STELLA STUMBLED FORWARD, suddenly pushed out of Arest’s too warm and too hungry embrace. Though she couldn’t tell if it was his hunger or her own. She should have let go of him a long time ago, but as they’d walked the tunnels for hours, she couldn’t step away. He was warm and safe and there and she needed another human—well, person—who was something approaching safe.

When Arest fell forward after her, she thought he’d tripped, but the soul curdling growl that came from behind him told her otherwise.

They weren’t alone. Again.

The last fight had been interminable, with her huddled in the corner, trying not to draw any attention to herself. This time, it was already over by the time she even thought about getting out of the way. Arest crouched over another monster, its throat slashed and gushing putrid blood into the hallway around them.

He glanced over his shoulder at her and jerked his head back, telling her to get out of the room that she’d stumbled into. She was half over the threshold and stepped back, edging around the corner of the wall and trying to stay out of his way.

What if he went crazy on her? What if he tried to attack? He’d taken out the creature on the ground in seconds and it seemed to know how to attack. The most she’d ever done was taken a self-defense class offered for free through her civilian fleet training program.

But Arest wasn’t paying much attention to her. He hefted the creature up over his head and tossed it through the doorway into the room she’d almost been sitting in. All she saw of the monster was something vaguely humanoid with too much hair and rat-like claws tipping dirty fingers.

Arest seemed to be waiting for something. He held up a hand, but was too far away to hold her back. For that, Stella was thankful. His hand was black with nasty blood that she could smell from a few meters away.

He crouched low and she found herself mimicking his motion, bending her knees and placing a hand against the wall to steady herself. Arest looked around and Stella couldn’t take her eyes off him. He was like a machine, or one of those cyborgs she’d seen doing patrols of a space station far away from here. Of course, everyone said cyborgs were mostly human, or mostly whatever they were made from—Oscavian, Keie, or some other race. But she didn’t know what Arest was, and she was pretty sure he didn’t know either.

He walked like a human, but with a dancer’s—or fighter’s—grace. The gestures he gave her were human: nods, waves, hand holds. But space was a mixed up mass of people and so many gestures crossed cultures with ease. Despite the purple skin and claws, Stella couldn’t help but see something human about him. She’d met many aliens in her life, and none of them had acted like Arest.

No one she’d ever met had acted like Arest.

After a moment, he stood and she did as well. He took a deep breath and looked over at her, meeting her eyes while he flexed his fingers out, telling her to stay put. She nodded.

And then he walked into the room with the creature’s corpse.

It was on the tip of her tongue to call him back, to tell him to wait or to urge him down the road and away from that thing. But she bit her lip to keep from making a peep and watched him go. He’d made this decision, and she wasn’t his keeper.

But she took a step back, making sure she was completely clear of the entrance to the room in case the door closed. A moment later she scuttled back further and ducked as something came flying towards her. She thought they were under attack again, but as the thing landed with a meaty crash, she saw it was the body of the thing that Arest had defeated.

What the hell?

She looked between it and the shadowy door. The room beyond was too dark to make out, though she thought she saw Arest’s outline stalking around.

They needed to work on their communication. Maybe the guy couldn’t really talk, but there had to be some way to tell her that he was about to chuck a dead body her way. Just yell out ‘bad’! He could handle that, couldn’t he?

She was about to stalk into the room and give him a piece of her mind. Clearly there weren’t any other monsters in there. She’d hear him fighting. Or something. Adrenaline surged through her and she needed to move, to run. Who just threw a body? She took back all she’d thought about his humanity. Clearly he wasn’t from Earth or anywhere that humans lived. Not unless he’d been plucked out of some cave tens of thousands of years ago. And since time travel was impossible, she knew he had to be an alien. At least that made sense.

Arest’s outline got closer as he approached the door, and Stella stepped up to meet him, ready to go off on him. But before she could cross the threshold, the door slammed shut, cutting her off from him and leaving her next to the rotting corpse of some tunnel monster.

She didn’t scream. She couldn’t scream. When she opened her mouth to cry out, it was like something grabbed onto her throat and squeezed, cutting off the sound before she could make it. Stella clutched at her neck, but nothing was there except the choking feeling of terror soaking into her.

Stella stumbled forward and dug at the metal, looking for a place she could try to pry the door open. She had no idea what the inside of that chamber looked like. What if Arest was trapped? Was there air? Were there more monsters? What if it filled up with water or something and he ended up drowning?

When nothing on the door itself seemed to work, she scrambled to the side and looked for a panel or a sensor, anything that would open the door for her. The stone was totally smooth on her end and the one crack she found couldn’t be budged. There was nothing but wall, no way to lift the door.

It opened back up.

At first she didn’t realize what she was looking at. But Arest stood right there, a bright smile on his face. He reached over to his left and the door slid shut again and then just as quickly, it was back open. Her heart hadn’t stopped racing from the first instance and sweat poured off her from the panic.

He’d found a control?

Arest was still grinning and he waved her inside. “Safe,” he said. “See.”

She absently noted that he’d added a third word to his vocabulary, but she was scared to step over the threshold. What if this was a trap? What if there was another monster just biding his time? Well, she looked over her shoulder at the one that Arest had already killed. If there was another monster, she was safer with her beastly alien than without.

She stepped over the threshold and Arest reached over and pushed a button on a brightly lit panel, closing the door behind her.

Her personal space evaporated and Arest didn’t step back. She was caught between him and the door, between cold metal and hot, hard, naked muscle that she wanted to reach out and lay her fingers over.

She knew she shouldn’t. She knew it was wrong. Arest wasn’t human, and he didn’t seem to be all there. But his blue eyes pinned her in place and the heat coming off his body enveloped her like a blanket. Without consciously making the decision, Stella reached out and flattened her palm against the heat of his pecs. The short, almost invisible hair surprised her and her fingers curled, digging in further.

Arest groaned and planted a hand on the door, trapping her on three sides. So why didn’t she feel trapped?

When the door closed, faint lights illuminated, buried in the floor along the walls. She could see her beast perfectly, even more clearly than when they’d been in the halls. His eyes drooped half closed and one half of his mouth tugged up in an absent smile. He was so damn big that she might as well have been in a tiny hole rather than a cavernous room.

But she didn’t want to move.

She flexed her hand out, taking in the feel of hard muscle and the pulse of his heart, right where a human’s would be. Arest’s free hand came up and covered hers, holding it in place, and she was caught in the inferno of his heat. If he hadn’t been walking around and fighting at top form, she’d have thought him feverish. But there was nothing sick about this man.

Stella tore her gaze from their joined hands and looked up to see him studying her like some lazy jungle cat. He could pounce and end her at any moment, but for now he seemed to want to play. To want to protect.

“Safe?” she asked. She had no idea if she was talking about the room or him.

Arest leaned in close and brushed his lips against her forehead, sending her heart back into that racing rhythm that had just settled. “Safe,” he promised.

He pulled her away from the door, cradling her shoulders and not letting go of her hand. When he bent to his knees along one of the walls, he took her with him, and Stella’s mind went wild with where this might go.

But he simply laid down and wedged her to his side, placing her close to the wall and protected from the room and the door behind them. His bag acted as his own pillow and he acted as hers. His breathing evened and he fell into sleep, leaving her confused and on the verge of frustration, wondering what the hell she was going to do with him.

***

AREST DREAMED OF BLOOD and grit. He looked through a cloudy haze of mist and darkness and struggled against the bonds that chained him to the hot metal at his back.

He wasn’t alone in the darkness. At the edge of his vision the whip snaked along on the ground, drawing designs in the dirt and sending up dust with every flick of the end. The man holding the handle was a mystery of leather and shadow. A mask covered his face, the nose a harsh point and a swath of red where his eyes should have been.

When he caught Arest staring, he jerked the whip back and flicked it toward him, coming within a hand span of Arest’s eyes and making him flinch.

The trainers didn’t always miss. If they did, there would be no reason to fear.

Somewhere beyond, outside the dark misery of this putrid room, a crowd roared. He was under the arena, a pawn waiting to be placed into the game of blood that these hostile aliens played.

This was never the life that Arest wanted, but a man had to pay his debts.

Blood and ash and lasers.

The memory flashed before him, deeper than this one. Something from long before. He stepped into the cold stone of this arena and submitted himself to the whims of the rich.

He had a mission.

BEAST

The whip snapped again, and this time Arest didn’t flinch. He jerked against his chains and snapped his teeth at the trainer, growling out something guttural and ancient, something no translator could decipher because there was no need. Some language was universal.

Words came through the space beyond the trainer, though the shadows obstructed any view. Arest didn’t know whether he sat in a room or a hallway or a hole. “The ambassador cannot use these tunnels,” came a gruff, tired voice.

A lofty man replied with scorn. “The other paths are blocked. I’m certain your trainers can do their jobs.”

Awareness flickered to life in the back of Arest’s mind. He strained once more, but as footsteps grew closer, he slumped, letting his body go completely limp and releasing a pained moan.

The whip struck him on the arm and he didn’t flinch, he couldn’t. This trainer was nothing compared to the ones who owned him.

With a curse, the trainer threw down his whip and approached with caution. He checked for a pulse with a jab of green fingers, but he missed the right spot and pressed the column of Arest’s throat instead of finding the vein. The trainer cursed again and muttered something about cost if the prized fighter died.

He flicked his hand up and Arest’s arms sagged down, suddenly free.

That one move sealed the man’s fate. And that of the ambassador.

A sharp pinch on his arm brought him out of the fog and into the cavern that he’d claimed for the night. The soft press of flesh against his chest anchored him to the present and the heat of her thigh against his cock made him want to stay.

But Stella looked at him with worry, not desire. “You stopped breathing,” she said. “One second you were fine, then you went totally limp.” Her eyes raked over him, searching his exposed flesh for any hint of injury. “Did the monster get you?”

His trainers? The ambassador? No, she knew nothing of the dream. She spoke of the monster from before. “I... am...” he cleared his throat, croaking out the words through tight vocal chords, “well.”

Her eyes widened. “You can talk? More than two words?”

The dream jarred something loose, or perhaps it was the hours and hours away from the BEAST trainers. They kept tight control on him, ensuring he was never a threat to those who kept him. His head and body ached and he realized that he’d not been given whatever drugs he normally took to dull his senses.

In answer to Stella’s question, he nodded, his voice still rusty. They rarely required him to talk and he knew that it had been some time, perhaps years, since he’d spoken in full sentences.

She pulled away from him. Tried to pull away from him. But Arest held onto her arm and wrapped himself around her. For a moment, Stella stiffened, but then she relaxed when he did nothing more than hold tight.

Her skin was chilled and she shivered, even in his embrace. He wished that he had something to give her, but she wore more than he did, and he barely felt the cold. That was another thing they’d done to him.

“Who are you?” she whispered against him, burrowing closer and turning herself so they were chest to chest, her head nestled into the crook of his neck.

Arest breathed deep of her scent. This chamber reminded him of the place beneath the arena where the trainers and the whips did their tortures, but this time he was safe. They were safe. For now. He knew that something was wrong with these tunnels and that he’d been sent on a mission for a reason, but that was all trapped below the cobwebs and chaos that had only started to abate.

But Stella wished to know him, and she sat quietly in his arms waiting for an answer. So he gave her what little bits of himself he had and hoped that it was enough. He grabbed her hand and placed it on his heart, where she’d touched him so gently before. “Arest,” he said, “wasn’t always my name. Don’t remember before.” And every time he tried to prod that cloud of memory, pain lanced through him and he was forced to retreat. “Used to be something else.” He looked down at his claws where they rested lightly against Stella’s shirt, the ends tearing little pinpricks in the soft fabric. He pulled his hands back, unwilling to risk any damage to her. “I’m... bad.” Even though she’d woken him before the dream ended, he could feel the heat of the ambassador’s blood on his hands. He’d done the deed then. The only thing that’d saved him was that it would cost far more to kill him than to just package him off to the next victim.

Stella’s fingers wrapped around the base of his neck and pushed through the short hair there. Arest let out an involuntary little moan. It felt so good to be touched, for her to touch him, he didn’t know how to let go, even though he feared every moment that he held on to her.

“You’re not bad,” she said. “You’re a protector.”

He didn’t believe her, but he didn’t say it out loud, not while she cradled him close. “Stella? Who?” Full sentences were still a bit much, especially after cutting his past open and letting it bleed over her, pathetic trickle that it was.

She gave a hollow laugh. “Me? I’m no one. I’m a mission coordinator for the civilian fleet, which is a fancy word for a secretary. My parents are gone, my brother’s a marine out past the third quadrant somewhere. And if I never come back from this crash I don’t think anyone back home will remember to miss me.” A tear leaked out of her eye and she wiped it away with a fierce jerk of her arm.

“I will,” he said. And kissed her.