Page 47 of Fractured Souls

“What are you doing, Nythian?”

He exhaled softly and rose to his feet, moving silently and fluidly despite his impressive size. “Good question, human. I’m trying to figure that one out myself.”

“Oh yeah?” She tried to remain calm, but the slight quirk to his lips told her that he knew.

Unfair. She couldn’t read him at all, and reading people was supposed to be part of her skill-set.

Perhaps the slight narrowing of his eyes and the almost imperceptible flare of his nostrils meant something. Perhaps the rapid pulse in his neck—the only part of him that was visible aside from his face—meant something.

She wanted to peel back his hard layers and understand what had made him this way. The bloodhound inside her was baying for answers.

He inched closer, closer, until he was standing inside her personal space. She caught a tendril of his scent.

It reminded her of a forest, hints of dark, ancient woodiness shot through with unexpected lightness.

Complicated.

You wouldn’t think it, just by looking at him.

“You’ve been to a place most of us will never come back from,” he whispered, and Alexis went very still as his fingers gently grazed her cheek.“What you’ve been through… some folks would lose their minds because of it. You didn’t.”

Because of you. She remembered how he’d held her, how he hadn’t even flinched when the Tharian started to transform her body. He simply accepted her strangeness for what it was.

They were all strange.

It didn’t matter.

Warm fingers traced curious lines across her cheek. His fingers were bare, carving sensual trails across her cool skin.

“I saw the truth of our existence,” she whispered, remembering that feeling of pure enlightenment; a moment of absolute peace. “Not just humans, but all of us.” One second, she’d been careening wildly through the smashed hull of the Malachi, in agony and struggling to breathe, staring death in the face. The next, she was warm and safe and complete.

Then she’d woken up in a freezing stasis tank on a terrifying alien ship.

Unbidden, a tear slipped down her cheek. She’d caught a glimpse of what lay beyond, and then, in an instant, it had all been taken away from her.

Her grief was so devastating, but all she could manage was a single tear.

Alexis had never been a crier, not even when she was eight years old and her sister had disappeared while they were walking on the beach.

She’d only turned her back for a minute…

And then Tasha was gone.

An extensive search turned up nothing.

The local authorities suspected human traffickers who had been active in the area at the time. They’d closed the case after just two weeks, citing a lack of evidence.

Even as a kid, she’d found that a bit suspicious.

Where are you, Tasha?

She wanted to cry more, but the tears wouldn’t come.

“Hey,” Nythian murmured, wiping away the track of her single tear with his fingers. “We understand death and all the fucking strangeness of the Universe. We’ve been there a thousand times over. I’m not going to let anything like that happen to you ever again.”

A wave of guilt crashed down upon her, making her feel very small. “I still don’t understand. Why the hell did I survive?” A single moment, frozen in time, flashed in her mind’s eye.

Bodies floated past, people she knew, people she’d been speaking with only minutes before…

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