Page 1 of Warlord's Mate
Chapter One
Her wrists were bleeding. Marcy braced her arms on her knees and let her hands dangle away from her body. Blood from the abrasions the metals cuffs made on her skin dripped onto the floor between her bare feet. She’d been wishing for days now that she’d bleed out. Prayed she'd go to sleep and not wake up again but every time she opened her eyes, she was still in the same six-by-six metal room with nothing but a bucket in the corner for her personal use.
Noise outside drew her gaze to the small square cut into the door that the aliens used to feed her the bowls of slop they considered food. She’d lost track of the days and had no idea how long she’d been here, nor how long she’d been on that spaceship. She snorted a laugh. A spaceship. With all the screwed up bullshit in her life, she would end up abducted by aliens and dropped who knew where.
Her brother had told her more than once that she’d end up being abducted leaving her dance studio so late at night. She’d taken self-defense classes just to be on the safe side but—who would have guessed it would be aliens that abducted her? She learned real quick that you can’t outrun an alien spaceship when a beam of light paralyzed her, freezing her limbs in place. She blacked out and woke in a cargo hold with twenty other women. Scared, hungry and unable to understand what the ugly fucks who’d taken her said didn’t help her anxiety any either. The day they knocked her unconscious and implanted a translator into her head had been the one highlight of the entire bizarre trip. It didn’t last long, though. Dropped onto a prison moon and told to run or die had brought on a whole new level of weird. More so when they caught her and dumped in here, waiting to be offered as a prize to the strongest alien willing to fight for her.
Marcy pushed the metal cuffs back and rubbed her thumb over her bleeding wrists. It was so dark she couldn’t see how bad it looked. With her luck, it would end up infected.
Something scurried in the corner and she pulled her knees in. She hadn’t been able to glimpse what ran along the walls but she’d take whatever this planet offered in the way of vermin if it meant she escaped the alternative—becoming the possession and sex slave to some random alien. She would happily live out the rest of her pathetic life right where she sat and not complain about a single second of it. But like it or not, they would come for her, and she knew this little reprieve would be short lived. They’d offer her as a prize and she’d end up the property of some ugly ass thing she could barely stand to look at and spend her life on her back, knees spread wide. Either that, or on her hands and knees, head down, ass in the air. Neither was anything to look forward to.
Marcy leaned her head back against the cold metal wall and stared at the ceiling. Prison Moon One, the galaxy’s most popular penal colony—and the number one reality show in the universe, she’d been told,—had been nothing short of terrifying from the moment she’d been dropped here. Every person here was watched, everything they did broadcast to those who paid to see it. She’d been kidnapped and dropped here for entertainment. Meeting Sara and Emma on the ship had been the one small bright spot in the whole ordeal. Well, until they told them to run or die trying. Emma had refused to go with them, and Sara had run off the side of a cliff and was snatched from the air by a freaking dragon. She’d watched it fly away with her new friend until she could no longer see them. By the time she remembered aliens were chasing her, she’d been found—and brought here to the Arena.
Movement outside her door brought her head up again. She’d already been fed so them coming back so soon couldn’t be good.
The door opened and a guard stepped inside the room. The hired muscle that did all the dirty work for the aliens who ran this place appeared human, if you could overlook the patches of scales that dotted their flesh or their red eyes. They also shape-shifted into dragons but looked different from the one that snatched Sara from the sky. That one had four limbs and wings. These, their wings were attached to their arms. She’d heard someone say the guards were Wyvern. Apparently it was different from your standard dragon.
The one that walked into her cell had a pissy attitude. Bald like the others, his scales ran down both sides of his face but his eyes were larger than most, the red seeming to shine even in the dim light and there wasn’t a thing nice about him.
He turned those eerie eyes on her as he crossed the small space. “Get up.” He didn’t wait for her to do so, instead, grabbed her by the arm and jerked her off the floor.
“Hey, easy asshole.”
“Keep quiet!” He grabbed the chain attached to the metal cuffs around her wrists and dragged her out of the cell. Two other guards waited outside the door.
“Where are we going?”
He gave her chains another hard jerk, the metal once again cutting into her flesh. “I said be quiet. One more word from you and you’ll go out with more than your wrists bleeding.” He started down the hall, the other two guards falling into step behind them.
Despite asking them where they were going, she already knew. She wasn’t stupid. They were taking her to the Arena. Playing dumb was just a poor attempt to live in denial for a little while longer but today was the one she'd been dreading. Today was the day she became an alien’s play thing.
When the double doors at the end of the hall opened, bright sunlight flooding inside, she staggered.
Her time was up.
Nothing had changed since the last time she’d been there. The main gates were open. One of the brutes was standing there with what appeared to be humans, one of which was naked. The female looked like Sara and her pulse leaped. Was it her? She yelled, “Sara!” just to see if she would look her way. When she did, Marcy’s heart started pounding. She struggled and screamed Sara’s name again, hope making her pulse leap when the girl’s head turned left, then right, as if looking for her. “Sara!” Maybe that dragon hadn’t eaten her after all.
The guard holding her wrist cuffs gave them a yank. “You’re not to speak, human!” He dragged her to one of the cages they kept the other girls in and tossed her inside.
When she turned to the main gates, they were closed. If that had in fact been Sara, she was now gone.
She sighed and leaned back against the bars. Everyone in the cell was looking at her, with good reason. She’d been caged with a lot of these girls before they’d taken her into the private cell inside and judging the looks on many of their faces, they weren’t happy to see her. Of course, she’d done nothing since they brought her here but fight at every opportunity while the other humans sat along the back wall and cried and yet, she had never been picked. The guards had always snatched up one of those simpering girls cowering in the corner and acted as if she wasn’t even there. Playing the hard to get along with bitch had worked, even if it didn’t gain her any new friends.
Marcy paced the cage through four fights with her heart in her throat knowing that before the sun went down, that would be her up there for those aliens to fight over. She’d never been made to watch before so, they planned on getting rid of her today, and by nightfall, she’d be the property of one of the aliens lining the make-shift bleachers around the perimeter of the ring.
She looked over at them, wondering which of the ugly fuckers would be the less terrifying to belong to when the guards came for her.
“Let’s go.”
Marcy dug her heels into the dirt as they dragged her from the cage. The aliens along the walls went still, every creature there watching her and fear made her lose her mind. She didn’t cry like the others had. No, she kicked, scratched, and fought as if the devil himself had caught her as they pulled her toward the raised platform at the end of the arena and hoped the guards lost patience with her and killed her where she stood. That would be better than the alternative.
She’d watched so many of these fights—knew how this one would play out—and she'd not stand up there like some simpering, screaming girl begging for help. She may be ready to piss herself, but she’d die before they knew it.
Those aliens standing on the bleachers along the walls were all watching her now. Falling off the side of a cliff and being snatched from the air by the dragon that grabbed Sara wouldn’t have been her first choice, but as they pulled her across the hard, packed dirt inside the arena, she wished it would have been her.
She locked her knees, her bare feet sliding across the ground as the guard pulled her to the platform. He yanked her up the steps and if he hadn’t been holding her clasped hands, she would have fallen on her face.
The hateful guard she loathed so much pulled her to the center of the platform and told her to stay. She tried to jerk away from his grasp but did nothing but stumble.