Total pages in book: 82
Estimated words: 77692 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 388(@200wpm)___ 311(@250wpm)___ 259(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77692 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 388(@200wpm)___ 311(@250wpm)___ 259(@300wpm)
I just want to get away from that … word.
That thing they keep saying.
Just because they say it, doesn’t make it true.
As if picking up on my internal, silent irritation and knowing it probably won’t lead us to anywhere good if history is any indication, my father asks the Hallan accompanying us to direct us through the house to a suitable spot. One we can use to clean up and take care of Zarah’s injured foot.
The lack of life outside the house should have been an indication of what we would find inside. What I imagine was once a beautifully decorated home where a family once lived is now empty rooms with open, rifled drawers and cabinets. Nearly every light is off and all the hallways are empty, leading to further quiet, dark rooms that the four of us, although only three standing, walk through.
We make our way to a bathroom just off-set from the large kitchen and dining room, and the Hallan man helps Zarah to find a comfortable seat on a marble counter edge.
“Thank you,” she tells him.
He only smiles in reply. As if he knows it’s there, he pulls out a red first-aid kit from under the counter and places it down next to Zarah.
“Could you give us a minute?” I ask him when he moves as if to stand on the other side of the room.
“I will stand outside in the hall,” he replies, “but my duty is to remain within a reasonable distance of you …” He trails off, nodding toward Zarah before adding, “And her, too, until otherwise stated by the prince.”
I blink at that statement.
There can only be one person he means as the prince.
I look to my father.
“Halun is a prince, too?” I ask, almost in disbelief.
It explains a lot, though. The way the Hallans treated him with an almost godly respect from the very moment we stepped off the ship. How his every word seems to be heeded the second he allows them to pass his lips.
Not to mention, the entire army currently at his fingertips.
“The prince,” my father returns once the Hallan guard has exited the room to give us the privacy I asked for.
“What does that mean?”
“There can be many princes, as I understand it, but there is only one who will be the next king,” my father explains.
Once again, despite hearing my father just fine, I am not quite sure his words are right. Or my brain just keeps misfiring every time Halun comes into the picture.
I don’t like that at all.
I almost want to scream. It’s entirely too much for my brain to process. What does being the mate of a prince to another planet even mean in the first place?
“Didn’t he talk about going home?” I ask. “Soon?”
“To see Selina,” Zarah says happily. She grabs my hands. “I think she’ll really like you.”
It’s only the serenity and true honesty shining in Zarah’s expression and gleaming in her eyes that keeps me from breaking what spirit she has left by opening my mouth and ruining it with something I say. Doesn’t make what I know any less true, though.
No, I am not going anywhere.
Certainly not for an alien.
Not even if I am his mate.
I have twenty-six years of life under my belt, and not a single one of them has been spent at the beck and call of a man who would only suffocate, control, and suppress every strong and capable part of me. When my father told an eight-year-old me watching her mother be burned at the town center in front of everyone who came to witness that her fate would never be mine, and we would someday make them answer for what they did to her, I took that to heart.
I believed him.
I still do.
“I’m not going anywhere with anyone,” I tell my father very quietly on the other side of the bathroom as I unpack the kit of items I need to clean and bandage Zarah’s foot. “Just so we’ve had that conversation and it is clear.”
My father has always given me the choice. He educated me in secret for years when the rest of the women on Earth were forced out of school early to become wives and mothers. He prepared me for the day he said would come.
The day The New Order would know …
“Perhaps now isn’t the best time for a conversation like that,” my father says, glancing toward the door where the elbow of the Hallan guard is still visible. “It’s entirely possible that we have misconstrued the Hallans culture and language, and maybe this is all a … a mistake.”
“A mistake?” I whisper-shriek. “Are you fucking serious?”
I was not mistaken about Halun’s words at all.
Zarah definitely heard our conversation despite our care in being quiet. Her next words confirm it and I stiffen to stone with each of her words.