YALTAH

Goblars.

Why did it have to be Goblars?

I pumped my legs as hard as they would go to rush through the tunnels.

I feared for Emily’s safety, for what might happen to her if I was too late and the Goblars got to her first.

No, not what might happen but what would happen.

Their intentions were clear and had been for as long as time had existed.

The reason appeared to have been lost to the mists of time but it made no difference to the significance of what would happen to those who got caught in their crosshairs.

Emily would be ruined if I did not get to her first, if I did not protect her.

The Goblars would do unspeakable things to her and it angered me just to think of them.

If I had known we were fated mates, if I had been given a sign…

But of course, there were signs — there were the emotions that I couldn’t fail to miss.

But how was I to know they weren’t merely the emotions of infatuation that overcome any male when he was in the midst of Steyatt?

We had been told we would know the difference, that it would be like looking at the color of white and saying it was black when all the world and the universe could see it wasn’t so.

Then there was the Mark, said to be located on the body in a place impossible not to see…

Especially when you were lying naked with your mate.

To miss it was said to have your eyes stitched shut.

But what if you were forced from your mating bed in the middle of your very first day of Steyatt as the Facility was attacked and no one informed you the pirates were in fact Goblars?

Then what if you didn’t know it was them until you had left your fated mate alone to her own devices to hand yourself in, and now there was nothing between the Goblars and their disgusting desires?

It had been one unfortunate turn after another.

Now I knew more about our situation, I realized just how close to disaster we had come…

That is, if I wasn’t already too late.

My legs ached from my earlier rush through the corridors and my lungs protested but there was plenty of time to complain later once I had made sure Emily was as safe as it was possible to be.

I would tuck her under my arm and take her far from this place and never again darken its threshold.

I would move in the opposite direction to the location of where we had first made love — where the Goblars could always sense, somehow sensing the spiritual portal had opened up between Emily’s soul and my own.

That bond somehow set off a beacon to the Goblars, forcing them to hunt the female down and mate with her, giving birth to the next generation of their disgusting breed.

I growled as I pushed myself harder, overriding my body’s desire to stop and rest, for me to take it easy and pull back.

I really should have kept something in the tank for any return journey in case Emily and I needed to rush away again, but that goal fell to second place as there would be no chance of that happening if I didn’t ensure Emily was safe in the first place.

And so I pushed myself harder than I had ever pushed myself before.

More than during the Raising Ceremony when we were cast into the wilderness and forced to defend ourselves amongst the exotic and dangerous creatures that resided there…