Page 17 of Star Marked Warriors

It certainly explained why someone who was so worried about his son’s “strength” would be wandering around a garden feeding flowers. They were evil flowers.

We made our way out of the terrifying garden, onto a huge open walkway. The stone balustrade along one side of it was covered with clinging vines of some kind, and I flinched away from them instinctively when Kaelum led me over to the edge.

“Just a harmless vine,” he promised, soothing, petting my arm.

Part of me wanted to slap him away, tell him I wasn’t okay with a single thing that was happening. The other wanted to cling to him as the most familiar thing I had.

It wasn’t healthy.

But hell, I’d left healthy long before I’d left Earth.

“Kaelum,” a sweet voice exclaimed, and I turned to find... a woman walking toward us. Not an alien woman, eight feet tall and blue. A human one. Tall and nearly Amazonian in physique, she still made me feel a little inadequate, regardless of the silver strands in her blonde hair and lines around her eyes, but she was human.

For his part, Kaelum embraced her. “Mother,” he answered, nuzzling into her hair in a way that would have been weird for a human.

All the touching suddenly made more sense. Kaelum and his father hadn’t touched, but Mr. Smirky had always had a hand on him, and this woman wrapped him in a tight hug, patting his shoulders, then as she pulled away, his chest, then his arms. Like she was reassuring herself all the parts of him were still there.

The Thorzi didn’t seem to have limits on random touching like we did.

Well, except the king.

The woman turned to me, her warm brown eyes familiar from looking up into Kaelum’s just a moment ago. Once she focused on me, they went round. “Human. You’re... you’re human. Anewhuman!” Her hands reached out as though to grab me, but she held back at the last moment.

“Lucas,” I offered, holding out my hand to shake. “And I, um. Yeah. I am. Brand new prisoner.”

She winced a little at that, but shook her head. “Once you get used to it, it’s a nice place. The Thorzi are lovely people, for the most part, and—”

“But they didn’t ask me if I wanted to come, and I can’t leave.”

She hung her head, and seemed unhappy, but not especially surprised.

“You wish to leave?” Kaelum asked, and he sounded somehow confused. I turned to look at him, incredulous. “Crux was to retrieve only humans who wished to leave their lives. Who wished to help us.”

And put that way, assuming Crux had, I dunno, read my mind or been creepily spying on me, they weren’t wrong. I’d had a terrible life on Earth, and if someone had offered me the chance to go somewhere new and have a whole new shot, even an alien one, I might have said yes.

But the fact was that no one had asked. And clearly, from the fact that Genevieve had been among us, Crux hadn’t only chosen people who were unhappy. But would Kaelum listen to me if I said that?

Fortunately for everyone, his mom said it for me. “Crux has never been terribly interested in the needs of humans, Kaelum. He assumes he knows better than we do. I doubt he asked the new humans any more than he asked me all those years ago.”

Kaelum’s eyes narrowed, his fingers flexing as though he were going to rush off and pick a fight with the asshole. And hell, that was nice. Okay, maybe he was defending his mom’s honor more than mine, but minewasin the mix.

I looked over at her, frowning. “Is he going to hurt the people he took? He still has all my friends.”

Her eyes darkened with anger, and this time she did grab my hands, squeezing tight. “No, dear. There are rules. Crux knows what will happen to him if he breaks them ever again.”

Kaelum brought his arms up, crossing them over his chest. “He will die, and his progeny will disown his line, lest they wish to accompany him to the frozen depths.”

Kaelum’s mother winced but nodded. “They don’t do things halfway here on Thorzan. It’s true, we can’t go home. And they do want our, um...” She blushed and glanced away. “But it’s just a little donation for most people, and then you’re free to start a new life. A lot of us found something we’d been missing back on Earth.”

With the light in her eyes, and the adoration she clearly held for her son, I couldn’t doubt it. But even if it was true, and Kaelum wasn’t just a prince, but prince fucking charming, we’d always both have to live with the fact that we’d started out with me as a kidnap victim.

Wouldn’t we?

CHAPTER10

KAELUM

Lucas wore a serious, thoughtful expression as we left my mother. She was right—she was not the only human on Thorzan, and most who came were happy. They had given up their homes and found new ones here. They had chosen this life, I thought.

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