Page 2 of Victoria's Discovery

When her breathing slowed a little more, she braved raising her eyes a little farther and scanned her cell. It was at least twenty-five feet long and wide, and maybe ten or so feet tall. Plenty of room to run around screaming like a crazy person if the urge struck her. There was a clear, plastic-looking trough in the opposite corner, full of water.

So, she wouldn’t die of dehydration. Also, good.

Drawing in a bracing breath, she finally looked beyond the walls, concentrating on only the cell across the aisle to the left of hers.

Inside was a… asomething.

Squinting one eye, she tilted her head, as though that would help her to make sense of the thing. It didn’t. The only way she could think to describe it was a mashup of a people-sized bird and a spider or maybe a crab. Her calm started to shrivel in the face of such a nightmarish creature, but she clenched her jaw and determinedly tried to think of something positive to say about it.

“Easy. It’s not in my damn cage. That thing’s beak looks like it could crush bones,” she muttered shakily.

Victoria shuddered and quickly looked away, turning to gaze into the enclosure across the ten-foot-wide aisle to her right, only to go perfectly still.

Thatwas not an animal.

That was most definitely a person—a male person judging by the rather large bulge in his leather pants—and also most definitely not of the human variety.

A mix of stunned disbelief and excitement shot through her, overshadowing her fear.

“That’s an alien! Holy shit,” she breathed, eyeing him owlishly.

He was a scary-looking, very pissed-off alien, but an actual, living being from a different world. She was absolutely sure of it.

Humans could maybe bleach their hair to get the pure white shade of his dreadlocks, but they damn sure didn’t have olive green skin with pretty orange splotches dappling their necks and shoulders, and they definitely didn’t come equipped with claws and fangs.

Speaking of pretty, behind the murderous scowl and intimidatingly sharp teeth, he was kinda… hot.

A quiet, breathless laugh that came out sounding more like a deranged giggle escaped her before she could slap a hand over her mouth to muffle it.

Quickly darting a look around, she made sure no one heard that and got the accurate impression she was having a mental breakdown, then sighed in relief when she saw everyone was still too busy losing their own minds to care about her.

A further scan of the cages in her line of sight told her that a lot of the incomprehensible shapes she’d seen earlier were actuallypeople, or what she was pretty sure were people. Some were questionable, but a lot were behaving in a way that made them seem sentient.

They were pounding on their cells, trying to make eye contact with the beings around them, and most importantly, they were shouting.

While she obviously couldn’t understand what they were saying, she recognized they were, indeed, saying words. Victoria was fairly positive languages were exclusive to people with the obvious exception of talking birds and huskies, but that was mimicry.

“Sooo, I’ve been… abducted?”

Her first thought wasn’t that that was impossible or even ridiculous. It was that whoever was in charge of choosing people to abduct should be fired. Surely, they could find someone more worthwhile than a twenty-five-year-old college student whostillhadn’t managed to settle on a major and who’d just been fired from her job. Shouldn’t they be stealing models or geniuses?

A particularly hard slam of a fist nearly made her jump out of her skin. Jerking back around to the angry guy, she stared at him wide-eyed, wondering for a moment if he was capable of breaking the glass. That thought went a long way in killing what was left of the wonder she felt and replacing it with a renewed surge of fear.

Their eyes met, sending her heart leaping into her throat to choke off her air supply and making her gasp come out as more of a garbled moan.

He must have caught on to the fact that he was scaring the hell out of her because he grimaced slightly.

Or she thought it was a grimace.

Maybe that was his peoples’ expression for ‘fuck off scaredy cat’ or ‘quit looking at me or I’ll eat your face off.’ It was hard to tell, particularly because, after the grimace, he stared. Hard. In a way that felt predatory. Or maybe he was just really curious?

“Please let that be curiosity.”

Victoria tried to break their stare off, remembering what they always said on Animal Planet about looking a predator in the eyes, but she was frozen. Right up until his face softened and his lips pursed. Then, her eyebrows shot up her forehead.

“Is he… cooing at me?” she wondered, tilting her head slightly and narrowing her eyes.

She couldn’t hear him over the clamor, but that damn sure looked like a cooing face. Unfortunately, unless she was mistaken, which she very well could be, that didn’t look like the kind of expression you made at someone you thought was an intelligent person. Itwasthe kind of face she’d seen people make at animals and babies.

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