Chapter 1:

Athena

One year, 27-days.

I had been on Dobromia for one year and 27-days.

I could still remember leaving my sister Marina and her Weredragon partner, abandoning them to our ship so they could take off back to Earth. Take off and leave me behind. I spent a week in hiding, fostering a plan to infiltrate The Tower where kidnapped women were being held.

Then I became their prisoner.

I thought Marina would come back for us. I thought the Earth would care that their people were captured. But nobody came.

My mind worked in overdrive, planning how to leave The Tower and get home. I was tireless with my planning, but the walls were impenetrable, and I refused to be claimed by a Weredragon in exchange for a level of freedom. A pond may be larger than a fishbowl, but it is still a prison. A figurative cage to be watched in.

These days my mind was a numb field of endless waiting.

I was a soldier. That’s why I was brought on our mission to Red Wall 7.

Now I was nothing.

“Look at her,” came a gruff, gravelly voice from one of the alien shifter guards. He was a tall, muscular red Weredragon with pale yellow eyes and a sadistic smile. It went without saying that we’d had our fair share of butting heads. “Still planning your escape?” the guard, Kayldreon, laughed.

I sat in the far corner of the beating hot cave with my knees to my chest. I looked up at him with a scowl and he laughed even harder.

“We heard from your sister. Did they tell you that?” the red shifter asked huskily.

I twitched. I knew he was lying, but the mention of her still sent a flutter through my heart.

“She left you a letter,” the shifter insisted and reached his muscular arm through the bars of my cell, flapping a scrap of cloth in my direction.

I stared at the makeshift paper with curiosity, my eyes darting toward it but my head never moved.

“Take it,” he insisted with a tone so stern I knew I would have to get up and face him.

I slid my backside across the dusty stone floor and flicked my dark blue eyes up at him.

“Drop it then,” I snapped.

“Come here so I can see you,” Kayldreon said in an unusually soft tone.

“I don’t think so,” I said with a smirk.

He cocked his head to the side, probably wondering how I could ever resist his charms.

“And why’s that?” he asked. “You don’t want to hear from your sister?”

“No, Kayldreon,” I said with an annoyed breath. “It’s because talking to you without a drink in me is like taking an axe to arm. Annoying, painful and unnecessary.”

He raised a brow to me, obviously infuriated, and I fought off a smirk.

“You think that’s funny, do you?” he said, nodding, his eyes twitching and narrowing in my direction.

Before I had the chance to swallow the spit that had graciously formed under my tongue, he grabbed my legs at lightning speed and pulled them through the bars so that the pillars crashed up against my chest.

I let out a guttural cry as I hit the cage and scraped my teeth against my bottom lip. My breasts formed perfect circles on either side of the pole that was wedged between them and he grabbed one firmly in his hand. I jerked away, spitting at him.

Kayldreon laughed and with his free hand he grabbed my chin and tilted my head upward. I stared at him defiantly as though tilting my head back were my own idea and seethed, “Take your hand off me, shithead.”

“I should claim you and get this over with before somebody gains their senses and kills you,” he said smoothly, as if he were making small talk about the weather.

Which, as it turned out, wasn’t small talk at all.

I’d learned as much one morning when I had broken my week-long silent-strike. The Weredragons were my least favorite race I’d ever run into during my time as a gun for hire across the planets.

After being captured, I refused to speak to them. Then they turned the other prisoners, my former crewmates, against me. The girls would no longer speak to me. I’d gone so stir crazy that I actually bothered to make what I thought was small talk with one of the kinder guards.

The conversation went on for what felt like hours and I wasn’t sure what was more tortuous: being confined in my own brain by the deathly silence or the hideously boring conversation that followed about the Weredragon’s woes.

As though I cared.

The dragon planet was so hot they claimed they were unable to cultivate their land.

Two giant stars, their ‘suns,’ had been passing over the planet for years now. One of the suns should have shattered by now. Or… passed? Or… whatever their latest claim was.

Whatever the reason for the heat, it crept over the land like a wave. The air was so hot I could barely register when I was inhaling. The refreshment of breathing had been sucked away by their suns.

“I’d rather die,” I said firmly, setting my jaw to the ridiculously tall red shifter. “Now take your hands off me.”

“That can be arranged, Livingstone,” Kayldreon said warily, using my last name. “But I would miss these conversations of ours if you were gone.”

I tried again to back away from him and he gripped my chest harder, pulling me forward and licking the side of my face as it pressed up against the bars.

Disgust crawled across my skin as I felt his warm tongue on me, raising my pores into hard bumps of contempt as the air hit the wetness.

“My turn,” came the familiar voice of another shifter guard. Before I could look up, the gray shifter’s boot came down hard on Kayldreon’s arm; causing him to lurch back with a howl of pain as he nursed his now limp forearm against his chest.

“Are you kidding me?” Kayldreon said with spite as he looked up at the deep gray shifter and nearly hissed.

The dark shifter didn’t respond, instead taking the time to grip Kayldreon hard by the shoulders and whip him into the cell bars. I watched as the bars dented and crumpled in front of me and my eyes went as wide as saucers.

The red dragon didn’t stick around to see what the gray shifter would do next, should he be defiant. With a tumble of his thick, scaly feet to the floor, my guard shoved his thick wing against the new dragon present and left The Tower floor with a loud slam of the door behind him.

“You really have a way with people,” came the familiar voice of Aurlauc.

We had met when my sister's ship crashed on a nearby planet, more than a year ago now.

The Weredragon's lulled us into safety and then murdered our crew: stole our women to breed with. They wanted to find out how to get to the Earth so they could pillage us and kill our men. For that, I hated them.

I looked at the crooked smile on the familiar warrior and felt myself soften, just a bit.

“You're one to talk,” I said with a grateful smile. “You were the one assigned to try and charm me, remember?”

“Actually,” he said, raising a pointed finger to the air, “that was Khrelan.”

I snorted. “And not a one of you could succeed.”

“You’re a hard one to crack,” he said with some pride. “Not like the other humans here.”

“Yeah, I noticed,” I breathed, taking a half-hearted look around The Tower’s cells. “Next time have him let go of my breast before you whip him at the floor,” I said with no note of thanks in my voice as I rubbed my swelling breast under my shirt. “These things are attached, you know.”

With a quick flick of his brows to the air, Aurlauc scoffed and looked to the direction Kayldreon fled. He brushed his mouth with the back of his hand and laughed. “If that were the case, I would have been waiting forever.”

I rolled my eyes and scrambled backwards in my cell, pushing my back against the wall so I could use it to balance myself.

He watched me carefully and crossed his arms over his chest. He wore dark pants, something like leather. Straps of the same fabric covered his bare, chiseled muscles on his chest and held various weapons strewn across them. I couldn’t help but notice my own laser pistol was still hanging from his side, after all this time.

“You need to learn to make friends,” he said exasperatedly, catching my eyes as they trailed along his body.

“Here I thought I had a way with people?”

He grunted. “There’s no time for funny.”

It still made me laugh to hear the way Weredragons used English. Correctly, but slightly off.

“There’s no time for funny,” I repeated mockingly: my voice hitting a low pitch. I watched as Aurlauc’s face quickly changed from annoyed to charmed.

Most of the dragons had a vague grasp of the English language when we got here due to a mixture of their own language and the Earth paraphernalia they’d found floating through space—including movies, which I’d now heard again and again and again.

One of the first females let out of The Tower was assigned to teach the shifter’s the English language.

Correction: The first female was actually let out for sex. But, the next few that followed were asked to teach English.

“You know what to do to get out,” Aurlauc said carefully. His eyes skimmed the room as his words came out.

I shrugged. “Snuggle up to a Weredragon and get myself a nice home in the pit?”

“That’s one spin on it,” he said slowly. “Khrelan. He wants to claim you.”

“Yeah, he also led the slaughter on my ship,” I spat. “No, thank you.”

His brows shot up and quickly lowered. “He wasn’t so bad once.”

“Once,” I repeated with a scoff.

“Then…” Aurlauc squirmed on the spot and then walked up to the bars of my cell thoughtfully. He gripped his hands around the cool metal and looked at me seriously. “You know that I care for you.”

My eyes flicked back and forth from his and I approached the front of the cell cautiously. I couldn’t lie to myself that my heart skipped a beat when he said the words. If there were any Weredragon that could redeem the sadistic race, it was probably Aurlauc. He was the only one who had been kind to me or tried to make me smile. Succeeded.

The right side of my lips curled up into a half smile and then I laughed.

“No, you don’t,” I argued.

He blinked in surprise and looked taken aback. “I do,” he confirmed with a waver in his tone.

I brushed my hair behind my ear and met his gaze with my most seductive eyes. “If you cared for me, you would let me out,” I teased.

Aurlauc blew out a long breath and his hands dropped from the bars. “Athena…”

“What?” I snapped.

“You think I want you in here?” he asked genuinely. I knew he didn’t.

My shoulders sloped down into a half shrug. “Then let me out.”

“And you’ll do what?”

I blinked. “I’d run.”

“And die in the elements?” He frowned. “No. I can’t do that. You don’t know enough to get around here.”

“I’m a soldier!” I screamed from nowhere. My hands gripped the bars of my cell as though they were independent of my mind and I began shaking them with all my strength as I screamed. “This is what I do! So give me back my gun and let me the hell out of here!”

Aurlauc swallowed hard and I watched the way the light hit his deep gray and black scales. He brushed his long black braids behind his shoulders. Azure eyes stared at me intensely and he put his hands over top of mine, peeling them from the bars so that they fell at my sides.

“I can’t keep protecting you,” he said quietly.

“Then let me go,” I breathed.

He raised a thick brow and shook his head slowly. “You know I can’t do that.”