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And when I saw her standing there on the dais alongside the other Prizes—although they might as well have been invisible for the attention I paid them—I lit up inside.
It was a bizarre emotion, one I was not accustomed to feeling.
Our master disapproved of such feelings, believing they got in the way of the mission—his mission—to ensure he had enough living creatures to Reave life from and sustain himself.
I had been chosen to enter the prison undercover. Getting inside was easy enough. I came forward, admitting guilt to a crime I hadn’t committed. There were thousands of runaway criminals in the galaxy.
I admitted to the murder of a Vishar merchant and went through the sham trial and got sent to Ikmal prison. It was my job to infiltrate the Supervisor’s prison to sow discontent among the prisoners and encourage rioting and mayhem.
In the end, I hadn’t been the one to bestow the final blow.
Kren and his fated mate did it for me.
Krial was a hayim. Their civilization had long since been destroyed, the survivors dispersing to the deepest reaches of the galaxy. He might have been the last of his kind for all I knew.
The attackers had been the accumulated masses of hundreds of varieties, farmed and mated for Reaving—that was the name of the process where he sucked the lifeforce from his victims until their bodies turned grey and wilted.
They decided they no longer wished to be cattle and rebelled against his people.
The hayim had the incredible ability to live forever. I really had no idea how old Krial was. He could have been a hundred or a thousand years of age.
It sickened me the first time I saw him Reave. A vessel would lose its strength as they kicked and screamed and punched, their attacks becoming so weak they were nothing more than a husk of a creature lying on the floor by the end, unable to move a single muscle. Over time, I got used to it.
“They made a great sacrifice,” Krial would often say. Other times, he wished for the creature to be removed from his sight and murdered or crushed or stabbed or tossed into a desert or ejected into space where they would die a slow and agonizing death.
Krial hated seeing those small, weak and shriveled figures after he’d been at them. I suppose they reminded him of the way he would look if he let nature take its course.
But he was never going to let that happen.
There was nothing a hayim feared more than death. I suppose no creature liked to consider their own demise but for the hayim it was more visceral and terrifying.
The worst part was, the more often he Reaved, the less effective it became. He needed to Reave more and more until an entire lifetime could be absorbed and it would power him for no more than a month at most.
His body might heal itself frequently but his mind became more bitter and twisted until there was nothing left of him.
The only reason Krial hadn’t Reaved me or the other members of his personal guard was because he had chosen another babe to use for his purposes, sucking the lifeforce from a babe no more than just a few hours old.
He decided I looked stronger than the unfortunate babe and kept me to train as a member of his guard.
Those so chosen became like siblings, learning to fight and defend Krial at all costs. With the number of creatures he had Reaved over the years, he had many enemies, and occasionally they sent an assassin to destroy him in retribution for killing their loved ones.
His one great goal was to find somewhere to call his own, somewhere for him to farm as his species had done all those years ago.
And now, with him as the supervisor in this prison, he had finally found the cattle he needed. There were thousands of prisoners at Ikmal prison and more would keep getting sent there as the years rolled by.
The warden and the alien civilizations that sent their worst criminals didn’t care if the criminals disappeared, never to be seen again. Many of the prisoners would never get out of this place. For many, their stay at Ikmal was a life sentence.
And so, Krial took their lives from them.
“They would only waste their time in this place,” Krial would say. “I would use their time far more effectively than they ever would.”
I was relieved when it turned out Harper wasn’t the fated mate Kren had claimed for himself. The last thing I needed was to bring more attention to myself, especially if Kren was hiding in the prison somewhere, undetected by the guards.
He would swoop down on me and attack in the dead of night for taking his fated mate for my own.
But Harper wasn’t his fated mate. Some girl called Ivy was.
Relief unlike anything I had ever felt before eased off my chest and I hugged Harper even closer in bed.
