Instinct A Dark Sci-Fi Romance

“You’re speaking with the huntresses,” he says. “That’s good. You should make friends.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m making friends,” I mutter to myself.

“Good.” He falls into bed and pulls me down next to him. I could tell him what Tyna did, but I don’t want her name in his ear. He is mine. She may hate it, but she will have to live with it.

I curl up into his arms, and I breathe his scent. I will fix Tyna. I may not be as strong as her. I may not have her brutality, but I do have several thousand years of evolution on my side.

* * *

“What happened to your face?”

Morning comes. With it comes light, and with light comes a troublesome question.

“I don’t know,” I lie.

Zion takes my chin in his fingers and turns my head to the side. “It looks like you were scratched, attacked by some kind of animal. What have you been up to?”

“Nothing.”

Those blue eyes sink into me. “You’re lying.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Tselia, tell me how this happened.”

Now would be the time to tell him what Tyna did. I can tell by his tone that he is starting to grow impatient, and when Zion gets impatient, I get punished. But if I tell him, I bring her back into his orbit. I make her a thing in his world, and I won’t have that. I’d rather him punish me than so much as think her name.

“Have you been wandering off on your own again?”

“No.”

“Then an animal came into the camp and attacked you.”

“Sort of, yeah.”

He quirks a brow at me. “Tselia…”

“I’m not telling you anything, so beat me, fuck me, get it over with, I don’t care.”

Zion draws himself up straight. “I don’t like the attitude.”

“Yeah?”

I don’t like being the victim of these backwards people, but it would seem it doesn’t matter what I like. And it doesn’t matter what he likes either. Maybe I’m taking a kind of sick perverse pleasure in defying him. I know this is going to hurt me, but it’s also a moment of power. I don’t want to tell him, and I’m not going to. I’m going to get my revenge on Tyna on my terms.

* * *

Zion

It’s not the fact that she’s lying to me.

It’s not even the fact that she’s lit with rebellion—my star girl is glowing with it. She lifts her chin and she looks at me with that silver gaze and I know how much she is enjoying this moment.

It’s the fact that she’s hurt and she doesn’t trust me enough to tell me how it happened.

I know no animal did that to her. Those are a woman’s marks. Those are the nails of a huntress, and I have a pretty good idea which one. I will deal with Tyna later. Now, I know that the time she has spent with me has not created a real bond. I saved her, but she is still wild. She is still of the stars.

I may have her body, but I don’t have her heart. That is the problem with taking a woman captive.

“What are you going to do to me? Whip me with a branch? Fuck some part of my body that was never made for intercourse?”

She’s goading me.

“You’d like that,” I growl, taking her in hand. I wrap my fingers around the back of her neck. “You’d like me to spread your holes and take each of them one at a time until I have no cum left to spend.”

I feel the quiver that runs through her body. She does want it. The dirtier, the harder, the better. It’s what I want to. But it isn’t what she needs.

This is going to be a lot more difficult than breaking her body. But I think I have an idea.

I pick her up by the waist and I throw her over my shoulder. She curses and screams as I carry her out of the house and the village. I can’t do this down in the valley. We have to go up and into the mountains, back to the ancestral caves.

She curses and swears the whole time. It’s a very long walk, but she doesn’t stop. She will fight me to her very last breath, and I am sure I know why. It’s difficult to keep her in my grasp. Even when I begin to carry her up the heights and the drops start to become more severe and steep, she keeps kicking and bucking. She likes fighting. Every chance she gets to defy or to rebel, she takes it. That’s why she’s down here. It’s why she fell from the sky. Shot down or not, it was her behavior that brought her to our skies, and it was her insatiable curiosity that got her close enough to become a target.

I bear her weight up the mountain. I carry her into the ancestral cave. This time I go well past the outer chamber. I carry her deeper, into the places where our oldest secrets are hidden.