Page 87 of Alien Prince's Claim

He drew back his foot and slammed his heel into my face.

It took three strikes before he knocked me unconscious.

Emily. I’m sorry.

28

EMILY

“Are you sure this is her? She doesn’t look like much.”

The voice was grating, like nails across an iron sheet, but the words were clear enough.

I drifted in and out of consciousness, my senses were roaming from one point of sensory stimulus to another, interspersed with a bright flash of light.

It was the last thing I recalled before I’d passed out.

A strong incense passed under my nose, and I shot back, bursting awake, my entire body reacting to whatever had wafted under my nose.

I peered around, lost, and confused.

One minute I was in the back of Cayah’s ship heading into the safety of deep space, Yaltah by my side, and the next thing I knew, there was a bright flash of light and I was out for the count.

And I suddenly woke up here.

‘Here?’ Where was ‘here?’

Everything hit my senses all at once:

The dull gray walls, the dark interior, the returning smell of the scent that had wafted beneath my nose, and the feel of the ice-cold straps over my wrists and ankles locking me into place.

And most of all, the lingering headache that attacked my temples.

I shut my eyes against the pain and took deep breaths that I let out between my teeth in unsteady gasps.

“Do not fear, my dear,” that grating voice said. “No harm shall come to you. And the headache shall pass.”

The speaker’s voice was female, I thought, a strange guttural rasp beneath the tone like she’d been a smoker for the past forty years.

I kept my eyes clenched shut, thankful that at least there was someone I could speak to. “Where am I? What happened?”

“The answers will come soon enough, my girl. For now, focus on recovering. You are going to need your strength before too long.”

There was nothing hidden about the threat in her voice… nor the fake reassurance of her tone.

With the pulsing headache at my temples, I kept my eyes shut tight.

I felt something on my chin and instinctively shifted my head to one side.

I immediately regretted it as the searing pain in my head returned with a vengeance and traversed the entirety of my brain.

The thing at my chin consisted of multiple sharp points, I thought.

Like a block of knives.

Then the knives shifted and twisted my head one way and then the other.

I realized they weren’t knives at all but sharp fingernails located on a small hand.

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