Page 6 of Breed

I draw in a deep breath, and I smell the unmistakeable scent of alien males all around me. There is something almost intoxicating about the pheromones they are emitting. They are like little keys of desire looking for a lock to slot into, and with every breath I take, I become increasingly saturated with them. My brain is being addled, and there’s no hope for clarity now. Between touch and scent, I am more captured than I was when Shan snatched me out of the bushes.

The journey is not long, or perhaps it is and I have no sense of time while huffing saurian pheromones like someone discovering a new addiction. I had wondered why Sullivan and Raine didn’t try harder to escape. Now I understand. These aliens generate sexual serotonin, if that’s even a thing. That’s what it feels like. It feels like every receptor in my mind is wide open and begging for more.

I am picked up and put over Shan’s shoulder. I feel his scaled shoulder pressing into my soft belly, the blood rushing to my head as I am carried what feels like down a deep and winding ramp. The air becomes stiller, and a little more stale. Sound stops traveling in the way it does outdoors and instead starts to bump against heavy things. We are underground. We are getting progressively more underground with every step.

I am guessing that I am being taken to Shan’s room. And I am also guessing that Shan’s room is underground, along with all the other outlaw saurians. The place has the feel of a subterranean frat house. Laughter echoes through passages as the story of how they captured a human starts to spread. I hear myself being described in crude terms.

“Thick and juicy human treat.”

“Fuckmeat,” another growls.

“Human holes,” another adds. They are riffing on a coarse theme, until I feel myself swing around fast with Shan’s spinning motion.

“ENOUGH!” He roars the word and the burrow falls silent.

The effect of his one word is impressive. He may not be an obviously high ranking outlaw, but I am starting to wonder, for none dared challenge him for me. Even Wrath himself did not try to taste me. We have gathered from our surveillance that Wrath is equally powerful, if not more so, as Alpha Thorn. Thorn has the might of the law on his side, but Wrath seems to have practically everything and everyone else. A schism runs deep in saurian society, and I have just fallen into it.

Seems to me that the main pastimes of these outlaws are fighting, carousing, and imbibing mind-altering substances. It’s actually very much like a lot of pirate places. I would almost feel at home, were I not being held captive in the arms of a devastatingly handsome and frighteningly silent saurian outlaw.

A heavy metal door swings closed with the kind of CLANG that creates instant existential dread in career criminals like me. I find myself enclosed in a room that is little more than a cell. The blindfold is pulled from my eyes, and I finally get to see what I have gotten myself into.

It’s an irregularly shaped room on account of being carved from rock. I imagine the location of the walls is determined by the location of other structures in the outlaw warren, and probably various kinds of dirt and rock and… I’m overthinking the room. The walls are all bare, aside from a bed, a big, heavy metal box, and a wardrobe.

Shan swings me down onto my feet and lets me look at what little there is to look at. If there is a secret way out of this room, it is either through that metal box, the wardrobe, or under the bed. There are no other avenues of potential hidden escape. I always look for non-obvious ways out of a place. I imagine there must be some down here, otherwise every single saurian outlaw could be taken out if they plugged the exits and just ran a bit of toxic gas through the place. It’s a dark thought, but we live in a dark universe. Everyone has to have an escape plan. That goes double for outlaws.

The bed is simple. It looks like it’s basically a single bed for a saurian. You could fit probably four people in it, top and tail, but just one massive horned creature. There’s one pillow on it, and a blanket that looks like it has the texture of steel wool. It’s basically one very small step up from a bed of nails. Nothing in this room looks comfortable. That tells me comfort isn’t very high on Shan’s priorities. And that really doesn’t bode well for me.

He turns and locks the door, then reaches for a thick steel beam which he runs across the door and through loops secured into the wall on either side of the door. I watch him barricade us in from across the room where I have scrambled for a semblance of freedom, my back against the wall with a simple instinct for survival. I push my hands into my pants, looking for something that might help the situation.

I find something small and round in the first pocket. It’s not a lot, but it might help. Pulling it out of my pocket, I make a move to dash it on the floor. But before I can throw my little smoke grenade, Shan is on me. He moves like fucking lightning, his big saurian hand wrapped around my human wrist, holding my arm up above my head as he pins me back against the wall.

I am stuck between rock and a scaled place, very much embarrassed at having been caught so quickly and so easily. It makes me feel amateurish. If you’d asked me yesterday if I was good at my job, I would have said yes. Now I am not so sure. What kind of a rogue gets caught in the underbrush almost immediately and can’t even get a distracting smoke grenade off? Every single one of my movements seems so obvious and so telegraphed to him.

Shan hasn’t said a word to me yet. Not a single one. He is inspecting me with a quiet, intelligent gaze. Most of the saurians have lizard type eyes with dark slits set in bright, colorful orbs. His eyes are dark, two solid black holes. It is much harder to read emotion in them — if he has any.

“Sorry,” I squeak. “I had to try.”

“Let go.”

His tone is very cool, very calm, very collected. He doesn’t seem upset that I tried to pull some shit. He certainly doesn’t seem surprised. He just wants me to do as I’m told, and so I do. That’s not only the easiest thing to do right now, it’s the only thing to do right now.

I drop the little round ball into his waiting hand. He examines it briefly, before putting it into his pocket. He does not let my arm go, so I remain stuck, arched back against the wall, looking up at him rather ashamed of myself. I’m not embarrassed at having tried to escape, but I’m fucking humiliated at having been caught.

“Sorry,” I whimper again. I want to shrink away from him, but that is practically impossible with the way he is holding me. I am forced to stand in place, and I am made to look him in the eye as he inspects me with that cool, detached demeanor.

He says nothing. He gives the briefest of nods, then releases me. My instincts make me want to scramble further away, but what would be the point? This room is too small to evade him, and he is obviously so much faster than I am. The first time he caught me, out in the forest, I didn’t see him coming and assumed I’d just done something stupid. Now I’m not so sure. Now I think he might be able to move faster than any creature should be able to move. His reflexes seem impossibly quick. There’s a part of me that wants to test them just to find out. There’s a bigger part of me that doesn’t want to move a goddamn muscle lest he snaps on me. I can sense his predatory nature, and I know that nothing this strong, this fast, and this quiet is safe.

“Please don’t hurt me.”

Maybe I’m safer than I think, I try to rationalize. Shan seems self-contained and self-controlled, and not easily annoyed. The other outlaws wouldn’t shut up the entire way back from the forest to their hideout. He did not respond to a single of the taunts of the other outlaws on the way back, and he only roared in the halls outside when the smack talk became too much to allow.

He walks across the room and removes the leather holster which carries his weaponry and such. He hangs it up on the back of the door. My eyes follow the motions of his arms. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and every part of him ripples as he moves because he is absolutely ripped. This guy is scales, muscle, and bone. My eyes run down his body. Some of the saurians have tails. This one doesn’t. This one has a thick, meaty ass with glutes I know are powerful enough to hunt me down. He is wearing dark pants that cling to his body in a frankly sinful way. It’s the sort of styling that hot girls in even hotter clubs wear, but for rough outlaw saurians.

Shan turns back around, his dark gaze settling on me again. I see his eyes narrow just a fraction, and a bolt of anticipation and fear run through me. I still haven’t moved from where he left me, and now he is coming back. This time, he’s leaving behind all the weaponry I could have attempted to grab and use on him if I’d had anything resembling presence of mind. Though, now I think of it, I don’t think I’d have a snowball’s chance in a volcano of using his own weaponry on him successfully. He’s too quick. I need to look for some other kind of edge. I’m not giving up just yet, but I do know that I’m going to have to be damn smart to get away from him.

My brain freezes as Shan gets close enough to me that I feel his energy somehow penetrating mine. He is muscular and he holds himself in that very specific way that people who are very, very dangerous hold themselves. Sort of a lithe, powerful gait that could erupt into violence at any moment. Is he angry with me? How would I be able to tell?

I feel myself shrinking away from him as he stands in front of me, close enough that I have to tilt my head back to look up at him. He reaches out, curls his index finger, and tucks it under my chin, holding my face up to his for his inspection. I wonder what his intense, dark, mysterious eyes fathom in me. Does he find me weird looking? Probably. I’m probably just a short, round, fleshy blob to him. I’ve always been good at stealth and subterfuge because I’m not one of the sorts of women who stands out. I’m not statuesque and murderous like Raine, and I’m not a blonde ball of energy like Sullivan. I’m just Lettie. Or Lottie, sometimes, because people often forget my name. They forget me entirely from time to time, which I use to my advantage.

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