Chapter 13
“ I was taken young, by our standards. Barely past my first molt. Most males don’t see their second game until they’re fully grown. I didn’t get that luxury.”
She studied his face in the dim glow. “What happened the other times?”
He exhaled through his nose, a soft rumble.
“I was strong enough. Fast enough. I reached the chosen female first more than once. But I never forced the claim. Never pinned her down and took what the game demanded. By the time she might have chosen me willingly, another rival had already dragged her under or marked her. The Malquarans don’t reward restraint. They reward results.”
Greta absorbed that, turning it over. No self-pity in his voice—just flat truth, like he was describing tide patterns. “So you’ve never won.”
“Never.” A faint, humorless twitch at the corner of his mouth. “Six times I watched weaker—or hungrier—males finish the three claims while I held back. Six times the game ended without me.”
She shifted slightly, the leaf skirt rustling. The movement brought her knee a fraction closer to his. Neither pulled away. “What happens to you when it ends without a win?”
Klari’s gaze drifted toward the screened opening of their shelter, where the jungle pressed close.
“I wake up in my pod. The disorientation lasts a few cycles—time feels… slippery here. Days might be years, or the other way around. Then the wait begins again. The pull comes without warning. One moment I’m hunting in the kelp forests, the next I’m in another game, dropped onto whatever platform the Council chose this time. ”
The admission sat between them, heavy but honest. She felt an unexpected pull in her chest—not pity, exactly, but recognition. Two people caught in something larger than themselves.
She swallowed. “Tell me about your world. What you left behind. Or… what you want to go back to.”
Klari was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice had softened, the rough edges worn down by memory.
“Deep water. Not like the shallows here. True deep—black as night beyond the first hundred fathoms, but alive with light. Massive kelp forests that stretch for leagues, fronds thick as your thigh, swaying in currents strong enough to knock a weak swimmer senseless. Cities carved into the rock walls of the trenches, lit by colonies of bioluminescent worms and glowing coral that never dims. You can swim for days and still not reach the edge of one district.”
“I’d like to see that one day.”
He smiled at her, his tail tickling her inner thigh.
She gulped at her body’s reaction.
“Maybe you will.”
He paused, claws stilling. “There’s family. A sister who was barely hatched when I was taken the first time. She’d be grown now, if time flows the same. A mother who taught me to read the pressure changes before a storm surge.”
He stopped there, jaw tightening. The words cut off cleanly, like he’d hit a wall he wasn’t ready to climb.
Greta didn’t push. Instead, she found herself speaking, the words spilling out before she could decide against it.
She wasn’t a talker—never had been. She processed the world with her hands: soldering circuits, tightening bolts, building things that worked when everything else fell apart.
But here, in this alien overhang with a scaled predator who listened like the rest of the universe had gone silent, the words came anyway.
“I was in a warehouse,” she said, voice low.
“Running away from strange men. I suppose they were aliens, come to think about it. I was trying to escape wih my friend. Then a beam hit me and I floated up and up into the sky. Then I woke up in a pod. Now, I’m here.
” She gestured vaguely at her bare human form, the leaf coverings suddenly feeling ridiculous.
“I teach, too. Engineering and physics to kids who mostly just want to pass. There’s one boy—Jasper.
Can’t get basic circuitry to save his life, but he asks questions that make me stop and rethink everything I thought I knew about how current flows or why materials fail.
He’d probably notice I’m gone first at summer school.
The others…” She trailed off, a hard lump forming in her throat.
“I don’t know if any of them will even realize for a while.
My apartment’s empty most nights. No one waiting. ”
The words landed heavier than she’d expected. Her eyes stung. She blinked it back fiercely.
Klari listened without interrupting, without shifting or offering empty comfort. He simply absorbed it, golden eyes locked on hers in a way that made her feel like she was the only living thing in existence worth his full attention .
It was disconcerting—intimate in a way that had nothing to do with the leaves barely covering her or the dangerous males still circling in the sea below.
The sexual tension hummed underneath it all, quieter now, like a deep current rather than a breaking wave. When he moved, it was subtle—he shifted closer along the coral wall until their shoulders brushed. The cool smoothness of his scales radiated against her warmer skin.
She didn’t move away. The proximity felt grounding instead of threatening, his presence a solid counterpoint to the raw vulnerability of her naked human body.
She let the silence sit for a moment before asking the question that had been building. “If we finish the three claims… if we somehow win this thing… do you actually get to go home?”
Klari went still. The thrumming call from the water rose faintly in the distance, then faded. “That’s what they promise,” he said at last.
“But?”
He turned his head to look directly at her. The golden slits of his pupils had widened slightly in the low light. “I’ve never seen it happen. There’s no way.
Winners disappear from the games after their victory cycle. Whether they truly return home, or whether the Malquarans or the Council has other uses for them… no one knows for sure.”
Another silence settled, thicker this time. Greta’s heart beat a little faster, aware of how close he was, the faint briny scent of him mixing with the metallic air of the island.
His cock pulsed, growing stiffer, harder. Larger. She studied the line of his jaw, the way his chest rose and fell with steady breaths, the subtle play of light across his scarred scales .
Then she asked the real question, the one that had been sitting beneath everything else.
“Why are you being kind to me?”
Klari didn’t answer immediately. He looked down at the narrow space between them, then back up to her face. When he spoke, the words came slower, rougher around the edges, like they cost him something to pull out.
“Because for the first time in seven games, something feels different.” His voice dropped, honest and raw.
“I look at you—raw skin, no armor, every cut and shiver visible—and I see someone who shouldn’t have to break just so I can finally go home.
And that feeling… it’s dangerous. It’s new.
And I don’t know what to do with it yet. ”
The admission hung in the humid air between them, unresolved. Neither moved.
The island’s alien pulse continued around them—glowing leaves, skittering creatures, distant predatory calls—but inside the overhang, the space felt smaller, charged with something neither predator nor prey could name.
Then the quiet shattered without warning.