Seed (Alpha Unknown 2)

“Fuck,” I muttered.

Juliana exhaled sharply, swinging her pistol into sight. “Jesus, what!”

Lowering her weapon slowly, I made sure no one heard her yell. The coast was clear, but I couldn’t be certain for how long. I kept walking through the maze, pushing myself closer and closer to the sick fuck at the end of the tunnel. “Sorry. Should have warned you. I was just thinking about something Mia and I need to take care of.”

“Lord have mercy,” Juliana whispered, hand against her heart. “You nearly gave me a heart attack. What on God’s green earth do you and my beloved doctor need to take care of that’s more important than this?”

I thought about what Mia would go through. Without the strength of an omega’s reproductive system, this was going to be difficult.

I needed to get that baby out of her. I needed to save her like I told her I would.

“We, uh.” I coughed. Looked away. Crept into myself like the ashamed brute I was. “Where I come from, procreation is a life-saving ritual.”

“Oh, no,” she muttered. “You two really fucked.”

Silence.

“Talis, please tell me my best friend isn’t pregnant with an alien fetus,” she said.

I swallowed and scratched behind my ear. There had to be a way out of this. “Omega. Woman. What’s the difference?”

Her face twisted with revulsion. “Omega...?” She waited, but I wasn’t explaining shit. “Okay, I’m just going to let that one go, but I’m going to ask you one important thing. Is Mia safe? I mean, biologically speaking...”

I reached the end of the hall. We were close. I could smell her, and she was definitely alive, but that’s all I could sense. “There is a chance that the baby will turn parasitic. She will...” I stopped to catch my breath because it didn’t hit me hard until I nearly said it aloud. But once I realized how dire this was and how much time we truly didn’t have, I nearly lost control. “She will die if that happens. Gods be damned.”

“Here I was thinking this was a horror flick gone wrong, but then you go ahead and tell me this is a romance gone wrong.”

I actually laughed. “Didn’t say it was a romance.”

“Well, what the hell is it?”

“Real fucking life.” I reached for the bar above me and heard a large crash. More movements circled our heads before Mia’s screams were audible. I turned and made sure Juliana was okay to go, and she had her weapon in hand, her face tough. She was as good as the circumstances allowed her to be.

“Load up,” she said, checking out the gun before pushing on ahead of me.

“One misfire and we’ll start to lose oxygen again,” I said as a warning.

The pilot started to climb. “Got a newsflash for you, alien. We’re already losing oxygen, and my crew is long past dead. Pay attention to your gun. You know where your site is and all of that?”

My fingers hugged the side of the weapon. “I’ve shot a gun before, woman.”

She laughed and reached the top, stopping to pant near the entrance of yet another crawlspace. “Well, Talis. It looks like we’ve made it. Let’s go and kill that son of a bitch, shall we?”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

I looked down that narrow corridor and stared at the rounded metal door that led to the main emergency exit on this ship. The escape pods were gone. Cade, no doubt. Now, the only exit was my ship down in the cargo hold, but there was no way he knew how to rig an old fuel cell into much newer technology.

I heard Mia’s scream, and nothing could hold me back from lunging at the door. An alpha is designed to do three things: fuck, mate, and kill. This was my final act of triumph. I was going to protect what was rightfully mine. Her. My growing seed.

Someday, we would be a family.

As for now, it was killing time.

14

Mia