Never. Smoking-hot, dominant lovers were not part of my reality.
My reality included prison. Harsh lighting. Bad food. Stale air. Several hundred women who looked at me like I was fresh meat. Loneliness. Betrayal.
“Yes, Miss Pierce. I’m terribly sorry. I don’t normally stop the testing so abruptly, but I have to admit, I was a little nervous about your screaming.”
I couldn’t help but flush. “Let’s just say the dream was very…vivid.”
She looked down at her tablet, apparently having decided that I was not dying in her testing chair. She went around the generic table and sat down. The room was clinical, beige. I’d think I was in an office conference room if not for the fancy testing chair I sat in. No, that I was tied to like a mental patient. The cuffs around my wrists were at least four inches wide and an inch thick. I wasn’t sure what kind of superhuman women they normally strapped down, but the only way any normal girl would get out of these was with a hacksaw.
I looked down at myself, oddly pleased to see that I wore the bland, gray testing gown instead of the orange prison pants and white t-shirt that had made up my wardrobe for the last few months. I was naked beneath, and bare from the knees down. Medical gowns, it seemed, were standard-level ugly no matter what planet they were from. And I wasn’t a fan of my bare ass sticking to the chair. Where was the standard-issue granny panties and sports bra?
“The testing was successful, a match was made at a ninety-nine percent.” Her smile transformed her face, and I realized that she wasn’t that old, probably even a few years younger than me. Her brown hair was pulled back in a severe bun, a style that reminded me of Wild West school marms in the old movies. Her gray eyes held a keen intelligence I could respect, but her words alarmed me. I was here at my attorney’s insistence. But I’d never really believed in this whole matching process. I mean, really? How the hell could some alien computer select a man who would be perfect for me? I didn’t believe it. But that didn’t stop the little kernel of hope from bursting to life with a painful buzz in my chest.
I frowned to hide the reaction. This was not how things were supposed to go. “I’ve been matched?”
“Yes, to a Prillon warrior.”
“A Prillon?” I knew nothing about the other planets in the Coalition. I’d had my nose in a petri dish and my eyes on the lens of a microscope for the last decade. “I told you I didn’t want it. A match. This. I don’t want to go off to some…some planet.” I spit out the last as if it were foul on my tongue. “I told you. I shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be in jail. I’ve done nothing wrong, except expose the truth. I’m not going to leave Earth because someone else broke the law.”
The warden looked at me with sympathetic gray eyes. “Yes, I’ve heard of your case, heard your claims of innocence. From a process standpoint, the testing doesn’t change that you’ve been convicted of a crime. It doesn’t change that you are going to be in jail for the next twenty-five years.”
“I filed an appeal.”
“Yes, your attorney informed me and I wish you the best of luck.” Her gray eyes softened and I found my anger fading beneath the onslaught of pity I saw there. “I’m sorry, Rachel. But your innocence or guilt is irrelevant to me. And believe me, your new mate won’t care. You’re here. You were convicted. They must have had evidence.”
“It was planted,” I countered.
All hints of the orgasm had faded, replaced by the same anger, frustration and bitterness that had followed me for the past five months. When the Whistleblower law went into effect, it hadn’t included me. No. I’d been quickly taken away, falsely pinned with crimes I didn’t commit by people who committed far worse just to hide their own.
Yes, I’d been the lead researcher at GloboPharma. The trials had been under my supervision. But I’d pulled the plug when things went wrong. I’d followed the FDA guidelines to the letter. The data in my reports was truthful and accurate. Yes, I’d known that the company had hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, looking for a cancer cure. And the treatment worked, it just killed too many healthy cells in the process.
I’d filed my reports and expected my superiors to do the right thing.
The day I heard that the FDA approved the drug, I’d nearly puked up my hot mustard and salami sandwich at my desk. I’d called the president of the company personally, and when she wouldn’t listen, I called the CEO.
They all ignored me, and sent some goons to wreck my house and shut me up. They’d fired me, discredited me, and, little did I know, kept my data and lined me up to take the fall if things went bad.
And things went really, really bad. At least four hundred people died before the FDA figured out it was the new drug doing the damage. When they came looking for someone to blame, GloboPharma handed them my head on a silver platter.
Fuckers. I refused to go down without a fight. I was not going to run like a scared puppy and live the rest of my life on another freaking planet. I had to do the right thing. I had to fight. If I didn’t, the bastards who did this to people would just do it again. And again. And again. I went to graduate school and completed my PhD just last year in biochemistry. I studied physiology as an undergrad so I could make a difference in the world, so I could help people. I never wanted to be in a fight like this. But now that I was here, I couldn’t walk away. I didn’t have a choice. It was either fight or rot in jail. And if I let them beat me, they’d just do it again, make another mistake. Kill people. Lie about it.
“I can’t leave. I have to go to court. Please, I want you to understand.”
“Your appeal is two months away,” she replied, not commenting on my rant. She knew what had happened, the charges, the trial, my conviction. It was all in my file on that tablet of hers. Everything about me was on there, including what I ate for lunch three months ago and my bra size. “Your lawyer recommended that you be tested for the Interstellar Brides Program, just in case.”
My lawyer was a nice man, accomplished at his job, but he had highly skilled, very well-placed people at the FDA and GloboPharma’s army of attorneys fighting against him. He’d told me it was going to be a hard fight, but I didn’t care. I’d done nothing wrong. I’d found out what others had done, were doing, to tens of thousands of frightened people desperate for a cure. They’d taken advantage of people who were sick and scared. They’d forged documents, lied, conspired and put my name on everything. The company paid a stupid fine and walked away. I was the one in jail for forgery, fraud, conspiracy. And that was the short list. I didn’t care what they said about me. I wasn’t giving up.
“Yes, two months, then the truth will come out and I’ll be free.”
She didn’t look hopeful. “Mating a Prillon is not the end of the world, Rachel.”
“Yes, it is. Literally. I wouldn’t be on Earth any longer.”
“I’ve been there. To Prillon.” She angled her head toward me. “I was mated to a Prillon warrior six years ago. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
“Yet you’re here,” I countered. Her lips compressed into a thin line and a shadow passed through her gray eyes. I’d said something to hurt her. “I’m sorry. I don’t know your story, your life. I’m just—” I tugged at the restraints “—trapped.”
When she did not respond, I studied her carefully stoic expression. Yes. She was young, probably younger than my thirty-two by at least four years. But the pain in her eyes was old pain. Old and hardened into armor around her heart.