Chapter 3
Raiza
I stewed in the seat behind him, imagining all the ways I could end him if I only had the tools or stronger guns or pretty much anything at my disposal right now.
I watched him warily as he moved around the cabin of his personal airship, powering on the engines and stowing away the weapons I’d used to try to kill him.
He’d touched me and I should have hated it.
Sure, it made sense for him to pat me down for anything else I’d concealed, but he’d done it in a way meant to humiliate me and worst of all, there was a part of me that enjoyed it.
Even now, my breasts were throbbing with desire and my pussy was aching for something more, but I didn’t know what.
My core constricted and I wondered if this was what desire was.
I shouldn’t want him. Not like this.
I’d seen other humans engage in sexual activities together, but I’d always turned away because I’d been too embarrassed to look. There wasn’t much room for privacy in my world and I’d given them as much as I could, or at least I’d tried to.
There was only so much I could do when the wet sounds of fucking were happening less than six feet away from me.
It was safer to stay in groups, especially in times of weakness like when we were sleeping.
The soft moans shared between couples were branded into my memory and right now, I was wondering if I was experiencing just a little bit of that.
His hands on me had made me sensitive. They shouldn’t have.
I glared at the back of his head. This was his fault. Maybe he was making me react like this. What if making me want him was just another part of his alien abilities?
He sat down in front of me, typing in several commands into the dashboard before the engines whirred a bit louder and the ship lifted off the ground.
My stomach dropped precipitously. The feeling of weightlessness was jarring and for a second, I was grateful to be bound to the seat. As we lifted higher, the force of gravity pressed down on me, and I closed my eyes.
I decided in that moment that I didn’t like flying.
It took several more minutes for us to stop rising into the sky, and when we finally leveled out, I hazarded opening my eyes once again. He was watching me with a curious expression, and I struggled not to scowl at him.
“Shouldn’t you be flying this thing?” I muttered, realizing that his hands were nowhere near the dashboard. He grinned, the pearly whites of his teeth far too bright against the blood-red color of his skin and a shiver raced down my spine. My pussy tightened at the sight.
I hated that.
“Autopilot still exists, Raiza,” he chided, and I blushed, immediately feeling like I was out of my element.
How was I supposed to know? In the human world, the last working plane probably flew through the skies a century ago.
His gaze on me felt judgmental and I pressed my thighs together.
He glanced downward and my heated cheeks burned that much hotter.
I knew enough about my body to identify that I was wet. I wondered if he could sense that. Trying to be brave, I searched his face for some hint, but I found nothing. Eventually, it grew to be too much, and I turned away as the full weight of today’s events finally settled on me.
I hadn’t been able to kill him. What if one of my fellow soldiers saw me drag him into that building? What if they’d seen me bandage his neck and pet his brow?
They’d brand me a traitor to humanity. It was a fate punishable by death.
My breath rattled anxiously in my chest. I looked back at Commander Talyn. Did it really matter now though? I was his prisoner and there didn’t seem to be any option of escape at this point.
The odds had been stacked against me in the first place. Maybe it was possible that he couldn’t die? That the aliens had found evolutionary mechanisms that would allow a man like him to escape all manner of death? Maybe he was the ultimate undefeatable super soldier.
His lips edged up in a chillingly seductive grin. I glared back at him, trying to figure out what his motives were and what he had planned for me when we arrived wherever we were going.
I couldn’t shake feeling like I was an innocent rabbit caught in a hunter’s trap. I did my best to ignore that screaming voice inside my head.
Thus far, Talyn hadn’t shown any indication that he wanted to kill me. If anything, it almost seemed like he wanted to understand me, and I could figure out a way to work with that. I’d survive this. Death wasn’t an option for me.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked, doing my best to keep an anxious tremble out of my voice and failing at that too.
He cocked his head, studying me intently before he was ready to answer me. “I am taking you to my home base, the alien city of Zenarkin,” he replied, and I stiffened visibly. He noticed.
I knew whispers of such a place. I’d never been there myself. No one I knew had ever gone there either. It was so far inside alien territory that none of us had dared venture there. It was too dangerous.
All our supply and reconnaissance were based at the outer edges of their land where there were still places left to raid. Sometimes, we were desperate enough to attack their outer camps, but those were only manned by low-tier aliens that we were able to kill.
Escaping from so far inside enemy territory would be nothing more than a dream.
Zenarkin had been established not long after the Great World War.
Rumor had it that the city was once known as Manhattan, but it soon fell into ruin and the aliens took over and rebuilt it themselves.
They’d taken the old cobblestone streets and paved over them.
They’d built the buildings taller, but they didn’t stop there.
They dug down deep into the earth and established a central breeding colony to ensure their continued survival.
They’d flourished. Every day, more aliens walked Earth.
At the same time, humans struggled to survive.
We didn’t have access to the same things they did.
No medical care. No electricity. No dependable food sources.
Human civilization had resorted to something of a dark age since the rise of our experimental mistakes.
And now one of them was taking me deep into his territory.
I stared down at the floor, trying to come to terms with what I was about to see.
Sometimes at night, my fellow soldiers had told stories of the alien city.
They spoke of the subservience of humans there, that the aliens sometimes made the men fight in gladiatorial games and that they made the women do far more shameful things while in the company of others. Rumor had it they made sex into a game.
They didn’t need human women to procreate, but that didn’t mean that they turned away from the use of their bodies. To them, a woman was nothing more than a possession, a vessel that they might decide to use if it tickled their fancy at the time.
A tight sheath to sink their cocks into whenever they wanted.
I jerked my gaze back to him. Would he do that? Was he just taking me so that he could bend me over and use my pussy as he saw fit?
My inner walls fluttered with excitement at the thought, and I gritted my teeth, trying to ignore the wanton betrayal of my own body.
“You’re scared, aren’t you?” he asked.
“No,” I lied.
To his credit, he didn’t point out my falsehood. He just let it go. I licked my lips and stared down at the floor. I felt uneasy about all of this.
“Why didn’t you just kill me? Wouldn’t it have been easier for you?” I asked.
“To be honest, I don’t know, Raiza. You are a curious little thing and I want to understand you,” he mused softly. Feeling a bit bolder, I lifted my gaze and looked back at him.
“My comrades would have expected me to kill you. If they’d been there, I probably would have, but they weren’t, were they?” he continued gently.
“No.”
“Your fellow soldiers weren’t there either. They didn’t see what you did after you shot, slashed, and injected me with whatever that terrible concoction was,” he continued.
I shook my head.
“What would they have done to you?” he asked cautiously.
I chewed the inside of my cheek. “I’m not sure, but they would have probably killed me. We’ve never had anyone do anything like I did,” I answered meekly.
“Is that right…” he replied thoughtfully.
I didn’t like it. I turned my head and stared out the window.
The big green trees towered below, their leaves just beginning to change color with the advance of fall.
The yellow, orange, and red foliage peeked through the green leaves, bright enough to paint a beautiful picture beneath me. It was sort of mesmerizing in a way.
Seeing the landscape like this was so very different from experiencing it on the ground.
I recognized several rivers, the sandy rock beaches some of my favorite places to let off steam in the hot days of summer.
Beneath the trees, I could see some dilapidated houses and buildings down below and it almost seemed like Earth was devouring them from below.
Grasses and vines swallowed them whole, breaking them down with every passing second.
In another hundred years, there might not be much left at all. Would humans still exist then? Would they know that’s what homes used to look like in the past?
“Why do you look sad, little one?” Talyn asked gently.
I shook my head and painted on a smile. I wasn’t going to tell him the direction of my thoughts. He was nothing more to me than my captor and he would never be.
“It’s nothing,” I replied. I didn’t look back at him. I didn’t want to know if he believed me or not.