Page 3 of No Strings Attached (Mated Fates #1)

Violet knew unequivocally that her parents’ esoteric classic rock record collection had saved her life. Or at the very least, her sanity.

She came awake inside her stasis pod when she felt it move. For the first goddamn time in three weeks. Probably three weeks. It was impossible to know for sure when strapped into a motherfucking statis pod for what felt like all of recorded time. But she had counted her longest periods of sleep and was up to 45; assuming she slept for long periods twice a day, she guessed it had been three weeks. Also, she had gone through her entire mental catalog of Dylan, The Who, The Rolling Stones, Yes, Led Zeppelin, and Bowie, and was currently working her way through Pink Floyd.

The first several days had been so panic filled she had barely slept. Waking up after her abduction, strapped to a gel pad, with a respirator on and IVs, tubes up both her hoohah and wazoo, and closed up in a coffin-sized box…well, there had been panic. Lots of it.

Buried alive. Entombed. Unable to move even an inch. She’d thought her heart would explode.

But it had eventually dissipated, which was weird. Apparently, the body can’t just keep freaking out when it becomes obvious that the situation is ongoing, maybe even permanent. So, after a few days, her panic had transformed into fear, which she thought was a very legitimate response to having been motherfucking abducted by the motherfucking Greys while hiking in the motherfucking Olympic forest and kept in a motherfucking coffin.

That fear had led her to imagine all sorts of scenarios she might be in for, the least terrifying of which was being butchered and prepared for dinner. That sucked ass for sure, but it beat all the sex slavery scenarios by a wide margin. And really, those were the two most likely options, weren’t they? It wasn’t very probable that she had been grabbed and thrown into this box to serve as an honored representative of the planet Earth in some council of intergalactic assholes.

Given that—the unlikelihood of her serving as Ambassador Vi and the likelihood of her becoming just the wrapping around some very abused orifices—she had realized that she would probably have to find a way to kill herself if her death wasn’t automatically a part of whatever was in store for her. In the meantime, she had played her parents’ records in her head. Every note, every beat, every scratch on the vinyl. If she realized that she had forgotten any element, any track, any musical transition, she started over. She constructed stages, bands, orchestral sections, lines of backup singers in her mind and let ‘em rip, starting with Highway 61 Revisited .

Yeah, Vi, how does it feel?

And at some paradoxical mid-point in the interminable, unending, infinity of time, her fear had transformed into…what? Something like a small kernel of acceptance that her end was nigh surrounded by a nearly bottomless fury. Blackest rage. The kind that whispers, “Sure, I’ll die in the end, but I’ll take as many of you miserable sons of bitches with me as I can.” She was going to be the wrath of God.