Page 13 of Maid for the Alien Prince

“Your actress tried to assassinate you?” I said.

He shook his head. “I wish! There’s nothing better than violent sex! No, she just took off!”

It was Steyatt week and neither of us now had a mate. Still, I thought, peering at the scratch marks etched in the wooden floor, there were worse things.

“I’ll find us new mates,” Ges said. “You can rely on me.”

I relied on you last time, I wanted to tell him.

I shut the doors and immediately locked them. I turned back to the room where, just a moment ago, I had been expecting pure, unadulterated pleasure…

And barely escaped with my life.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t where the surprises ended for the evening.

* * *

I tossed and turned that night, waking every few minutes, sensing there was someone in the room with me. Another assassin, perhaps, or one of the guards, sent to turn on me the moment my head hit the pillow.

I thought having money would make my life simpler. Instead, I had bigger worries than when I’d been living hand to mouth!

I just lay there on my back, peering up at the ceiling. The ornate design was beautiful in a way, and thinking that way instantly made me growl at myself.

There was nothing beautiful about the royal family, nothing beautiful about their culture of stealing innocent people’s money, of the way they cared nothing for the people—including their own family.

I couldn’t find any beauty in anything they did because of what they had done to me in the past. There was no forgiving the unforgivable.

Family was everything, and the royal family—the First Family of the empire—should have known that.

A floorboard creaked and I froze.

Old houses like this, made from wood of long-dead forests, were known to talk in the middle of the night…

But this was not a natural creak. It was man-made, something you learned to recognize when you were surrounded by thieves and cutthroats.

You learned to sense an impending attack. I had even sensed it with the female assassin—only I had thought I was the one who would do the attacking!

My senses were on high alert and I gripped the bedsheet with one hand. And as another creak erupted, grinding like an immense earthquake, I threw the bedsheet aside, hurled myself out of bed, and fell upon the figure I knew would be there.

When I collided with something solid, it shrieked.

Gotcha!

The thing I landed on top of was soft. I immediately reached down, smothered their arms, located their hands, and checked for weapons. I was relieved to find they had either lost their weapon or I had already relieved them of it.

“Get off me!” a soft voice snapped. “Get off me!”

“What the hell are you doing in my room?” I growled.

It was a female—another female assassin! Were there any females that did not want to kill me?

“Who sent you?” When she didn’t reply, I leaned forward further, crushing her beneath my weight.

The air gasped from her lungs.

“I said, who sent you?”

“No one—” the shadowy figure beneath me managed to say through wheezing breaths.

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