Page 38 of The Ozar Triad

“We’ll be able to find another craft there,” Klaej said. “And then we will take our mate home.”

“Home? You mean… you’ll take me back to Earth?” Riley asked.

The pregnant pause said it all.

She huffed a cynical laugh. “Right. Your home. What I want doesn’t even factor into it, does it?”

Rujali stroked her cheek. Her first response was to lean into his touch, because if she was totally honest with herself, that touch was more like home than the bare barracks she called a place to sleep, but her control remained tight, the betrayal strong. They never had any intentions of taking her home.

“Mate… Riley. We have never heard of this Earth. We’ve never heard of your planet and we have no idea where it is,” Rujali said. The beads clacked as he bent his head towards hers.

“You’ve…neverheard of Earth? I thought with spacecraft and being on another planet and everything, you would have heard of it,” Riley said.

Setzan shook his head, his expression tight. “Never. We’ve never even seen a female like you before.”

“A human? You’ve never seen a human? What about all of those space probes NASA sent blasting into the galaxies?” she said.

Earth hadn’t exactly been quiet about its location. Surely they must have noticed something originating from Earth.

“You call your species a human?” Klaej said.

She nodded, her mouth filled with a sour taste. It felt strange to talk about herself as ahuman. To have that in her perception. It was foreign. She was a woman, a soldier, but never had she thought of herself as human. But here, she was ahuman. From Earth. “All seven and a half billion of us.”

“Seven and a half billion? How many of you are female?” Setzan said.

“Why? You thinking of going for some booty?”

“Booty?” His dark brows creased.

“Yeah. Find some more ladies?”

“Now you are speaking in riddles. If you’re alluding to us finding another female, then rest assured, we have only one mate for our entire lifetime. After you, there is no other for us. One female for a Triad of brothers. It has always been that way and it will be that way forevermore.”

Riley blinked. “You mean that this…” She gestured between all of them. “This is normal to you and you won’t, uh, be attracted to anyone else?”

“Attracted is too weak a word for what we feel for you. You are the only female for us. You will be by our side and we will be by yours. As a fully-formed Quad,” Rujali said.

A mass of emotion bombarded her as she read between the lines. That they felt affection for her was beyond doubt, but it was that same affection that was never going to let her go. What was the term—a jeweled prison?

“Once we’re mate-synced there will be no question of our dedication to you,” Klaej said.

“Wait! What? Mate-sync? What the hell is that?” Her heart hammered in her chest. Holy fuck. Why did the target keep moving?

“It is when we are fully bonded. All four of us at one time. You are our conduit for our full connection,” Rujali said. ‘Don’t you have that on your planet?”

“No! We have nothing like that. Nothing you’re saying is making sense to me.” She swallowed hard. All of this was too much information. She needed time to think. To breathe. And it wasn’t here. “Look. This is not the time or place to discuss this. Let’s get out of here and then, when we’re sure that worm thing isn’t going to come back, we’ll sit down and have a nice long chat so I can understand everything. How does that sound?”

The fact she didn’t intend to do any of that went beyond saying. As soon as she was back at that port, she was going to find someone who’d take her the hell back to Earth.

She might never see her men again, but her life would go back to being that of a simple soldier. Her heart protested the thought, a twang added to each beat, but she had to set that aside. What they were talking about was just so…permanent. Andimpossible.

“That is true. We have our mate, now we need to get her to safety,” Klaej said.

She looked up into his deep, shining emerald eyes. She didn’t bother resisting the impulse to cup his cheek. Just while she still could. His skin was soft suede beneath her touch. She committed this to memory.

She had no intention of becoming part of this crazy Quad thing , let alone this mate-sync thing. It sounded more and more alien to her and that was something she wasn’t prepared to do.

And when it came down to it, that’s what they were. Aliens. She really knew nothing about them, their ways or what even this Homeland was like. For all she knew, this tenderness, this thoughtfulness, this caring was all a big ruse to lure her into a false sense of security and when they got her into a situation she couldn’t get out of, they’d change.

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