by Erin Raegan
The New King
Galactic Order Book Five
Erin Raegan
An Alien War Romance
Contents
Dear Reader,
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Epilogue
One night shortly after Mona’s arrival.
Juldoris
Untitled
Uthyf’s favorite Kahyk
Other Books by Erin Raegan
Books by E.M. Raegan
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Glossary
Chapter One of Willow: Defy the Ravaged Book One
The New King. Copyright © 2019 by Erin Raegan. All Rights Reserved.
Cover Designed by Cortney E Designs
Edited by Joy Editing
All characters, alien or human, events―on planet Earth or otherwise―in this book are a product of the author's imagination and hours of daydreaming. Any resemblance to actual people, or otherworldly beings, living or dead, actual events, are entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or transmitted, or distributed, in any form, by any means, without explicit written permission from the author with the exception of brief quotations embodied in reviews or articles. This book is licensed for your enjoyment only. Thank you, a thousand times and all the hugs, for purchasing.
Created with Vellum
Author’s Note
This book is science fiction romance story with explicit language, sexual situations, dark themes, and possible triggers. It is intended for audiences 18 years and older.
If any of that bothers you―beware or turn back.
If not―enjoy and onward to the fun and sexy times!
Beware!
This book DOES NOT end in a cliffhanger, however, not all plot points will be tied up!
This is a series, not a trilogy, it will continue on for quite some time. There will be no other cliffhangers in THIS series, each book after this one will feature a different relationship but will have cameos and pop-ins of other characters.
Enjoy.
There is a Glossary, as requested by my lovely readers, at the end of the book. It’s full of all my fun words and species’ and may help those that need a refresher. Feel free to reference it or ignore it. It is there for you! Special thanks to my FB Council Members! Who helped me tremendously with putting it together!
Dear Reader,
This page is for you.
Thank you for reading.
Books inspire us. They bring us joy and allow us to escape for a little while.
I hope you find that with mine.
Thank you for taking the time out of your lives to read my hard work.
It means the world,
Erin.
Dedication
To my people. You know who you are.
“I wish only to be your ear when you need to release your fears and doubts.
Your hand when you need strengthening.
Your guard when you cannot hold on your own.
And your heart when you are too far gone to pull yourself free.
I will always be here, lovely. When you feel all is lost and you are alone, I will be right here.”
-Tahk
The New King
Mona
It’s been a long time since I felt safe. Too long. You would think after all I’ve been through at the hands of an alien monster it would be difficult for me to live near them.
That it would be difficult to live under their roof. To sleep near them. To eat their food. To talk to them. The Dahk may not be the Juldo, but they are still alien to me. They are frightening and different from me. They look, talk, and move differently than me. They are monsters in their own way. But I’ve lived through horrors, both outside of my world and inside it.
For the first time in my life, I’m starting to feel safe. I’m living amongst an alien race on a frozen world, lightyears away from my old home. But I can breathe without wanting to hold it in. I can open my eyes without wanting to claw them out. I can live without terror clawing at my heels. And that is because of the Dahk.
Their king is arrogant and infuriating, and I can’t stand him. But he would never raise a hand to me. He would never lock me away in a cage.
We may not be able to speak to each other without shouting. Or look at each other without a glare. But he is safety and comfort and it’s not long before I need him. It’s not long before I’m running to him faster than I ever ran from him. It not long before he is my world, and I am his.
It’s not long at all.
Prologue
Juldoris
The Juldo Master seethed inside as he pulled at the binds around his wrists. In his own dungeons, he thought furiously. For sunrings he had been caged inside, like a slave. His Juldo betrayed him following that—that quisling.
But he could do nothing as he was taunted by his own prisoners caged beside him. His fury bled through him, invigorating him. He would not let the Shadow Born keep him here. He would not let him take his throne, his army, and his pride from him.
The Shadow Born tossed him inside the cage and left him to rot. He did not even have the sense to worry over the master. The Shadow Born Assassin did not think he was a threat. How fool him. For the assassin did not know what came for him. What the master had sent for him.
But it would not be long now.
For soon he would come and free the master and they would slaughter the assassin together before they took on every last enemy that had every foolishly thought to slight the Juldo Master and his reign.
1
Mona
“I’m nervous.” Katrina rocked back on her heels and dug her nails into the sides of her braids. Her dark skin was flushed, and her eyes were wild and roaming around the great hall erratically.
“You’ll be fine,” I said, eying her.
“Says you. I don’t remember the trip last time.” She shivered. “I’m awake this time.”
“You’d prefer they knocked you out?” I asked sarcastically. “Spoiler alert, that wasn’t fun.”
“Bitch,” she muttered. She grabbed my shoulders and hugged me tightly. “You sure you want to stay here?”
I nodded, and she rolled her eyes. I shook my head. “I can’t go back home.”
“He could be dead.” She grinned. “Probably got his fat head ripped clean off by those aliens everyone’s talking about.”
I sighed. No, my father, Mark, was too damn stubborn to die. He was alive. I could feel it. And if a Vitat had come after him, Mark would come back from the dead to haunt me. No, I would never step foot on Earth again if I could help it.
“Sorry, babe, I’m staying.” I hugged her and gave her a push.
She jumped when a Dahk warrior brushed by her on his way to the ship. “God, you’re braver than I am.” Her braids whirled around her head as she shivered. “The Dahk are creepy as fuck, and its colder than I can handle.” She smiled sheepishly when th
e Dahk scowled at her over his shoulder.
The Dahk were creepy. They were tall and had eerie bat-like characteristics. Wings as wide as they were tall, purple-and-grey scaled skin, fangs, and armored plates and ridges. They were muscled and bulked in a way that would put a human body builder to shame.
But that wasn’t what put me on edge the most. It was their eyes.
They were silver pools of mercury. You couldn’t quite pinpoint what they were looking at because they didn’t have a pupil. The silver nearly filled the entire eyeball, and they penetrated me in a way that left me shaken and completely creeped out. And the Dahk were not polite like most humans were. They stared, like, all the time.
There had been a man, Andrew, in my old neighborhood in Denver who used to wake up before the sun and walk the streets with a mane of ratty curls, dressed in a Superman cape and an elephant onesie. Both were so dirty I didn’t think he had ever washed them. He had been in a fire when he was a child and his face was completely scarred and he was missing his right ring finger and pinkie. He dug through the trash cans in the street and often left rotten banana peels on my front porch.
I remember the first time I saw him when I moved there a few years ago. I had stared. I had gaped at him. He had been screaming at the light post outside my apartment complex and threatening it with a plastic spoon. But he caught me off guard. Maybe thirty seconds, a minute later—after I had deduced that he wasn’t a threat to me—I averted my eyes. Like any polite person would do.
After, I had given him money when I could spare it, and shared my meals with him. He was nice.
He was also strange, but I wasn’t in danger. The light post had been, maybe the spoon, but he had barely acknowledged me before I took the initiative to get to know him.
Unlike me, the Dahk stared for so long, polite sailed right on by. But like Andrew, we weren’t a threat to them. We were so not a threat it was laughable. There were only twenty of us human women, and we were on a planet of millions of Dahk. They were a threat to us. Yet they stared and stared and stared. It irritated me—but not enough to climb onto that ship and go back to Earth.
The Juldo may have taken all twenty of us out of our beds and enslaved us, but I was different from the others. They had been taken from their families, and homes, and lives, and couldn’t wait to go back and check on them. I had been taken from one hell and thrust into another.
The Dahk’s home planet was a cake walk compared to the last twenty-four years of my life.
Besides, these girls were in denial. Katrina couldn’t wait to get home to her boyfriend and condo in Florida. Sybil had children she wanted to be reunited with. Franny was going home to a husband and three cats. And on and on it went. Twenty women foolishly hoping their loved ones had been untouched by the invasion back home.
But Peyton had warned us. It was bad.
The Vitat had invaded and crushed the human population in hours. The loss of life was astronomical. The destruction almost worse. And though the Dahk had intervened, saving us and defeating the Vitat with the help of a slew of other aliens, the Dahk were still there on Earth. The Dahk were there to stay, as were the Kilbus, and that was because there was a Galactic Council that had decided we owed them for the Dahk’s aid. We owed our freedom.
So I understood the others’ need to go home, but I didn’t agree with it. We were safer here. But I didn’t have anyone I loved back home. I didn’t feel their undeniable need to go back.
Out of all of us, only three of us were staying. And getting the rest sent home hadn’t been an easy task. Peyton and her commander had had to basically beg the Dahk King to send them back. He wanted to keep us all here. He didn’t think it was safe to send any of us.
The travel alone was dangerous. The universe was filled with aliens that would do just about anything to get their grubby hands on a human female.
And he hadn’t wanted to risk his Dahk to protect us.
But more, he didn’t understand why any of us wanted to go back.
But he had reluctantly agreed, after all our nagging, and now an enormous ship was preparing to take seventeen human women and three hundred Dahk to Earth.
I wouldn’t be setting foot on that ship.
Mark would be looking for me. He would be stalking my apartment. A new world without order? Without law or consequence? He would be coming for me.
But he couldn’t get to me across the universe.
For the first time in my entire life, my father couldn’t get to me. I wasn’t going anywhere.
Peyton waved from the ship’s ramp, her other hand cradling her baby bump.
Katrina groaned. “A sedative sounds so good right about now.”
I rolled my eyes.
Katrina gave me a look of understanding. She may have been given a drug when she was kidnapped and shipped away from Earth, but not all of us were so lucky. I had been shocked by an electric current that hurt so badly, I wet myself. It knocked me out. But Katrina had been injected with something while sleeping. One night she was fast asleep in her bed; the next she was on Juldoris.
I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for her to wake up on an alien planet, completely unaware of what had happened and what was to come. But me? After I woke up, a faint memory of monsters invading my home and my safe place, I was lucky enough to witness weeks of slavery on that disgusting ship. Weeks of being tortured and taunted before the real fun began.
After spending nearly a month in captivity, Katrina hadn’t even been aware of the Vitat invasion back home. I hadn’t either. But I had been there much longer than her.
Not until Sybil joined us. She had been taken after the invasion and filled some of us in.
How the Vitat had come and decimated Earth. How they ate people.
That had been a bad day.
“Take care of yourself, girl.” Katrina hugged me again.
I tried not to flinch from the contact. She couldn’t hide hers. Most of us still couldn’t handle any kind of physical contact, but Katrina was hell-bent on pushing through it. Recovering. If that were possible.
“You too.” I hugged her back even though my body rejected every moment of it.
I wanted to keep her here. She was my only friend on this frozen rock. I wanted to scream at her that he was dead, that her boyfriend, Martin, couldn’t have survived, that the odds he was waiting for her were so low that she needed to stay with me to avoid that heartbreak. But I couldn’t extinguish her hope. I couldn’t snuff out that light of excitement as she backed away toward the ship.
She wouldn’t have listened anyway.
Lydia and Roxanne stood beside me as seventeen of our friends—seventeen women with whom we had forged a bond through pain and fear and desperation—walked onto the Dahk ship. We watched the ship as it disappeared into the black, unending space above us. We watched long after they were gone, long after Peyton gave up trying to coax us back into the castle.
When our fingers were blue, and we couldn’t feel our toes, and our tears had frozen to our cheeks, only then did we trudge back into the crystal castle, closely followed by a dozen Dahk warriors. Their strange eyes boring holes into our backs.
We couldn’t walk anywhere on Home World without at least twelve guards. Peyton and Tahk had stressed how dangerous it was for us here. Most of the girls had been terrified after that conversation. But not me. These aliens hated us for our differences, and maybe that alone was enough to kill us. But no one tried to stab me with electric rods. No one tried to chain me to the floor. No one tried to whip me every time I opened my mouth.
No one tried to rape me.
I had never felt so safe in my life.
I left the other two girls in the entrance hall and climbed up to my room. I had been given a room on the second floor. It was huge, bigger than my entire apartment in Denver. It had a huge bed with silk curtains hanging from the ceiling on all sides.
The bathroom was my favorite part. It had a huge depressed pool in the center that filled
with steaming hot water every time I opened the panel on the wall.
Before my guards could follow me inside, I slammed my bathroom door and stripped down. I kept my gaze fixed on my toes as I stepped into the hot water. Dahk didn’t have mirrors, but their lavender crystal walls held my reflection. I couldn’t stand to see myself unclothed, so I avoided looking until I was in the water up to my chin.
My reflection stared back at me in the thick water. My red hair was wild and as vibrant as ever. But my face was paler than it had ever been, my blue eyes sunken in and shadowed. A scar ran from the center of my chin, down the curve, over the bruises on my neck, and stopped at my collarbone. Another one at the corner of my eyebrow sliced up to my hairline. I fingered them, feeling the tender, raised skin. They were ugly, but they weren’t the worst of my scars. Those were on my back. Those were still tender and healing. But the ones on my face, they affected me the most. I had had them for far longer.
My back had been ravaged by an evil master who saw me as nothing more than a pet. But my facial scars had been given to me by someone I had loved. Someone I had worshipped. My father made the Juldo Master look like a puppy.
