Page 34 of Shattered Silence

But as quickly as it had arrived, her fascination vanished, because her bare foot brushed against something soft.

Cloth.

She looked down and saw Captain Pradon lying dead on the floor. His limbs were askew, his harsh features softening in death.

His throat had been slit.

“Tch.” Enki made a small sound of irritation. “You don’t have boots?” Without warning, he hooked one arm around her waist and lifted her into his arms. His movements were swift and effortless, as if she weighed nothing. “There’s blood on the floor, and we need to be quick.”

Layla forgot to breathe as a chilling realization struck her.

Pradon wasn’t the only dead Kordolian in the room. The rest of his crew had been killed too, all five of them.

Pradon, the mad scientist, and the five henchmen were dead. All of them had neat, deliberate knife wounds at points where vital organs and vessels lay—neck, heart, base of skull.

Layla didn’t need to ask. She already knew who killed them, and there wasn’t a single part of her that felt sorry for them.

What truly shocked her was how quick and effortless it had all been. The time from Pradon’s sentence getting cut short to Enki finding her had been…

Seconds.

Holy crap. He’s a badass.

Not an ordinary one, but a super-ultra-elite one, because who the hell could kill an entire squad of soldiers in just a few seconds?

Enki swept her from the chamber of horrors into another room, where the same gentle blue light allowed her to make out a row of large tech-looking seats. Glowing monitoring devices stood beside the seats, along with an array of mysterious looking medical equipment.

There wasn’t a disposable canister or plas-bag or IV line in sight. Everything was so unfamiliar.

Without ceremony, Enki set her down in the nearest chair and stepped back, crossing his arms as he studied her from head to toe, a slight frown curving his dark lips. He wore a dark utilitarian suit that looked like a uniform of sorts, except it wasn’t nearly as well cut or expensive looking as the dead Captain’s clothes, and hung loosely on his frame, around a size too big.

“Killed a medic with nothing more than this pretend-blade,” Enki muttered, shaking his head slightly. For a fraction of a second, so quickly she almost missed it, his gaze grew distant. “For that alone you have earned my protection.”

“I was desperate. I got lucky. Look what he did to me.” Layla was scared of what she might see when she looked in the mirror. The scratches were on her face, too.

Enki’s snow-white brows drew together, his expression pure thunder. Layla balked, but then she realized his anger wasn’t directed at her. Still, it was rather unnerving to be under the full force of his gaze. She couldn’t read him at all; she had no clue what he was thinking.

“I’m going to tend to you now,” was all he said as he turned and retrieved a bunch of strange looking items from the… med-trolley, or whatever that thing was. “Those wounds will not withstand repeated stress. Take off your clothes.”

Layla gave him one of her famous side-eyes, trying to figure out if he was messing with her. “You mean all of my clothes?”

“The relevant clothes.” He was dead serious. “I need to apply fibrogel to your wounds.”

So… her cabin-jacket and the top half of her cryo-suit. The garments were shredded beyond repair anyway, so they had to go, but it occurred to Layla that she wasn’t wearing anything else underneath. No bra, no tank-top, nothing.

She was in a strange room with an alien she barely knew, a man who just so happened to be a special-ops super-assassin or… whatever, and she was seriously considering taking her top off for him.

Fuck it. He wanted to treat her, right? After killing a guy, nothing was beyond her. Besides, Enki was an alien, so he probably didn’t see her in the way a human man would. “You know, there are people on Earth who would pay thousands of credits to see what you’re about to see.” As Layla shrugged off her jacket, pain shot through her ribs, making her wince. “Personally, I’ve never understood what all the fuss is about.”

“Pay?” Impossibly, Enki’s expression became even more thunderous. “What are you, some sort of courtesan?”

Why did that notion seem to piss him off so much?

Layla shook her head. “No, no.” She waved her hand in a placating gesture. The very last thing she wanted to do was piss him off. “I was just being flippant. Sorry. Back home, I am—was—a VR star. If you’ve ever been to Earth, you’ve probably seen my face on a holo-board somewhere.”

Not recently, though. They don’t seem to like me very much on Earth these days.

Her admission didn’t seem to make any sort of impression on Enki. He nodded at her top. “Take it off. You should not make such unserious remarks about selling your body. This is purely for medical reasons, and absolutely necessary. I will not have your fragile human skin breaking and bleeding all over the place as we escape. Now hurry. It is only a matter of time before we are discovered.”

---