Page 50 of Forbidden Desires

A vision of her came screaming. The spider’s web wrapped around her and it was invading her mind, trying to find something.Amelia was screaming and begging Zylar to help her.

“You would think he would try to help.” Her heart hurt, knowing her mate wasn’t helping to shield her from the pain.

“Quite true. He’d do anything for you if he was getting your pain. I deflected it. So, you ended up here with me.”

“Why?” Once again, she was in the dark, unable to see anything. When the lights came on, she was blinded. Her hand went to her face to cover her eyes from the intensity of the light.

“Look at me!” The sweet voice of the goddess hardened, making Amelia’s heart beat faster. She was sure a heart attack was coming her way.

Amelia hadn’t realized until that moment that she was huddled on the floor with her hands over her head trying to protect her body. Why? Because her spirit was here, but her body was being abused and she wanted it to stop. It took everything she had to open eyes that weren’t eyes and to stand. Her spirit, her soul, call it what you will was being bathed in bright light. When she looked up, she gasped.

In front of her stood a goddess, yes, but she was more than that. She was a Diza female. Amelia had never seen one and assumed they would look like the males. She assumed wrong. This female was beautiful, with luscious black hair and purple skin. She was jealous of her big breasts and shapely legs. Hell, even her feet were cute. The goddess was making Amelia feel like a poor relation who would never clean up well enough.

“Stop that and listen. The Tan-ge killed my people, my females. Now you and your cousins belong to me, and I refuse to lose anyone else. Are you listening?”

“I am.” Amelia was stunned and gave a loose nod to her head. This goddess wanted to claim her, to make her one of her people. To assign worth to her. That’s what was so shocking. When you realized the deity that was above you assigned worth to you.

“Listen, Amelia, time is running out. You have to figure out what Vexar is hiding, or the spider will rip it away from you and kill you. Only full knowledge of what’s going on can save you, and it may still be too late. Don’t let it freak you out or you’relost. Think, remember, avenge the females that came before you.”

***

Amelia screamed as the spider dug into her mind. She tried to raise her shield but couldn’t find her soul.

“Tell me your secrets,” the dreamy voice of the spider insisted. Small spiders were crawling over her body and Amelia went back to the closet where her uncle liked to keep her as she crowed about the new world order.

He talked and talked and then it was Zylar telling her about conversations he’d had with his cousins. None of it made any sense. Her uncle was talking, and then Zylar talked about Rakha and then SaKura. It was all about what they experienced since coming to earth. There were so many things, but they had one thing in common.

It was impossible. That couldn’t be it. She squeezed her eyes shut and went back to the closet. This time, she tiptoed to the door to hear her uncle better. He was just drunk enough to brag, but not drunk enough to slur his words or make up lies.

Zylar’s voice washed over her as she questioned something his cousins told her. Holy hell, she knew what the spider was looking for!

Chapter Twenty-six

The minute Amelia knew what she was protecting, she knew how to raise her soul shield. There was an audible scream of no that reverberated around the room and through her, as she scrambled to get her shield raised before the spider could rip the knowledge away from her, and with it, her ability to protect herself.

Amelia reached for her shield, pulling it up more like a cover of a long thick wall that had fallen on her just as the monster spider lifted its huge palp to break her shield and rape her mind. Amelia’s shield dropped into place. The spider yelled in pain as its front legs crashed against the shield and it blew up in a profusion of guts and spider parts all over, landing on Amelia.

With the spider gone, having taken all of its offspring with it, Amelia could move. She scrambled away from the place of death and destruction, jumping to try to get as much spider guts off her as possible.

“Your Yelp rating for hospitality is going down, Vexar. You’re in the negative star territory. This is disgusting.”

She thought briefly about taking off her clothes and decided not to. Who knew what was going to happen next? Some covering was better than none.

“Amelia.” The door opened and Vexar stood there in all his human glory. He was a tall male in his human shape, with olive skin reminiscent of a Greek heritage. He had inky black hair and eyes a strange color of blue. She bet he could have picked up a few modeling gigs if he were human.

It was strange now that she was looking at him through eyes not colored in fear, realizing that the true monster looked as human as she did. No wonder so many of her fellow citizens had been taken in by their smooth words, putting their efforts into a plan that would leave them dead and their planet raped of all natural resources.

Never discount the monster in the closet theory. She laughed. It was easy at first, more like she was laughing at herself. As the laughter continued, it got deeper until she was bent over. The whole situation from start to finish was playing through her mind like a bad comedy that she was reading from the script for the first time.

“Stop laughing,” he snarled. “This isn’t a joke. There won’t be any April Fools following what’s happening here.”

Amelia stopped laughing and glared at the impeccably dressed Tan-ge. “You’re on my time, not the other way around. You stole me from my ship and my mate. What did you think I was going to do? Then let’s not forget about torture from the spider. You know, if you had left me alone, I might never have connected two and two, but now I know. There’s a saying on Earth about when knowledge is shared. Kill me, Zylar will know before I die. Kill him and his cousins will know before he dies and then it’ll be all over the news and you will be the number one most wanted on the FBI list and all the other alphabet police intelligence agencies. Your reign of terror is coming to an end.”

“You don’t get it, do you?” He took a step toward her, his face morphing from human to Tan-ge and back to human.

Amelia took a step backward, wanting to stay out of his arm’s reach. “Tell me what don’t I get.”

“My people are like the locusts of your planet. We’ve always been this way. It’s not in our roots to settle down and make a planet our home. We have to conquer new planets and bring resources back so our people can live. What gives you the right to live when we are dying?”

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