C is for Captive (The ABCs of Alien Abduction #3)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

The cart’s back wheel caught on the loading ramp again, and Amy leaned into it with her whole weight, desperate to get it moving before the guard at the gate could decide to cuff her impatiently.

“Move it, boy,” he snapped.

She moved it. The containers of stew sloshed against their lids, and the smell of braised root and cheap protein rose into the cold morning air. She kept her head down, her hood up, and her shoulders rounded the way she’d practiced until it had become automatic.

A year of this. A year of pushing Pelloq’s cart through the same rusted gate into Krebb’s compound, unloading the same crates, and saying the same nothing.

The guards had stopped paying attention to her months ago.

She was just kitchen help, a scrawny, silent young male who brought the midday meal to the compound.

She was invisible, which was the whole point.

“Hey.” A second guard peeled away from the wall, a hulking Ordanian with a jaw like a dropped anvil. He wasn’t one of the regulars. “You the food boy?”

She nodded once. Despite her attempts to keep her voice low and flat, it could give her away faster than anything else. So whenever possible she nodded, and grunted, and let them think she was slow-witted. It suited everyone.

“Grab a bowl off the cart. You’re taking one downstairs.”

Her hands froze on the cart’s handle. Downstairs meant the holding cells.

In the year she’d been delivering meals to Krebb’s compound, she had never once gone downstairs.

She took the cart to the kitchen off the main courtyard, handed the containers to a bored cook, and left.

That was the careful, invisible arrangement.

“The kitchen usually—” she muttered, keeping her head down.

“Kitchen’s busy.” The anvil-jawed guard smiled, and it was not a kind smile. “Krebb wants the prisoner fed before the priest gets here. You’ll do it. Unless you’d rather I tell him that Pelloq’s errand boy’s got opinions.”

Dammit. Pelloq couldn’t afford to offend Krebb.

Nobody could. Too much of the port ran on Krebb’s goodwill the way a body ran on blood, and one squat old Ordanian restaurateur with a soft spot for a sick female he’d bought cheap didn’t have the standing to say no to him. Which meant that neither did she.

Silently, she ladled some of the stew into a dented metal bowl, added a flat round of bread, and balanced them on a tray. Her fingers were steady. She’d trained them to be steady even when the rest of her wanted to bolt.

“This way.” The guard jerked his head and started walking. “You’ll want to see this one anyway. Tuori. Big bastard. Put three of ours in the medbay before they got the chains on him.”

She kept her mouth shut.

“One of them’s not going to use his arm right ever again.

” He laughed like that was a good joke. “Broke it in two places with his bare hands. Cracked another one’s skull against the floor.

We had to shock him half to death before he’d go down, and even then it took six of us.

” He glanced back to see if she was frightened.

She let herself look frightened. It wasn’t difficult.

“So don’t get too close,” he added, pleased with himself. “Set the food down and back off. If he’s stupid enough to starve himself, that’s his problem.”

The stairs down to the holding cells were narrow and slick, cut into the old foundation stone of the compound.

As they descended, the air turned damp, filled with the sour smell of blood and iron and bodies kept too long in one place.

The lighting strip along the ceiling flickered and buzzed.

Water beaded on the walls and ran in thin dark lines towards a drain she couldn’t see.

Three cell doors lined the corridor at the bottom, two of them open and empty with the barred doors hanging loose. The third was shut. The guard keyed a panel beside it, and the door groaned as it slid back.

“Go on, boy,” he said. “Feed the animal.”

She stepped through the door, her head still down.

The cell was small, and the male against the far wall made it smaller.

Even sitting against the stone wall with his knees bent, he was enormous.

Port Rusk was full of big aliens, but he was in a different category of size, the kind that rearranged a room simply by existing in it.

His shoulders were vast, and his heavily muscled chest as deep as a barrel.

Heavy cuffs locked his wrists to short chains embedded in the wall and clamped his ankles to a ring set in the floor.

The thick restraints were meant for cargo, not people, and the skin beneath them was rubbed raw and crusted dark.

Long black hair hung around his face in a matted curtain.

Through it she caught the hard line of a jaw, the ridge of a cheekbone, and the swollen split of a lip.

Short black horns swept back from his temples, half-hidden in his hair.

His bare arms and chest were covered with burns and bruises blooming green and yellow and black on his bronze skin, and a long shallow cut down one forearm had scabbed and been torn open again.

They had hurt him. Carefully and methodically, the way you hurt someone you were afraid of.

Her stomach turned over.

She kept her breathing even and crossed the cell quickly and silently, her eyes down. She crouched to set the tray on the floor within reach of his bound hands. The bowl clinked against stone. Steam curled off the stew, absurdly ordinary in the darkness of the cell.

She started to rise, and he lifted his head. He looked at her through the veil of hair, and every plan she’d ever made about being invisible disappeared all at once.

His eyes were silver. Not grey, not pale, but silver, as bright as poured metal, and luminous in the dim cell like they held their own light.

And they were not the eyes of a broken male, not the dull, drugged, half-mad stare she’d braced herself for.

They were terrifyingly aware, moving over her face and her oversized clothes, reading her the way she read a difficult customer, taking in everything and giving back nothing.

He didn’t speak. He didn’t growl or lunge or make a sound. He simply watched her, with an attention so complete it felt like a physical weight against her skin, his body absolutely still. Her heart slammed against her ribs.

She knew that stillness. She used that same stillness every day, behind her hood and her lowered eyes. It was the stillness of someone who had learned to be underestimated. The stillness of a mind working hard behind a face arranged to look like nothing was happening.

He’s not what they think he is, she thought, sudden and certain. He’s watching them. He’s watching everything.

And now he was watching her.

Those silver eyes held hers, and for one suspended moment she forgot the guard behind her, forgot about the bowl, and forgot about her careful invisible life.

He saw her. Not the food boy, not the disguise.

Her. It struck her with terrifying certainty, as though he’d reached through the disguise she’d worn for four years and set one enormous finger on the truth of who she was beneath it.

The guard’s boots scraped on the stone behind her.

“I said back off,” he barked. “You deaf as well as ugly? Move.”

She jerked upright and stepped back, her pulse roaring in her ears. She turned for the door on legs that didn’t quite feel like hers.

Behind her, low and rough and unmistakably deliberate, the prisoner growled. Just once. But she’d have sworn, all the way up those slick narrow stairs and out into the hard bright day, that it had been meant for her.