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

today, Vey. I’m sorry to say it. I didn’t want to say it, but you need to be ready. All your brothers are sore.”
    “What have they to be sore about?” Vega muttered, scowling.
    “The donara.” Bathari’s mouth quirked, head tilting so that his one tall antler cast a shadow across the sand. “Lohar told everyone you ruined it. That our domina is not going to give her to the highest victor anymore.”
    Vega hissed out a breath. “Of course he did. Well, not that it matters, but I didn’t ruin fuckall. Lohar ruined his own fucking self.”
    “His words were heard first, mate.”
    “Fine.” Vega bent down, scooping up some sand, and started rubbing it over his hands. “Let them be pissed. Let them try to kill me. I’ll go through every one of them and win in the end anyway.”
    Bathari sighed. “Or you could apologize. Soothe them?”
    “I’ve nothing to apologize for.”
    “That pride is going to get you in trouble, Vey. You’re a slave yet, remember, just like the rest of us.”
    Vega glared at him, but said nothing. Bathari was, it seemed, his only friend, and there was nothing he might have said that wouldn’t have alienated him. Vega’s pride kept him alive. His pride kept him fighting. His certainty that he was not , in fact a slave, that he would not die a slave, was the secret of his strength. And he wouldn’t let it go, not for any man. He suspected Bathari would have gone on, but then the siren call came, the roar of the crowd followed, and the guards were shouting for them to find their weapons. The games had begun.
     

Chapter Twelve
    It was mayhem in the pit like nothing Alaina had ever seen before, once the games started. The cursii fought in teams, against other races, against other houses, and then sometimes against each other. From the pit, Alaina couldn’t discern what disputes were being settled by each game, but sometimes there were specific weapons and sometimes there were vehicles involved, like chariots, but they hovered above the sand. There was a Master of Games whose voice was amplified through the Arena, but Alaina couldn’t hear him over the bellowing of the crowd, the war cries of the cursii on the sands, or the screams of the fallen as game after game was fought, and won, and lost.
    She watched the first game through the gate, standing beside one of the guards. Errai versus Ankaa, House Chara versus a house whose name she couldn’t have pronounced on her own. House Chara won, but one of the cursu was stabbed with a shining metal spear right through the heart, and there was nothing Alaina could do for him at the end. They threw his body onto a hover-pallet and drew it down one of the dark tunnels, never to be seen or spoken of again. After the second game, Alaina got busy. More wounds, less of them mortal, and she tried to patch people up and clean blood the color of blueberry syrup if they were Jiayi, silver if they were Errai, and a clear, viscuous liquid if they were Ankaa.
    She did the best she could without understanding the medicines in the bag or half the instruments, and at least she could say that she was saving more than she was losing. But she was losing some of them. And it never seemed to stop. She lost count of how many games were fought, of who was fighting who, and eventually gave herself over to the never-ending line of patients.
    Until she heard a siren, different from the previous calls for the cursii to line up at the gate, and the guard muttered to her that it was the last fight. Alaina realized it must have been hours and hours, though it felt like days she’d been bent over alien after alien, learning their anatomy at the same time as trying to heal them. She looked up, watching the cursii find their place before the gate, and saw Vega among them. And the red-scaled Errai who’d attacked her, the one Vega had saved her from. Were they meant to fight on the same side? She finished stitching up the sliced shoulder of the Errai cursu she was