by Corin Cain
Claimed by the Alien Warrior Triad
Corin Cain
Contents
Foreword
Excerpt
1. Aubrey
2. Stryker
3. Aubrey
4. Haleon
5. Aubrey
6. Brigg
7. Aubrey
8. Stryker
9. Aubrey
10. Stryker
11. Aubrey
12. Aubrey
13. Aubrey
14. Aubrey
15. Aubrey
16. Aubrey
17. Stryker
18. Aubrey
19. Aubrey
20. Aubrey
21. Aubrey
22. Brigg
23. Stryker
24. Aubrey
25. Aubrey
26. Brigg
27. Stryker
28. Aubrey
Foreword
The Scorp Blood tribe is set in the Aurelian Empire Universe. Each entry in the Scorp Blood Tribe series is a complete story which does not affect the main storyline of the Aurelian Empire.
This was a tough book to write as it was a little more emotional than I was expecting when I started it. Please note that it does have some triggering themes, including self-harm.
This is a steamy romance for adult audiences, containing spanking and submission.
I truly hope you enjoy this alien reverse harem romance!
Excerpt
This isn’t real life. In real life, you don’t have towering, broad-shouldered, Greek Gods of men stepping out of a portal and into your reality. Shirtless, in nothing but loin clothes, with every inch of their rippling, marble-hued muscles covered in tribal tattoos… You don’t have men like that appearing out of nowhere; out of a rippling crack in the universe... Until three of them do exactly that…
1
Aubrey
This isn’t my life.
My life? My life is carefully planned out.
I’m going to make partner at the law firm by 32. I’m going to be married by 33. I’ll have two kids by 36.
After I stopped getting my period, eight months ago, a visit to the doctor’s office put a wrinkle in the kids part of that. Tests confirmed I was infertile – but Joshua and I agreed adoption was an ethical alternative.
But the first stage of my plan? I achieved it – today.
I’ve worked my ass off for the last ten years to make partner – and today it finally happened. I celebrated by coming home before 8pm for the first time in a decade; excited to tell my fiancé the incredible news.
The entire way home, as I pulled my jacket close against the chill November winds, I imagined his reaction: How his light blue eyes would sparkle when I told him that I’d just become the youngest-ever partner in the history of the prestigious New York law firm.
I gave the homeless veteran an extra dollar on my way out of the subway station, and he grinned and nodded as he always does. My hands shook with anticipation as I fumbled my key into the lock, opening the door to greet the love of my life…
…and then the truth hit me like a crowbar.
While I was slaving away at the office for the last ten years, all in an effort to make partner, my fiancé had made a ‘partner’, too.
I met her that evening, when I let myself into the apartment much earlier than Joshua had clearly anticipated and found them tangled in a passionate embrace.
She must have been eighteen or nineteen – all perkiness, curves, and “fuck me” tits.
I stood there, stunned, for a moment. Joshua and I had always had a fairly bland sex life, reserved to the bedroom and preferably in the dark. Seeing him inside another woman – her pert bottom resting on the same kitchen counter I chop vegetables on – felt like I’d walked into some kind of sick porno movie.
To her credit, the girl didn’t seem any more enthused by the interruption. Her eyes shot open and she smacked at Joshua’s back to warn him that they’d been busted.
“How long?” I yelled, as I stood there in the doorway. No “how could you?” or “who is she?”
I needed the timeframe – to quantify the betrayal.
I didn’t make partner in the law firm for nothing. In times of crisis, my mind goes to fact-finding mode.
Joshua couldn’t even look at me. His eyes fell to the floor. He was still hard, despite being interrupted.
“Eight months,” he eventually replied, and the answer hit me even harder than walking in on him balls deep in some naive young slut, in my kitchen with the so-called love of my life.
His words replayed in my head, even as I stared hatefully at the two of them.
Eight months.
Eight months almost to the day since I’d gone through the trauma of being pronounced medically infertile.
I didn’t even say a word. I just backed away and closed the door of our apartment.
No, not ours any more.
His. He was welcome to it. This would be a place haunted by memories, filled with the ghosts of betrayal and the bitter taste of broken promises.
I stumbled back outside, past the same homeless veteran on the steps, and tumbled into the first E train that was headed downtown.
During the subway ride back, I was in a daze. When I finally got off at my stop, the coldness of the New York autumn – which was colder than winter in most states – assaulted me so sharply that it hurt.
But I didn’t care. I needed it. The pain across my chilled face was the only thing in the world that still felt real to me.
I needed something real, because my world had just come crashing down around my ears; but all around me nothing seemed to have changed.
I was surrounded by the same bodegas, the same little coffee shops, and the same mass of anonymous people walking the streets on either side of me. It was as if everything remained the same – as if my carefully planned future hadn’t just been cruelly snuffed out.
All those years I’d spent with Jason. Our love together – the laughs and tears.
They were lies. All lies.
I’d stormed out of the apartment I shared with Jason, and didn’t have anywhere else to go. That’s how I ended up taking the subway back to the same office I always returned to – the place I’d spent more time in over the last ten years than even my own home.
Ten years building our… No, my future now.
Just like outside, in the lobby of the office block nothing has changed. The world is unaware that it has come crashing down around my ears. The same security guard I always pass gives me the same respectful nod he always does, and the same button in the elevator produces the same ‘ding’ as the door closes like it always does.
It all seems, sounds, smells the same…
Except now, everything has changed.
Now, everything I worked for is gone. I’ve built a future and it’s been snuffed out.
The doors open with a cheerful ding.
Marissa, our lovely secretary, greets me with a smile. It’s hard to look at her right now. It’s not her fault. The bubbly blonde has no idea that her age alone reminds me of the images I can’t push out of my head – of Joshua, buried balls-deep inside that barely-legal slut.
Marissa’s father founded this law firm – but no one can claim she got the position at the front desk out of nepotism. She applied for the position under a fake name, beat out the other candidates at an interview in which nobody knew her, and won the position fair and square. Marissa didn’t reveal her true identity until after she had the job.
“How did Joshua react?”
Just like with everyo
ne else – the homeless veteran, the security guard downstairs, even the damn elevator – she has no idea that my world has just been destroyed.
I stop in my tracks.
It takes me too long to figure out the meaning of Marissa’s cheerful question. My mind is usually sharp as a whip, but right now I feel like I’m in a daze.
“He… He was ecstatic.”
It wasn’t a lie. I remembered the sounds Joshua was making when I walked in on him – on them. He was in ecstasy, alright – he never made those sounds with me.
I remembered the noises he’d uttered, and then I remembered the words – when he’d turned to confront me, the sweat dripping from his brow, stinking with the sweat from his passion with another woman.
“Eight months,” he’d said.
That’s what hurts the most. Eight months of Joshua telling me he’s working the same, long hours as I was – to get his freelance media and marketing company off the ground.
“Off the ground.”
It’s been on the ground for the last ten years – and it stayed there no matter how much money I poured into it. All my friends judged me for staying with Joshua, but I’d always thought that when we’d have kids, he’d be the perfect dad. There was something so youthful and vibrant about Joshua that kept drawing me in.
Like a moth to flame.
A sickening fist forms in my stomach – as though someone is playing with my insides. Of those thousands of dollars I kept giving Joshua every few months, how much went towards his business…
…and how much towards his little, teenage princess?
Oblivious to my thoughts, Marissa listens to my words - and brightens up even more, if that’s even possible.
“I’m sooo happy for you, Aubrey! And listen, since you’re back in the office already, your first meeting as a partner starts in five minutes. I… My God, this is so embarrassing… But, Aubrey… You inspire me. You made partner at thirty-two! That takes so much hard work and determination! It’s such an honor working with you.”
Marissa speaks so earnestly – her bright, red cheeks flushed with the embarrassment of telling me how much she looks up to me.
Marissa means the words well enough, but they twist the knife into my wound. On the outside? I have it all. One the inside, I have nothing. I force myself to smile.
“That’s very kind of you. You’re going to take the corporate world by storm.” I force back my petty annoyance at her tender age. Marissa has the same drive as me – and the advantage of youth. She’s going to grow into a powerful force in the business world – and after walking in on Joshua, I feel a momentary pang of jealousy – worried that she’ll achieve the same dreams I just watched crumble around me…
But that’s not fair, so I reluctantly utter my sincere compliment, and it makes her light up.
That’s all the reward I need. Despite the pain I’m going through, I will not take it out on her.
I leave Marissa and walk the hall to my office. The second I close the door, I crumple to the floor. Silent sobs wrack my body.
My future was snuffed out. I still can’t believe it. Life presses in on me, and my office feels like it’s growing smaller by the second, closing in.
I’ve spent the last eight months since the doctor told me I was infertile feeling like less of a woman – inferior, somehow, as if my inability to bear a biological child was all that defined my worth.
Joshua had told me over and over that it was fine. He kept talking about adoption, and about how there are so many children in need of loving parents like we’d planned to be...
But then the truth came out. All my eighty-hour work-weeks and my finely-tuned legal mind meant nothing to Joshua.
Over the last eight months, I’d shifted what I wanted. I imagined adopting a child whose real parents would have no idea of the gift they’d scorned – or of how the child they’d abandoned would be the light to bring me from the darkness.
I’d imagined being a mother – of a future filled with laughter and joy. Christmas presents. First reports cards. First steps.
Oh, God. It’s all gone!
I clench my fists so hard my fingernails dig into my palms. The pain centers me – reminding me of similarly dark days during high-school and college, in which I’d taken a Swiss Army Knife to my thighs and carved myself with the tip of the razor-sharp blade. The intense, but controllable pain would take me out of the stress – if only for a minute or two…
…but it left disgusting marks on my legs. Thin white scars that I hate to look at to this day.
“I won’t fall apart,” I promise myself, my voice raw.
I try to ground myself of thinking about the first time I went into a courtroom, as a junior lawyer.
I had a full-blown panic attack that day. My heart hammered, and I thought I was going to die. Through the grace of God, the panic happened moments before a break in proceedings. I rushed to the bathroom, ignoring my colleagues, and hyperventilated for thirty minutes in the stall before I could finally compose myself.
Then I came back, and I won that case.
It still haunts me to this day. If that panic attack had hit me a minute earlier, I’d have lost all credibility – and my chance at a career.
A career that had now seen me make partner.
I pull myself up from the floor and fix my make-up in my handheld mirror. Seeing my own mascara-smeared face forces me to involuntarily compare myself to the woman I’d walked in on, moaning in my kitchen.
My logical brain kicks in.
When you go to the court, emotions are the enemy. Stress, fear, and anxiety? All of that will lose you a case. You need to be robotic. Precise. Controlled.
How did Aristotle define law? “Reason, free from passion.”
Trying to stick to that maxim, I intellectually work through all the legal ramifications of my separation with Joshua. He’ll argue that the combination of his work from home, his precarious financial situation, and the fact that he was the original renter of our apartment entitles him to the place. The judge will agree. Therefore, there’s no reason to fight for the only home I’ve known for the last decade.
Reason. Free from passion.
I must remember that. Live by it.
I reapply my lipstick and attend to my mascara. My battle armor is on. I fix my hair, make myself presentable, and leave my office for the partners’ meeting.
I’m a minute late, and I take my seat to polite, reserved applause at my new position in the firm. It isn’t every day that a new partner is recognized – and never before one as young as me.
I sit at the boardroom table – the place I’ve been working towards for the last ten years. I see myself reflected, mirrored in the sallow faces sitting all around me. The five other partners, all male, range from mid-forties to their early-seventies; with hair ranging from bald to ashen white.
Sitting amongst them, I feel decidedly unfeminine.
It’s ironic. I should be in my moment of triumph. The men I’ve looked up to for the last decade are now my peers. I envisioned this moment through every long hour I’ve worked into the night, through all the friends I’ve sacrificed. It’s sustained me as I abandoned my social life… Then my activism…
…and now, even my relationship.
For this.
Now that I triumphed, success is empty. The betrayal sits heavy in my soul.
“Please excuse me,” I say, interrupting my first partners’ meeting almost as soon as I’ve sat down to it.
I recluse myself. Earlier this morning, I’d never have imagined slinking out of a partners’ meeting – let alone my first.
But I do. I leave quickly, my heels clicking against the floor as I walk, in a daze, towards the elevator.
Marissa gives me a confused look as the doors shut with a ‘ding’.
I exit the building into the bustle of New York, finding delicious anonymity in the busy sidewalks. Here, I’m just another career girl - making her way in the Big City.
; No one who sees me can guess that I’m a failure – as a girlfriend, a lawyer, and worst of all…
…as a woman.
Partner by 32.
Married by 33.
Two beautiful kids by 36.
Those were the goalposts I’d built my life upon.
The rest was fluff – where I lived, where I shopped, how I dressed. I’d always imagined I’d figure that out once I got there.
A dog, maybe… I’d thought that far ahead – although I’d never liked the idea of cooping one up in a New York City apartment.
I shake my head and look around.
Immediately – trained by my criminal justice degree, law school background, and passing the bar - my mind starts focusing instead on the seemingly inane details of my surroundings:
I focus on a woman’s hat. The crook of a man’s nose. My attention is taken by a floating grocery bag, discarded and used. In a courtroom, these are all clues…
But out here? They’re distractions.
But they cover up the pressure boiling up in me.
Once again, I’m brought back to my first case – when the panic attack had almost cost me everything. I feel like I’m about to explode just like that again – my conscious mind rebelling at the shock of my new reality.
Then, suddenly, a crackling sound makes me turn my head.
One of New York’s many dark alleyways stretches off to my right. People walk past me – grunting irritably as they have to walk around me – and I just feel like a stone in a river; changing the teeming flow in my own minute, meaningless way.
Yet I stand there, and look.
