Me? Not me. I turned down a bribe, got framed for a crime I didn’t commit, and now I’d been rejected by not just my matched mate, but the fucking king of his entire planet?
Not my best day.
“What do I do now?”
Warden Egara tilted her head and sighed. “Well, your volunteer service to the bride program was all that was required to satisfy the terms of your criminal sentence. Since no one has ever been rejected before, that is a loophole that you fall through and will most likely be rectified. I would assume in the future, a rejected woman would have to go to prison instead. For now, there are no rules regarding alternate punishment, therefore you’ve met all the requirements of your sentencing.”
“You mean—”
“You’re free to go, Miss Smith.”
She lifted the edge of the blanket and wiped several drops of blue liquid from the corner of my eye where it had begun to pool and slide down my cheek like tears.
I was free. No sentencing. No prison. No off-planet hottie.
“Go home.”
I didn’t want to go home. I had no home. No job, no friends, and no future. Since I was supposed to be in a galaxy far, far away, my bank accounts had been cleared out, my home sold. When a woman went off-planet in the bride program, their belongings were divided as if they were dead. Dead and gone, never to return. I had no one to claim my toaster or my worn-out sofa, so I had to assume it was all donated to charity.
I was the first bride ever to be sent home like a dog, tail between my legs, unworthy of an alien mate.
If I walked out the doors of the processing center and showed my face around town? Well, the creeps who set me up would send their goons to finish what they started. If they knew I was still on Earth, I’d have a price on my head within hours.
But then again, I was no pampered princess. I had a go-bag, a stash of clothing, and cash my friend in the intel business overseas had convinced me was necessary for survival. Thank God, I’d listened. All I had to do was get to my storage locker that no one knew about and I could start over. I was free. Lonely. Miserable. Hurt. But free to do whatever I wanted to do… like expose a group of corrupt officers and politicians.
The underhanded bastards thought I was gone, off-planet. No longer their problem. Perhaps that was the only luck I was going to have today.
I swung my legs off the table and smiled, suddenly filled with unexpected glee. I might not be good enough for an alien fuck, but I was very good with a telephoto lens. I thought of it as my own personal style of sniper rifle. One perfect picture was all it took to take someone down, expose their lies, ruin their life. If my camera was a weapon, then I had a hit list a half-mile long. If I was a ghost while doing it, a person who wasn’t even supposed to be on Earth, then so much the better.
I hopped down off the table, clutching the blanket closed, but had to rethink the sudden movement when the room spun. Warden Egara’s arms shot out to steady me and I nodded my thanks.
Time to go, but there was one thing the masochistic side of me needed to know. If I were to leave my off-planet opportunity here in this room, then I wanted to know. “What was his name?”
Warden Egara frowned. “Who?”
“My match?”
She hesitated, as if she were imparting state secrets, then shrugged. “Prince Nial. The Prime’s eldest son.”
I laughed then, for had I left Earth, I would have been a princess indeed. Matched to an alien prince, wearing ball gowns and ridiculous shoes, my long blond hair tamed not by my normal ponytail, but with gemstone pins and elaborate twists as befit my royal station. God help me, I would have had to wear mascara and lipstick, for my pale complexion was less than beautiful when bare.
A princess? No flipping way. Perhaps that really was the reason I’d been rejected. I was absolutely, positively, not Cinderella.
“I think it’s for the best, warden. I’m not exactly princess material.” I was better with a dagger than a politician’s silver tongue, more skilled with a rifle than on the dance floor. And that, sadly, was simply a fact. Whoever this Prince Nial was, he’d just dodged a bullet.
Me.
Perhaps this prince was better off without me. That didn’t mean that deep down, where the emotions of that other woman’s claiming ceremony lingered, the dream in which, for a few moments, I knew what it felt like to be wanted, loved, fucked and claimed by her mates, that I wasn’t bleeding.
* * *
Prince Nial of Prillon Prime, Aboard the Battleship Deston
As I lumbered to the view screen to speak to my father, I was numb. I felt as if my body weighed next to nothing, no more than a child’s. It was the easiest way to handle my father if I offered no emotion.
The cyborg implants injected into my body during my time in a Hive Integration Chamber were microscopic, and impossible to remove without killing me. Hence, I was now considered contaminated, a risk to the men under my command and to the people of my planet. I was to be treated as a highly dangerous rogue. At least that was what everyone thought. Warriors who were contaminated with Hive technology were typically banished to one of the colonies to live out the rest of their lives doing hard labor. They didn’t take brides. And they didn’t become the Prime of Prillon’s twin worlds.
My birthright, as Prime heir and prince of my people, had kept me from being immediately banished to the colonies, but there was one thing I cared about more than that and it wasn’t the person who filled the screen before me.