Free Barbarian Prince by Kaitlyn O'Connor

of, however.
    Not that she knew what sort of animal had given its all to keep her temporarily warm! But it certainly had a gamey smell to it that tainted the air and made it hard to get plain fresh air.
    And being wrapped in it—or possibly because of the arm cinched around her middle—she had to struggle to breathe.
    The first she knew that she was going to get up close and personal with the giant monster-beasts was when she was lifted up and then plunked down on something that was warm beneath her ass—and moving. Fortunately, since the fur she was wrapped in produced a straight-jacket effect, the Prince never completely released her as he joined her on the back of the beast.
    She relaxed fractionally when she felt the bracket his arms and chest formed around her, losing her fear that she was going to hit the hard ground any moment. The skin began to loosen almost immediately when she’d settled and Noelle wiggled until she could free her arms and hands and push the piece over her head and face far enough back to get a look at her surroundings.
    Most of the females appeared to be rolled in a similar hide—and hogtied and strapped across the rumps of the beasts!
    Noelle’s shock at that discovery gave way to a sense of gratitude.
    Unable to stand much total freedom from the fur, she coiled it tightly around herself again and covered her head and face, leaving only a sliver of an opening to view her surroundings. Through that small crack, she turned to look at the Prince. “Why … uh?”
    Amusement, she thought, glittered in his eyes, narrowed against the gusting wind. He shrugged. “They fought.”
    Well, that was stupid! She didn’t voice the thought, though, particularly when she didn’t honestly know if it was a stupid move or not. It did seem to her that they would have been better off to make a pretense of cooperation to lull their captors into letting their guard down, but one never knew how such a thing would turn out.
    With modern era crime on Earth, it usually turned out that the longer one was able to stay alive the better chance one had of staying that way—it increased the chances of escape or rescue—but it didn’t always end well. At least as often as not, it seemed to her, if a fierce effort to escape the captor immediately was unsuccessful and the perpetrator managed to carry their victims off to a quiet place, murder, not release came after the perp had satisfied whatever desires had prompted him to commit the crime in the first place.
    She supposed, though, that her current circumstances couldn’t be compared too closely to that sort of situation, and not merely because she wasn’t dealing with humans—because she didn’t think they were that different from humans when all was said and done. These people were aliens and that meant an unknown mindset, culture, and belief system, but she thought there would very likely be certain constants, that they could be counted on to feel, and exhibit, many of the same traits/emotions believed to be purely human.
    Because they had discovered that the traits were purely animal—not human—and that many so called ‘lower’ animals on Earth also exhibited greed, desire, generosity, etc.
    Given that, she didn’t think it was too much of a stretch to expect similar behavior, regardless of the vast differences between them.
    However, this primitive society didn’t seem to have laws prohibiting this kind of behavior, and that was the main motivation for criminals to kill—the possibility of getting caught and punished. By killing their victims, they had this twisted type of logic that made it seem they were less likely to get caught and convicted—no witness, no conviction. And sometimes they were right. More often, they were dead wrong and ended up paying a life for a life.
    The important thing to her health, though, was that these people weren’t concerned about retaliation and therefore had no motive to dispose of their captives.
    That being the