Chapter 12

The mate bond between Piper and me is like nothing I have ever felt before. Even with the cuff on my arm dulling the call of it, as well as my abilities to manipulate energy, it’s between us, a living thing all on its own.

Piper is not the shy, na?ve female I thought she was.

She viciously killed one of our captors.

She is an admitted spy.

I love it.

I thought I was taking advantage of her before, castigated myself for it, for my need to slake my own lust upon her soft human flesh.

She is no innocent, and no female could be better suited for me than my Piper.

I glance sidelong at the carnage in the alien arena.

Our current situation, admittedly, is less than ideal. I didn’t lie, though. I didn’t know what a perfect match this female was for me, for the Roth bloodthirstiness I’ve tried to hide, tried to be better than. But she’s just as violent and secretive as I am.

And that knowledge has given me even more reason to get us out of this fresh hell.

We will rule the Roth well together. The settlements will not stand a chance against us. Not only do her body and face appeal to me, but so does her wiliness. The courage it must have taken to decide this fate for herself.

Now, though, she looks small and tired, the ugly collar biting into her sensitive human skin.

“You must believe,” I tell her. “You can’t give up already.”

“You think they mean us to fight?” She jerks her head toward the stadium.

“You know the answer to that.”

She sighs. “I do.”

“You got the best of them once.”

“They gassed me. Knocked me out. Otherwise, I would have killed them all.” She bares her blunt, even teeth, and it’s fucking adorable.

“That’s the spirit,” I coo at her. “Bloodthirsty little human wife.”

She glares at me, but I will gladly take it. Better than the lost look. I cannot stand to see her hopeless, that fire banked. I never even knew she was hiding it inside her.

Oh, we will escape. I refuse to let a female like this slip through my fingers.

“We will escape, even if it means we have to burn this whole world down together,” I tell her.

“Can you access the fire?” she asks without missing a beat.

She has me there.

“Not yet,” I tell her. Frustration tightens my chest, and energy begins to build inside me—energy I could tap into without even wanting on Roth—then fizzles out again.

“What do you think they are?” She’s asked this question several times, but I just shake my head.

“I don’t know. A disruptor of some sort. Does yours pain you?”

She gives me a rueful smile. “Only as much as yours does, I bet.”

“They will pay for this,” I promise her.

“They will,” she agrees.

We both look up as an alien shouts outside our cell. We’ve taken to ignoring the maned visitors who come to gawk at us as though we are animals in a menagerie, but this one is attempting to actually get our attention.

I stand, flexing my shoulders and my arms, and I smile.

It’s not a nice smile, and the alien takes a step back.

A malnourished human steps out from behind him, greasy brown hair hiding most of its face.

Piper lets out a low hiss of anger, then stands, too.

The alien shoves the human at us, muttering something, and she looks up at us with huge brown eyes.

“Il dit qu’il faut que tu viennes avec nous.” Her gaze drops immediately to her feet.

“English? Do you speak English?” Piper asks, fury laced in every syllable.

It seems insane to me now that I didn’t see her for what she truly is. Glorious.

The human girl trembles. “Oui, je sais parler anglais. He wants you to come with us. With him, I mean.” Her language is stilted and heavily accented, and Piper narrows her eyes.

The alien jerks his hand back, and the collar on the human’s neck lights up. She stumbles a bit as he yells at her, then blinks at us sorrowfully. “Please come easily.”

I don’t think that’s what he said, but the human is clearly terrified of him, the scent of her fear overwhelming.

The alien jerks his hand again, and the human seems to make herself smaller, her shoulders bowing as she shuffles behind him. There’s a black ring on his fingers—my eyes narrow. Four fingers and one ring on what seems to be his pointer, ostensibly made of the same materials as the collar on Piper’s throat and the cuff on my biceps.

Some sort of control mechanism, then.

The revelation is not a good one, but at least it assuages my fears that it was some sort of parasitical addition to my body. I fear a parasite might be harder to dislodge.

“Fucking aliens,” Piper snarls, her small human hands fisting at her sides. “How many do you think they’ve taken?”

The blue alien studies her, his mane floating out around his head. A feral growl builds in my chest at his interest. He jabbers something incomprehensible, then jerks again, sending the slight human flying out from behind him, where she pants for a moment.

“He wants to know if you’re a mated pair.” Her nose crinkles, and she looks as if she might cry. “Says you’re worth more if you’re breedable.”

I fling myself toward the cell wall separating us and am immediately brought to my knees as pain ripples through me, arching my back. The human female doesn’t seem to notice.

She has the same hopeless, lost look I just tried to wipe from Piper’s face.

“Look at me,” Piper tells her. “Look at me and watch. We are a mated pair. Do not separate us. Do you understand?”

I jerk my head back just in time to see her fingers rapidly moving as if they’re dancing in the air.

The human’s eyes are huge in her face, her lips parting in wonder.

She repeats what Piper’s said in the alien language. At least, I assume she repeats it, her own fingers now flying even faster than Piper’s.

The alien yells at her, and she whines as her collar lights up slightly. “He asks if you will come with us nicely or if he will have to hurt you.”

“We’ll come nicely,” Piper tells her.

Relief slumps the girl’s shoulders. She points, and I look around for a minute before I realize it’s at me.

“I will come,” I agree.

She cocks her head at me, then says something in the foreign alien tongue to her captor.

My blood runs cold. Not just her captor.

Ourcaptor.