Page 33 of Tricked By the Alien Prince

I sniff, thinking back to all the ways we had started to cut costs elsewhere. It was little things at first, like when my worn school dresses had been altered to fit me, just to squeeze another year out of their value, rather than buy new ones.

“I said my tablet wasn’t a gift, because, well, it wasn’t,” I tell Volan. “When I couldn’t afford to buy the textbooks, my mother encouraged me to get the digital versions. Even if it meant contacting the original author to beg for the files or rent them from the school’s library. She insisted, so much, that I continue my studies. At first I thought she just wanted me to have a normal life after she… When she got really sick though, she told me it was because she wanted me to have the life she never got. To be able to decide what I wanted to do, not to blindly follow other people’s demands.”

The tablet she gave me wasn’t a gift, it was a fail-safe; a way for me to take control of my destiny, the means to establish myself as a working-class individual if the need arose.

She never admitted it, but I strongly suspected that my mother and father had an arranged marriage. If not by the textbook definition, then at least one that was strongly encouraged. She was from a wealthy family, an only child, and he was from an up-and-coming merchant family, making waves among the socialites. Their marriage made sense; with his business experience, he took over my grandfather’s business, and my mother was well-cared for. A merger of two high-ranked families rather than an all-out stock war.

“When my mother finally passed… everything sort of crumbled around me. We could barely afford her funeral. We’d lost nearly everything, and if I’m honest, I didn’t care. Still don’t. If it gave me the chance to be with her, even for a few more days, I’d have given away every dollar without a second thought. But my father… I think over the years he’d kind of gotten over it all. Maybe he’d grieved before she died, knowing what was coming. Maybe he was just trying to salvage what he could after…”

Volan’s hand squeezes mine, and I grip his in return like a lifeline as my fingers tremble. I’m doing my best to breathe normally, but each word feels like it’s being ripped from my soul in a breathless rush. So many memories, so many emotions, and they are all so vivid! Did I repress all of them?

“If we were to keep our tier in society, we needed cash and fast. My father thought it prudent to arrange my future in my stead. Maybe he was looking out for me, but it felt like a means to an end. He took away my choice entirely.”

“What do you mean?” Volan asks. For the first time I’ve started talking, he looks angry. Not at me, but for me.

I blurt out the words, unable to stop them or the flood of anger and misery from escaping. “One day I discovered that he signed me up to the Mating Program. He didn’t ask if I wanted to get married! No, he just went ahead and picked out my alien husband! All that was left was to sign the documents to make it official. He never asked my opinion. He just didn’t care what I wanted.”

Tears burn my eyes. The desire to just curl up and cry nearly overwhelming.

“When I found out what he had planned, I confronted him. There were things I wanted to do in life. I hadn’t spent years in college studying cybersecurity to simply just throw it all away to marry some old guy that I didn’t like. But my father refused to listen to reason,” I say.

For several years my father had become distant, a man I saw but hardly spoke to. I kept telling myself it was because he couldn’t see my mother the way she was; a shell of herself. But then the heated arguments came… I might not have liked my father much but I’d never feared him… until that day. I can still feel the grip he used on me as he dragged me, forcibly, to my bedroom. The sound of the door closing, and the security locks throughout our house being engaged. Meant to keep others out… they kept me in.

“He expected me to just fall in line. He took away all my choice, my freedom, and didn’t care about me at all. I decided then and there that I had enough.”

“What did you do?” Volan asks. His hand wraps around my bicep. I stiffen, the ghost of my father’s grip still holding me tight. But Volan’s hands are warm, and his fingers don’t squeeze but stroke me so very gently. Comforting, not restricting.

“It wasn’t the smartest of moves to be honest,” I reply, “but I made a run for it. I took what I learned in college, and I applied it. For the first time ever, rather than trying to fortify security code, I hacked it. I escaped.”

I escaped my house in the dark of night, sneaking past the electronic and physical security alike. I’d been prepared, having already hacked the transport system to get tickets to a train across the country. And when I ran out of money, I found myself creating a job on board a starship heading out into the universe, no return trip. Because there was no going back for me, nothing to keep me tethered to Earth. I deserved a new life, even if it was all built up on lies and false information inserted into databases.

“I refused to be used by my father for monetary gain,” I sneer. He does not get to sell me like cattle, just to be bred by the highest bidder. I am worth more than that!

I am worth more than that—words that I repeat to myself every single day. They kept me warm on the spaceship to Atraxis when I felt like I had abandoned everything behind. They kept me going when I was matched with a shitty husband, one who refused to even touch me. And they will keep me fighting for the right thing even when everyone else around me falls.

“Yes, Maya,” Volan says softly as he gazes down at me with a look I can’t quite make out, “You are worth everything.”

For the first time since my mother’s death, I cry. Really cry. And through it all, Volan holds me, his hands a comforting caress.

There’s no denying it anymore; I’m in love with Volan.

ChapterTwenty

VOLAN

Guilt is a sensation I am wholly unfamiliar with. Yet it burns through my veins like liquid fire, scorching me from within as I watch Maya’s excitement grow with each step we take toward our destination. Her eyes shine with determination, her fingers clutching that beloved device of hers as it guides our way.

“Talking to you was a major weight off of my shoulders. Thank you. I should have gotten therapy years ago,” Maya laughs, tucking a curl of hair behind her ears. The way she glances at me from beneath her lashes, smiling gratefully…

She trusts me so completely that it makes my chest ache.

My steps clomp all the harder onto the rocks beneath my shoes, crumbling them into dust. Each step is almost painful, as if I am fighting my very muscles. My brain and body are at war with themselves, instincts demanding I care for Maya, while desire reminds me how close I am to my lifetime goal.

“Are we close?” Maya asks, her voice breathless with anticipation.

The weight of her story only makes this decision harder. Up ahead, the path splits; one direction leads directly to my kingdom, and the other to the location her map had marked.

“Soon,” I reply to her question, undecided. Since when have I ever faltered on a simple choice? For a ruler, this kind of indecision can lead to deaths and destruction… and yet for the first time in my life, Maya has me re-thinking everything.

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