and living on the streets? Some lost their legs, not just their parents. Some people needed more than a prosthetic leg; they had burns on the inside of their lungs. Breathing with an oxygen tank? Some weren’t breathingat all.
It was a crappy game of comparing hurts, but it was true. Life had been hard for Thalia, but she was able-bodied and clever enough to be useful, which let her survive. She kept her head down and did as Nicky said.
Some didn’t have food or a warm place to sleep. Some people didn’t have the little collection of books she scavenged from abandoned houses. Some people weren’t able to go to school at all, and she should be grateful for the days she could attend. Some people didn’t have a guardian—if you could call Nicky a guardian—even if he ranted about the government spying on them and poisoning the water.
Some people had no one.
Then one day, her skinny little kid body vanished, and she looked more adult, even though she so was not an adult, and Nicky thought of other ways she could be useful for the organization.
Thalia attached herself to Old Doc Mitchell, acting as the pair of steady hands and sharp eyes he needed, seeing as how he ruined his own with booze and out-of-control diabetes. Doc lost his medical license long ago, but he was a real doctor. No one cared about qualifications and credentials when he patched them up.
Trauma affected people differently. Basic, right? Some people were resilient, and they bounced back, stronger than ever. Other people had to learn to cope with stress, anxiety, and all those lovely acronyms that fancy doctors flung at you pre-Invasion. Probably still did, but it was a fact that everyone on the damn planet had some sort of trauma. That’s what happened when aliens invaded and blew shit up and millions of people died.
She was traumatized. Nicky was traumatized. Poor Doc was hella traumatized.
Some people coped by staying busy. Others meditated or some shit. Some developed a fanatic devotion to the aliens who allied with Earth, the Mahdfel. And plenty of people medicated themselves with the chemical of their choice. Thalia read old books and watched too many movies. Doc reached for alcohol.
Reeking of beer and sweat, busted capillaries turned his nose red, and his hands shook until he got his morning top-off. He never talked about what happened during the Invasion or who he lost, but that was fine. Thalia didn’t talk about her mom, either. He was a drunk and more likely to be passed out than awake to practice his version of frontier medicine, but he taught her everything he knew, or at least the bits of knowledge that clung to his surviving brain matter despite the years of pickling. He took care of her, in his own way.
When she turned eighteen, Doc told her to run away and volunteer to be an alien bride. She was surprised as hell, needless to say. In moments between maudlin and passing-out drunk, he spoke about the aliens, and not too kindly. Not the invaders, the other ones, the Mahdfel. He never said they ate babies or whatnot, but he hardly sounded like a fan.
Thalia didn’t run away—obviously—despite Doc looking disappointed when she turned up morning after morning, still firmly under Nicky’s thumb. He had been the closest thing Thalia had to a father figure and friend. She couldn’t run away from that.
Which was so fucking sad it wasn’t even worth mentioning.
