Alien Conquest: (The Warrior's Prize) An Alien SciFi Romance by Scarlett Rhone Read Free Book Online Page A

up a wrist. Looped about it was a copper bracelet glinting in the dim. “But I have the key. Because I am a cleaner.”
    She slid the bracelet off her wrist and held it out to Alaina. “Here. It will unlock any door on your way, because I am allowed to move through the sections of the palace to clean.”
    Alaina took the bracelet, turning it over in her fingers. It looked like simple enough jewelry, but when she held it higher up, in the light, she could see the flicker and bounce of tiny blinking electronic lights through the gloss of its exterior. More technology she had no hope of understanding. She slid the bracelet onto her wrist and looked at Nyssa again.
    The girl indicated the control panel to the left of the gate.
    “You just wave it,” she explained. “And the gate will open.”
    Alaina felt lost for a moment. Once she got out of this palace, she still wasn’t sure how she would get off the station, but it was a step. A huge step. And this stranger had just given her a key to open the locked doors that had seemed to suddenly cage her in. She was grateful and terrified and she knew if she didn’t act she would freeze altogether and spiral into panic, and it would be all for nothing.
    “Thank you,” she said to Nyssa, heart in her throat.
    Nyssa smiled, the expression sharp. “Better hurry.”
    There was something about the girl’s smile that disconcerted Alaina, and gave her pause. That sharpness, as though she should have had fangs instead of normal teeth. Or what Alaina thought of as normal. The yellow scales covering her face certainly made her look like a viper, or like a dragon. A small, blue-eyed, smiling dragon. A predator. And it make Alaina feel starkly like prey. But she told herself it was just the strangeness of it all. The foreignness of the space station and the, well, alienness of all of its inhabitants. She was just being prejudiced because nobody in this place even looked like her. And she couldn’t take this gift for granted.
    So she nodded, clutching the bracelet to her chest, and gave Nyssa a grateful smile. “Thank you,” she said, again, and then she turned to the control panel.
    As Nyssa had explained, just a wave of the bracelet in front of the panel summoned the sound of the gate’s lock clanking open. The gate slid away.
    “Go straight down,” Nyssa told her. “You’ll see signs.”
    Alaina marshaled her courage and hurried into the darkness, and the gate slid closed and locked again behind her.

Chapter Seven
    Vega couldn’t sleep, his mind clogged with thoughts of the games. It happened every time. No matter how early he retired, or how much he meditated, at some point the night before he was to enter the Arena, he came awake in wee hours and could not get back to sleep. Nerves or anxiety, or perhaps anticipation, he didn’t know, but his mind was a nest of insects. Thoughts all writhing one on top of the either, hissing and buzzing about his skull. Over the years, he’d given up trying to silence it all in the night. By the time he set foot on the sands, those thoughts would extinguish, and there would be nothing in his mind but a quiet stillness, and then the rage of battle.
    So he gave up trying to nod off again and got up, pulling on the light linen pants all the cursu wore in the comfort of the barracks, and left his room to walk the anxiety off. The barracks were silent at this time of night. Even the fighters who burned through the sleep cycles, like Bathari, who would rather spend the night drinking and fucking whomever he could get his hands on — out of some fear, Vega suspected, that it would be his last opportunity — had retired.
    Vega didn’t blame them, in the end, not really. They had the right of it to some extent. Any one of them could enter the Arena and never leave it. Every fight could be their last. Cursii died on the sands every game day. Only Vega couldn’t live that way. Day to day, moment to moment. He had to hold onto some kind of dream