Page 21 of Taken By the Alien Killer
“I’ll sip from a holy spring,” I mutter, but my smile gives me away. Boo Boo stuffs a last calamari coil into my pocket “for breakfast” and lopes off with Lloyd; Smurfette fades like she’s part shadow; Chuckles salutes the invisible saints of bad ideas and vanishes toward the kitchens. The hallway swallows our noises, and then it’s just me.
The east wing at this hour feels like a cathedral that forgot to lock its doors. Night-lights glow low along the baseboards like a river of moons. The air is clean and faintly floral—the staff swapped out the day’s decadent lily clots for something gentler, sane. I peel off the borrowed pilot jacket; my top clings where sweat dried, and a chill skates over my bare arms. My boots go soft on the runner. Somewhere, deep in the belly of the house, pipes tick, settling; a lift cable hums and stills; the clock in thelong gallery clears its throat as it considers an hour change and decides against it.
I should go to bed. I should drink water and scrub the glitter from my collarbones and pry the lounge’s fake apricot smoke out of my hair. Instead, my feet remember a path older than sleep. I don’t choose it; it chooses me. Turn after turn, past the family portraits that watch without asking, past the door to the music room where my mother keeps the good silence, down the narrow service stair that smells like soap and brass polish and recipes. The hallway opens, the ceiling lowers, and the floor changes from forgiving carpet to unforgiving stone.
The training room lives at the bones of the house. Even at night it hums, as if someone bottled the sound of breath held between blows and poured it into the walls. When I palm the plate, the door unseals with a low hiss, cool air sliding over my skin like a warning.
He’s there.
I know before my eyes finish the math. The air is different with him in it—warmer, alert, metal threaded through with something animal. The holo rig paints ghosts across the room: a tall-bodied enemy, armor flicker-blue, looping through a preprogrammed routine that adjusts to the aggression you feed it. Against that light, Rayek is all obsidian and scar.
He’s shirtless. The formal blacks folded on a bench, boots planted, he moves in a clean predator line that makes the holo’s algorithms stutter. Scales catch the rig’s glow in silver stipples; the long scar over his left eye pulls and smooths as his focus tightens and releases. Sweat beads along the valley of his spine, runs like quicksilver over muscle that belongs in a myth tired of being told. His breath—steady, paced—fog-silvers the cool air, and the room smells like ozone from the emitters, chalk from the grips, salt and iron and the faint copper ghost of the fight he didn’t finish beating out of himself.
I edge into the shadow behind the weight rack and stand there, an audience of one, a trespasser in my own house. The holo-enemy feints; he reads it before it happens, catch-pivots, drives a palm through the projection in a strike you can feel even though it passes through light. The rig compensates, floods the room with a defensive lattice; he rides it, breath syncopated, claws flashing once, twice, restrained at the last inch. The restraint is the part that unstrings me: the violence coiled and caged, the way he holds it because there’s nowhere safe to put it down.
He knows I’m here long before he turns. He always does. The set of his shoulders changes by a degree; a listening. The hologram resets with a chirp; he stands, rolls his wrists as if to pour heat out of joints, and tilts his head toward the shadow where I’m pretending to be wall.
Our eyes meet.
The room shrinks around that line between us, air stretching thin as wire. His gold is deeper in this light, layered, not flat at all; I can’t believe I ever pretended it was. He doesn’t startle, doesn’t scowl, doesn’t try to cover the fact that he’s half-dressed. He just looks at me like I’m a puzzle you don’t force or a map you read without moving your finger.
I step out from behind the rack. The floor is cold through my socks; the skin at the back of my neck tightens where the night air kisses it. A bead of sweat slips from his temple and travels down the hard plane of his cheek; I track it because looking at anything else is more dangerous.
“Do you really hate him?” I ask. My voice sounds scraped—too much neon, too much shouting, not enough sleep, not enough lies.
A beat. The holo rig hums softly; a distant duct ticks. Rayek’s mouth is a straight line; his shoulders square—one of those microscopic recalibrations that means he’s choosing.Then he nods. Tight, economical. A soldier signing a receipt for something he didn’t buy.
The nod hits like a thrown stone: simple, blunt, true enough. I swallow against acid and move closer because I am not smart, because restraint is a language I never learned to conjugate, because the air between us has always felt like a dare.
He doesn’t back away. He doesn’t welcome me either. He holds his ground, and it’s somehow worse than either.
“Do you hate me too?” I ask, and the question falls out naked. No lace. No court sugar. The sound of it startles me—the tiny catch on the last word, the way I put the stress onmelike I could move it with tone.
Silence.
Not empty. Full. Packed with everything he would say if he were a different species or I were a different girl or the room had a different ceiling. He keeps his eyes on mine, and his face stays carved, but a pulse climbs in his throat and I watch it because I don’t know what else to do.
“Because,” I add, softer, “if you do, I’d rather you just say it.”
The rig waits for input, its ghost enemy a blue man frozen in a half-step. The fans breathe around us. I can hear the damp slide of his breath through his nose—slow, controlled, pinched at the edges like every inhale nicks something on the way in. His silence stretches, becomes a tightrope strung between two roofs in a stiff wind. You could cross it if you didn’t look down. I’m looking down.
I step again, closing the distance to a span my father would call improper and Sneed would call grounds for a sermon. The heat coming off his skin brushes mine; my own body answers, traitor-bright, a flush rising under the glitter dust that refuses to let go of my collarbone. Up close, the scar is a thinner line than I remember, the edges softened by time and by the number of times I’ve traced it in my head. His hands hang open at his sides,claws not extended, every muscle in a state I know by heart: ready, and refused.
“If you hate me,” I say, and my throat burns like I swallowed the neon, “at least I’ll know I’m not imagining the part where?—”
I stop. The part where what. The part where you walked past me in a hallway like I was a lit match and you were kerosene. The part where you listened to my footsteps before I learned how to be quiet. The part where you always take the outside of the path so I won’t have to. The part where my name sounds different from your mouth and you pretend it doesn’t.
My hand moves before my senses does. I reach. Not for his face, not yet, not for anything the world would shout about. Just his arm. The near one. The forearm, where the muscles twist like braids and the veins draw faint maps and the heat lives.
My fingertips graze scale and skin.
He steps back.
Instinct, like a flinch from a blade you can’t see. It’s not a dramatic leap; it’s worse: a clean, trained shift that erases the chance of touch with no waste, no noise, that puts two body lengths between us and slots him in the angle where he can watch the door, the rig, the window, me. He is suddenly a soldier in a diagram. He is suddenly no one’s.
I stand there with my hand still up like I forgot to tell it the plan changed. The air where he was is cooler; the fan breath catches the sweat on my palm and chills it until it stings. Something inside me shrinks hard, earthquake-fast, shelves toppling, glassware breaking in an elegant, invisible cascade.
“Right,” I say. The word is a laugh that couldn’t find its feet. “Okay.”
