Page 5 of The Alien's Private Redemption

He was also certain that they had both been in the wrong in whatever had started the conflict. Ae-cha did not share this view on their history.

Angela whimpered and buried her face against his neck. Zoric's heart ached at her obvious discomfort and continued to hold her.

"I will not leave while she is still in obvious distress," he announced. "If she needs to be moved somewhere else to get clean, I will carry her there."

Ae-cha and Dr. Phillips scoffed in unison but the soldier next to him nodded. "We're taking her to medical. There's a shower there and she can get checked over by the Doc. She'll be under guard the entire time but she needs to be removed from this room."

"She doesn't need to be carried," Dr. Phillips protested.

Zoric ignored her to find the best way to lift Angela. With her arms secured behind her back, it was awkward, and the look on her face told him she wasn't exactly comfortable. But he felt better with his arms full of the troubled woman than he would have watching her shuffle down the hallway.

The moment he stepped out into the hallway with his precious burden, he was surrounded by guards. Ae-cha and Dr. Phillips were forced to follow.

He could taste the chemical sterility in the air before they turned the corner to the hallway of the medical facilities. It was a curiously human taste, layered as it was over all the other human smells. Whatever other things it was trying to remove, it couldn't completely hide the passage of all the human bodies.

The acrid scent of bile filled his nostrils but the underlying taste of the woman in his arms was still there in the moist air between them. He wanted to taste it directly from her skin with no other interference.

When they walked through the doors to the medical facility they were met by a veritable flurry of doctors and nurses. Several of them were pushing a hospital bed and tried to take Angela from him.

"Sir, you have to put her down before we can take her shackles off," one of the guards told him.

Zoric noticed the fear and uncertainty in the eyes of some of the medical personnel and he nodded. Everything in him demanded he keep her in his arms but he took the step he needed to turn and put her on the bed.

The restraints were unlocked to let her arms fall to her side, then secured to the side of the bed. They started pushing her away, towards another set of doors, and he moved to follow but the guards restrained him.

"She needs a shower," he called after them. "And new clothes."

"They'll take care of her," the higher ranking soldier told him. "Female nurses and guards will make sure she gets cleaned up."

"Thank you," Zoric said.

"Colonel Schuh," the man said, and held out his hand. "We didn't have time to be properly introduced."

Zoric shook his hand. "Of course, thank you, Colonel Schuh. I appreciate your help."

"I appreciate your quick thinking and attention," the Colonel said. "You caught that she was in distress before any of the rest of us did. May I ask how you noticed from that far away? You hadn't even made it to the monitoring station."

"Would you believe me if I said I wasn't sure?"

It was the truth, though Zoric had some theories. From everything he knew, what had happened was impossible. If you had already met, and lost, your Bond Mate, you didn't get another one. When he'd let Dorcas go, he'd resigned himself to being alone for the rest of his life.

"I believe you," Colonel Schuh said. "But I hope it doesn't stay that way for long. You're here as an advisor on a case we've never seen before but I'd like answers if they exist."

Ae-cha moved up next to them and the look on her face told Zoric she was going to be unpleasant.

"Zoric's people have more than a passing familiarity with the self-destruct commands that your prisoner has in her brain. If he's at all sensitive, he would recognize the signs as soon as he was in range."

"What kind of familiarity?" the Colonel asked.

"Well, it's certainly not with removing them," Ae-cha said with a grim smile. "That's my people's specialty."

Chapter 3

Angela laid back on the gurney and enjoyed the oxygen being blown up her nose while the nurses cut her out of her clothes. It was the fastest way to get her out of them while she was handcuffed to the bed.

The hospital wing's chemical sterility burned Angela's nostrils, overlaying but not quite masking the metallic scent of fear and illness. The wheels of the gurney squeaked against polished floors, each turn and bump magnified by her drug-heightened senses. Overhead lights strobed past like morse code as they rushed her down the corridor, the ceiling tiles creating a hypnotic pattern that made her head spin.

The voice in the back of her head urged her to fight her way out of the restraints but she was exhausted. She barely twitched when the IV went in and the cold chill of the painkillers hitting her blood stream promised relief soon.

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