Noble Monster: A Scifi Alien Abduction Romance Standalone (Jannan Raiders Book 1)

by Zena Zion

  A few of the beast-men looked up as she descended, and she saw them sweep their eyes over her lasciviously. One of them was the big, yellow-eyed man who had entered a bidding war for her with Kaelon.

  Dressed in a velvety black tunic and breeches, his golden hair spilling around his face in a mane, he kept his eyes on her as she paused on the stairs to look around for Kaelon.

  She finally found her would-be owner in the midst of a knot of admirers and yes-men at the far end of the room. She would have to go through the crowd to get to him. Damn it.

  She gamely went down, and walked around the edge of the room, trying to get to him without cutting through the dance floor. Hopefully, the big idiot wouldn't have anything more for her to do tonight besides make sure that his wine-cup stayed full.

  She didn't realize that the yellow-eyed man was following her until a huge hand closed on her arm and yanked her to a stop. “Why so unfriendly?” a raspy voice hissed mockingly in her ear.

  She turned, struggling to pull her arm away and getting nowhere. “I must join my master,” she said in a loud voice that she hoped would embarrass the stranger. Instead, as she turned to him, she saw him smirking in a predatory way as he stared straight into her cleavage.

  “Oh no, I don't think so. In fact, I think that you're coming with me. He can go without a cup-bearer for an hour or so while I have fun with you.”

  God damn it, Miriam said this crap wasn't supposed to happen. “You are mistaken, sir,” she said in a voice with a razor's edge to it, once again, keeping her voice loud so that it could be heard over the music, and would hopefully draw someone's attention.

  “It is my duty to be by my Lord's side for the duration of this gathering. Nor would he be particularly happy to see someone else laying hands on his property.” she hated calling herself Kaelon's property, but it was the only defense that she had against this repulsive male.

  He let out a laugh. “I don't see him coming to stop me, do you?” Without waiting for her answer, he turned and started dragging her toward the stairs while she cried out a protest.

  Nobody was even bothering to do more than glance in their direction. No one was intervening. She tried to look back at where Kaelon was still holding court, but of course, he was oblivious and useless. She started struggling in earnest, losing one of her shoes as he dragged her up the stairs. She knew where the blond was taking her, and she knew what he planned to do to her as soon as he got there. And no one was doing anything.

  He laughed as she struggled and fought, shrugging off the blows from her free hand. “Mmm, feisty. I like that. I'm going to enjoy making you bleed. Kaelon has gotten entirely too big for his armor, and it's about time that I cut him down to size by breaking something of his.”

  “How about I break something of yours, you piece of shit?” She lunged at him and tried to knee him in the balls.

  In response, he shoved her away and then backhanded her hard, bouncing her against the stair railing. The band simply played on. The conversations continued uninterrupted.

  Her abduction and his announcement that he planned to rape her went completely without reaction, as if it was normal. “You are all a bunch of fucking savages!” she screamed at the top of her lungs.

  The stranger blinked at her wide-eyed for a moment--and then burst out laughing and started dragging her upward again. “You're not wrong,” he chuckled. “But why be civilized when being a savage is so much more fun?”

  She kept fighting him, very aware of the blood running down from the corner of her mouth. “You'll have to kill me before I'll let you rape me.”

  “No I won't,” he replied casually. “All I'll have to do is beat you until the fight goes out of you. And that's double fun for me. Yes, a little entertainment, and then I'll empty my balls into you.

  Perhaps, I'll put a baby in your belly. Once Kaelon finds out about it, he'll probably discard you. I'll be able to pick you up at a bargain price, and then I'll get to do this to you every night--”

  “Torvin!” shouted a familiar voice, icicles of rage dripping off of his tone. She looked down, and saw Kaelon standing at the foot of the stairs, surrounded by four soldiers in his black livery.

  All four carried silver pulse rifles, which they aimed straight at the stranger who had her by the arm. “Let her go. Now. Or I will hang your corpse off of my battlements for the scavenger birds.”

  Torvin’s response was to yank her back against him, laughing. “You can't have them shoot, or they'll hit her. I'm leaving with her. There's nothing you can do.”

  “The hell there isn't!” Irina started struggling again, despite the iron grip on her arm. “Just shoot this piece of shit, Kaelon. Forget about me! You think I want to live in this hellhole? Give the damn order! Shoot us both!”

  Torvin stiffened, eyes widening in shock at her demand. “Quiet, you!” He struck her in the side of the head, leaving her ears ringing.

  Kaelon responded to the attack on her with a thunderous growl. Suddenly, his entire body blurred and expanded. His black armor seemed to creep over his whole body, a pair of leathery wings unfolded from his back, and his form shifted until he stood on four taloned feet and raised a narrow, scaled head on a sinuous neck. He had become a dragon.

  Irina stared as he leaped up and latched on to the grillwork stair enclosure bare feet from where they stood. His head snaked inside and darted forward, straight toward the arm that was holding her hostage.

  Torvin let her go and ducked back just before Kaelon's fangs could meet in his arm. He snarled himself, light brown fur starting to cover his skin. But before he could complete his transformation, Kaelon inhaled and looked at him very pointedly.

  The yellow-eyed man froze, suddenly a thousand times more intimidated than when he had simply had the guns on him. Apparently, he didn't like fire very much.

  Kaelon nodded, and let out his breath through his nose, two thin streams of smoke drifting up. “Leave my home and do not return,” he rumbled. “You are banished from my court.”

  The dragon stood guard over them until four of his soldiers came forward to lead Torvin out. Then he turned his glowing green eyes to Irina, and she was shocked to see that same look of worry in them.

  “Are you alright?” The creature asked in such a gentle voice that it put a lump in her throat.

  “Of course I'm not.” She had avoided crying in public so far on this planet. Right now, she knew that it was a near thing--simply because for once, one of the beast-men actually appeared to give a damn.

  “I am sorry,” he said suddenly, in a voice so soft that she almost didn't hear it. As she stared at him in astonishment, he jerked his head up toward the top of the stairs. “Go back to your chamber and take care of yourself. I can fetch my own wine.”

  Her eyes started stinging dangerously. “Thank you,” she murmured in a shaky voice. Then she turned and hurried up the stairs, eager to regain the safety of her small room.

  Uncollared Woman

  It took Irina an hour to pull herself together after her run-in with Kaelon’s predatory rival. She did cry, as soon as she was alone. Irina had never been the kind of person to let her suffering show.

  She was a product of the foster care system back on Earth Prime, and ever since her youngest days she had had to fight for everything she had, up to and including her doctorate. The opportunity to catalog alien flora and fauna many light years down the galactic arm from Earth had been a dream job for her.

  Six months ago, she had finished her biotech residency. Her new job with Galaxy Pharma was supposed to have been the start of a grand adventure. She was going to find and catalog biological materials capable of providing new treatments for diseases. She was going to make a name for herself, the way that she always had before: through sheer will, and a lot of hard work.

  And then the Janna Raiders had hit her transport ship on the way to her first job, and ruined everything.

  She cried in the shower pod, glad at least that the palace seemed to have a bott
omless supply of hot water. her arm was sore where Torvin had gripped it, And she knew she would have bruises tomorrow.

  But she had survived without being raped. She kept reminding herself of that fact every time the mental image of him leering down at her entered her head.

  The strangest part of all of it was that Kaelon himself had actually rescued her, and then apologized to her and sent her back to her room. You aren't supposed to have empathy. You're a beast-man. If you had empathy you wouldn't have bought me as a sex slave in the first place. You're not supposed to care. What the hell is your game? The act of kindness and protectiveness confused her utterly.

  After she finally managed to stop crying, she went to her wardrobe and search for something comfortable enough to recover in. She did have a robe, though she had never tried it on. It was made of some fuzzy substance that she suspected with real fur, despite being bright blue.

  She bundled into it and tied it around her waist, feeling herself relax a little bit as the fur brushed against her skin. It felt like a hug from some sort of friendly animal.

  A knock at the door alerted her. She figured that it was Miriam, and immediately called, “Come in!”

  The door slid open, and she blinked in shock as she saw Kaelon move somewhat hesitantly into the room. He was still wearing his polished armor, and in fact had a wine cup still in his hand. But what shocked her most was not just that he had decided to check in on her before the party was actually over.

  He had that worried look on his face again, and the first thing that he asked as the door slid closed behind him was, once again, “Are you alright?”

  She swallowed, her throat suddenly too tight for words, and nodded.

  “Had I known that that mongrel of a lion shifter still had designs on you, I would never have invited him to tonight's event.” He walked inside, keeping something resembling a respectful distance and settling into a chair across the room from where she sat on her bed.

  “It was never my intention to put you in danger.”

  “I guess I don't understand your criteria for keeping me safe. I'm your captive, remember? I'm here against my will.”

  He stiffened slightly, as if she had slapped him. “I know. But I...I do not understand how it is that I had to purchase you, and I had to bring you home, and why it is that I absolutely must keep you here, in spite of the fact that you reject me at every turn. This has never happened to me before.”

  “What are you going on about? Look. I don't just mean that I'm with you against my will. I mean that I'm on this planet against my will. I was supposed to be headed for the third planet from a star on the edge of the Crab Nebula, to catalog medicinal plants. The only reason that I'm not is that kidnappers from your planet intervened. Those kidnappers would not be grabbing human women out of the spacing lanes if people like you did not provide a market for the slaves they sell. So if you talk about how you absolutely have to be with me even if I reject you, do you have any idea how that sounds?”

  “No, I suppose not. I do not think that the translator does a very good job on certain concepts. I am simply trying to explain to you that my motivation is not to break you. It is not to use you. I have to be near you. I don't know why.” He laughed incredulously suddenly, startling her.

  “You are human, after all. We are genetically compatible on a basic level, but that doesn't explain how this could have happened.”

  “How what could have happened?” She was trying to keep the anger and skepticism out of her tone, since he seemed to actually be trying very hard to be nice to her.

  “On my world, true mates find each other instinctively. We only breed to humans to expand our genetic diversity, as our population is too small and we constantly risk inbreeding otherwise. But our greatest citizens and most powerful shape-shifters are always products of this instinctive mating with another member of our species. Yet...now something has changed.”

  He ran a big hand back through his wavy hair, face slightly tense. “The moment that I saw you, I knew that you the one I had been looking for. Somehow, you, a human, are meant to be my true mate.”

  She stared at him, a scowl on her face. “Look. I have no idea what you're talking about. All I know is, if you honestly think that this is true love, you are out of your mind once again. I am a kidnap victim. I have been held against my will. You are continuing to hold me against my will. What part of this is not translating properly? This is not how you treat someone you love. And if you think it is, once again. Out. Of. Your. Mind.”

  He sighed and looked ceiling-ward, a tight smile on his face. “Well, I can't blame you for feeling that way.” He sat back in his seat.

  “The truth is, I never gave much thought to what the slavers were doing. Most of us don't. We don't ask too many questions. We depend on them for new genetic material.”

  “You can get the same goddamn thing from a treaty, you hypocrite. It's just more convenient to you to kidnap us because it doesn't involve you taking any risks--or facing the music for your past crimes against my race.”

  His eyes widened slightly at her defiance and criticism, but after a moment, he simply nodded. “I suppose you are right. We were told things about humans by the slavers. You should know this. We were told that human females were naturally tractable. That you enjoyed serving. That you were trainable. That you made ideal slaves because it was not offensive to your egos to act as servants to others.”

  “And you believed that load of garbage?”

  “I didn't know. I inherited my father's servants when he died a few years back, and I've never actually purchased a slave of my own before. The servants are treated well, but I have very little interaction with any of them except for occasionally Miriam. Because everyone has always been obedient, I thought that what the slavers said was the truth.”

  She folded her arms across her breasts and looked him right in those emerald-colored eyes.

  “Let me ask you something. If you were kidnapped, taken away from everything you knew, stripped of all power and resources, made into a slave--made into a sex slave, with the right to your own body taken away, and subjected to pain and humiliation if you did not toe the line at all times, what would you do? Miriam can explain it to you better than I can.

  She's been forced to do this for twenty years, and she obeys because she knows that if she doesn't, she'll be killed. And that is why we're obedient. Because we want to survive. That’s why we give into this humiliating, awful life you bastards impose on us. Because it’s the only way we can live with a gun to our heads.”

  His expression had gone from surprised to utterly shocked, and a little bit horrified. “Then what you are saying is that a portion of our society depends on the misery of human beings.”

  She nodded slowly, a corner of her mouth tilted up. “Now you're starting to get it.” Deep breath.

  She had never actually expected to confront Kaelon and actually survive it. She had expected to simply goad him into being angry enough to push the button on her.

  “I'm guessing that your society is so significantly behind ours in terms of social and moral development that you don't even realize that rape is forcing a woman to have sex with you. Instead you gave me this crazy idea that the only way you could rape someone is if she belongs to another man.”

  “I'm not saying that it is not cruel to treat a woman in such a way. But women in our culture do not have ownership of themselves. They belong to men. Even the ones that are not slaves are daughters, and then they are wives. If Torvin had succeeded in forcing you to service him sexually, the offense would have been against me, as he intended. He was using you to attack me.”

  “Yeah, I get it. You primitives don't realize that women are people. You don't understand that we're your equals and that we deserve the same rights. You don't understand what it's like to have some asshole decide that he owns you, and then have another asshole decide what he's going to break you to piss off the first asshole. You know what?

  If he wants
to rape somebody and he wants to hurt you, then why doesn't he just try to rape you, huh? But no. Of course not. You've always got to drag some innocent woman into the middle of your rivalry bullshit. God, you people are sick.”

  She hadn't meant to start crying, but the the sheer horror of confronting how even the kindest beast-man that she had met yet thought about women, and especially about human women, overwhelmed her.

  “You want to talk about how I'm your ideal mate somehow? And that's why you bought me? You want to talk about how there's some kind of special connection between us? Even if that were true, what kind of a man keeps his supposedly fated true love in a goddamned slave collar?

  “What kind of a man sees someone try to rape her and takes it as a personal insult against him instead of thinking about what it did to her? Don't pretend you care about me. You think I’m property. A thing, not a person.” She touched the collar around her neck with her fingertips.

  “If you actually gave a single damn about me, I wouldn't be wearing this collar, I wouldn't be at risk for rape, and I wouldn't be on this planet. So don’t talk to me about true mating, Or any other kind of romantic tripe. I know I'm just lucky you haven't decided to force me yet. Eventually, you're going to want to get your money's worth. I know how guys like you think.”

  He stood up rigidly, his eyes flashing. For a moment, she thought he would strike her. He stared down at her with his mouth working, and then let out a tremendous sigh.

  Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the collar remote. Pressing his thumb against the fingerprint lock, he startled her by keying in a series of numbers. She heard a beep beneath her jaw, and suddenly the collar snapped open.

  He took a translator bud from his pocket and fit it into his ear while she stared at him.

  “You still have to wear it while others are around. I can't change that. If you do not, rumor will get around that I cannot control the humans in my household. They would lose respect for me, which is dangerous for a warrior in my position.” He hesitated.