Intrepid bond, p.1
Intrepid Bond, page 1
INTREPID BOND
MATED TO THE ALIEN UNIVERSE
DETYEN WARRIOR OUTCASTS
BOOK TWO
KATE RUDOLPH
CONTENTS
About the Book
1. Noelle
2. Ryklin
3. Noelle
4. Ryklin
5. Noelle
6. Ryklin
7. Noelle
8. Noelle
9. Ryklin
10. Noelle
11. Ryklin
12. Noelle
13. Pippa
14. Ryklin
15. Noelle
16. Noelle
17. Ryklin
18. Ryklin
19. Noelle
20. Noelle
21. Ryklin
22. Noelle
23. Ryklin
24. Noelle
25. Ryklin
26. Noelle
27. Ryklin
28. Noelle
29. Ryklin
30. Noelle
31. Zyrus
32. Ryklin
What to Read Next
Also by Kate Rudolph
About Kate Rudolph
Copyright © 2024 by Kate Rudolph
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Stalked and stranded...
All Noelle wants is some peace and time to recover. But a gorgeous blue alien can't seem to stop following her wherever she goes. His icy demeanor is enough to drive her crazy.
And his intense looks heat her up inside.
He can't stay away from the beguiling human...
Ryklin is on the edge of fixation. It's the only excuse the soulless Detyen has for his obsession with Noelle. The only way to save them both is to leave Nebula Outpost, never to return. If only he could walk away.
When they end up stranded on an abandoned planet, they'll need to rely on one another to survive. And as Ryklin's ice thaws, nothing can stop the inferno that flares to life between them.
1
NOELLE
“Ouch!” An unseen pointy piece of metal bit into my finger, and I flinched, staring at the bright, cherry-red drop of blood as it bloomed like a jewel.
Jewels don’t bloom. I had to roll my eyes at myself, and at least that made me stop scowling. My face had been stuck in one for the last hour at least. I’d been banished to the far reaches of Nebula Outpost where even the bravest feared to tread, and I hadn’t seen another soul since the beginning of my shift.
The hairs on the back of my neck tingled, sending a shiver down my spine, and my jaw firmed. I refused to turn around and look down the hallway. No one would be there. They never were.
Two freaking months of jumping at every tiny noise or surprise had me on edge. I needed to be over it by now, but my nightmares hadn’t figured that out, and I’d been working on, at best, half a night’s sleep every night since that asshole tried to make me his mate.
Damn it. There was the scowl again.
I shuddered, and then I had to set my tool down. The drop of blood was flowing down my finger now, and I needed a bandage. There was probably a medkit down the hall somewhere, but I was so close to finishing my work that I didn’t want to get up, as if it might all come undone if I turned away for even a second.
There were gremlins living in the station, I would swear it.
Nebula Outpost was a big station on the edge of nowhere. We weren’t part of any empire, though the Oscavians weren’t that far away. At one point, there’d been mining down on the planet of Nebula, but a disaster ten years ago shut it down. Apparently, no one survived. I wasn’t sure why they kept the Outpost running. A lot of things on our station didn’t make tons of sense, but I wasn’t going to question it. Maybe we were a convenient waystation for travelers. Or maybe there were just enough of us here that we paid for our own upkeep.
I was uncountable light years away from my home in the Consortium, and until two months ago, I’d never been happier.
Something clanged down the hall, and I jumped. I pressed my bleeding finger against my jumpsuit, glad the dark fabric wouldn’t show a stain. My ears strained to hear if someone was coming, but it was just the everyday sounds that came from living on a space station.
It took a lot of moving parts to keep us in orbit, and sometimes those parts made metal on metal screeching noises that meant someone hadn’t been doing their bit of upkeep.
He’s gone, I reminded myself for the dozenth time that hour. No one escapes penal colonies.
Two months ago, I’d almost been killed by a madman I’d thought was my friend. He’d pointed a blaster at my head and told me all I had to do was accept him as my mate and all would be well. It was kind of hard to accept the idea of love and affection under the threat of violence, and I was sure I was dead. He’d killed before and attacked other women.
Naively, I’d trusted that station security would do their best to catch him. But if he hadn’t attacked me, I was pretty sure he’d still be roaming free, smiling at me by day and murdering the innocent by night.
I sucked in a deep breath and held it for a count of three before letting it out and doing it all over again. My heart rate calmed down, but my anxiety was still there, the surety that if I let my guard down for even a second someone would take advantage and hurt me.
Maybe I needed to leave Nebula Outpost.
It wasn’t the first time I had the thought. No, it had crept up on me much like a feared stalker more than a month ago, on one of the nights when I got no sleep, sure that any shadow in my rooms might be hiding someone intent on doing me harm. I’d been sleeping with the lights at full brightness, but that didn’t stop my imagination from conjuring monsters.
I’d been certain I’d get over it. My best friend, Pippa, lived on the station, and leaving would mean missing her. And if I tried to go home, I’d face the shame that came from my less than ceremonious departure. But a part of me longed for the high gates and security guards of my mother’s estate. No one would be kidnapping me from there.
But I’d gone willingly with my attacker at first. I hadn’t given it a second thought when he invited me to dinner.
Stupid, stupid girl.
My moping gave my finger enough time to stop bleeding, and I gathered up my tools. I only had one more set of checks to do before I could call my shift done, and it was what I’d been putting off since yesterday morning.
The maintenance closet was the furthest thing from intimidating on this ship. It was nestled between two escape pods and held some storage equipment and an access panel to some wiring that I needed to check. It would take ten, fifteen minutes tops for me to do my work.
My hands shook as I picked up my tool bag and walked towards the door.
This wasn’t G-man, an incinerator on the other end of the ship that had been used as a weapon to murder one woman and attempt to kill another. Even if I got locked into the maintenance closet, I could call for help on my comm or on the communications panel on the wall. Someone would come for me in less than an hour.
But the shadows were deep in the closet. And no one could hear me scream.
Just get it over with. I had to get this done. No one else was going to be assigned to do this work, and if I missed something, some crucial part of the ship’s inner workings might malfunction. What if it was life support? Or sewage? I didn’t want to be responsible for that.
I opened the door, half expecting something to rush at me from inside, but the closet was empty.
There was an acrid, spoiled, musty smell that made my nose wrinkle, and for a second, I wondered if something had died in there. We didn’t have rats on the station, but ships came in from all over the galaxy, and sometimes things escaped, despite the most stringent controls.
But as I got a second whiff, I realized that nothing had died. No, this was Solar Flare. The drug was cheap to make and impossible to stamp out. Station security may have not been very good at catching murderers, but that was because half of their job was taken up finding Solar Flare producers and destroying the drugs.
Or selling the stuff themselves, I had a feeling Pippa might tell me.
I pulled out my comm and approached the source of the smell. There was a small burner in the corner and a pan that was scorched black with strange streaks of bright blue and green. This looked like someone’s private kitchen. A single pan wasn’t big enough to produce enough Solar Flare to offset even the minimal costs of the ingredients.
Not unless artisanal, small batch poison was catching on.
I didn’t touch anything. Procedure when we found spots like this was simple: record the area and report. Station security would deal with it. Or the janitorial staff.
For some reason, the mundanity of finding evidence of drug production calmed me down. It was so normal that it seemed to reset my fears. There had always been a seedy underbelly to Nebula Outpost, and I’d found dozens of sites similar to this before. It was just part of living on the station.
My ear twitched, and my head snapped toward the door just as it started to slide closed.
I lunged for it, desperate to put my fingers in its path and trigger the sensor to keep it open, but the closet was deep, and I wasn’t fast enough.
Any calm vanished as the closet plunged into darkness.
I fumbled with m y comm, trying to turn on the light, but my hands shook so much that I dropped it. When I fell to my knees to search for it blindly, my fingers only felt the metal of the floor beneath me.
I’m going to die.
Was this what Pippa felt when she got locked in that incinerator?
I knew I was freaking out. I knew this was a complete overreaction to something that wasn’t a big deal. But my heart threatened to beat out of my chest and sweat poured down my brow as the panic tried to sweep me away.
My breaths were choppy. I could barely drag in any air, and I felt like I was going to pass out.
I forced myself to crawl towards the door. There was a light switch, I just had to find it and turn the lights on and all would be okay. The lights should have been triggered by a motion sensor, but whoever was cooking their drugs in this little closet had probably disabled it for some unknowable reason.
Was there enough air? I couldn’t breathe.
I found the door and crawled my way up. I pawed at the wall and didn’t find the light switch, but I must have palmed over the sensor that opened the door. The door opened with a whoosh, and I stumbled out and ran into a broad chest.
I looked up, and for a second that panic rushed back as I saw turquoise skin, short dark hair, and dark eyes.
I reeled back, but sense came rushing in a second later. My would-be murderer wasn’t back from a penal colony.
The male studied me with his cold gaze. Ryklin.
The Detyen who seemed to be stalking me.
2
RYKLIN
I reached out to steady Noelle, my hands going to each of her biceps and holding her in place for three seconds before she tore out of my grip. Her eyes were wide, her black hair matted with sweat, and her normally light brown skin had gone pale with a sickly undertone.
“Is something wrong?” I asked. We were in Sector J, an older part of the station that was undergoing serious repairs. Everyone housed in this section had been moved to other locations, and there were warnings posted everywhere to keep out until further notice. “What are you doing here?”
She glared at me, though I didn’t know why. It was a reasonable question.
I only asked reasonable questions. As a soulless Detyen, I had no motive to ask any other kind.
“I could ask you the same thing.” Noelle took a few steps back and scooped her comm up from the ground. “Did you shut the door?”
“I believe there are timers on these closets.” As a maintenance person, she should have known that.
Her shoulders sagged. “Right. I forgot.” She nodded towards the back of the closet. “Someone’s cooking Solar Flare.”
It was too shrouded in shadow for me to see, but I could smell the faint hint of the drug scorching the air. “That needs to be reported.”
“Yes. Obviously.” She shoved her comm in her pocket. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “No one comes down here.” She leaned back but hesitated before taking a step deeper into the closet.
“I was working on the greenery in the atrium of Sector J. It is my break. I decided to take a walk.” The confession was my own little rebellion, though the human woman had no way of knowing that. They were words that might have once condemned me.
They had condemned me.
The soulless didn’t need breaks. We didn’t need vacation. What use were emotionless warriors if we still needed to be treated like people?
I couldn’t take enjoyment from any of the sights on the ship, whether it was the lush greenery I helped to plant or the never-ending views of the stars around us from the viewing stations in every sector. But it was good to stretch my legs. It kept me limber, and activity kept my mind sharp.
I would give up a lot before I gave up my breaks.
“So, you just happened to stop in front of this closet?” Her eyes narrowed, and she crossed her arms. A combative pose.
I had studied Noelle’s poses more than I should in the past two months. Longer than that, if I was being completely honest. She only crossed her arms like that when she was feeling threatened.
As if I was any sort of threat to her.
“I saw the door slide shut. I thought someone might be up to no good.” And there had been something nagging at my mind, an itch deep in my brain I couldn’t quite satisfy. It had me moving my feet before I could quite decide whether or not I should, and that itch had resolved the moment Noelle stumbled into me.
“Oh.” Her arms uncrossed and she looked … I wasn’t sure how to describe it. Her eyes were downcast and her mouth slightly open. For a moment, her whole being had been poised for a fight, but now she looked defeated. “Screw it, I’m done for the day. I need to report this before I get any more work done.” She bent down and scooped up her tools, shoving them into a canvas sack before slinging that over her shoulder.
I stepped to the side to let her exit the closet and fell into step beside her as she walked down the corridor to the lifts.
“Are you following me?” she asked, throwing me a sideways glance, lips pursed.
“I’m escorting you.” It was a long walk back to maintenance headquarters. Noelle had already been put in danger once on this station. If I could prevent it from happening a second time, I would.
She picked up her pace. “I don’t need an escort.”
My legs were longer than hers, and I’d spent years as a trained warrior in the Detyen Legion. It took little effort to keep up. I didn’t respond. She hadn’t told me to leave, not technically.
Soulless Detyens were literal; we had to be. With no emotions to guide us, all we had was what we could observe, what we saw as the objective truth. There were philosophers and psychologists who might have something else to say about that, but I didn’t think about them any longer.
That was the life I’d given up six years ago.
We made it to the lifts, and Noelle jabbed her finger at the call button. “You’ve escorted me far enough,” she said. “I can take it from here.” The door to the lift slid open, and she stepped in.
I joined her. “I’m taking a walk,” I said. I had a full half hour for my break and escorting her would take up most of it. It was a logical use of my time.
She made a sound in the back of her throat. Frustration, perhaps. I remembered emotion, even if I couldn’t feel it, and from time to time I tried to identify the unspoken evidence of it.
The rest of the walk was silent, though Noelle shot glances at me every few minutes. Finally, we arrived back at the maintenance headquarters, and she gave me a challenging look. “See, I’m fine. No stalkers but you. Now go back to work.”
“Oh.” I recognized the quiet, feminine voice that came from behind us and knew the sight of me caused her distress.
Pippa Vale. Drex’s denya.
I turned and nodded to her in greeting as she approached the entrance to the maintenance quarters.
What she was should have been impossible. When Detyens surrendered our souls, our emotions, we gave up the hope of life, of love, of anything to purchase a few more years in service to the Detyen Legion. It was the darkest secret of our race, that we would give up so much, become so little, just to escape the denya price for a time.
Unmated Detyens died at the age of thirty. It was a fact of life. Before our planet was destroyed a century ago, the stories had it that there had been a robust system for identifying and connecting mates. But most of the population had been wiped out in a single, crushing blow, and the survivors were scattered across the galaxy. There were few mates to be had.
There had been no need for soulless Detyens before the destruction of Detya.
I banished the thoughts; they did me no good.
