Page 42 of Alien Rescue

Enormous rats scurried around beneath them. One paused and looked up at them, and she could’ve sworn there was a hungry glint in its eyes.

“Please go higher,” she squeaked.

“The rats cannot reach us,” he said calmly, and she wanted to kick him.

“They’d better not bite me; they carry disease. Do you even know where you are going, my Komodo?”

He flashed that awful grin at her and then abruptly stopped. If she didn’t hold on so tight, her momentum would’ve carried her forward. Not Zanr—he sat as if he didn’t stop the bike between one moment and the next. “He is up there.”

She narrowed her eyes at the one window where light spilled through beige curtains. This was not the kind of place she expected Morgan to stay in. His tastes ran to the finer things in life. “Let me go in alone.”

He didn’t even stop to think it over. Just said, “No.”

“Hear me out. If I go in alone, he might tell me stuff he won’t with you present.”

He got off the bike and helped her down. “I can assure you, he will talk with me present.”

She looked around them, saw beady eyes, but the rats kept their distance. “He might tell you a few things out of fear, but I think he’d like to brag to me, and he might let slip things he’d otherwise not say.” She looked him up and down. “It’s a pity you can’t turn invisible like the hoverbike.”

He cocked his head and something about his body language alerted her. She felt her eyes widen. “You can?”

“Of course, I have superior Zyrgin technology.”

For once she didn’t roll her eyes at that. “Cool. I’ll go in, and you turn invisible and come in with me. Then if—”

He lifted her with his hands under her arms. “I am the warrior and you are the breeder.”

It was hard to act nonchalant while your feet were swinging a foot off the ground, a large alien glaring at you, but she managed to lift a brow. “So?”

“So, I tell you what we are doing. You do not instruct your warrior.”

Yeah, he’s got a surprise coming. “Well, excuse me.”

“You are excused,” he said gravely, as if he was royalty pardoning a peasant. Rose was tempted to kick his knees real hard. With utmost care, he set her back down on her feet.

“Well, what do you want us to do?” she asked with heavy sarcasm. When she knew what they’d injected her with and had dealt with it, she’d teach this alien not to pick her up like a doll and try to intimidate her.

“You will go in and I will be with you, but camouflaged.”

Rose rolled her eyes and opened the outside door to the twenty-story building and crossed the grubby lobby to the cement stairs. She started up the stairs, then hesitated.

“Third floor,” Zanr whispered in her ear, his breath warm on her skin. She shivered. “Room 1001.”

She went to the third floor and knocked on the door, then moved so that he couldn’t see her through the peephole. Morgan opened the door, a pistol in his hand. He glared at her. “How did you find me?”

She shrugged. “Skills.”

His lips turned down in that disgusted smirk he’d had for her from the first time they’d met. “As if.”

She wasn’t about to debate her skills with him. She aimed a smirk of her own to hide her bone-deep fear. She had an alien and she wasn’t afraid to use him. “What did Abel inject me with?”

His gaze sharpened at her calm question. As if he expected her to be intimidated by his attitude. He stood back and motioned her inside. “Something that’s going to kill you eventually,” he said with such satisfaction in his voice, she shivered. Why would he enjoy the idea of her dying so much?

“Why? The Director would never do that to me.”

“You were the experiment. He wanted to see exactly how someone injected with the nanos would react.”

It hit her then—the betrayal, the same rejection she’d received from her father. Her body physically ached at the emotional blow from that realization. Parnell—she’d never call him Mr. or Director again—had used her and had tried to kill her. Nausea threatened.

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