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“I’m sorry, I just wanted to talk. But are you okay?” Alina’s consciousness was detached from her actions. Shewatched herself reach out to take his hand, examining the injury. The blood looked different from what she remembered of his chest wound. Diluted, almost. How the hell did this man keep hurting himself?
Man.
Was that what he was now?
Threxin jerked out of her grasp, and Alina sighed, registering a dull wisp of disappointment.
“It is not mine.”
Alina processed that for a while, her gaze slowly reaching over his shoulder. She noted the way his spikes flattened slightly as she looked at a door to another room behind him. It was the office cabin of his quarters, and through the open door she saw a sliver of swaying shadow. Narrowing her eyes, Alina let her feet take her there.
“Alina.” The warning in his voice was curious, but ignored. She kept walking. If he wanted to stop her, he could. He wasn’t.
The body hung from a hook driven into the ceiling, strapped up at the elbows. His head was bent forward, hiding his face with a tuft of grayish hair that swayed back and forth. What looked like a dozen apertures lined the bare skin, only that was not what they were. Long crimson scratches bled onto unmarked skin and dripped to the carpet. The man twitched, alive. Recognition flared as he swung clockwise and revealed the profile of his face in shadow.
Alina’s gasp was silenced as she backed into a familiar wall behind her. The sound roused the man, a swollen eyelid forcing itself open, the eye gliding to her from the battered shadow of his face.
Threxin curled a forearm around her shoulders and twisted her in one quick motion to face him. He grabbed her face and tilted it forcefully to make her meet his eye.
“That’s Orion’s father.”
“It is.” Threxin nodded in a wholly human expression. Was that for her benefit?
Alina breathed. Her head wanted to freak out and run, as she should. It would be a perfectly normal reaction to seeing the father of your commander… ex-commander—God, whatever he was now—carved up and hanging from the ceiling in the cabin of the alien who just the night before had his tongue shoved in her mouth.
So yes, her head wanted to freak out. Her body though…
Alina simply stared up at Threxin and processed the situation. He was rolling the sleeve of his shirt up one muscled forearm, then the other, revealing intimately familiar blue slits trailing up his wrists and along the striations of muscle.
“Why are you doing this?”
Threxin cocked his head at her. Had he been expecting a different reaction? Alina was sure she’d have plenty of time to work herself up about this later. For now, she needed to know, and then she needed to get out of there.
He scratched the side of his jaw with three talons. “Information.”
“About the planet.”
This time Threxin lifted his chin in a more uhyrelike acknowledgment, before catching himself and turning it into a short nod.
“And when you find out, you’ll kill us.” Alina’s hands worked, nails digging into flesh in little pulses of muscle. It was tugging at her, the real reaction brimming within her. But her head was cold, and her body simply did not care to indulge it.
Threxin’s silence was answer enough for Alina. There was only one option now—she had to walk across that hall and tell Kaia everything.
It hadn’t really occurred to Alina that, after witnessing what was going on, Threxin might not be compelled to let her leave this place alive. The thought only appeared when heblocked her retreat. A tendril of fear broke through the ice for the first time.
Well, now she had no choice but to test her favor with the uhyre. Instead of pulling away, Alina took a breath and stepped closer. For a moment she thought he would prevent that too, but after a flash of surprise, he let her close the distance between them, close enough to feel his heat seep through their clothes. Alina put a palm to his chest, fingers gentle as they pressed into a faint puckered line beneath his shirt where his chest scar would remain.
“Threxin,” she peered up at him. “Please let him go.”
He cocked his head.
“Him? You wanthimreleased? Do you not understand what is happening here?” Threxin stepped back, out of her touch, clasping a hand to his spikes. “Shoq, I should have never let you enter.”
He turned his back to her and exhaled a string of expletives in Apthian.
“Why do you hate us so much?” Alina spoke softly, approaching again even as his back tensed beneath the collar of his shirt.
He threw his head back to glare at the ceiling with an almost pained expression that she’d witnessed several times, where she’d otherwise expect a show of emotion to be. If this was uhyre evolution, it was odd. Alina glanced back at Per Halen, who had found the strength to tilt his head just enough to observe the scene. Turning back to Threxin, she chanced reaching out to brush her fingers against his shoulder. “Are we that bad? Am I?”
