by Erin Raegan
Shadow Assassin
Galactic Order Book Seven
Erin Raegan
An Alien War Romance
Contents
Author’s Note
Dear Reader,
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Other Books by Erin Raegan
Books by E.M. Raegan
About the Author
Chapter 1
Glossary
Shadow Assassin. Copyright © 2019 by Erin Raegan. All Rights Reserved.
Cover Designed by Cortney E Designs
Edited by Joy Editing
All characters, alien or human, events―on planet Earth or otherwise―in this book are a product of the author's imagination and hours of daydreaming. Any resemblance to actual people, or otherworldly beings, living or dead, or actual events are entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or transmitted, or distributed, in any form, by any means, without explicit written permission from the author with the exception of brief quotations embodied in reviews or articles. This book is licensed for your enjoyment only. Thank you, a thousand times and all the hugs, for purchasing.
Author’s Note
Author’s Note
This book is a science fiction romance story with explicit language, sexual situations, dark themes, and possible triggers. It is intended for audiences 18 years and older.
If any of that bothers you―beware or turn back.
If not―enjoy and onward to the fun and sexy times!
Beware!
This book DOES NOT end in a cliffhanger, however, not all plot points will be tied up!
This is a series, not a trilogy, and it will continue on for quite some time. There will be no other cliffhangers in this series. Each book after this one will feature a different relationship but will have cameos and pop-ins of other characters.
Enjoy.
There is a Glossary, as requested by my lovely readers, at the end of the book. It’s full of all my fun words and species and may help those who need a refresher. Feel free to reference it or ignore it. It is there for you. Special thanks to my FB Council Members who helped me tremendously with putting it together.
Dear Reader,
This page is for you.
Thank you for reading.
Books inspire us. They bring us joy and allow us to escape for a little while.
I hope you find that with mine.
Thank you for taking the time out of your lives to read my hard work.
It means the world,
Erin.
To my people. You know who you are.
“I wish only to be your ear when you need to release your fears and doubts.
Your hand when you need strengthening.
Your guard when you cannot hold on your own.
And your heart when you are too far gone to pull yourself free.
I will always be here, lovely. When you feel all is lost and you are alone, I will be right here.”
-Tahk
This one is for Tahk and Peyton.
They started me on this series and inspired me to the end.
I would not be here without them.
Shadow Assassin
London
Taken from my home. Imprisoned on an alien planet. Toyed with. Moved around like a pawn. Terrified. Angry. These are all things that sum up the last few days of my life.
Confused. Curious. Anxious. Captivated. All the things that sum up the days that follow.
I don’t know what’s going to happen from today to tomorrow. All I know for sure is that I hate him. He infuriates me. He confuses me. But I also want to know more. I’m ensnared. He has that way about him. You want to look away from him and stare all at the same time. I don’t know if he’s going to kill me or let me live. But I do know he likes to play games. And I am his brand-new shiny toy.
So when I start to play back and crave his next move, I start to worry he has a pull over me I’m not sure I know how to escape. He’s dark and violent. Dangerous. But I’ve gotten used to danger in recent months and after witnessing my entire world be torn apart and taken over, you can understand why I didn’t turn away. Why instead I found myself trapped in a game I wasn’t ready to give up. Why the big bad Shadow Assassin didn’t scare me. Why instead I found myself right where he wanted me all along. Lost in him.
Prologue
Dordyn⎯The First Juldo Master
Five thousand years ago on a deserted mining planet.
Chyn—the Latari prince—stalked into the tent, ripping his armor from his chest and thrusting it away in anger.
Dordyn, the Juldo Master, sighed and sat back in his seat, watching the prince carefully. “I told you it would not be easy.”
“You don’t know,” Chyn rasped. “You could never understand.”
“No, I could not. But I care for them in my own way.”
The prince glared at him. Dordyn watched sweat bead on Chyn’s temple and roll down. The gods were fighting Chyn hard. They did not like him hunting his Latari brothers. But it was more. With each kill, the gods grew stronger. Dordyn regretted asking this of his maker, but there was no other who could face the Shadow Born than Chyn. Dordyn may not be Latari, but Chyn had made him and his species Juldo, accidentally or not, and Dordyn felt his pain.
“They are slaughtering innocents by the thousands. They must be stopped,” Dordyn told him solemnly.
Chyn’s glare seared Dordyn, and the young master swallowed heavily. Dordyn may care for Chyn as a father, as a Juldo brother, but Chyn did not see the Juldo as his children. He did not see Dordyn as his son. He saw them as his comrades, but Chyn was reserved and refused to rule his creations. Instead, he asked Dordyn to challenge for the throne. And so he did and became the first Juldo Master.
“The Bour will not survive this if you do not find him,” Dordyn pushed.
“They are just as vile,” Chyn muttered before chugging a jug of spirits.
“That is not for us to decide. We will conquer their world as we have done other worlds, but I will not stand by as Prow kills the innocent mercilessly for nothing more than sport.”
“They killed his son,” Chyn rasped, the gods clawing from his throat.
Dordyn nodded regretfully. Prow had once been in control. Chyn believed Prow would find control of his mind once more, but Prow had found his pair on Latari at a young age and lost her to the failing world. Dordyn did not believe it was possible after losing his son as well.
Before she met her death, Prow and his pair had a son. The only son born to Chyn’s generation.
The boy was young when the Bour found Latari and thought to steal the Juldo infection for themselves. Prow became despondent after the loss of his son, only holding o
n to his life for his prince, and when Chyn urged them to leave the dying moon and find a new home, it was Dordyn’s world they first came to.
Dordyn did not remember his past life. The Juldo infected their minds and stole their pasts from them. But Prow, Chyn’s closest companion, had been the one to urge Chyn to help Dordyn’s males. And so the Juldo were born.
But Prow had a sinister motive. Under his urging, the Juldo conquered worlds, always searching for the Bour, revenge on their mind. Revenge for invading Latari and taking the boy. When finally, the Juldo found the Bour.
It was on that day that Chyn lost his Latari brothers to their madness. The Shadow Born broke. Madness encompassed their minds, and they went off to destroy those conquered worlds, slaughtering their inhabitants mindlessly. But not Prow. He hunted the Bour only, seeking his revenge.
Dordyn had no choice but to order the deaths of the Shadow Born for the sake of the Juldo and the innocents being slaughtered.
Chyn the only one capable and strong enough to defeat them. And the last Shadow Born of sound mind to carry out the task.
Though Chyn believed he could bring Prow back from the brink, Dordyn knew he was long gone. Just as the rest of his Latari brothers.
Prow was now missing, and soon the Bour would be no more. For if it was not Prow who eradicated their species for claiming the life of his son, it would be Chyn—as revenge for them claiming Prow’s mind.
1
London
“Hello?”
Nothing. Silence.
“Helloooo?” Nothing but the annoying trickle of water down the stone walls.
“Urgh!” I banged my fist against the bars of my cell door. I hit them again and again until my palms screamed in pain. Huffing my frustration and letting loose a ragged breath, I slid down the wall at the back of my cell. The rough stone scraped my spine through my dirty T-shirt but I barely felt it. I looked down morosely and clenched my bare toes into the sandy floor.
Rubbing my eyes, I looked up at the sliver of light coming through the tiny hole in the ceiling that was a piss-poor imitation of a window. This would be my… eleventh night? Twelfth? I was losing track.
The days were so short here. Barely four or five hours. But the nights were endless. Or at least they felt like it. At least six times as long as the sunlit hours. That made almost thirty-five-hour days. It was impossible to keep track of the amount of time I’d spent in this cell. At least in human terms.
But I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. Er, on Earth anymore. I was on some alien planet so fucking far away from Earth, it was a dream.
“My fucking pee bucket is full assholes!”
I screamed behind my clenched teeth when no one answered. Not even those two red freaks that had been guarding me this whole time were out there anymore.
A low groan echoed through the halls and my eyes lolled to the cell next door to me. That poor freak was waking up again. He had been in and out of it since I got here, and I suspected he didn’t have much longer to live, given he was one giant slab of pulverized meat. He was one of those bat things that had helped us out back home. A Dahk. After the white ones had invaded and started fucking eating people. The bats, the Dahk, had come and helped get rid of the white ones. The Dahk were still helping us. At least, they were still there when I was snatched and brought here.
Dad had been working with them. Shockingly. But I guessed they hadn’t given him much choice in the matter. They had kind of dropped out of the sky and saved us against our will.
I snorted. We had been on the brink of extinction before they showed up, so you’d think my dad, the former vice president—now president, of the free world would have kissed their feet, but nope. Not my dad. He had resisted at first. Nearly gotten a few of them killed. Then we would have really been fucked. But thank god that douche, Howard, hadn’t succeeded at shooting them out of the sky and turning another alien species against us. Now Dad was knee-deep in peace treaties and catering to a slew of aliens from all over the damn universe.
We owed the Dahk and that weird pirate lord so much. They had saved our asses, but Dad still didn’t trust them. But I guessed that was part of his job. Still, if those big bastards wanted to wipe us out—after expending all that effort to save us—then we were woefully unprepared to fight them off. We were so unprepared it was laughable. They had space travel for one. Fucking laser cannons for another. And yeah, our bullets basically did nothing to them.
Dad may be the new president and pseudo peacekeeper of the world, but really, he was a glorified lackey to the Kilbus Lord. That alien let my pop think he had a say in humanity’s recovery efforts, but really, Kil said jump and my dad asked, “How high?”
I had little hope anyone was coming for me. Sure, I may be President Burin’s daughter, but Kil was a hardass and not a little scary—a whole damn lot—and I would not be anywhere near the top of that alien lord’s priority list. If my dad knew how to fly a damn spaceship, I might’ve had a chance, but that was a no-go.
I was alone. I was all the hope I had of getting out of this place.
I had to save myself.
I pushed my weak body into a crouch and faced the wall. Gripping my chipped belt buckle in my fist, I went to town on the little hole at the base of the wall. I had started on it sometime around my second night in here. Slowly carving it out, making it bigger.
When that hooded guy first ordered those hulking red guys to toss me in here, I inspected every inch of this cell. There were no weak points other than a tiny hole. I felt a cool draft from it and decided to try to widen it. The stone was set like huge bricks, one on top of the other. I thought if I could gouge out the clay holding them together with my belt buckle, I could push one of them out and crawl free. But the stones were so deep, and it was taking me forever just to get the bottom of the stone brick clear. My little tiny escape plan would take me months, but I wasn’t giving up.
My hands were a bloodied, bruised mess and I didn’t know how much longer I could continue before I seriously hurt myself. They were feeding and watering me, but not enough for me to keep up a good amount of strength. And the food was weird. So weird I had balked at eating it at first. It was some pukey-orange stew-type sludge. It smelled rank and I’d had to force it down after my stomach threatened to cave in on itself some time after the second night.
They gave it to me once a day. Once an alien-day. So really, they fed me every day and a half in human time? I sighed and adjusted my grip on my belt buckle, my sawing motion waning. Thinking about food was only making my stomach cramps worse.
The bat guy groaned again and shifted in the sand in his cell. I looked at him warily. If he really was waking up, then I was in for a hard night. He had to be in pain for all the moaning and whimpering he did every time he woke up.
Firyt, or something like that, was his name. It was hard to tell what the red aliens—the Juldo— were saying most days. I’d had—as a lot of humans had—the language chip implanted when the Dahk came to town. Mostly because my pop had insisted on it after the Kilbus and Dahk forced it on him, but also because I wanted to be able to communicate with the guys saving our asses. Even so, the Juldo talked in low, grumbly tones and it sometimes made them hard to understand even with the translation chip.
All except the hooded one. The leader. His voice was clearer, but I wished it wasn’t. He’d only said a few words in my presence, but even the guards had flinched when he spoke. I watched his deep red lips move, but it was as if several voices left his mouth. As if a group of people were speaking all at once through his low, gravelly voice. It was freaking unnerving. I had been relieved when the guards dragged me away from him.
Survival instinct flooded me when he was near. Something about him screamed hazardous. It was the way he carried himself. His voice. The fact that he seemed to be completely shrouded in shadows as he lazed in that enormous throne, lording over his red-skinned buddies. Buddies, I should add, that seemed more terrified of him than I was.
I
crawled over to Batty and shoved my hand through the bars separating us. He had a small cracked bowl in his cell, and I pushed it against the wall of his cell until the trickle of water streaming down the stone slowly started to fill it. Once it was full of grainy, dirty liquid, I crawled closer to the front of his cell, pushing the bowl closer to him one bar at a time until I could lift it and trickle the water into his mouth. He coughed and spewed out the first few sips but eventually gulped it as he did every time I offered it to him.
He was too weak to do much of anything for himself, and even though I didn’t know him, I felt a sort of kinship with him locked away down here. We were both prisoners, even though we didn’t get the same treatment. Not yet at least. For now, they seemed fine with keeping me locked away, but this poor guy got the shit beat out of him by a few guards every time they got bored. I honestly couldn’t believe he was still alive. I wouldn’t have survived the first hit from that red guy with the metal arms. If they suddenly got bored with him and turned their attention to me, I was screwed.
