Assassin's Bride (SciFi Alien Romance) (Celestial Mates Book 9)

by C. J. Scarlett

  #

  They lead her to a room she hadn’t been in yet. That wasn’t a surprise. There were also people here she didn’t know, men and women she hadn’t seen before. They looked at her with the same unfamiliar and unkind expression everyone had given her thus far. They stood around a table. It was a meeting room. She didn’t see Diego. There was no friendly face. She wondered what all their animals were, how she would die.

  “Welcome, Miss Andi.”

  If she ever got the chance to dream again, that was a voice that would haunt her in her sleep. Damien stood there with such a coolness, like the cold and dark of the world itself came from him. She shivered thinking about what his dragon form must look like in its fullest. She imagined a demon with those all too human eyes. That’s what made evil so terrifying, of course. Evil was human at its core. You couldn’t be evil without eyes like Damien’s that had once belonged to a child, a son, a newborn baby that, somewhere along the way, had turned into something awful.

  She didn’t say anything, though there was a pause that she was fairly certain she was meant to fill. She had nothing to say to him. What could she possibly say? Sentences wouldn’t form. She was a shell. It didn’t even occur to her to be sad, to cry, that Diego might be dead already. She would never see her mother again or her father. Her family would wonder for years and years what happened to her because she doubted her death, and the nature of it, would be made known to the world. Damien would make her disappear from the world.

  “You will do a favor for us,” he said. “And then you will go free.”

  The words just sort of bounced off her at first. She took that at face value. She would perform a service for Damien. Then he would set her free. Fair enough. He looked at her though with a cocked eyebrow and a frown.

  “Didn’t you hear me, Andi?” he said. This time she couldn’t get out of speaking.

  “Yes.”

  “Doesn’t that excite you? I will let you go free,” he repeated.

  He lingered on the word free with a measured hiss. He made the syllables stretch out and mean something. Free. He would let her go. She would do something for him and then she would walk away. She’d be able to shower, she’d be able to sleep in her own bed. She’d see her own apartment again and her parents. She’d be able to hug her mother and she’d never let her go. She’d apologize for every single time she’d said something inconsiderate or wrong.

  She’d be out of this hellhole. This entire world she’d been forced to create in her mind, with her own imprisonment, it’d be gone. It would be a memory. And memories couldn’t hurt you, not really, not when they were over. Damien would linger, but she could escape him in the light of day.

  “Yes,” she answered him finally, breathlessly. “It does.”

  “Good,” he said. “Because you need to do your job correctly or you won’t be able to get anywhere, you understand? You follow our instructions to a T and you do your job and you get to leave. If you don’t, you come back here and it’s a lot less pleasant. Understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” he said. He walked around the table and toward Andrea, smelling sour, like a snake. He pointed to the screen that showed a park. “That’s where you will be going. It’s a nice place. Lots of people will be there, lots of eyes, and lots of cameras. That’s good for us. We want you to be seen by as many people as possible, understand? Everyone needs to see you.”

  “Okay.” She’d go naked if she had to, if it meant she would get out of here.

  “You will wear a special vest for us. Pretty easy, right?” Sure. Easy. Perfect. “And when the time comes, you will push a button… then the vest will explode.”

  Oh.

  Every single dream she had up until that moment crumbled. She watched the images of her mother’s face, the distant smell she could remember of her childhood living room at Christmas, then it was gone. It was stolen from her like a drowning man being dragged farther and farther below, watching the sun get dimmer and dimmer as the pressure around her increased. She wasn’t going free. They were letting her go because she would die.

  “If you don’t press the button,” he said. “If you choose to run. We will blow it up for you. I will be a lot less happy, but you won’t have to worry about that too much.”

  So that was that. This was how it ended, not with starving, not with torture. They would use her to make their points. They would force her to publicly do something that would get a lot of people hurt. Would her mother watch the news and wonder where she went wrong? Why her daughter would do something so heinous and awful? She wanted nothing more than to let her mother know that she wasn’t doing this on purpose. She wasn’t doing it willingly. She didn’t want to hurt anyone.

  “Where’s Diego?” she choked out. She needed to know there was at least one good thing in the world, that Diego was alive, that he could go on, go home to his family.

  “He’s around,” Damien said and she wasn’t sure if she could trust his word play. “Would you like to see him?”

  “Yes,” she nearly gasped, trying not to sound too desperate or terrified.

  She needed to see Diego. She needed something. She needed to touch something familiar, soft, anything that might lead her home from the darkness she was trapped in. She nodded fervently and prayed it wasn’t a trick. She prayed he was alive, that she wouldn’t be shoved into a room with a body when they claimed that they would let her see him.

  “Well then, since you’re helping us out so much, I can’t possibly deny you one last request while you’re our guest, can I?”

  She didn’t say anything. She was out of words. She imagined a world where she ended up with Charles. The heartache and irritation would have been worth being allowed to live now. She desperately wished she had that foresight. But, at the same time, she couldn’t imagine a world where she didn’t know Diego. She was meant to, she needed to. She would live the rest of her life with a gaping hole if she hadn’t met him and she’d never know why. Of course, at least she’d be living.

  #

  They took to her to another cell, not unlike her own, but on the other side of the complex. They’d kept them as far away from each other as possible. She was led up to one and made to stand in front of it and wait. The guard unlocked the small gate and called at the person on the inside to wake up, that he had a visitor. She could see the outline of something inside the cell but she wasn’t exactly sure what she was looking at. Diego seemed to be lying down, maybe they’d broken him too.

  But when he rose, she made out the outline of fur. She saw pointed ears that didn’t look human. He was in his wolf form. Suddenly, she rushed into the cell and looked at him closely. She reached out her hands to place them on his body and feel everything she could. He was large, larger than a normal-sized wolf. His fur with messy, almost dangerous looking in the way it stuck out in all directions like in spikes. She wondered if it was from the dungeon or if he always looked so rugged. She wouldn’t know. She’d never known him before now.

  His eyes though. His eyes were exactly the same as she always remembered them. And that’s what pulled her in, pulled her back to the present. She held his head in her hands and he looked at her so tired and so sad that she wasn’t sure how she wouldn’t cry. She needed to be strong, for both of them.

  “Hi,” she whispered. “You’re beautiful like this, you know.”

  Diego didn’t respond; he just kept looking at her, watching with eyes that were far too human. She pressed her forehead against his, letting the warmth from his body touch her own. It would be the last time she ever saw him. She prayed and prayed he’d get to go home, at least one of them should be able to go free, to live life.

  “I think I love you,” she said. “I know I do, actually. Even with everything. I’m just glad I got to see all of you. I don’t think we will see each other after this and I can’t tell you why. But just know that I’m always thinking about you and I’ll always have a part of you with
me.

  “I don’t know why you didn’t want to tell me. I don’t think I’ll ever quite understand that, but I want you to know that I forgive you. I’d never blame you for being exactly who you are and I think it just makes you that much more beautiful. I want you to never stop being that gorgeous man I know you are, whether you’re walking on two legs or four.”

  She pulled back to look at him. His eyes were sharp and focused on her and he lunged forward to hook his furry head around her neck. It was a hug and a kiss in the best way he could. She held him as tightly as she possibly could before someone came in and dragged her away to her fate.

  They’d call the bombing several things after that in the news and in debates in college classes. But she’d remember it as the worst day of her life and hoped that, one day, someone could make all of this right.

  TEKKIN

  (Flames of Freedom Series Book I)

  C.J. Scarlett

  ***

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  Chapter 1

  “Reports are coming in now that an emergency session of Congress has been called in the wake of the July attack, better known by sympathizers as the Assault for Freedom—”

  “This session of Congress is expected to address the moral issues presented in the Bill of Protection put forth by Republican senator, Nome Casey—”

  “The bill is expected to pass in both the House and Senate with the Republican majority in strong favor of many facets, including the implementation of a registry for shifters, required medication, and many other precautionary measures—”

  “None of this is about protection,” says the head of the DC Shifter Family chapter David Olsen. “It’s a about fear—”

  Alessia had to turn it off, putting the television to sleep with a flick of a button. It clicked and she watched all the color pull into the center, darkening the screen around it like a reverse black hole. She heard the hum as it slowly shut itself off completely. She rose from the couch and walked into the kitchen. She felt a little ridiculous using student housing. She just passed her twenty-fifth birthday and still lived in a dorm, hanging onto the last year of her eligibility for her mother’s health insurance.

  It was the way things were going. It was the plight of her generation; it had been such a joy to hear about it again and again in several culture classes during her undergrad. All sorts of statistics showed how no one seemed to leave home anymore and everyone born after date X were fucked and would starve to death by the time they were thirty. She was living it now, with her head buried in debt, in a crappy student apartment, listening to talking heads have nothing better to tell the world.

  She didn’t condone the attacks. They’d killed four people, one of them had been a child. It was abhorrent.

  “You still buying that shifter victim crap?” her father asked after the attack during one of his particularly drunk phone calls to her.

  She ignored him and hung up. She’d lost too much time over the years explaining to him all the good shifters had done for society and how no one looked at white teenage boys from low-income families like a threat even though they were constantly shooting up schools. His skull was thick and filled with alcohol. There was no getting through to what was left of the brain, despite what her classes said about trying to educate the prejudiced.

  She walked into the kitchen and poured out what was left from her stained, hand-me-down coffeemaker. She had to use a folded paper towel for a filter after she realized she’d been far too lazy to stop at the drugstore like she promised herself she would. Her mother claimed she could taste the difference when she had to do that back home. Alessia shrugged it off. Who cared? Filtered coffee was garbage anyway. She learned that during her semester in Austria when she had real European coffee and told herself she would never go back.

  She never liked the first day of classes. It was always a bullshit, shortened hour of handing out a syllabus and explaining to a room full of adults to get their homework in and actually show up for class. She never dressed for it. What was the point of making a good first impression to a room she’d be spending only twenty minutes at most? That had always been her mentality during her undergraduate career.

  But now she would be standing on the other side of the room.

  As part of the practicum of her PhD program, she was required to teach at least one class a semester to undergrads. She didn’t get a choice in the class, just handed an empty spot within the Shifter Studies and Culture major with whatever professor was willing to jeopardize his class by letting a teaching fellow behind the podium.

  For her, it was Gender Roles in Shifter Culture with Professor Drake Tekkin. She’d taken the class herself in her sophomore year, under a different professor, at a different school. But it was a reprieve nonetheless. She considered it an easy first go at the practicum. Besides, she was a woman; that automatically got her points in any gender studies class.

  She took a look in the mirror, fixing her skirt and flattening out a fold in her blouse. She tried to dress business casual but somehow always succeeded in looking like some kind of schoolboy librarian fantasy. It was the best she could do; at least it would get them to pay attention to her.

  She slipped on a jacket, put her purse over her arm, and walked out the door.

  #

  She hadn’t expected the protests to start so early in the semester. But several groups were already outside, picketing both sides of the argument. They never seemed to direct their chants at each other, but she caught several glares and sneers directed across the neutral patch of grass that was the only barrier between them and World War III in the quad.

  She walked through them, keeping her head down. She tried not to look swayed either way, like both batches of students skipping their first day of classes were an inconvenience to her. But she couldn’t stop the slight smile on her face at some of the pro-shifter signs outright calling the president a twat and filled with puns. It always seemed those who were on the right side of history in these situations were more clever with their protests. She walked on.

  Other than the chants behind her, the chatter as a student took pictures and tweeted about the incident, the campus was gorgeous on this first day of classes. The grass shined a bright green under the sun and the blue of the sky was practically mesmerizing against the dark brick of the buildings. She was glad she chose a grad school in a warm climate. She’d done four years battling miserable winters in the Northeast and had no interest in doing it again. Here, even her worst days would be brightened—literally—by the gift of good weather. She often fell victim to seasonal depression.

  The school for the Shifter Culture and Studies program wasn’t a highly well-funded institution, which wasn’t surprising, but also said something considering this was the top school in the country for the program. The student body that made up the roster of classes each year was sparse and, more often than not, populated by undergraduates who got permission to take the course to fulfill an elective requirement in their own general education studies.

  Still, it would be home for the next two years; she might as well get used to it.

  She pushed the door open and stepped inside. It smelled of dust and old floor cleaner that was far past its best use date. Old flyers were stuck to the announcement board, dating back several years from when no one bothered to change them out. The hallways were empty.

  “So it begins,” she sighed, becoming the loudest, most alive thing in the building.

  Her heels clicked aggressively against the tile, the sound bouncing off the walls and back at her as she moved down looking for Room 107. It was a lecture hall that seated fifty, but the class roster had only thirteen students signed up, just barely enough for the administration to justify the course and not shut it down before the semester started. She pushed the door open and saw two students already sitting in seats, faces to their phones. At the front of the building, a man in a white t-shirt
and jeans stood, back to the audience.

  For a moment, she thought he was another student, readying herself to go up and tell him that whatever profane comment or penis he would draw on the blackboard wouldn’t be tolerated when he turned around at the sound of her heels and she was met with an older man. He was no older than thirty-three, she was sure of it. His hair still had all its color, though the stubble on his chin gave away the flow of a gray tide. His jeans were washed out from years of use. Loose, untied Doc Martens adorned his feet. He looked more like he should be on the cover of Rolling Stone for a story about his Bruce Springsteen cover band than teaching a class about the social context of shifters in society.

  The arms and chest beneath the shirt were defined as it hung on him loosely, clinging to the curves and valleys of his muscles, clearly visible underneath. A sprinkling of chest hair sat at the very tip of the V-neck in his shirt, hinting at more below.

  “And you are?” he asked, looking over and reaching for his class roster.

  “Alessia. Monroe. I’m not a student,” she said. “I’m your teaching fellow.”

  “Right. The administration-assigned glorified assistant.”

  She felt her head jerk back at the comment without meaning to, blinking at him as he turned back to the blackboard, his interest in her gone completely now. He wrote notes on the board from a slip of torn, ratty paper in his hand.