Total pages in book: 53
Estimated words: 47529 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 238(@200wpm)___ 190(@250wpm)___ 158(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 47529 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 238(@200wpm)___ 190(@250wpm)___ 158(@300wpm)
If I’m honest, I’ve gotten distracted. Ripping Arkan’s ancestral home off has become a means to its own end. I know he’s not one of the people who fucked the rest of the planet over back on Earth, but stealing his stuff is like a symbolic victory.
I use a bed sheet to gather everything together as I take enough stuff to not be able to hold it all in my hands. I know I can’t take everything I want, but I want to take as much as I can.
This isn’t the way he probably intended his night to end. He probably thinks fucking me and feeding me means I’m dedicated to him, but I am a survivor and I know that at the end of the day the only creature I can ever be dedicated to is myself. As hot as he is, I can’t trust him. I can only trust myself.
Having moved through many of the upper bedrooms, I start to get hungry again. It’s work, carrying an increasingly expanding collection of stolen material. I decide to abscond from the higher reaches of this mansion and get back down to the kitchen.
Carefully padding down the stairs with a bedsheet full of fine treasures hoisted over my shoulder, I am thrilled with my subversive actions. Sure, I’m ripping off the alien I just had sex with for the first time, but if I’m honest — and I rarely am, that kind of adds to the thrill. I might be stealing some of his things, but he already stole the actual all of me.
He deserves this, I tell myself. They all deserve this. If I could get a shuttle and work out how to fly it, I could go around ripping off all these aliens and then take my ill-gotten gains back to Earth. Or maybe I could retreat into the big wild forests I’ve seen from the grate of my travel crate, and start a civilization of rebel humans living a human life on this planet.
There are so many possibilities, and with all these riches I am convinced that I can make a new life for myself wherever I choose. These are not just things. These are the harbingers of freedom.
“What are you doing, human?”
Arkan’s voice booms from in front of me, giving me a hell of a fright. I drop my sack of stolen goods, which promptly rolls down at least a hundred stairs, shedding bits of pretty tat everywhere in an uproarious cacophony of metal on stone.
I follow them, slipping on the falling sheet somehow and becoming another object sliding down the stairs on an impromptu raft of cloth and shame, bumping each and every step on my way down with my already sore rear.
Before I can break my neck, I am scooped up mid-fall by strong arms, and I look up into strange eyes.
“Who the fuck are you?” I blurt the question.
It’s not Arkan. It’s someone who looks like him, and sounds like him, but isn’t him, and doesn’t know me. His hair is blue, but it is much shorter than Ark’s. It ends around his shoulders, whereas Ark’s is almost all the way down his back.
“You’re lucky you didn’t kill yourself!” he exclaims, deeply unimpressed.
He speaks fluent English as well. A twin? A brother? Arkan hasn’t spoken about his family. Arkan hasn’t spoken about a lot of things. My mind slips back to the banquet debacle with Melinda. Is this Kahn?
This new guy gives me a shake, as if he is expecting an answer. My mind is working far more slowly than it should. I suddenly realize that I have met him before, sort of. He was the one who told the family to take the crate I am in. He sold me without bothering to look at me. He sold me like I was a fucking box of soda. That does mean he has absolutely no idea who I am.
I don’t want to say a word. Whoever this guy is, and however much he might look like Arkan, he doesn’t have Arkan’s softer edges. I can feel that already. This brother has a similar appearance, but a totally different energy to Ark.
“Breaking into our home, stealing our goods. What would you have done with them?”
I don’t answer. I have to hope that Arkan will hear this commotion and come down and save me from this doppelgänger. Falling down the stairs with a sheet full of stolen metal items wasn’t exactly a quiet affair.
“No answer? Very well. Let me see if I can loosen your tongue.”
He props his foot up on the stairs and I already know what is going to happen. He’s right about this making me break my silence.
“No!” I shriek the word as he turns me over his knee. “I’ve had two spankings in one day! I can’t take a third!”