Catch up reading here: Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapters 10 & 11
An abducted cop and a gladiator prisoner must learn to
trust each other with their lives…and their hearts…to escape their alien
captors.
CAPTIVE
Chapter Twelve
“You’d better be burning in hell, Max.” Addy hurled her half-empty glass against the wall where it shattered. Orange juice and glass sprayed the kitchen.
“Still in the anger stage, I see.” Tess had entered the room from Ferly Mor’s apartment.
“What?”
“You know, the stages of grief? You’ve been in the anger stage for three weeks now.”
The door began crackling, but before it solidified, a hand reached through the vapor, stopping it. It vaporized again, and Duncan emerged through the gas. He hung his cloak. “If ye ask me, it’s those wee heathen hormones. One minute she’s fine. The next she’s…well…we’re going to need more glasses, aye?”
“It’s everything! This planet. This baby. That lying bastard.” Searching for something else to throw, she reached for a miniature garden gnome that Duncan, for some reason, kept on the side table.
He scooped it up before she could swipe it.
Addy plopped onto the couch, her head in her hands. “After they shocked me, he said he wouldn’t hurt me. But when I was unconscious, he...he—” She slumped to her side and dropped her head onto the armrest. “And I was too stupid to even know.”
The cushion compressed under Tess’s added weight. A gentle hand rubbed her shoulders in soft, rhythmic strokes. “I can’t say that I know how you feel. My experience in the breeding box had been different. But please understand you’re not alone. I’m here for you. And so is Da and Ferly Mor.”
Addy shot upright. “He’s the damn cause of all this. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for that...that...thing.” She stormed into the only room offering privacy on the damn planet, and guilt hit her like a blow to the gut. Tess hadn’t deserved her outbursts. She had been nothing but kind and friendly to Addy the entire month she’d been here. Addy had no right to yell at her.
Standing in front of the 3-D mirror, a worn-out, angry woman she barely recognized stared back. Dark circles hung low around tired eyes. Wild strands of strawberry-blonde hair had escaped the confines of her French braid.
Addy lifted her shirt and stroked her curved belly. She couldn’t deny the pregnancy. A baby was most definitely in there, growing, changing, and anchoring her to this Yard. This planet. This bizarre existence.
How had this happened? Disgusted, she pulled down her shirt and sat on the flowerpot lid. She closed her eyes, trying to recall the wildfire and the rapids and anything else she could from that night.
A gray fog rolled into her memory, clouding her thoughts. Why couldn’t she remember anything? Had she been in shock when she’d first seen the alien? Did Ferly Mor abduct her after she’d been knocked unconscious?
Still without answers, Addy exited the bathroom and apologized to Tess before she began cleaning up the mess of glass and breakfast juice. “You said your experience in the breeding box had been different. I’m glad to hear that.”
Tess knelt beside her with a dustpan and broom. “I turned sixteen the day before my first time. I remember being scared thinking about all the stories I’d heard. How some studs jump on top of you right away. Fortunately, the man they paired me with was charming and gentle. We spent the entire night and half the next day talking. On the second night, he reached for me, and I didn’t back away. It was lovely.” She blushed pink all the way to her neck.
A twang of jealousy tugged Addy’s heart. Why couldn’t her first time have been...well...totally different? She rested a hand on her belly. “Have you ever resented your children?”
“I’ve never given birth.” Tess’s tone remained neutral. “I always miscarried at nine weeks.”
“I’m sorry.” An awkward silence filled the little space between them. “I don’t know what to say.”
“I know some women don’t want their babies, but I would’ve liked to have one. Even if it was only for a little while.” Tess touched Addy’s arm. Her eyes shone with tenderness. “When it comes,” she began with apparent caution. “If...if you want me to, I can care for the baby.”
Give up her child? Could she do that? Addy had vowed long ago never to make her children feel unwanted or unloved, like her mother had made her feel. She had been determined to protect them from that loneliness. She was not going to wind up like her mother: unmarried, pregnant, and resentful.
She planned on having kids when she was ready. She would not chance having an “oops.” Yet here she was unmarried, pregnant, and resentful.
Apparently, an apple doesn’t fall far no matter where in the universe it lands.
Though angry at Max and her situation, this baby was a part of her. She couldn’t give it up, not to Tess and certainly not to Ferly Mor. She had to protect her baby from the alien. But how?
“I appreciate your offer, Tess.” With any luck, she’d find a way to escape this planet before then.
Addy tossed the glass shards into the trash before sweeping the smaller pieces into the dustpan. She needed to change the subject before she went crazy thinking about her choices, or lack thereof.
“What happened when the aliens realized you couldn’t...” She didn’t need to finish the sentence.
Tess wiped the floor with a wet rag as she spoke. “Well, I had two more cycles with the same man and one with another. During my fourth miscarriage, I hemorrhaged so much I bled to death. After that, Ferly Mor never brought me to a breeding box.”
“You died?” Having worked with emergency medical personnel, she’d known a few cases where people have been revived with CPR or defibrillation. But they’d never talked casually about their experience like Tess did.
“Yes. For nearly an hour. Any longer and Ferly Mor wouldn’t have been able to reawaken me.”
Reawaken. That was the same word Max had used in the breeding box. “You mean resuscitated?” Was it even possible to resuscitate someone after an hour?
Tess sat back on her heels, wet towel in hand. “Didn’t Da explain reawakening?”
“No.”
Addy’s personal ringtone sounded from the Yard. On the other side of the observation wall, Ferly Mor waited with a leash in his hand. The music played again.
“You best go. I’ll explain later. And Addy, think about what I said about the baby. Please?”
She nodded because, well, what else could she do?
Ferly Mor carried her to HuBReC, a peculiar experience for an adult, yet less humiliating than being walked on the leash.
Inside the office, a woman’s labored breaths and grunting drifted from an open doorway down the hall. A newborn cry made her heart sink. Placing a hand on her belly, she sighed. Four weeks down. Sixteen to go according to the accelerated gestation period.
Ferly Mor placed her on a cold examining table and then left her alone with her prenatal doctor, Rosalita. Since Addy had been the first person in the Yard to encounter the new Hyborean at the survival race party, Duncan said Addy had the privilege of naming her. If Ferly Mor was the Great Gray Man, why not name his chestnut-red girlfriend Little Rose.
Rosalita weighed, measured, and shot Addy in the navel with the injection pen. The device must have contained growth hormones because her hair had been growing about a half-inch every week. When the exam ended, Addy sat on the floor to put on her shoes.
Ferly Mor charged into the room, nearly stepping on her as he guided in a hovering gurney. He handed it off to Rosalita before lifting Addy up onto the counter like the last time an emergency prevented him from taking her home.
By the look of the scuzzy, bloody man they transferred to the exam table, this was going to take a while. Addy settled in to watch Ferly Mor work again, letting her legs dangle over the counter’s edge.
He dipped his hands and furry arms into a bowl of pink antiseptic liquid and then dried them before cutting the tattered clothes from the man’s body. Rosalita cleaned her hands and arms before hooking the guy up to machines.
When Ferly Mor stepped aside to throw the filthy shirt into the garbage chute, Addy gasped. Whip marks, both fresh and scabbed, crisscrossed the man’s emaciated back. Welts and bruises covered the flesh that sunk around his ribs and spine.
How the hell could these animals beat and starve a man like that? He looked like Justice, the abused pit bull terrier her family rescued when she was ten. Dad had found him beaten, starved, and locked in a crate in the forest. From the wounds and bite marks on Justice’s body, they figured he’d been used in dog fights.
The fetid smell of the man's filthy body and matted hair made her dry-heave. She pinched her nose to find relief from the stench.
Rosalita sponged him down, uncovering more bruises and marks beneath the blood and dirt. Ferly Mor cut and removed the man’s pants. A grotesque lump protruded from his skin as though the bone had snapped in two. Wincing, she diverted her gaze from the gruesome wound and rubbed her own shin in sympathy, as if that could possibly help ease this poor man’s suffering.
They sprayed something in his hair—probably to kill lice or fleas or some weird Hyborean insect—and then shaved his head to tend to a gash there. Raw burn lines that must have come from his choker encircled his neck.
“My God,” she whispered. “What have they done to you?”
They rolled him onto his back, and his head turned in her direction. Vacant, green eyes stared through her. Her mouth dried. How could the man who haunted her sleep and dominated every waking thought be alive? Regan had killed him.
Max’s breaths, shallow and labored, sounded as though he stood at Death’s sublimated door.
Not taking her eyes off him, not even to blink, she waited for his last breath. Almost wishing for it. Perhaps then, her anger and resentment of this past month would quell.
But did he really deserve to die? Hadn’t he suffered enough? Tears pricked her eyes. Did any man, even her enemy, deserve torture?
Damn. Why did he make it impossible for her to hate him?
The pain must have been sheer agony, but Max never moaned or grunted. Maybe he’d been given drugs, or maybe he was too damaged to make a sound.
The Hyboreans worked quickly, rubbing cream on his wounds, giving him injections of who knows what, and monitoring his vital signs on some kind of chirping equipment. After another injection, his breathing slowed to almost nonexistent. The chirping also slowed. His eyes shut and opened as if he fought heavy lids. It didn’t take long before they remained closed.
Her pulse quickened. She held her breath in order to listen for his. Had he been euthanized?
As Ferly Mor and Rosalita worked on Max’s leg, she watched his chest. Each time it rose, she prayed it would stop. Each time it fell, she prayed he’d inhale again.
She wiped the tears streaming down her hot face.
Ferly Mor pointed to the leash on the counter next to her. Another Hyborean—the sandy-colored alien who had held her down after the breeding box incident—nodded and grabbed the leash. She scooted backward on the counter but couldn’t escape his big, leathery hands. After attaching the leash to her collar, Sandy set her on the floor and walked her to the Yard.
She didn’t need a mirror to know her face turned beet red. That was what happened to a person when they held their breath in humiliation.
The door to the Yard sublimated. Sandy pushed her outside, unclipped the leash, and gave her a pat on the head like a good little doggy.
Addy spun around to kick him in the ankle, but the door solidified. Her foot smashed into the camouflaged wall, and pain reverberated up her leg. She clenched her fists. “I hate this place! I want to go home!”
#
I hear you, Addy. I wouldn't want to be on Hyborea either. Although, it's pretty amazing that the Hyboreans can reawaken the dead. It's good to see Max again. But my heart breaks for him for having been abused and tortured. Hopefully Ferly Mor and Rosalita can heal him. See you next week for Chapter 13.
Romance with a rebel heart
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