Page 18 of Decadence

But his presence didn’t seem to bother Riana at all. In fact, Sienna swore she’d seen them exchange a weird little heated glance as Riana passed.

“I don’t feel like that’s enough detail,” Sienna said dubiously. She didn’t feel confident about any of this. Her closest friends—who she also worked with—weren’t exactly naive.

“Relax, it’ll be fine. You don’t want to make it too elaborate, because then you’ll just end up digging yourself deeper and deeper to cover for all the inconsistencies. Remember, you had memory loss. If anything gets weird, just say you can’t remember. I can tell you aren’t exactly adept at lying. Don’t worry, that’s a compliment. It just means you’re honest.” A soft laugh escaped Riana, and Sienna was struck by how comfortable and yet out of place she looked on this dark, forbidding Kordolian ship.

With her lush, copper-dyed bouncy coils and mismatched pink and blue gemstone heart-shaped earrings and her khaki jumpsuit and cute pink hi-top sneakers, Riana could easily have been one of the über-cool regulars that popped into the Whisk and Pin every morning to feed their carefully curated caffeine addiction.

For most of her highly discerning clientele, only the best would do, and Sienna’s barista Cleo was the best, and they had gone to a lot of effort to source the very best organic coffee beans in the world.

God, how she missed her small empire, as Ikriss had called it.

“You know what? I think I’m just going to tell people the truth,” she said dryly. “That I was abducted by aliens and I don’t want to talk about it. I’m terrible at lying.”

Riana shrugged. “Well, whatever works for you, hun. I’m betting nobody will believe you, but even if they do, these guys have no problem with people knowing who they are. They’re not trying to hide anything. They have no need to. This is really all just to make your life easier. I’ve gone into all the necessary digital records and updated your movements, paid your bills, your suppliers, your staff’s wages…”

Everything except for the Syndicate repayments, because they’re off-system.

“Wait… you can’t…” Sienna shook her head. This was the kind of stuff that only happened in movies. It went way over her head. “How did you do all that? Are you working for the Federation… or for them?” How are you even here?

“I know my way around the Networks,” Riana said quietly, modestly, giving Sienna the feeling she was actually scarily good at what she did. “And I’m not gonna lie. Full disclosure here, just so you know what you’re getting into. I’m totally in bed with these Kordolians. See, one of them—that big guy standing outside the door right now? He’s my mate.” She beamed with pride.

Mate. Sienna’s eyes nearly popped out of her head. “You mean, you’re… ”

“Done. That’s it. I fell for him, and I fell hard, and I know there’s never going to be anybody else for me in this life, and it’s… amazing.” The human’s eyes gleamed with a fervent intensity that scared Sienna a little, because she didn’t understand it.

She didn’t know this person, really, and Riana was speaking of totally alien things.

The kinds of things she’d come face to face with when she’d encountered Mr Scary-Hot Intensity himself in that cold, silent room that looked out onto the stars.

A strange, delicious kind of tension snaked through her core, winder her tighter and tighter like thread pulling through silk.

Her thoughts spinning out of control, Sienna picked up the mug of warm chamomile tea on her bedside table and took a long, slow sip in an attempt to regain her composure.

Riana studied her closely, her expression growing serious. “You don’t look terribly impressed,” she said after a moment of silence. “Look, I’m not going to sugarcoat anything. Kordolians are the Big Bads of the Universe. They’re fucking scary if you get on their bad side, but they’re oh-so good to us. A lot of alien-folk in the Universe would so easily grind us humans beneath their heels, but he would never treat me bad.” Riana grew thoughtful. “He’d easily kill for me, though,” she said softly, in a tone of voice that both chilled Sienna to the core and warmed her battered heart. “It’s hard to explain and probably just a little bit illegal to have these thoughts, and I hate to admit it to a perfect stranger, but the evil part of me revels in it a little… all that vicious protectiveness, I mean. If you get to spend more time amongst them, you’ll see for yourself what I mean.”

Holy hell.

This totally normal-seeming, friendly human was in a relationship with that stone-cold killer outside?

Sienna cupped her hands around her mug—a quaint pink porcelain thing. One the side was a picture of a cartoon cat wearing a light blue bowtie. She stared down into the swirling golden depths of her tea. “Why do I get the feeling we humans really have no control at all over our little corner of the Universe anymore?”

“Because we don’t,” Riana said softly. “We really don’t. We’re just lucky these guys found us first.”

An unpleasant shiver coursed through Sienna as the horribleness of the past few days threatened to crack through her composure. You’re just lucky they found you… lucky to be alive.

“But seriously, you have nothing to worry about now. You’ll be home soon, and everything will be back to normal.” Riana smiled. “Besides, we’re here to keep them in line. They do tend to get carried away sometimes.”

“We? You mean there’s more of you?”

“I’m not the first human girl to fall for the silver-and-fanged. If you ever decide to join us, well, you know where to find us. I’ll give you my link details. Any problems at all, you contact me straight away, okay? We’ll move heaven and Earth to help you out.”

Join us? Give up her hard-won independence for one of these über-powerful, violent, intimidating, all-controlling aliens?

No way. Not even if some of them—cough, cough, ahem, Ikriss—were fucking hot.

She’d already made the same mistake twice. She wasn’t about to let herself be broken a third time.

Correction, a fourth time. She was still fucked up from what her abductors had done to her, and the only thing that could make her feel better right now was to do something she had actual control over. She longed to do something simple; something where she could work with her hands, something that had been done by humans every day for thousands of years… like kneading dough.

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