Page 17 of Taken By the Alien Killer
He hums in his chest. “The ones we cannot control,” he echoes. “Like weather. Like people.” The warmth in his tonedoesn’t die; it deepens. “I am an old man, Rayek. Not ancient, not done, but old enough to know a tide when I’m standing in it. There’s a great deal of… feeling running under my roof at the moment. Not just panic and gossip—that’s the usual, easy to swat at. No, I mean the other kind. The kind that makes fools of all of us.”
The whiskey glass leaves a wet ring when he lifts it; he chases it with his thumb until it shines again. “I want you to hear this from my mouth, not from whispers that turn spiteful by the time they reach a guard post.” He pauses, not for effect, but to choose bones for the words. “My family’s future depends on this alliance. Not because we love titles more than people. Because titles keep people fed. Because treaties are ugly things that stop uglier things from arriving. Because a union inked now might keep two dozen villages out of the path of the next famine.”
He lets that sit between us like a set stone. The air tastes of oak and storm.
“I don’t doubt your loyalty,” he continues, and there’s real affection in the way he says it, like a father talking to a son who hates to be called that. “You have given more to us than any contract could ask. But I will be plain: I cannot afford… complications. Not now.” He doesn’t look at my face when he says it. He looks at the whiskey, at the ceiling map, at the door. A gentleman’s mercy.
I feel my pulse in the old scar along my ribs the way you feel thunder through floorboards. I keep my jaw still. There are a dozen sentences in my throat, none of them fit for speech. I swallow them all like glass. I nod once. It isn’t consent or confession, just acknowledgment that the message has landed where he meant it to.
He lifts the glass again and studies the way the light folds in it. “One more thing,” he says, and his eyes come back to mine. “I am not a cruel man. I am not blind either. If I were twenty yearsyounger I would be a worse version of myself about it, and we would all be sorrier. As it stands… I am trusting you to be the best version of yourself. Do you understand me?”
“I do.” The words carry more gravel than I put in them. I straighten a fraction. “My duty is to Chamberland.”
“And to my daughter’s safety,” he adds gently. Safety. He doesn’t flinch at his own choice; he knows what he asked and what he didn’t. He sets the empty glass down with a quiet click. “That will be all for tonight. Get some sleep, if sleep will have you.”
I rise. “Sir.”
“Rayek.” He waits until I look at him. The warmth returns, the big laugh ghosting in his eyes without the sound. “For what it’s worth, whatever else I am, I’m grateful you’re in this house.”
I incline my head because I can’t bend any other way. The door unlatches with a soft approve-me chime, and the hallway air hits cooler, thinner, smelling faintly of beeswax and flowers that gave up around midnight.
The corridor outside his office is a long spill of pale stone and shadow. Night-lights glow low along the baseboards, making each step feel like moving through a quiet river. For a moment I let the silence rinse me. Then I start down the hall, boots whispering, thoughts held tight enough to creak.
She steps from an alcove as if the wall decided to shape her out of moonlight. Evening gown still on—slate silk that drinks the shadows and throws them back as smoked silver—hair unpinned and tumbling over her shoulders like she’s just won an argument with gravity. The formal makeup has smudged to something softer; a smear of kohl makes her eyes look greener, like leaves at the edge of a storm. Barefoot. Of course she’s barefoot. The polished stone must be kissing her toes cold.
“Rayek,” she whispers, and my name in the dark tastes like confession. Not Commander. Not my title. Just the thing I am when no one is looking.
The hallway shrinks around the sound. Distantly, the house breathes—pipes ticking, a servant cart humming on a lower floor, a door sighing shut two wings away. The night holds its breath with us. She stands half a step forward, hands curled in her skirts, knuckles pale where the silk bites. The perfume she wore to the garden has melted into the salt of skin and something like crushed citrus peel. Heat radiates from her skin into the air between us, a warmth I could step into like a fire.
A thousand answers crowd my mouth. Every one of them is a blade turned the wrong way. I hold my body like a barricade built from orders, tilt my face just enough that she catches duty instead of the animal behind it.
“My Lady,” I say, and the title is armor, and it is ugly, and it is all I have left that won’t ruin us.
Her expression shifts—surprise to something smaller, then to something I can’t bear to name. She doesn’t move again. The silence is thick enough to chew. Somewhere behind her, down the corridor, a clock ticks once, twice, measuring out how long a heart can hesitate before it makes a mistake.
I step past her.
A measured move a soldier makes when the only way not to fall is to keep walking. The silk of her gown whispers against itself; a strand of her hair catches the faint draft of my passing and brushes my sleeve like a memory trying to become a touch. I don’t look back. The floor keeps offering up light in little squares to put my feet on, and I keep taking them.
The house exhales as I turn the corner. Ahead, the barracks wing yawns open like a mouth that remembers my name and never asks me to be anything else.
CHAPTER 5
STAR
The days smear together like paint you forgot to let dry—bright and pretty from a distance, sticky and ugly up close. The palace hums on its clockwork: breakfasts that taste like obligation, escorted tours with politely fascinated dignitaries, afternoon “rest” periods that are actually wardrobe fittings, and evenings gilded with speeches I never asked to give. Through all of it, Rayek is there—within arm’s reach, within heartbeat—only he’s not. He’s a shadow wrapped in protocol. He answers in monosyllables that sound like something you’d stamp on a cargo manifest.
“Route clear.”
“Confirmed.”
“Affirmative.”
When I try to snag him between moments—on the terrace, in the armory hallway, outside the stables where the greathounds howl at the wind—he gives me that emptiness he’s perfected. Once upon a time, we sparred with wooden blades until the sun blistered the back of my neck and my palms sang for hours. We’d argue about openings over a chessboard, throw insults that were really compliments. Now the chessboard sits in its velvet-lined drawer and my mouth tastes like unsaid things.
Sneed notices everything. Of course he does. He reconfigures seating charts, escort patterns, and “accidental” detours so flawlessly that I rarely end up within whispering distance of Rayek. A lot of doors mysteriously require repair right when I walk by them. In the mirror, my face has learned a new expression: a smile with a headache inside it.
Kaspian, meanwhile, refuses to be loathsome. He’s quick with names, gentler with staff than I expected, and punctual—which should be illegal in noblemen. He keeps asking me real questions: where the wind is strongest on the north ridge, which pastry is least likely to turn my mouth blue during a photo op, what the old hymn plaques in the chapel actually say. He doesn’t fawn. He doesn’t boast. He listens, which is its own kind of disarming.
