Chapter 4

It was the first time since the invasion that Amelia had walked outside, and the smell of fresh air was heady. The world was an odd contrast of familiar and new. The city scape was the same as it had been all her life, the same jutting skyscrapers with their gleaming windows reflecting the sky, the same black tarmac roads.

The vehicles that moved over those roads were different – wheel-less liquid looking vehicles, surfaces without texture or joins, floated soundlessly over the tarmac, or through the skies above it. Amelia wondered if they had some form of rules of flight to prevent collision, or if it was a survival of the fittest scenario, like it seemed to be in general amongst them.

Black uniforms dominated amongst their people. Armed forces maintained a strong presence even a month after their brief but brutal arrival, but the muted clothing spoke of the arrival of civilian colonists.

Amelia s people looked stunned and bedraggled, pulled along between them. The walking plunder of space pirates. She wondered where the elderly and the children were and wasn t sure she wanted to know the answer to that question.

Her owner had come to a stop in order to have a conversation, the other voice coming from the cuff on his wrist, and now he looked down at her, his expression thoughtful.

He shrugged off his jacket and dropped it over her shoulders. The cloth was body warm and covered her to her knees. He hooked a finger under the chain lifting it and sealing the jacket along its front opening. She wriggled her arms into the sleeves, though they hung over her hands. He made a noise, like a hum, and hooked the chain onto his cuff to free his hands to fold the sleeves up.

Beneath the jacket he wore a sleeveless formfitting top that exposed the decorative scarring on his arms and moulded to a heavily muscled body, even for one of his people. Amelia had not had the opportunity to examine the scars closely, her contact with her captors having been limited and mostly from a distance, and she saw that they held a metallic silver tone that caught the sunlight. The result of the addition of the black powder?

Satisfied with her covering, he said a word, his blue eyes meeting hers, and jerked his head indicating that they would continue moving.

He did not stride along, as many of his people did, but kept to a pace that she could follow in her bare feet. Amelia concentrated on not letting the chain between them grow taut, not wanting to give him any reason to grow annoyed with her.

A man that his own people feared, was not one she wanted to anger.

They walked through a city that was eerily quiet. The more they moved into the shadow of the buildings, the less civilians she saw, and the more uniformed invaders. Concentrating their forces where the population was densest. Was there still a population hidden behind the glazed glass of these buildings, or had they been taken from their homes as she had been?

The civilian invaders they passed moved out the way for him, and the uniformed invaders struck their hands to their chests with a harsh bark of sound. They turned a corner and Amelia s steps slowed, the chain tugging her forward. He paused when he felt the resistance and looked back at her with a frown, and then followed her eyes.

The light poles along the street were all strung with corpses, swaying gently on their ropes, and the stench of death was ripe, both the rot from the bodies, and the excrement they had expelled at their death. As Amelia watched, a bird flew from a corpse carrying away the gory prize of an eyeball in its beak.

She averted her eyes away from its meal and focused instead on the whomp of air through its wings, and the sweetness of its mate s call. A breeze blew from another direction, washing away the scent of the dead.

The man said something quietly and gave the chain a gentle pull. She forced one foot in front of another and followed him into a building. There were guards on the door, but they did not challenge his entry.

The foyer was empty, the furniture upended, and paper scattered like confetti across the floor. There was a dried puddle of blood across the reception desk, its surface blackened and broken by the bodies of insects that had become trapped in its stickiness and perished.

He walked past it, indifferent, towards the elevator, and pressed the button.

They stood side by side as the little box took them up to the top floor. In the mirrors on the walls, she saw that he watched her from the corner of his eye and felt her pulse pick up, its rhythm the dance beat of fear against her ribs. She controlled her breathing because she could, unlike her runaway heart.

In the elevator, Amelia could smell him, a scent that she couldn t define. Masculine and alpha, she thought, primal, and almost animalistic, holding shadows of smoke and blood. The scent of a predator, and she was prey.

The ding of the elevator as the doors opened was over-loud and reminiscent of a time now in the past. He stepped out first.

There was only one door on this floor, and it was unlocked. This man did not fear invasion, he was the invader.

He paused in the doorway and released the chain from her collar, pressing it to the wall above the door frame, where it adhered in a way she could not determine. He said something, meeting her eyes, his tone very solemn. He touched the chain, and then her collar, before placing his overly large, scarred hand on the wood of the closed door.

She stared at his hand and imagined it closing around her neck, as the salesman had done to one woman who had not stopped screaming, caught in her own hysterics, the first night. The crack of her neck as he d broken it had silenced the rest of the women in the dark room in which they d been kept.

He had dropped the woman onto the floor and walked away as casually as if he d crumpled a piece of paper in his fist, and not the bones of a living being. The woman had breathed for several minutes before dying, the pull of her lungs wet and pained, a low groan of sound that haunted Amelia s dreams.

No, she did not want to anger this man, or any of them, for that matter. She pulled her eyes off his hand and met his blue eyes.

"Don t go past the door," she said.

"Mhm," he seemed satisfied that she had understood.

He said another word, with a gesture that was universal, she thought, for follow. They crossed a decadent hotel apartment, the thick, soft carpet heavenly beneath the abused soles of her feet. The curtains were pulled back from floor to ceiling windows onto a balcony, beyond which the city fell into the sea, and the sky was busy with gleaming, fluid vehicles.

The only sign that the occupant of this penthouse was not native to this world, was the devices on the glass coffee table. Amelia cast her eyes over them with interest as they passed them, not able to identify any of them. One, however, looked a bit like a tablet.

There were rust coloured stains on the glass, scuff marks, as if he sat on the couches, facing out over the city that he had conquered, working on the devices with his feet up on the table.

He led her into the bedroom, and for a moment, her treacherous heart was still in panic. But he continued past the overlarge bed, into the bathroom. He started the water in the shower, before using the toes of one foot to remove the boot of the other, and then in reverse.

His feet were large as suited the height of the man, and bared the bones and toes were long and strangely elegant. Five toes, she noted. Small similarities between the species, alien and native. He gestured her forward and released the jacket seam, before lifting it from her. He draped it over the edge of the bathtub.

It was somehow more exposing having clothing removed from her, than being bare all along, she noted.

He removed the sleeveless top revealing a body that should have been beautiful, but was terrifying instead, and then released his trousers, removing them like every other clothes wearing creature – one leg at a time. Both articles of clothing, he placed over the jacket.

More similarities, and more differences, she thought grimly as he was revealed to her. She had no illusions what was coming, nor that it would be painful when it occurred. He was already hard, and like the rest of him, large.

The scars were intricate and covered all his skin. Someone must have done his back for him, as there was no way that he could reach himself. They continued down his buttocks, and over his legs. There was no hair on his body, and the scars continued down over his pubic bone, and even lower. Amelia could only imagine how painful that would have been and wondered at a people that mutilated their own genitalia.

But then, she thought watching as he tested the water temperature, perhaps they did not see it as a mutilation. Perhaps, to them, it was beauty.

Her own body hair had been removed, using a device that had been hot against her skin but had not burnt. Her skin had felt unfamiliar after, and her arms had looked odd without the fine down that had covered them before.

He held out his hand, and she stepped towards him, not sure if he meant for her to place her hand in his. He closed his fingers around her wrist and drew her into the water, waiting as it doused her head to toe before pulling her out of it. He used some type of soap that smelt faintly herbal and a rough cloth and scrubbed her hair, face, torso, legs right down to the soles of her feet, before submerging her again.

His handling of her was oddly impersonal considering his obvious arousal. Once she was cleansed to his satisfaction, he rinsed the cloth under the water, before using it on himself. Amelia fixed her eyes on the drain, watching as the soap washed away and envying it. He turned off the water the moment the soap ran from his body.

He used a towel to dry her, against perfunctorily, before drying himself and then stood her in front of the mirror whilst he collected oil from a bottle and rubbed it into her hair and skin. His eyes met hers as he smoothed the oil over her breasts, and his touch was far from impersonal, the expression in his eyes almost challenging, as if daring her to object.

Amelia felt the heat of his skin come against her back, the press of his erection, as his hand stroked between her legs. It was obvious from his strokes, that their women s anatomy was similar enough that he knew where to touch her.

He used a comb to stroke the oil through her hair, and then put the container of oil into her hands, and the comb onto the vanity. He stood, waiting for her to reciprocate.

Amelia poured a measure onto her hands and stroked it over his skin feeling the ridges of the scars across her palms and fingers like braille. She stroked oil across the valleys and hills of his stomach muscles, up his chest and over his shoulders, down his arms, over his back, and down each leg, ignoring the evidence of his enjoyment of her touch that jerked with his pulse.

He let her oil and comb his hair, dark and almost as long as her own, before he caught her wrist in the ring of his fingers. He poured oil onto her palm and closed it over his c-ck, using his hand to hold hers against his flesh and directing the stroke of the oil over him, from base to tip.

The blue of his eyes was trapped between the dark spikes of his eyelashes, and he watched her face intensely.

She could not close her fingers around him, not even half-way, and the scars made an interesting texture on skin otherwise soft over an inner steel of flesh.

He released her hand abruptly, and turned, stalking into the bedroom, standing at the foot of the bed. He said a word and pointed to the bed.