Page 23 of Gladiators of the Vagabond Boxset

I gulped in fear, my heart pounding and my palms sweaty as I awaited what was about to step into the meager light.

This was going to be bad. I knew it. I desperately wished I’d never gotten up that morning for work.

God, it probably wasn’t anywhere close to the same day, was it?

I’d probably been in what I was now realizing was a stasis pod for a long time.

My attention was roughly snapped to the cell—away from my panicky, spiraling thoughts—when the cell’s occupant stepped up in front of the bars and into the light. Holy hell! My breath stalled for a moment as I took him in. This guy truly was humongous; he was nearly eight feet tall.

The male before me was bipedal, with two arms and opposable thumbs, but that was pretty much where the resemblance to a human ended. If you compared him to a crocodile on two feet, you’d come closer because of the green scales that covered him.

The shape of his head resembled that of a bull placed on top of a thick neck.

His trapezius muscles were more like actual trapezoids than those of the average steroid-using gym rat.

The reason for those huge muscles was obvious when you took in the bull horns that splayed wide and heavy from the sides of his head; they spanned easily three feet.

A blunted snout with a wide nose topped a maw filled with razor-sharp teeth, the canines long, pointed, and deadly sharp. A thick gold ring pierced the nose, and a row of glinting blades rose like a mohawk across his scalp to his back.

Fuck! Crap! Damn… I cursed in my head. His thighs were thicker around than my hips, and that was saying something.

Not to mention those enormous arms and feet, which had thick black claws.

And what’s more—was that a spiked lizard’s tail swaying behind him?

Oh god, no. They wanted me to mate with this thing? Was it even sentient?

I felt like utter crap for thinking that the next moment.

There was a pain collar tightened around that huge neck; he wasn’t here by choice any more than I was.

Then I noted the one soft feature on his huge body: long ears attached to his head just below the jutting horns.

They were shaped sort of like a corn husk—soft and mobile-looking.

They flicked once when my eyes landed on them, then drooped all the way down when I flinched at the sudden movement.

“On your knees!” barked Farn, and he jabbed at the huge alien’s thickly muscled belly with his pronged stick.

The alien slid out of the way effortlessly, his emerald eyes fixated on my face.

He’d moved with a dancer’s grace despite his big body, and he hadn’t even looked at the Krektar wielding a weapon at him through the bars.

The other Krektar were chiming in, all shrilly ordering the Beast to get on his knees.

He wasn’t obeying, a rebellious fire in his green eyes.

When Farn raised the remote for his pain collar, the huge male bared his mouth full of teeth and growled deep and low.

Then, on the sides of his arms, sharp-looking blades fanned out, and the blades growing out of his skull flicked upright, adding a good foot to his height.

The growl had clearly been directed at Farn, but when I flinched back from the ferocious display, those green orbs settled on me again.

I had a feeling that there was a keen and even calculated intelligence behind them.

The next moment, he focused on Farn and his pronged stick, and in a move so fast I couldn’t follow, he yanked Farn right up against the bars.

One fist had a hold of the stick, and the other was wrapped around Farn’s throat.

There was a moment of stunned silence from everyone, and then a cracking sound that would probably echo in my dreams for a long time to come.

The Beast tossed Farn’s body away from the cell with a contemptuous flick of his thick wrist, making it look effortless to throw the six-foot-tall Krektar right at my feet.

He grinned then, and for a sick moment, I wondered if he thought he’d just given me a gift.

The next moment, the cellblock broke out in utter chaos. The other slaves imprisoned were hooting and yelling, stomping their feet in applause for the Beast’s act, while the other Krektar yanked me back, shrieking in anger and fear. And then there was the Beast’s roar of victory.

Until it ended when one of the Krektar—Frek, the scrawny one—found his pain remote and pressed the switch, dialing it all the way up.

The Beast stared at my face the entire time his body convulsed from the pain coursing through his nerves on the highest setting.

Unlike the anthracite doctor, who’d collapsed to his knees after a minute, the Beast stood his ground against that pain for a long time.

A huge, immovable bulwark against oppression.

Eventually, his eyes rolled into the back of his head, and he collapsed, his body hitting the metal floor with a thud so loud I felt the vibrations of it shake up through my own legs. And they wanted me to mate with this creature?

Frek was ordering the other two to push me into the cell.

It seemed that, despite Farn’s death by a broken neck and his initial resistance to this plan, he was going ahead with it anyway.

With the click of a button on one of their wristwatches—much like a smartwatch—several bars to the Beast’s cell lowered into the ground.

“Get in!” yelled one of the two whose name I didn’t know.

I thought the two might actually be twins or clones; they looked so identically ugly.

A wave from Frek’s hand with the pain remote—just to warn me what they’d do if I didn’t obey—and I found myself squaring my shoulders, raising my chin, and stepping over the Beast’s collapsed body into the cell. Fake it till you make it, right?

The bars rose behind me with a definitive snick.