Page 26 of Shattered Silence

“Fuck you,” Layla muttered in Eskulin.

The collar went off again, wiping her mind of everything except the worst possible agony. Somehow, the more the Kordolian used the collar, the less afraid Layla became.

It’s just pain, she told herself, chanting the mantra over and over again in her head. It won’t kill you. If this thing was doing any real damage, you’d be dead already.

Amidst the haze of her torture, it occurred to Layla that she’d been dealing with physical pain all her life.

The crazy shoes they made her wear for filming.

The fractures she endured when doing real-life stunts.

The bruises she had to conceal with makeup each and every time Damien lost his fucking temper.

The crippling periods that had plagued her month after month, until she had enough money to afford a permanent cure for her endometriosis.

It won’t kill you.

It never had.

If she wasn’t afraid of pain, then he had no control over her, and Layla was pretty sure that he didn’t want to kill her. The Kordolians wanted her alive so they could… study her reproductive anatomy or whatever. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have gone to all the effort of retrieving her and putting the collar around her neck.

Just pain. It’s not going to kill you.

Somehow, that realization made it so much easier to endure.

“You are a stupid creature,” the scientist hissed, his stale breath washing over her. “And I am no longer amused this stupid game. This is starting to become tiresome.” His metal coated hand clamped down on her neck, and he pushed her down against the floor, mashing her cheek into the hard surface. Fuck, he was strong. With his other hand, he began to strip the cabin-jacket from her body. When it proved difficult to remove, he cursed in his own language and started to tear at the thing with his claws.

Layla knew he was using his claws, because they ripped right through the reflective fabric of her jacket, right through her high-tech suit beneath, and right into her skin.

Warm blood trickled down her arms and back. The pain of his vicious scratches was drowned out by the continuous agony of the collar.

He was treating her the way one might treat a wild animal.

Holy fuck.

His entire weight was pressing down on her, and he was heavy. As he tore away shreds of her jacket and the suit underneath, exposing her bare, bloodied skin to the cold, Layla squirmed as hard as she could, ignoring the fear that the skin on her back had been shredded to ribbons.

She couldn’t see a thing.

There was something terribly savage about the way he pushed her down and tore his claws through her skin. It was species against species, one seeking to dominate the other, to inflict pain, humiliate, terrorize. There was a maliciousness about it all, as if he possessed a deep hatred for humans.

He’d turned vicious so quickly.

Irrational. Unpredictable. He was probably insane.

“Keep still,” the Kordolian growled, his voice growing hoarse with frustration. “It is only a sanitation chamber. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

But Layla just couldn’t stomach the thought of stripping down to her bare skin in front of this monster. Something inside her snapped, and all reason went out the window.

She squirmed harder.

Her arms and back became slick with her own blood, and as Layla struggled, she managed to slip out of his grasp.

The Kordolian unleashed a long string of what sounded like curse-words as he slammed her head into the floor once again.

If Layla could see right now, she suspected her vision would be going dark from the blow to her head, but it was pitch-black, and she was guided by feel alone.

One of her arms slipped free of his grasp, and she reached around to the small of her back, where she’d slipped the knife beneath her waistband.

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