by Elise Jae
Kimba
Dancing has been my life since my bondmate was murdered. I spend my nights at Margot’s club, while sian men pay me ridiculous amounts of money to lose myself in the music and the motion. But I don’t do it for the cash. I do it for the distraction.
And I only dance.
The bonded women who work here sleep with the clientele for the hell of it, for the cash… for the thrill. But I can’t survive losing a bondmate again… so I’ve got rules. There’s only one man who gets alone time with me. Because all he wants is sleep, and he says I’m the only one who can keep the nightmares at bay. But others have noticed, and they want me to kill him.
They know my secret… they know I’ve killed before.
Drift
I see too much.
A so-called gift from the man who experimented on my brothers and I as children. What I see when I look at Kimba is everything I want. Everything I thought I’d never find. Just being near her calms my overactive mind. I want her to be mine, forever. Not just on stolen nights away from the Shadow Zone.
But someone wants me dead. They tried to use her to do it. And I’ll do whatever it takes to keep her safe while we figure out who, and more importantly, why.
Alien Obsession
Book 2 The Shadow Zone Brotherhood
By Elise Jae
Table of Contents
DEDICATION
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEE
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EPILOGUE
THANK YOU!
BOOKS BY ELISE JAE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
For those who want a love that crosses galaxies.
ONE
KIMBA
“He’s back,” Anna says as she slips past me, scooting close to the mirror to check her flawlessly winged eyeliner.
“Who?” I ask, pretending to have no idea who she’s talking about, but I do.
And I don’t.
“Big D,” Anna sticks her tongue out at me
Here at Margot’s we don’t ask for men’s real names. They tell you what they want you to call them. Anna and the other women who work here added the “big” to that D.
Humming as I smooth a brush over my cheekbone, I tease her, “Who do you think he’s going to ask for tonight?”
She rolls her eyes and shoves me. If I hadn’t been braced for it, I’d have fallen out of my chair.
We’re both laughing when the doors open, letting the heavy beat of the club’s music rush in in a wave that ebbs as soon as they close.
“Kimba!” Margot calls from the far side of the dressing room as she makes her way over. “Private room one-oh-seven. It’s your biggest fan.”
I don’t move right away.
He hadn’t warned me he was coming, or I would have worn something else. Something blue.
But changing would only take up time, and we have little enough of that as it is.
Margot has made it to us as I stand, and she drags my robe off the back of my chair. “Why are you scowling? This is your favorite part of the job.”
That wasn’t exactly true, but I wasn’t going to argue.
I slide the robe over my shoulders, not bothering to belt it. “He usually gives me more notice. That’s all.”
Margot skims her hand over the soft velvet flowers, but doesn’t say any of the dozen things I know are running through her head.
“You’re the only one in this place with a patron who asks you to put your clothes back on.” Anna hands me my favorite shade of lipstick. “Do you think tonight’s the night you finally get to take them off?”
I give Anna a sly smile. D knows my rules, and I know his, but she doesn’t need to know either.
Instead of informing her, I lean over and kiss her forehead. “That’s what the stage is for, Love.”
There’s a faint frown in her eyes as I turn from her. Everyone’s good at hiding it, but I still feel their pity. If only they knew….
I push through the doors and into the dark, pulsating beat of the club.
The stage is on the other side of the mirrored wall. In here—in the public play room—there’s little clothing left to remove.
A dozen faces turn my way, immediately turned back by a finger of the woman on their laps.
Everyone who works here knows me. Knows where I’m headed. Know Margot will give them hell if they let someone get in my way.
The private salons are on the other side of the club from the dressing room and employee lounges.
Those were for us.
These are for them.
Everyone else who works here is bonded. Their bondmates consented to their choices, and men who weren’t bonded could feel a little of what they were missing out on.
The Agency paid Margot for her services too.
Unbonded men were more likely to pay the Agency to find them a bondmate once they’d visited her club a time or two. It gave them the opportunity to narrow down their selection preferences.
Gave them the opportunity to know what to do with their bondmate when she finally arrived.
But D’s not here for that. He’s never once asked.
He knows I’m not bonded anymore. Knows I won’t bond with anyone again.
Knows I’m just here to dance….
That’s the reason I keep coming back to this room. To him.
I’ll keep telling myself that until it’s true. And maybe it was… a year ago.
There’s a lot more I’d be willing to do. Gratis, even. But none of that is what he comes here for either.
He’s standing at the vanity across the room when I arrive, back to the door, washing his hands.
When the door closes behind me, I pause for a long moment, just to take him in.
He’s tall and broad, with the sort of physique that takes hours in the gym on a daily basis. Whatever he does, he doesn’t do it in an office.
“It’s been a few days, I thought maybe something had happened to you.”
Glancing up at me through the mirror, he says, “Something did. But I survived it.”
His smile is tense, but then… D is always tense. He barely relaxes in his sleep.
He’s shrugged out of his coat and shirt, exposing long scars, turned silver with age, over banded muscle.
The lines on his arms extend up, over his chest. Down his back.
I assume his legs are riddled with the same.
There are only two occupations that would leave a person with that many marks.
I can’t ask if it’s the former, because I’m too afraid it’s the latter.
I don’t want him to be a criminal.
That’s how most of my unasked questions are.
I haven’t asked if he’s bonded. The warring parts of me want to know… but don’t want the answer to be yes.
Maybe he knows I’m overthinking.
Maybe he just wants to touch me, but he crosses the room and runs a hand down my arm to lace his fingers in mine.
“Did you dance tonight?”
“Yes.”
He smiles down at our hands. “I’m sorry I missed it.”
“You know I would happily dance for you.” There’s space and equipment in the room for it.
“I do.”
But, as always, he doesn’t ask me to.
D i
s here for one thing.
Raising my hand, he kisses my knuckles before moving to lie down.
He’s here to sleep… for whatever reason, he wants me there to do it too.
The first time, I couldn’t actually sleep. There are people—on Earth, if not also here—who get off on that sort of thing and I didn’t know him then.
But now…
I crawl onto the bed—custom and big enough for four—and settle down next to him, flicking off the lights.
The room is silent, but I know he hasn’t closed his eyes.
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
Shaking his head, he pulls me closer, lips on my forehead. “Go to sleep Kimba.”
He wraps his arms around me, and I do exactly what he asks of me.
DRIFT
It takes a few minutes, but Kimba falls asleep in my arms.
If any of my brothers knew this was where I disappeared to on these random nights, they’d probably try to make me go see a shrink.
But Kimba….
Kimba doesn’t want anything from me, not even my name.
Something tells me that if she could, she’d refuse the money, too.
She’s a soft weight in my arms. Breath fluttering across my chest, I tuck my chin against her hair, use the gentle thump of her heartbeat to ground me.
She’s wearing burgundy lace and one of the powders she uses glitters across her collar bone. She’s warmth all along my side.
Usually, I can sleep here, like this.
As long as I have her.
But tonight isn’t one of those nights.
Something’s tugging at me, telling me I need to find a way to make her mine, and soon.
Not a task that was ever going to be easy.
I’d heard a dozen stories, and from the random things she's said, paired with where the stories overlap, I know I could bet everything I own, that she’s here, doing this, because she loved her bondmate too strongly to let him go.
And she’s never met anyone willing to compete with a ghost… never met anyone who knew there was no need for the competition in the first place.
She hasn’t let anyone get close enough to know she misses Earth wine or that she broke her toe when she was seven, kicking a ballerina for picking on another kid in their class.
I close my eyes and try to sleep, but my brain is going fifty miles a minute.
The influx of women back into the planet has made the monsters more courageous. They’re encroaching more often.
Soon, I’ll have to man more of the watchtowers. I’ll have to take my numbers to the governing council and see if they’re smart enough to read between the lines without going off the rails.
Now that three of my brothers have bondmates, the monsters are getting bolder in attempting to sneak out of the caldera, and if they kill one of them, I’m not sure I’ll be able to stop that brother from razing the part of the planet the monsters inhabit.
Despite their actions, despite the fact they’d happily continue to slaughter women and children. They are sentient beings… and I can’t in good conscience allow an all-out attack.
The projections suggest there are somewhere near two million within the Caldera, and another eight in the underground cave systems on the hemisphere we have always acknowledged as theirs.
I’m one of the only people standing in the way of the bomb the council wants to drop to be done with them once and for all.
No wonder I can’t sleep.
But being here with Kimba, knowing she’s safe… helps calm me.
The ceiling is a dark abyss of flat black paint.
Darkness suddenly broken by scrolling blue from my lens.
There’s a perimeter warning, but Trench has already flagged it and is on his way out to deal with the problem.
Maybe it’s best if Kimba is here, ninety miles from the caldera. Despite my inability to do anything to protect her from anything else.
Because she might not be mine but she’s mine.
TWO
KIMBA
D isn’t coming to see me tonight.
When he left this morning, he promised he’d be back tomorrow.
And D doesn’t break promises.
On the nights D doesn’t come to see me, my only task is to dance.
Tonight, I’ve decided I’ll take the stage three times. It’s once more than usual, but I’m full of restless energy and the final dance will be enough to tire me out. I’ve gotten accustomed to sleeping with someone else in my bed again, and dreams wake me more often than not these days.
I take the stage to hushed reverence, and the first notes of the song I’ve chosen for this dance are a heartbeat that centers me. That pulls me into the moment and lets everything else fall away.
There are a dozen faces I don’t recognize, and twice as many who show up every night for me.
But they disappear. The music and dull murmurs are the only thing I hear. The fluctuating spectrum of lights the only thing I see.
My body might be here, dancing… but my mind is with D, wherever he might be.
And maybe that’s why the others don’t matter, because a small part of me knows I’m dancing for him—hoping he decided to come after all, knowing he didn’t.
Every twist and move of my body are a part of the fantasies I’ve had that I can never fulfill. Because I can’t bond again.
Not even for him.
The audience loves what I do for him. Around me, neon holograms of dollar signs burst against the faint, smoky haze. Patrons throw digital tips at me.
When the music ends, delicious exhaustion weighs down my bones.
I made two thousand, four hundred and sixty-seven dollars from that dance. The money tallies, the house cut filters out, and then it transfers directly to my account.
I slip into the back before anyone can catch me and ask me to be theirs for the night—or longer. That’s part of the allure.
Part of the reason they come back.
Part of the reason they spend the money they do.
They want to be able to say they were the one I chose… but they’re too late.
The back rooms are quiet, a respite from the pulsing music and the heavy air of the club.
Margot is waiting for me in the lounge, she motions for me to sit and runs a hand over my hair. “Luther is asking about you again. I told him you were engaged every night this week. He asked to get a private dance next week. But I told him no.”
Luther is one of the patrons who has a hard time following the rules. He thinks he’s special, above them. Thinks the fact that he’s paying me to dance entitles him to my body.
“Thank you.” I stretch out the muscles in my back. “Next time, just tell him the answer is no, indefinitely.”
It’s not something I would have requested back on Earth… but on this planet, I finally feel safe rejecting men.
*
I’m still at Margot’s when dawn breaks. It’s not a schedule I normally keep when D isn’t around, but Margot and Anna kept me laughing.
A patron had gotten so nervous when Anna touched him—she loves the part of her job where she gets to initiate sian men into the delights of the female body—he threw up.
Margot snorts as she tells me about the man who fell out of his chair during my dance—not that I saw him.
It led down a rabbit hole of men behaving badly and others getting confused or simply being an idiot over a pretty woman.
I was still chuckling over the man who wanted to join a bondmate pairing and professed his love for the woman he’d seen dance once… until her bondmate showed up and suddenly, his sense of self-preservation caught up to him.
The pair might have had no problem with her making side cash entertaining unbonded men… but they were not going to share to that extent.
What happens in the dark of the club usually stays in the dark of the club.
Sadly, I can’t.
Pushing out of the doors, I pause, squinting waiting to see again.
I don’t enjoy daylight.
My car is on the far end of the parking lot, and I breathe in the crisp air, as I make the walk. This planet is colder than Earth, but here in the grass plains, in the shadow of the mountains, the temperature is tolerable, even without bundling on layers of warm clothing.
The surrounding area is deserted. Everyone is off the streets this early in the morning. The ones out late have finally gone home, the ones up early aren’t about their business yet.
Except, I’m not alone.
I don’t see them until it’s too late.
They step out from behind the car and surround me, it’s a mechanical, rehearsed movement.
That’s what scares me.
Not the number of them, or the fact they chose to ambush me, but the unspoken ceremony in their actions.
Only one of them isn’t perfectly aligned in their circle.
He’s the sort of man I’ve only ever encountered on Earth, and back then, it was my job to separate the creeps from the good guys.
“Hello Kimba,” he says. “We’ve been waiting for hours to talk to you.”
The way he says it makes me think that’s all they want to do.
Just talk.
But still….
“You could have made an appointment.”
A slimy smile covers the man’s face and he glances at the others. “This isn’t a conversation you want on record. And we both know it’s almost impossible to gain an audience inside those walls.”
The others around me—they feel like hired muscle more than anything else now—chuckle and the man in charge raises a hand to silence them.
“I want to hire you.”
“Then you’ll still have to step inside and talk to Margot.”
“Oh, I don’t want to hire you for that. We have something in mind that you won’t want her knowing about.”
I have to force myself to keep from stepping back.
Right now, I’m in the middle of the circle, any way I move will put me closer to one of them.
“We will pay you one hundred thousand US dollars, and get you on a ship back to Earth.”
I don’t want the money, and I’ve never wanted to go back to Earth. But a ticket back to Earth costs a literal fortune.
