Page 4

The Island (Cuba)

Marinah

I kicked the door closed with my boot, the satisfying thump barely scratching the surface of my displeasure. It would’ve felt even better if I’d had a blockhead’s skull to kick along with it, preferably my irritating mate’s.

The island women were revolting. For some reason, they seemed to think that with me in charge, they suddenly had a voice. Because I was female, and they were female, we were sisters now? The thought made me snort as I crossed the room and kicked the wall for good measure. My Doc Marten boot slammed into the plaster, leaving a boot-sized hole. I ignored it. At least it accomplished something. I felt marginally better.

The women had always had a voice on the island, but judging by their current grumblings, they’d been too afraid of King to use it. And now they had me. I’d just spent six hours locked in a room with a delegation of them. What did I have to show for it? A list of demands and threats of a possible strike. This should’ve been King’s problem.

Could you even strike when you weren’t being paid?

We didn’t live in a society where money had value anymore. Food, clothing, safety, those were the new currency. The Shadow Warriors provided the safety, trained the island men and any woman who wanted to learn to defend herself too. Other women and men of the island worked on food and clothing, with plenty of help from the Warriors. It didn’t take a genius to figure out who needed whom more. I’d lived off Federation mush for years. The thought turned my stomach, but I’d survive if I had to do it again. Probably.

I longed for the comfort of our home on the northern part of the island or even a quick escape to Jardines del Rey, christened Love Island, or just Del Rey by the Warriors. King had appropriated it as a place for me to decompress. But no, I was stuck here at the citadel, playing queen bee to a swarm of harpies.

I glanced around our chamber, taking in the details with simmering frustration. The entire citadel was stone from floor to vaulted, columned ceilings, with miles of tiled floors that echoed satisfyingly beneath my boots when I was in moods like this. Of course, the tile didn’t give when I kicked it, so the walls, with their sturdy brick and mortar, were better for venting my anger.

The citadel was a sprawling, castle-like structure with hundreds of rooms, more a self-contained city than a single building. Its towering walls loomed high above the surrounding structures, offering an impenetrable defense. Inside, there was everything from offices for military intelligence, our arsenal, and our sleeping chambers. The high windows, located only on the top two floors, gave us an excellent vantage point in the event of an attack.

We had prepared for nearly everything. If the entire island sought refuge at the citadel, our food stores could withstand a siege of up to six months. The kitchens alone were a marvel. A home unto itself, with multiple ovens in each unit, a staff of over a hundred, and attached quarters for anyone who preferred to live where they worked. When King ran things, the citadel had operated like a finely tuned machine. Now, under my reluctant rule, it felt like I was mucking it up on a daily basis.

The door creaked open behind me, and I glanced over my shoulder, instantly regretting it. The last person I wanted to see stood there, and no matter how determined I was to stay angry, his presence made it difficult.

No, I wouldn’t let my eyes linger on his enormous, muscled chest that seemed to pull all the oxygen from the room. I wouldn’t acknowledge the way my breath hitched at the sight of his unorthodox face, somehow put together in a way that made it impossible to ignore. I clenched my teeth to keep from groaning out loud as my thoughts betrayed me. My brain flashed to his long, golden braids brushing over my skin when we last made love.

Nope. None of that. Not today. I didn’t like him right now. Not his chest, not his braids, not even those piercing blue eyes that told me he loved me.

I wasn’t in the mood.

King studied me, his damned eyes scanning me like he could read my thoughts. His gaze flicked to the new hole in the wall, and one brow arched in silent acknowledgment. He didn’t say a word, smart man. Instead, he strolled over to his chair in the corner, eased into it, and splayed his legs like he owned the room.

Callie, my traitorous cat, wasted no time leaping onto his lap. Her loud, contented purr filled the air as King casually ran his fingers through her sleek fur, his eyes shifting to meet mine, a smug glint in their depths.

This. Would. Not. Do.

The heavy thuds of my Doc Martens announced my approach as I crossed the room. Reaching down, I snatched Callie from his lap and ignored her indignant meow. “You’re supposed to be on my side,” I muttered, plopping down on the bed with her. She squirmed for a moment, then settled on my lap, her claws lightly digging into my pants. Her purrs returned, louder this time, and filled the room with their comforting rumble.

I shot King a smug smile, stroking Callie as if to say, See? I win. Her soft vibrations eased some of the tension from my shoulders, and for a moment, the disastrous day seemed a little less awful. I inhaled deeply, letting my nerves settle, teetering on the edge of relaxation until a knock at the door shattered the fragile peace.

“I’ll get that,” King said smoothly, rising from his chair.

He opened the door, stepping aside to let Beck in. Beck entered with the caution of someone walking onto a minefield, his steel-blue eyes sweeping the room like he was scoping the escape routes. His appearance was all sharp lines and discipline, the kind of lifetime military presence I’d seen countless times growing up around my father’s colleagues.

Like King, Beck’s hair was braided back, but the similarities ended there. He was slightly shorter, his muscles marginally less defined. Not that it mattered, his face held the weight of a man who’d seen too much. There was a tired edge to his expression today, though he carried himself with the same sharp authority as my mate.

Beck hesitated, clearly gauging the tension in the room. I swore he was about to turn around and retreat, but King cut off his escape.

“We haven’t had dinner yet,” King said, his tone dry. “And some of us are rather cranky. So, if I were you, I’d spit it out and be quick about it.”

Beck’s mouth twitched in something that might’ve been a grin, or a grimace, but he stayed put and lifted his head just enough to meet my eyes, then quickly looked away. Smart move. The last thing he wanted was for Ms. Beast to misinterpret it as a challenge.

“We’ve got a problem in the motor pool,” he said. “You might want to check on it.”

I couldn’t resist. “Are the women revolting there too?”

His eyes darted briefly to King before he lowered his head again. “Not that I’m aware of,” he muttered.

Callie chose that moment to leap gracefully from my lap, padding over to Beck and winding herself in tight circles around his legs. The look on his face told me he wasn’t a fan of feline affection. In fact, he looked like Callie might make a tasty snack.

That thought burned away my remaining patience. Not that Beck would ever dare hurt her. He knew the unspoken rule. Anyone who so much as glanced at Callie in the wrong way would find themselves shuffling on their stomach searching for their arms and legs.

I’d had enough. If I wanted King and Beck to survive the rest of the day, I needed to leave. “Tell it to King,” I snapped, practically leaping off the bed. I snatched my grandmother’s leather journal from the nightstand, scooped Callie off the floor, and charged from the room.

I needed space, desperately. The only place I knew I could find it was one of the pools beneath the citadel. It wasn’t Callie’s favorite spot, but too bad. She was stuck with me for the time being.

My stomach growled, hunger clawing at me, but I ignored it. My hasty retreat wasn’t just about Beck, the motor pool, or the women’s demands. It was everything. Leadership had been thrust upon me the moment I morphed into Beast mode on steroids, aka Nova.

King was supposed to be the leader. The King. Now, that burden sat squarely on my shoulders, and nothing about it came naturally. I did have my moments, but those were when I didn’t think about being in command and simply shouted out orders. The biggest problem I had was overthinking. It drove me crazy. My days were a blur of frustration and mounting tension, and no matter how hard I tried to find my footing, it felt like I was falling further behind.

I trained relentlessly, pouring every ounce of energy into mastering the weapons at our disposal. A few months ago, I hadn’t known the first thing about guns. Now, I could glance at a firearm and rattle off its make, model, and caliber like it was second nature. Each day, I spent hours with a sword in my hands, sharpening skills and perfecting my ability to cause damage. King and Beck drilled me constantly on military strategy, cramming so much information into my head that it felt like it might explode. And yet, despite everything, I still felt inadequate as alpha of the Shadow Warriors.

How long would it take before I started taking this role for granted? How long before I stopped losing sleep over the lives my decisions could destroy?

I carried my grandmother’s journal with me. Deciphering it had been an uphill battle. While the male Warriors’ history had been conveniently translated from the original language of our home planet, the women’s texts had not. Of course, the female Warriors would preserve their connection to their roots through language, but for me, that meant reading this journal was painstakingly slow. If it weren’t for a rudimentary dictionary one of the female Warriors had cobbled together, I’d still be stuck on the first page.

The problem didn’t stop there. My grandmother, Veda, had written in a tiny, shaky scrawl that turned each line into a puzzle. Every single foreign word had to be deciphered and then translated. I’d barely made it a quarter of the way through the third chapter, and most of that progress had been trial and error.

The beginning of her journal recounted the fall of the home planet. Her insight added a layer of vivid detail I hadn’t seen in the male Warriors’ history. The men had glossed over the violence, maybe to make themselves seem less monstrous. But Veda’s account, passed down from her grandmother, didn’t hold back. It was raw, unfiltered, and far more damning.

The male Warriors had been brutal; a vicious species that annihilated everything in their path, including each other. They had killed Veda’s mother shortly after Veda’s birth. I’d known about the wars but reading it through the eyes of a woman whose grandmother had lived through it made the atrocities sit differently.

There was also an underlying unrest in Veda’s words, a subtle but unmistakable tension among the women. It was a stark contrast to Nalista’s account, the only other female Warrior’s text I’d managed to read. Nalista had been a fighter, a Warrior who had fully embraced her nature. Her history reflected that, stoic and almost detached. But Veda’s journal was something else entirely.

I found myself impatient, desperate to understand the woman behind these words, and I did my best to translate and read an hour each night. Veda passed down accounts of the women’s day-to-day life on the home planet and brought her closer to me, turning her from a vague figure into a real person. Maybe, just maybe, I’d finally get the answers I desperately needed. If only the island Warriors and disgruntled human women would give me a few days of peace, I might actually find those answers.

The rooms below the citadel were a maze of storerooms, the medical bays which had grown from one to three, along with our extensive armory. Among these spaces was the aquatic area. Each room featured a different pool, some transformed into tropical rainforests while others had a serene, reflective quality. The pool I headed for was special. It was the one King had brought me to the first day we met.

That day, I’d overheated, through no fault of my own, and lost consciousness. King had carried me to the Olympic-sized lap pool to cool my body down. The memory made me smile despite my current mood.

I set Callie down near the edge of the pool and rubbed the spot between her shoulder blades. It was her favorite, though I doubted King or Beck knew that. I’d never share the secret either. At that moment, I didn’t care if I was acting like a petulant child. I needed a break from the adult world, somewhere I could be a whiny baby if I wanted.

Callie lasted all of sixty seconds before she leaped away, abandoning me in favor of exploring the far corners of the room. Her small body pressed against the wall as she prowled, likely looking for nonexistent prey. Whatever went on in her tiny, furry head was beyond me, but I let her have her space.

I kicked off the Doc Martens, peeled off my socks, and rolled up the cuffs of my stretchy war pants that allowed me to shift without going naked. The cool water felt incredible as I dipped my feet in, and the tension in my body eased slightly. With a sigh, I opened my grandmother’s journal to the last section I had translated.

The words weighed heavy on me as I read.

The women knew what was happening. They saw the complete annihilation coming. The men saw it too, yet they continued their wars, their revenge, their murder. This was the beginning of our end.

The weight of those words hung over me like a dark cloud. I stared at the page, running my fingers over the faint, shaky script. It wasn’t just history. It was a warning.

I lifted my eyes and stared across the still, calm water. Violence had always followed the Shadow Warriors. After their ships landed on Earth, their women abandoned them, a decision that forced the men to finally make the changes needed for their survival. They became farmers, feeding humans instead of warring with them and themselves. Their physical characteristics made it believable: blond hair, blue eyes, and massive builds that gave them the appearance of good, corn-fed farm boys.

The Warriors married human women and began procreating, much like their female counterparts. Males fathered male offspring, and I knew now that females bore females. The males somehow managed to raise their sons to embrace a pacifist way of life, mirroring what the Warrior women had done. For the most part, it worked. But not entirely.

Greystone, King’s uncle, remembered the old ways. He secretly trained an emerging group of young men to fight against the pacifist mentality that had taken hold. King was one of those men.

Then the hellhounds came, and the world as we knew it began to crumble.

Hellhounds. Our name for the monstrosities that looked like hounds dragged straight from hell. Scientists, in their brilliance or madness, genetically modified formaldehyde; more specifically, they altered a protein within it, setting off a chain reaction that created these creatures. They were formed from the bodies of the human dead, melded into four-legged, hunched beasts with poisonous claws capable of tunneling through dirt and razor-sharp teeth dripping with toxic saliva that killed humans without exception.

The hellhounds ravaged the human world, and Greystone and his secretly trained Warriors rose to meet them, rescuing what was left of humanity.

But salvation came at a cost. The new U.S. Federation, which had taken power after the government collapsed, betrayed the Warriors. Their reasoning? The Shadow Warriors were a threat. The Federation wanted them contained, studied, and ultimately controlled for experimentation or some other nefarious reason. It didn’t matter that the Warriors had saved them. The Federation saw only the nine-foot monsters with colossal teeth and claws—beings they believed could not be trusted.

Another war broke out, this time between the Federation and the Warriors. More lives were lost, including Greystone, the Warriors’ leader. When the dust finally settled, a fragile treaty was reached. As part of the deal, the Warriors were granted the island of Cuba. King became their new leader, a role he took on until I barreled into his life and changed everything.

And now, here I sat by the pool, surrounded by a history I’d only recently begun to uncover. A world that had been unknown to me for most of my life was now my responsibility, and every piece of it felt impossibly heavy.

With a spark of awareness, I lifted my head and glanced over my shoulder. King was heading toward me. I couldn’t hear his footsteps, but Ms. Beast, the restless, seething monster inside me, knew he was coming. I’d been noticing this “awareness” phenomenon more and more, along with several other peculiarities connected to mating. It was just another question I had about female Warriors. A mated Warrior pair hadn’t existed in two centuries, and I was discovering some fascinating, albeit frustrating, side effects associated with our union. A written rule book, preferably in English, would have been perfect.

I also felt an awareness of other Warriors, a sensation that was growing stronger by the day. It was nothing like the bond I shared with King, but it was there, an undercurrent I couldn’t ignore. King called it the invisible threads of energy that connected the men to their alpha. Those threads hadn’t abandoned him when I became alpha. My appeal that we should lead together, embracing a modern trend of shared leadership, had fallen on deaf ears. The universe, as always, hated me.

The sound of my mate’s boots finally reached my ears, and I lowered my gaze to the journal in my hands, feigning intense interest. He entered the room like the silent predator he was, his presence filling the space like a force of nature that couldn’t be ignored. Ms. Beast, ever vigilant, tracked him without effort. I didn’t look up when he sat beside me, but I heard the soft sound of his boots hitting the floor and the rustle of fabric as he pulled off his socks. Then came the quiet, satisfied moan he made as he dipped his feet into the cool water. A shiver of satisfaction coursed through me despite my attempt to remain unaffected.

Mate, Ms. Beast whispered inside my head.

I’d finally grown accustomed to her fiery, sometimes bloody nudges at King. Now, though, she behaved more like Callie, rolling over and purring whenever he was near. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or annoyed.

He relaxed beside me while I continued pretending to read. His nearness alone was enough to distract me, the familiar scent of his musky Warrior presence overpowering the chlorine and making it nearly impossible to hold onto my irritation. My stomach tightened, betraying me further.

King’s voice broke the silence. “I had the kitchen hold dinner until you’re finished sulking.”

I glanced at him sharply, my annoyance bubbling back to the surface. “Sulking?”

“Yes,” he said with maddening calm. “You’ve been stomping around, brooding for days. I thought you might like a hot meal when you’re done.”

I closed the journal and rested it on my lap, meeting his gaze. “You’re irritating.”

“So I’ve been told,” he said, completely unbothered. A faint grin tugged at his lips.

“And smug.”

“Also true.”

I sighed, defeated for the moment. “I hate you sometimes.”

“No, you don’t,” he replied, leaning back on his hands, his smile widening. “But you’re welcome to keep pretending.”

My eyes snapped to his in disbelief. He did not just say that! His gaze remained steady on mine. When we were alone, he never lowered his eyes because Ms. Beast accepted him, and up until now, I’d loved that about our private time. I bit back the sharp retort bubbling on my tongue, knowing nothing good would come from unleashing it.

His voice was low, his eyes glinting with mischief as he spoke again. “Let it out, baby; you’ll feel better.”

“Baby?” I echoed, my voice tight, my lips pressed into a thin line.

“Do you want to be cuddled like a six-month-old?” he shot out.

Murder was the only logical response. “Do you have a death wish?” I asked, my tone dripping with menace.

King stood slowly, extending a hand toward me. I stared at it for a moment, considering my options, before setting the journal on the pool deck. Reluctantly, I placed my fingers in his and felt the familiar burst of energy that always came with his touch. He pulled me to my feet, his imposing height making me tilt my head back slightly to meet his gaze.

Without answering my question, he stepped closer, wrapping his arms around my waist. My fingers slid down his muscled forearms, grasping his wrists behind my back while pushing my chest against his. The air between us practically crackled.

“Are you trying to get a reaction out of me?” I demanded. There was no other reason he’d tempt me to murder right now, not when he knew I’d been on the verge of exploding since we returned from the outpost. My head tilted back further; my eyes narrowed into lethal lasers aimed directly at him.

“Yes,” he admitted, far too casually. “But I don’t think it’s doing the trick.”

“Really.” The word dripped with consternation, each syllable a warning.

King twisted his wrists, breaking free of my hold with infuriating ease, not that I was trying to hold on. “If that won’t do the trick, maybe this will.”

I didn’t have time to react before I was airborne, my shriek echoing through the room. I hit the water with a loud splash, the shock stealing the breath from my lungs. So stunned, I forgot to hold my breath and inhaled a mouthful of water instead.

I surfaced, choking and sputtering, fury coursing through me. Someone was going to die today. Specifically, the overgrown oaf who thought tossing me into the pool was a good idea.

When I stopped choking, King would no longer be my mate or my guard. He would just be dead. My mental list of who could replace him was the only thought besides his death.