Claimed

by Presley Hall

The women all look terrified, and my temper rises to see it—but then my gaze shifts to the right, and I freeze.

  One woman catches my eye above all of the others. She is standing next to Djool, the leader of the warlords, and though I hate him more than any of our other captors, I can’t tear my eyes away from her. She’s as frightened as the rest, but there’s a hint of defiance in her posture as well. Djool laughs and whispers something to her, his wart-covered hand reaching up to squeeze her naked breast, and rage floods me at the sight of him touching her.

  In that instant, every instinct in me tells me to forget the plan, to leave the men and rush the stands, tearing this fragile, frightened creature out of Djool’s grip.

  It’s not only because I’ve seen him do terrible things when the Orkun attacked us. Not only because he’s murdered people I care about, hurt children and raped women, exactly as he plans to do to this woman. It’s not only because I want to prevent that fate for the captured women I see in the stands.

  It’s her.

  In this moment, a protectiveness I’ve never known for any woman washes over me, and I want to kill Djool simply for daring to put his hands on her.

  Don’t be distracted, I tell myself firmly, tearing my gaze away from her perfect body and defiant face. You have your own people to protect. Stick to the plan.

  But even as we move into formation, even as I take in the frightened face of my cousin Ishar, and the nervous expressions of the other men who are about to be pitted against each other, I keep glancing back toward the green-eyed woman in the stands.

  She’s noticed me, too. She’s looking at us—and me especially—with awe, as if she’s never seen anything like us before.

  And if she’s a Terran woman, as she appears, she likely never has. Terrans are notoriously ignorant about the existence of other, alien races. This is probably her first introduction to even the most basic reality of our existence. It must be terrifying for her, and a wave of sympathy washes over me, joining the rage and desire to protect her.

  Shake it off, Tordax. I mentally berate myself, tearing my eyes away from her for the last time.

  I can hear the shouts of the Orkun, see Djool standing to announce the start of the games. Distraction is death. Even if I could save her, there’s no chance of that unless I can save myself and my men first. And when the guards begin to advance into the ring, pairing us off, I know I can’t afford to think of her, or anything beyond surviving the minutes to come.

  But even as I focus on Vrexen’s face as he stands in front of me, his lips moving in a quiet assurance that he remembers all we discussed, I can feel her gaze on me.

  5

  Rose

  As the men in the arena are paired off and Djool rises to his feet, I feel every muscle in my body tense, the fine hairs on my arms standing up.

  “For the honor of Orka, fight!” he shouts, raising his hands.

  The men in the arena cringe, expressions of impotent rage on their faces as they raise their weapons and scream out a foreign battle cry. They don’t want to fight for the honor of their captors—why would they?

  But they do fight.

  As they clash together, Djool retakes his seat, his arm snaking around my waist and crawling up to my breast again. It’s all I can do not to cringe. The penalty for angering him will surely be severe, but my skin crawls with every movement of his hand. His flesh feels thick and leathery, the warts bumpy against my own smooth skin, and I think forward to what will happen after this. The promised breeding ceremony.

  What will happen? Who will be there? Who will watch? What will they do? What are they like… down there?

  The last thought frightens me more than any other, visions of spikes and wart-covered cocks filling my head, horrific images that I can’t bear to imagine. I can feel tears rising up, choking me with a lump in my throat, and I turn my gaze back to the arena, desperate for anything to distract me.

  Don’t borrow trouble, my mother would say. But she could never have imagined this.

  Despite my fear and the disgust that keeps sending my stomach into fits of nausea, I can’t tear my eyes away from the one Kalixian who caught my attention before the fighting started.

  He’s fighting a slightly smaller male, and I’m momentarily mesmerized by the movement of his body, the flex and ripple of his muscles. The Kalixian males are all dressed in nothing but loincloths and a small amount of leather upper body armor—leather shoulder pieces attached to layered leather armor that covers only the tops of their upper arms, studded with bronze rivets the same color as their skin. Other than this, their only covering is a strip of leather in front and back, held on by rope ties, and I’m sure if I looked closely enough, I could catch a glimpse beneath it.

  Oh, lord. What am I thinking?

  I’m shocked at my own line of thought, but I can’t help it. I hadn’t thought the tall bronzed man exactly handsome when I first saw him. His strange features and horns were a shock, but now as I watch him move, I can’t stop looking.

  His arms bulge with muscle, his chest ripples with it, and I can see his bronzed thigh flex as he lunges forward, narrowly missing the Kalixian in front of him. His loincloth sways to one side, and I almost catch a glimpse of what lies beneath it. I wonder what he must look like naked, a man of such strength and virility, like no one I’ve ever seen in real life before.

  He looks like something out of a fantasy, a movie. A barbarian in every sense of the word.

  To my shock, I realize that I’m aroused. Not just a little turned on—seriously aroused, in a way I’ve never felt for any human man I’ve ever encountered. I feel an ache like I’ve never known, desire flooding through me as I stare at the Kalixian fighting in the arena, and I momentarily come back to my senses, anger flooding me as well as lust.

  Is this why we’re watching these awful games? I wonder, tensing in Djool’s searching grasp. Is it meant to turn us on, watching these extraordinary men fight, since the Orkun certainly won’t?

  It must be. It’s a sort of preparation, readying us for the invasion of our new husbands, a means of remedying the fear and disgust they must know we feel. It makes it worse somehow, to think that they’re not in denial about their own desirability, that they manipulate us on purpose to make up for their horrific appearance and vile behavior.

  No. I won’t let them win. I won’t let them toy with me like this.

  I try to fight it. The last thing I want is to do what these Orkun wish, to please them in any way. The idea that Djool might believe me actually turned on by his advances makes me almost vomit—but every time I look at the Kalixian, who by now I think must be the gladiators’ leader, I feel a fresh wave of dizzying lust wash over me. I’m soaking wet, embarrassingly so, especially considering my nudity.

  There’s no way to conceal or hide my reaction, but my attempts to fight it are useless. If the bronzed barbarian in the arena came up here right this minute, I feel as if I’d fall into his arms without a second thought, begging for him to touch me. I can’t imagine that anything else could satisfy what I’m feeling. The sensation of such an intense desire is entirely foreign to me, but there’s no doubt as to who it’s directed toward.

  As I gaze down at the arena, I realize something else. My focus momentarily shifts from the breathtaking appearance of the Kalixian to what he and his men are actually doing.

  Their movements seem almost choreographed, not brutal and violent like an actual fight to the death. It’s as if they’ve planned this—which doesn’t seem right for a gladiator fight at all, and a fake fight doesn’t fit at all with what I know of the Orkun so far. But aside from a few scratches and shallow wounds, nothing has happened to any of the men. They sidestep blows at the last minute, parry each other effortlessly.

  It’s as if they’re stalling.

  And then I see the leader’s gaze shift toward the stands—and the warlords—once again, and I feel a change in the air, something imperceptible but unmistakably there.

  What is
this? What is happeni—

  Before I can even finish the thought, it happens.

  Djool’s hand tightens on my breast as he notices the shift in the air too, and I let out a pained yelp as his fingers dig into my skin.

  As one, the Kalixians in the ring, both the ones already fighting and the ones waiting for their fight, turn toward the warlords. The gladiators raise their weapons and scream the same battle cry.

  There’s no doubt that this was planned. The men in the arena move with soldier-like precision, killing the guards who try to stop them with sharp swings of their blades. The audience bursts into chaos, but the guards among them hold fast, and Orkun soldiers begin to surround the warlords.

  “Protect the brides!” Djool shouts to the guards, and he and the other warlords seize their weapons, advancing toward the Kalixians. Before I can figure out what’s happening or think of any way to turn it to my advantage, violence explodes around us, the Kalixians reaching the upper level of the stands with very little effort. But here, with the warlords, they’ve met their match.

  The women are screaming, some trying to run, as if there’s anywhere for us to go. But I stay rooted to the spot, frozen with terror and indecision as a guard falls in front of me, blood from his fatal wound splashing up to spatter my hands and arms.

  I cringe backward, my stomach turning over.

  And then I look up to see him.

  The Kalixian who caught my eye, the one who only moments ago I was fantasizing about, is barreling toward me, his massive body headed in my direction and his gaze fixed squarely on mine. His eyes are almost black, and I stumble backward, all of my lust turned into fear. He might be physically desirable, but he’s also an alien creature, a stranger, and I have no way of knowing that he doesn’t have the same fate in mind for me as the Orkun warlord did.

  I cast about wildly for an exit, a means of escape, but there is none.

  There’s fighting in front of me, a wall behind me, and nothing but the arena and more fighting below.

  There’s nowhere to run. And the Kalixian is almost on me.

  6

  Tordax

  For week after week, we planned this attack. In the infrequent moments when our Orkun captors let us out of our chains, we planned every detail that we could account for, and thought of all the things we could imagine that we couldn’t account for.

  We went over the plan like a litany, committing it to memory.

  Every move, every step, every attack.

  We have only one with us who isn’t a fighter—a hacker who was able to slip away before the fight, while the warlords and guards were all distracted with their new women. He managed to disable the guards’ weapons, leaving only the knives, swords, and axes that the warlords fight with. It’s a matter of pride among the Orkun warlords not to use firearms. They leave that for their guard, for lesser soldiers.

  And today it may be their undoing, because until the guards can fix their failed weapons system, they are all but useless.

  Each of my men is fulfilling their role to the letter, their movements as perfect as if they were choreographed, their targets chosen and destroyed with brutal efficiency. We’re poised to win, to escape, to take out a portion of the Orkun leadership and gain a huge victory for Kalix today.

  The one thing I couldn’t account for though, was her.

  It’s my task to take out Djool, the leader of the Orkun warlords.

  Without him, they will be scattered, forced to reconvene and choose new leadership. Taking him out will give us the greatest advantage we could hope for in the days and weeks to come.

  But as I advance toward him, fury and bloodlust in my eyes, I see the woman next to him, and a different kind of lust altogether washes over me.

  I can smell her scent—the sweet warmth of her skin, the remnants of some old manufactured fragrance that smells like fruit, and the bitter scent of fear underneath it all, staining the sweetness of it.

  The moment my gaze locks with hers, I see desire turn to terror as she stumbles backward, away from Djool. But all I feel is a need like I’ve never known, drawing me to her like a magnet to iron, as if there’s an invisible tether between us.

  I’ve heard stories of this, before the attack that wiped out so many things that came before. Stories of this sort of attraction—and what it means.

  It hits me like a punch to the gut, leaving me feeling as if the air has been knocked out of me and replaced with a burning lust that consumes every thought.

  I turn toward her without meaning to, and I can feel myself harden, my body filled with the aching desire to mate with her, to be inside of her, to possess her. It’s been a long time since I’ve lain with a female of any species, but this is something more than just deprivation. It feels primal… necessary.

  Irisa.

  The word whispers through my mind, sending a shiver down my spine.

  The return of this bond could mean the salvation of our people, in time. If it can happen to me with a woman not of Kalixian blood, it could be the same for others among our men.

  But I don’t have time to think about that—what it could mean for me, for all of us. I have a task to perform, just as all of my men do.

  I’m able to tear my thoughts back to my duty only long enough to see that Djool is slipping away, several of the Orkun warlords behind him, and a wave of fury washes over me as I realize that I’ve failed.

  Krax! I curse inwardly as three of my own men rush toward the door that Djool and his followers have vanished behind, but they’re too late. The last of the guards have to be subdued, or we risk being recaptured ourselves. Djool and his remaining warlords will undoubtedly escape, and our plans will only have partially succeeded. And it’s entirely my fault.

  Even as I curse myself, my body, and its damned reactions to a woman I don’t even know, I see an Orkun guard heading for her, gun raised as he shouts something to her.

  Her face is a mask of terror, and my legs are moving before I even give them the command. I race toward her, and I see her catch sight of me again, looking wildly around for a means of escape.

  But there’s nothing. Only me.

  I reach her before the guard does, wrapping my arms around her slim waist as I catch her and drag her aside, striking out at the guard with my spear. It slips between the plates of his armor, sliding through the thin fabric beneath, and drives straight through his gut. I hear the woman in my arms scream—a high, ragged sound—but her cry is lost in the sounds of the guard groaning and coughing as he sinks to the ground, his hands wrapped around the shaft of the spear in his stomach. I yank it free and turn to see my men dispatching the last of the other guards, our battle cry going up as at least part of our victory is realized.

  But most of my thoughts are on the woman I’m holding.

  I thought my need for her was strong before—now it’s almost uncontrollable. My skin is on fire at the touch of hers. The feeling of her crushed against me sends an overpowering rush of lust through me. She’s soft and warm, her body slight and fragile in my grasp, and her scent fills my nostrils. I pick up all of the aromas I noticed before… plus the unmistakable scent of her arousal.

  She’s wet, aching with desire, and I know that it’s for me. The knowledge drives me wild, and I grasp her waist, pulling her hard against me.

  I see her eyes widen as she feels me press against her, rigid and throbbing with need, and she gasps, twisting in my grasp as she tries to fight me off.

  It only serves to inflame me more.

  All I can think, the words pounding through my head in an endless refrain, is that she is mine. That she belongs to me.

  Irisa. Irisa.

  I don’t know for certain if she is that. If this is real.

  But if she is… nothing else would explain such desire, such a primal need to possess this woman, above all others. All of the women in this room are beautiful. Yet I haven’t noticed a single one beyond the female currently wriggling madly in my grasp.

  Vrex
en comes up to me, his face sweaty and streaked with the greenish blood of the Orkun.

  “Commander,” he says respectfully, inclining his head. “The guards are subdued or killed. Djool and the remaining warlords have fled. Our hacker was unable to disable all of the escape pods before they secured one. We killed two of them, however.” He gestures toward the hulking bodies of the fallen warlords, his face full of pride. “We have done as you commanded us. The Orkun are weakened, if not defeated.”

  “Take control of the ship,” I tell him, my thoughts momentarily diverted away from the woman I’m holding on to. “I have business to attend to, and then I will speak to the men.”

  Vrexen seems to notice the female in my arms for the first time, and a smirk appears on his lips. “I suppose you’ve earned your pleasure, Commander. May the other men do the same?”

  I know it won’t be appreciated, for me to deny them the pleasure of the other women when it’s been so long, especially when I’m about to take this one to my newly appropriated quarters. But we’ve never held with rape.

  “Only if the women are willing,” I tell him sternly. “You know our ways. Convincing is permitted. But not outright coercion. They are frightened from what the Orkun have done, and they may not take kindly to advances. Remember that, and do not go further than what is welcomed.”

  Vrexen looks dubiously at the struggling woman in my grasp, his thoughts clear on his face, but he only nods deferentially. “I will do as you say, Commander. The men await your next instructions, once the ship is in our control.”

  I look down at the woman I’m holding again, at her delicate features, now full of anger. She’s spitting mad—quite literally—and I dodge her attack as I sling her easily over my shoulder.

  “You’re coming with me, little one,” I tell her, although I know she can’t understand my words.

  The former captain’s quarters should be easy enough to find. And once I’m there, I’ll get down to the business of figuring out exactly who the little spitfire kicking my chest and pounding on my back is.