Page 64 of What Makes an Alien a Dad?

Chapter 21

Maya

Egus all but dragged me out of the aircraft and under the glass dome over the rooftop of the high tower on the other side of Voran City. It was far away from the hospital and the assembly building where he’d taken me from.

“You won’t get away with this,” I seethed. “Kear will be furious when he finds out.”

“If he finds out,” a voice came from the door behind a tall lattice draped with dry vines, then the owner of the voice appeared. The man was shorter than Egus and more stout, but he held himself with much more self-assurance than my kidnapper. “Which I’ll make sure never happens. Kear, as you call him, will never know what happened to you.”

Said softly, his words didn’t sound like a threat, more like a statement of fact, which made them only more terrifying, as if this man held my life in his hands, and he had already decided it wouldn’t end well.

Dread spiked into fear inside me.

“Who are you?”

He smirked, then gave me a formal bow before introducing himself.

“Professor Hezer, a far more renowned and distinguished scholar in my field than your Kear can ever hope to be.”

I cocked a hip, folding my arms over my chest. “Yet he’s the one being honored at the assembly right now. While you’re here, kidnapping his study subject.”

His lips twitched, wiping the smirk off his face.

“It was nothing but damn luck on his part,” he sneered. “I spent much more time working on this—”

“You didn’t go to war, then? Was that how you got more time than Kear to work on your research? And still, you failed.”

He jerked his head, his tail lashing around his hooves.

“I didn’t fail! He got fucking lucky, literally stumbling upon the breakthrough before anyone else.”

“Well, lucky or not, he’s ahead now and there is nothing you can do about it.”

“Unless he suffers a setback.” His face split with a smile, and I did not like the look of it. “He hasn’t delivered a live birth yet. I can still get ahead.”

My insides seemed to turn to ice at his words.

“What are you talking about?”

Egus shifted his hooves uneasily.

“We’ll just take a few tests, Maya.”

I drew in a shaky breath. I couldn’t allow them to touch me. I had to get out of here.

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