Hero's Bride (Alien SciFi Romance) (Celestial Mates Book 7)

by C. J. Scarlett

  They went at it like that all night until they fell asleep on different ends of Diego’s bed. Andrea would fuck him, but she couldn’t bring herself to cuddle with him after. He was still a liar, still made her angry. He was still doing the awful, dangerous things she’d yelled at him for days ago. He was still… something else entirely underneath his skin and in the very instincts of his core. So she kept away and swatted at his hands at the one attempt he made to touch her after he’d reached out for her. Never mind that those hands had just been all over her breasts, inside her. That was impersonal, anyone could do that. But she wouldn’t fall asleep in bed with just anyone, and right now he wasn’t one of those people.

  Chapter 5

  Andrea’s mother had always told her that life had a way of making sure that when it rained, it completely poured. All bad things came in twos and threes. She never just had a bad morning or one bad day; it was a stretch of events designed to test her patience to the most she possibly could take before she just broke down completely. And, for Andrea, that was the police knocking down at Diego’s door at six a.m. the next morning.

  “What the hell?” she murmured out, groggily, her throat still constricted from sleep.

  “We need to leave,” he said, whispering inches from her face. “They don’t know we’re in here, but I’m willing to bet they have a warrant.”

  “Oh, what the hell.”

  Right. Everything came crashing back down. Diego was a felon, a criminal and Andrea had made the poor decision of going to his apartment for a booty call the night before. Now his antics had finally caught up with him. The men on the other side of that door had guns and Tasers and badges that said they could do whatever the hell it was that they wanted if they so desired. Diego was a shifter, and a non-white male to boot. There was no way anyone would listen to stories of brutality when he had so much stacked against him.

  At that moment, she could kind of understand why he didn’t tell her about his nature. Not that she was just anyone, but there was a certain amount of fear to everything he was. He was the son of Mexican immigrants, he grew up poor, and he was a shifter. Very little about his existence had promise and his was the exact type of demographic that ended up in the news as a youth suicide. For him to get this far in life was a miracle, in many ways.

  “So, how are we getting away from the cops in your apartment with one entrance?” she asked, getting out of bed with several huffs, looking around for her clothes. He gave her a desperate, annoyed look as she slipped her legs in her pants, one at a time. “I’m not going anywhere naked, don’t even think about it.”

  He rolled his eyes and walked away. She would have taken it even slower, made it that much more stressful on him, if she wasn’t totally implicated in all this too. The emotions of last night were gone. She was back to being incredibly angry with him. Go figure.

  “Fire escape,” he said.

  “And you don’t think the police thought of that too?”

  “Not if they don’t think we’re here. So far, we’ve been quiet. Keep it that way.”

  She bristled at him giving her orders, but kept it to herself. He had a point. The longer they stayed quiet and anonymous in the apartment, the easier their escape would be. That didn’t mean, of course, that the escape would be easy at all.

  Diego moved to the window with care, avoiding the famously creaky board in his kitchen that he claimed every week he would fix and then promptly ignored each time. She stepped over it as well, moving with as much grace as she could muster for herself with how tired and frazzled she still was. She followed behind him where he gently worked at unlocking the window. It would squeak when they opened it, there was no doubt about that. So once he got it unlocked and lifted, they would have a very short window to jump out and get down the fire escape before the police realized what they were doing.

  One lock clicked open. Then the other. Now Diego turned to look at her as if asking for permission. This was the last moment she could be passive. If he opened that window and if she crawled out after him, she would be an accessory, a guilty party. She’d be abetting a criminal and obstructing justice. They’d probably find several other sentences to throw at her before they were done. It would be nothing compared to Diego’s life sentence for his terrorist activities. But she’d get a very short end of an already crappy deal. She also had a choice here, to turn back and give herself up. If she stepped forward and said she had nothing to do with it, that she was willing to open the door, give them any information they needed, cooperate fully, she’d probably go free. He’d lied to her, she hadn’t known what was going on. She could easily claim she didn’t come forward with information before because she was scared. She could easily get free of this, go back to work, continue her life and budding career.

  But God help her she actually felt something for that man looking at her with pleading eyes, trying to make a getaway as a wanted terrorist. She finally understood those women who stuck by serial killers or married death-row prisoners. Sometimes she just couldn’t help who she loved, who her heart decided she would risk her life and livelihood for. She wouldn’t give herself up and she couldn’t bring herself to abandon him. Not now.

  God, she hated herself. She nodded. He turned back to the window and lifted his hands, pulling the window up with him. The dreaded whine from the ungreased window frame came after about five seconds of movement. It never seemed to be a bother in all the years that Andrea had dealt with it. Sure, it could be annoying and rouse someone from a nap. Now it was her worst nightmare, her biggest enemy. As soon as it went off, it sounded like that fabled shot heard around the world must have.

  It went off. And then they were out the window. Diego went first, scrambling through it with such grace, she was sure this wasn’t the first time that he’d made an escape like this, which didn’t exactly comfort her but she ignored it, for now. She followed after. She wasn’t exactly quick or good at it, but she was small and limber enough that she could move through the gap without too much trouble. On the other end, he waited with open arms to pull her through. Once her feet were firmly planted on the metal grate of the fire escape, his hand stayed on hers.

  The banging from the front door was loud and angry now. They’d heard. They yelled. Time to go.

  Diego pulled Andrea’s hand hard, yanking her arm and the rest of her body with it. They moved across the metal platform until they got to the first gap in the floor. He kicked at the ladder until it dropped. They moved down quickly to the second landing. One more to go. They performed the same ritual, kicking the ladder down and practically sliding down it to freedom below.

  Their luck, naturally, ran out at the last ladder. It was stuck.

  “Dammit,” Diego hissed, kicking at the ladder, but it refused to drop.

  “We’ll just jump,” Andrea said, shoving him out of the way and moving to the gap.

  “And break our legs?”

  “Maybe but we know if we stay here, we get arrested and go to jail for life.”

  He didn’t argue. She slid through the gap and hung down off the bottom rung, as far as she could go to the bottom. The fire escapes were designed to prevent anyone at ground level from reaching the bottom and crawling up. That left her with quite a bit of room between her and the ground, even as she hung at her most stretched and straight. She took a breath. She dropped.

  She didn’t break her legs. In fact, the only thing that really hurt was the brush burn from the sidewalk she could feel already working its way across the skin of her palm. She hadn’t exactly landed gracefully, but her feet were firmly planted on the solid concrete underneath. She took off, hearing a thud of Diego jumping down behind her. He yelled after her but she just kept running. She was running from a lot of things, more than just the police. Maybe she was even running from Diego. She wasn’t sure. She just knew it was like last night, running was the only thing that made her feel safe.

  So, she took off into the early morning air, making wind around herself as she move
d, legs already burning from the forced effort so early in the morning and without an ounce of calories in her system to help sustain her. Diego was still behind her, not far.

  “Andrea, stop!” he called.

  She didn’t. She was petrified. Her life had been turned completely upside down and she didn’t know what to do except run away from it. That’s what everyone did when things got rough. She ran away from her problems and didn’t look back at all. That was adulthood, right?

  Her great escape was cut short when Diego used the last of his energy to sprint up to her and launch. He tackled her. Now that hurt. She had a few more rashes from the ground thanks to that and turned around wildly ready to smack him for it, but he was on his back, huffing and puffing as his chest fought to get air in his lungs. He coughed quite a bit.

  “We’re safe,” he said. “You ran like a fucking bat outta hell.”

  “Yeah well, when it was clear I might go to jail for associations with a terrorist, I kind of gave myself a kick,” she said.

  He didn’t say anything, he just kept gasping for air, laying there on his back. He was never the athletic one and now she felt a little smug for all those times he made fun of her when she asked if he wanted to go with her for a run. Joke was on him now.

  “Well, that was an exciting wakeup call,” he said, rolling over to his side and pushing himself up.

  Andrea sprang to her feet. She dusted herself off and checked to make sure nothing looked permanently damaged. She’d have a far bit of scraping to explain to her friends and work, but for the most part, she was put together well. So, she started walking away.

  “Where are you going?” Diego asked from his spot on the ground, now struggling to get up.

  “Away,” she said. “We did our miraculous escape but now it’s time to go.”

  “But—wait—”

  “This wasn’t a make-up night, Diego,” she said. “I was angry and it manifested a little differently than how I imagined it in my head, but now we’re back to normal. It was a one-time thing. No breakfast the next morning or cuddles.”

  “You can’t just walk away.”

  She spited him by doing just that, moving down the street and away from him. Behind her, she heard him groan and force himself up to his feet. She heard him scrambling behind her, still out of breath, but now up to a standing position and trotting behind her. She rolled her eyes. This was exactly how things always went with him, persistent and hard to shake. He said it was a trait he inherited from his Mexican immigrant parents who had to toil every day to get the things they wanted. Andrea just thought it was his way of being frustrating.

  “Diego, I’ve got a lot to do today—”

  “This is more serious than just running from the cops because we got caught egging someone’s house,” he said, catching up to her and holding onto her shoulder tightly. “You won’t be able to just waltz back home.”

  “Why? It’s not like it was me they were after.”

  “It won’t take them long to connect the dots. They’ll look into my family, my relationships. One of the cops from today could have ID’d you.”

  She was very quickly losing her patience. She pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed loudly. “All right, what do you propose I do then, smart guy?”

  “Come with me,” he said. “I can take you somewhere safe. You want to leave after a while, we can. But at least give me the chance to get you somewhere safe.”

  She wasn’t in a position to argue.

  Chapter 6

  He led her across town. He insisted they move on foot because they would be harder to track. And where they were going required stealth. Andrea knew as soon as he said that she regretted going with him. This was just getting deeper and deeper into a hole she already dug for herself. She could still take off running, still get away from Diego and all the lunatic things she’d learned he was up to over the course of the past few days. Or she could dig deeper and see how far it all went. She knew very little about shifters, about their world, about their life.

  But was curiosity worth the price she could pay in the end? Plenty of people were curious about North Korea but that didn’t mean they went tunneling across the fence just to see what there was to see.

  “We’ll be there soon,” he said as they crossed yet another dirt road. They’d left the main street long ago.

  “That could mean literally anything.”

  “It means before next week, for sure.”

  “You’re an asshole.”

  She heard him snort and was sure she could even sense the roll of his eyes. But she ignored him. She was in the position of power here. She had less to lose if they got caught and he knew that. She wasn’t entirely willing to go to jail just to mess with him. But she also wasn’t above milking this for all it was worth.

  This was where the regret set in. This was where she cringed a little too much at how she had lost all sense of control and not only fell into bed with him. She completely pushed him into bed herself. She really couldn’t blame that on bad planning or even impulse. She’d made a poor choice. He wasn’t about to pull at that thread though and she was grateful, but she’d never show it.

  When they finally stopped walking, it was in front of an old shed. Fantastic. She stood there with her arms crossed and sighed loudly while Diego walked forward and performed an odd sort of knock on the door. Then, like something out of The Goonies, the door opened. Someone awaited inside. A gatekeeper.

  “You know we don’t allow outsiders.”

  “There’s been a situation.”

  “Damien won’t like it.”

  “He’d like it even less if we let her get away after what I have to tell him.”

  Let her get away. That was a phrase that Andrea didn’t exactly appreciate. Diego had taken on a different tone, a different way of carrying himself here. He stood up straight, spoke louder. He didn’t shrink away as he had with her. They were outside a hideout of his shifter buddies. That much was clear. This certainly was digging much deeper into something incredibly dangerous.

  “This won’t be on me if he’s pissed,” the man in the shed said.

  “I know. If he’s pissed, we’ll both end up dead and all you’ll have to worry about is burying our bodies.”

  Nope. Definitely not something that Andrea was interested in. She wanted to back away. She almost stepped back to move and do just that. But then Diego was right there and the man in the shed looked at her as well. She was trapped under their gaze. She had no idea what could happen if she ran. Maybe they’d have guard dogs. Maybe these guys were the guard dogs. Maybe instincts completely took over when Diego let out his wolf. Maybe the last thing she would ever see would be the shine of his white teeth, the bare of his gums, the smell of raw meat on his breath, and the look in the eyes of a man who didn’t recognize her at all.

  She stepped forward because she had to. She had no choice anymore. Maybe she never did.

  #

  The shed, like any hideout, led down into the ground. They’d dug out a network of tunnels, the entrance to which was covered by the shed. They walked into the small structure and met with a hole in the ground attached to a ladder. They made Diego go down first. Then the gate man looked at her and nodded sharply for her to follow, closing and locking the shed door behind them.

  It was the descent into the underworld. She was poor Persephone, dragged down by Hades into his underground world and winter would sprout up on the earth above while it waited for her return. The question was, of course, if spring would ever return after this.

  Damien.

  She knew that name but she dared not trick herself into thinking there was a chance that it was the same one she read about. That man was terrifying and powerful even in YouTube videos. She could only imagine what he would be capable of in person. She swallowed down a tacky gulp in her throat.

  The tunnels were carved out as if by a large animal. They were lined with various types of lights: fairy lights, emergency lights, virtua
lly anything they bought at a store and strung up on the walls. She wondered how far it went, how deep and complex they were capable of digging. But they were shifters. Of course, they could tunnel themselves something big and hidden. She heard the claw reach of a dragon could measure over a foot. She imagined it as a shovel and it wasn’t that hard to imagine.

  She tried so many times to catch Diego’s eye. She had so many questions she wanted to voice but she was so afraid that if she so much as coughed, then it would be the last sound she ever made. She had gone from her smug lording over him to completely reliant on his good graces and friendship with her. His protection might be the only thing that would rescue her from God knew what down below. She was more than out of her element. She was in another world entirely. This wasn’t a place she was welcome to nor was it friendly to her. She was a stranger in a strange land. Who knew that strange land would be right in her own backyard?

  They led them into a room, segmented off by thick curtains that pulled to cover the opening. That gave Andrea a little bit of comfort. She wasn’t so completely locked in. It wouldn’t be her tomb. Nothing about the curtain stopped anyone from hurting her or killing her. But, in her mind at least, there was an escape. Though she knew, realistically, there was absolutely no escape for her. If she wanted to try to run, they would take her down. They would shoot her, maybe someone would maul her.

  But a curtain was better than a steel door.

  They were brought into the small room with garish lights and nothing in it except two chairs sitting in the middle of the space as if they had been waiting for them. They walked in and their escort left without a word, snapping the curtain shut behind him. They were left to sit there alone. Diego immediately dropped into the seat, but Andrea was less than willing to so quickly turn over.