by Vi Voxley
Zar
Alien Raiders' Brides
Vi Voxley
Contents
A Little Taste…
Copyright
1. Ashley
2. Zar
3. Ashley
4. Zar
5. Ashley
6. Ashley
7. Zar
8. Ashley
9. Ashley
10. Zar
11. Ashley
12. Zar
13. Zar
14. Ashley
15. Zar
16. Ashley
17. Ashley
18. Zar
19. Zar
20. Ashley
21. Ashley
22. Ashley
23. Zar
24. Zar
25. Ashley
26. Zar
27. Ashley
28. Zar
29. Ashley
30. Ashley
31. Zar
32. Ashley
Epilogue
Also by Vi Voxley
Rhys: Alien Raiders' Brides Excerpt
About the Author
Thank you for reading!
A Little Taste…
"I know who you are," Ashley said quietly, making sure no trace of desire slipped into her voice.
"Do you?" Zar asked, looking rather amused. "You don't seem very afraid."
Trying to ignore how smiling made the harbinger look incredibly sexy, Ashley replied:
"You must excuse my manners for not greeting you with the proper amount of horrified screaming."
The way Zar's lips spread into a wide smirk told her that hadn't been the cleverest of responses. She'd broken her own rule. Didn't she plan on not drawing the attention of any high-ranking Nayanor?
Then Zar moved so fast Ashley only saw a blur of him. He let go of Felicia and jumped over their makeshift cover with a leap that made her believe he could fly or at least float through air. As the other warriors caught Felicia and pulled her out of the room, Ashley found herself in Zar's impossibly strong grip.
She had only a second to look up into his dark eyes burning with desire before he claimed her lips with passion that left her knees weak. Ashley tried to fight the harbinger and herself both, ultimately losing to both as she couldn't prevent herself from enjoying the kiss.
It was impossible to.
Being kissed by Zar made Ashley feel like she was on fire, from head to toe. The lips on hers were demanding and firm, yet he didn't hurt her. Instead, butterflies beat their wings in her chest as she had to catch herself from responding to the kiss, melting into the soft touch of Zar's lips on hers. When he slipped a tongue into her mouth, Ashley moaned before she could stop herself.
With a chuckle, Zar pulled back, still holding her in his arms.
"What's your name, female?" he asked.
"Ashley," she replied, knowing there was no benefit in trying to play it hard.
Gaining Zar's trust was the only way she could ever hope to see home again, even if she couldn't have landed a more difficult task if she tried.
"Ashley," Zar repeated and the sound of her name on his tongue gave her goosebumps. "You are mine now."
Not for long, Ashley thought as the warlord led her away from the lost station.
Copyright © 2017 Vi Voxley
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Zar
Alien Raiders' Brides
All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be used, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means by anyone but the purchaser for their own personal use. This book may not be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of Vi Voxley. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material is prohibited without the express written permission of the author.
Cover © Jack of Covers
1
Ashley
"Attention, all personnel! We are under attack! The Nayanors are coming for us! I repeat, the Nayanors are coming!"
It was the dead of the night when the raid ships came.
That wasn't surprising in the least. In fact, it was so unsurprising that Ashley Donovan spent a good long while sitting at her guard post and looking at the ships growing larger on the screen facing her. With her heavy fur boots carelessly propped up on the pristine console table in front of her, the senior technician of the Arctic Research Station No. 26 felt a peculiar calm.
It didn't fit the dire situation in the slightest, judging by the harsh look of the young woman fidgeting in her seat next to her. Around them, the alarms they'd set off were blaring.
Ashley knew they wouldn't do them any damn good, but it was protocol. Up to that point in her life, following protocol had been pretty important.
"Ash?" asked Felicia, looking like a roly-poly doll. "We should do something! How can you just sit there and look on!?"
"What do you suggest we do?" Ashley asked calmly. "It's not like we can come up with a solution in the next five minutes that the entire Galactic Union hasn't been able to solve so far."
"At least we'd be doing something," Felicia shot back at her, frowning. "Instead of giving our best impression of sitting ducks."
Ashley nodded, her eyes fixed on the screens where the Nayanor ships were continuing their descent right toward their station. She could see her own reflection too – long chestnut brown hair tied up in a neat bun not to get in the way, clear bluish-gray eyes. She wore a white coat to shield her from the cold, hiding her curves and making her look like a marshmallow instead.
"Don't get me wrong," she told her bristling companion. "If you can suggest anything useful and proactive, I'm all ears. All I'm saying is that I don't see any reason in running around the station, screaming my head off."
She pointed to the screens showing the complex of the station. People everywhere were trying their best to take cover or hide or prepare to fight as befit their position and rank.
As well as their gender.
What was going on didn't qualify as an epitome of equality, but of course Nayanors tended to have that effect on people. They had a very black-and-white view of the world when it came to the planets they targeted. Females were treasure and males were obstacles in their way. The crew was acting accordingly to that.
"Where are they all running to is what I'm asking?" Ashley went on, ignoring how her pulse was speeding up as the sleek raiding ships kept getting clearer on the screens. "There is absolutely no reason why one section of the station should be safer than the other. Even we can't tell where the bastards are going to land and you know as well as I do it won't matter much.
"Say what you will about Nayanors – they are thorough."
Looking at Felicia, Ashley felt slightly bad about what she'd said. The blonde, blue-eyed beauty couldn't have been a bigger target for the raiders if she had a red mark painted on her back. One of those savages was going to turn out to be Felicia's fated mate, clubbing her over the head and dragging her to his cave, or at least that was the general concept.
Nayanors didn't actually live in caves and they were far more intelligent than Neanderthals. Which begged the question as to what had gone so terribly wrong in their society to make them think kidnapping women was okay? Even if the whole fated mates thing implied that the couples were going to end up together no matter what.
Personally I blame th
e parents. Or was it education? I can never remember. What happened to good old-fashioned dating anyway? I never signed up for the medieval times to make a comeback through intergalactic travel.
"Sorry, Felicia," she murmured. "I didn't mean that. It's not hopeless. It never is. We've had our briefings, we know Nayanors can be beaten if we're very lucky and very smart about it."
It was getting more difficult to look at the screens as well as keep up the semi-happy charade for Felicia's sake. She certainly didn't appreciate what Ashley was trying to do, but there was an ugly grain of truth to it all.
There was nowhere for them to hide, nowhere to run. If some genius in engineering didn't accidentally get hit by lightning and invent a teleportation device in the next few minutes, they were utterly trapped.
Taking their chances with the Arctic wilderness didn't even cross Ashley's mind. It wasn't the olden days of Terra, after all, where the worst concern would have been snow and polar bears. The Arctic of their time was a far more dangerous place. Bad enough to make the Nayanors seem like the better option.
It was a stretch, though. The warrior race wasn't known for gentleness or hospitality, or mercy for that matter. The tall, broad-shouldered and massively strong brutes with silver hair roamed the Galactic Union in search of females for their male-dominated home world no one had been able to locate. Their incredible power was unfairly coupled with smooth, bronze skin as tough as scales, making them very hard to kill or even wound.
Not just that – for all intents and purposes, the Nayanors were practically immortal. All warriors, and there were only warriors in their species, had a square, sapphire diadon – a mechanical device with a diamond-shaped glowing mineral in the center – planted in the middle of their chests. It kept them alive far past the point where they should have died, ticking like a second heart.
The Union's best guess was that it somehow prolonged their lives as well, making them devastating enemies.
There were tears beading in the corners of Felicia's eyes. Ashley took her feet off the console table and pulled her friend in for what she hoped was a comforting hug. Felicia began weeping, clinging to her like Ashley had any answers or anything at all to say to make their fate sound any less depressing.
"Being a sex slave isn't that bad, at least we’d get laid regularly", she tried in her head.
The quality of her humor really was going down the drain as fast as the Nayanor ships were approaching.
Ashley kept her mouth shut, patting Felicia on the back gently. As much as she knew she'd been right about no part of the station being safe, perhaps there was some comfort in running around. Feeling like you were doing something to save yourself had to be nearly as good as actually achieving that, right?
"Come," she told Felicia. "We're going to get ourselves some guns and build a barricade in front of this door. It will be a bottleneck for those silver-haired assholes. We can start picking them off and make a stand like you wanted to."
Felicia raised her blue eyes to Ashley, filled to the brink with desperate hope. She looked like a drowning little fool who had just glimpsed a rope on the surface without realizing it wasn't attached to anything.
"Will it help?" she asked. "Will it keep us safe until the army gets here?"
No. At best we might be able to take a few of them down before we're abducted like all the other unlucky women they've taken. In all the other stations and cities, on all the other worlds.
"We can try," Ashley said encouragingly, intent not to lie straight to Felicia's face. "Come now. Wipe your face, don't let them see you cry. I bet that's not a turn-off for a Nayanor, but if I was you, I wouldn't want them to see my fear."
"Aren't you afraid?" Felicia whispered. "I don't understand how you can be so cool and collected about all this. We will never see our homes again, Ash. We will be treated like pets. I... I almost think I'd rather die than live with them."
Ashley slapped her.
Not hard, just enough to get her attention and snap Felicia out of the self-deprecating misery that had suddenly taken a hold of her. It wasn't like her friend at all. They'd always had fun together, to the point where their commanding officer Captain Reed had to tell them to at least try and act professionally while on duty.
"Don't say that," Ashley said, emphasizing every word. "Make sure I never hear you say something that dumb again. Yes, this is bad. Yes, of course I'm afraid too. But no matter what, this is not the end. You know Nayanors don't hurt females. We are like precious stones to them, in every sense of the word. They hunt us down without mercy but once they have us, they'll keep us safer than we ever could be.
"We can use that. We can fight back, escape. The Galactic Union might stumble upon their ships or their elusive home world. Who knows? Maybe tomorrow is the day when they're brought to justice at last. We don't know that. All we can do is not give up.
"Are you with me, Felicia?"
Slowly but surely, her friend nodded, starting to look like herself again.
A terrible blast rocked the station and they could hear screams as the ceiling above them shook like it was going to break and bury them. Ashley knew the Nayanors wouldn't let it happen. They weren't that careless, not as long as there could still be women inside the building they were raiding.
"They're here," she said. "Let's hurry. If this should go badly, hope you don't get picked by one of their harbingers. Those bloodthirsty creatures. Look for kind eyes."
The smile on Felicia's lips told Ashley she was finally starting to appreciate her hopeless attempt to alleviate the mood.
They slipped out of the guard room as the station rocked again.
Kind eyes, Ashley thought as they hurried back after hastily arming themselves. Good joke. Gods willing, we'll be the fateds of someone who doesn't matter much.
2
Zar
Terra.
It was a curious little planet. Zar had been looking forward to raiding it. The other harbingers, the leader of the Nayanor fleets, told him it was a world worth visiting.
"Move out!" he bellowed to his warriors. "This could be the night when you find your fated!"
The men rushed to the station, the excitement plain on their faces. Zar could feel it himself as he always did, hoping that fate would reward him with a female at last.
A human female would have been a special gift.
Overall, the Terrans were not a noteworthy species. The Galactic Union covered a vast space and there were always those who were excelling at what the Terrans barely managed.
Their defenses, for example, were practically insulting. Zar had had to convince his men to raid the planet in the first place. There was no challenge to it, but as their harbinger, it was Zar's duty to find the warriors both mates and fun.
Fun was what Terra was lacking. The mates, however... That was the reason why he was there. His fellow harbingers had told Zar that Terran females were something else.
He couldn't wait to find a suitable female for himself at last, one deserving of the honor.
I have been without a true mate for too long. One worthy of pledging to, worthy of carrying my sons.
As he walked through a rough snowstorm toward the entrance to the station, Zar allowed himself a tinge of excitement. He'd grown tired of bedding females who left no impression on him, whether they were of his own race or from other worlds.
Zar hungered for more, someone who could make his heart race.
Today is the day. I can feel it.
"Harbinger!" Roagh called, saluting and falling into step with him. "The haul is good. We've already secured several dozen healthy females. The healers are pleased with their condition. They are ready to bear children."
"Good," Zar said, looking ahead where the gates of the station had been blown wide open.
The storm was raging inside as well now but it made little difference. What happened to the station after they were gone didn't interest Zar.
"Take the captured females to the ships," he ordered, his
deep voice carrying easily over the howling of the storm. "Be careful. They are fragile. They're not used to this weather. Gods willing they will survive the long night of Luminos.
"If a single one of them is hurt when I examine them later, I will have your head, Roagh."
The captain saluted again and rushed away.
Zar looked around. The weather that would have killed the Terrans was nothing more than an inconvenience for him. The snow obscured his vision, but little more. Dressed in his dark green armor, the harbinger barely felt the cold.
The station before him was filled with screaming. A futile means of coping with terror. It was advisable to put the pitiful creatures out of their misery quickly.
Alone, Zar entered the station. If Terrans had been even close to being formidable opponents, he would have been the first man in and the last man out. As it stood, it offended him to fight people more helpless than Nayanor children. He was fine with leaving most of the legwork to his warriors who had not yet earned the honor of rank.
Still, it was a pity to leave a world without bloodying his blade.
"Harbinger," his comm link called. "There is some resistance north of your position."
"On my way, Roagh," Zar replied with a grin on his face.
The Gods provide.
Walking through empty corridors, passing the occasional corpse of the Terran males, Zar was amused by his second-in-command. There was no resistance the warrior couldn't have dealt with himself, that was for damn sure. Roagh was simply looking to give his commander some worthy opponents, even if he had to reach to the bottom of the barrel for that.
Nothing on Terra could have matched the might of his raiding party. Not even the army rushing their way, hopelessly far.
Nayanors would be long gone before the Terran reinforcements reached the station. Zar refused to risk losing the females they'd captured. They would be back soon now that they'd discovered this little planet almost by accident a few years ago.
