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  Her Secret Champion

  Lunarian Warriors: Book 5

  Roxie Ray

  Contents

  1. Atlanta

  2. Apex

  3. Atlanta

  4. Apex

  5. Atlanta

  6. Apex

  7. Atlanta

  8. Apex

  9. Atlanta

  10. Apex

  11. Atlanta

  12. Apex

  13. Atlanta

  14. Apex

  15. Atlanta

  16. Apex

  17. Atlanta

  18. Apex

  19. Atlanta

  20. Apex

  21. Atlanta

  22. Gallix

  Her Fearless Warrior

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  Her Secret Champion

  1

  Atlanta

  There were two kinds of people in my world: the controllers, and the ones who get controlled.

  As it turned out, the same stupid crap was true for the whole freakin’ universe, too.

  My cell was four paces wide and four paces deep. It contained a bed, a rusted tap that trickled a thin stream of water when I turned it on, and a bucket that I was trying my best to ignore. There was a heavy, uncomfortable metal collar around my neck with a chain attached that kept me tethered to the back wall, so I couldn’t even reach the barred door that I was locked behind. I’m not exactly the tallest—back home on Earth, I got called “fun-size” a lot and couldn’t reach the top shelves of my walk-in closet—but if I stretched my arms up over my head and balanced on my toes like a ballerina, I could place my palms flat against the ceiling. If I were any taller or even a little bit claustrophobic, this place would have made me lose my mind.

  Actually, I’d only been here for a week and it felt like I was losing my mind anyway. Some would say I’d have to be crazy, considering what I was planning for tonight.

  But first, just like every night, I had an audience. When I saw a sliver of light bloom outside my cell, only to be eclipsed by a tall, curvaceous shadow, I knew exactly what I was in for.

  Right on time, Queen Lieja had arrived to gloat again.

  “Atlanta. How lovely to see you.” Lieja tossed her thick, red curls over a bare, bright yellow shoulder and gave me a poison-pink grin. She was dripping with jewelry and dressed in a fancy green gown like she’d just come from a party. Knowing her, she probably had. Up in the levels of the palace above me, the remnants of yet another feast were likely being cleaned up by her servants as we spoke. In Lieja’s hands, she held a golden plate full of table scraps: my evening meal.

  I didn’t buy the smile any more than I bought the pleasantries in her words, though. I was in this cell because of her.

  Or, well, I was in this cell because I’d tried to kill her. It was pretty much the same thing.

  “Queen Lieja,” I sneered back at her. “To what do I owe this displeasure?”

  “Oh, Atlanta. Don’t be dramatic.” Lieja pouted like I’d just offended her deeply, but I didn’t buy that either. If she wanted me to be pleasant and polite and well-behaved, she shouldn’t have me kidnapped from Earth only to force me to dance at her stupid shindigs—and she certainly shouldn’t have shoved me into this cell in her dungeons when I took my chance and tried to stab her with a steak knife.

  I’d been forced to dance for the amusement of people who wanted to own me for my entire life, so I get why she thought I’d be happy to perform. Back on Earth, my twin sister Savannah and I were social media influencers, shimmying and shaking our bodies in front of our cameras to keep the masses entertained while we spewed a bunch of propaganda for the sectors, our country’s soul-crushing government. But at least on Earth, I’d had the illusion of freedom—even if I hadn’t appreciated it at the time. Here on Nightmoor, the prison planet where Queen Lieja held court, there were no such smoke and mirrors.

  I wasn’t an influencer. I was a slave—and now, I was a prisoner to boot.

  Sometimes, all that trying to fight the chains that bind you gets you is just a collar around your neck.

  “I brought your dinner, Atlanta. You should be grateful for that.” Queen Lieja opened the small metal flap at the bottom of my cell door and pushed the plate through it. “Are you not going to thank me for my generosity? Look, I even had the meat charred the way you like.”

  I eyed the food on the plate, which included what looked like giant chicken leg that had been burned to a crisp on the outside. Early on, I’d explained to Lieja that humans didn’t eat raw meat like she did, so I guessed this was her servant’s way of trying to cook the food for me. Unfortunately, I knew what it would taste like: charcoal on the outside, dry and crumbly within.

  I didn’t miss that someone had already taken a bite out of the chicken to boot. It only highlighted my status here: Queen Lieja and her guests ate like royalty, and I was left to gobble up whatever was left like a stray dog.

  Alongside the chicken there were a few torn-up bits of bread and some fruit as well, though, which I actually was grateful for. The meat, I’d choke down once Lieja was gone—but everything else, I could stash in my pillowcase with the rest of the food I’d squirreled away there.

  If only Lieja knew that every time she fed me, she was making it that much easier for me to escape.

  “Oh, yes, thank you so much.” My voice was dripping with sarcasm, which unfortunately, Lieja was well versed in. She might have been an evil, nasty alien queen, but thanks to the communicator chip she’d had shoved into my skin just behind my ear, we understood each other just fine.

  “Someday, you will regret how ungrateful you have been to me, Atlanta.” Lieja’s lip curled like I’d just spat on her best dancing shoes. “There are worse fates that could have been bestowed upon you, you should recall. Or, do you want to be sent to the Rutharians, perhaps?”

  I scowled. I hadn’t seen a Rutharian yet, but the way they’d been talked about in Lieja’s court led me to believe that if she turned me over to them, I probably wouldn’t make it out intact, or even alive.

  “That is what I thought. Poor little thing. Now that you are in a cage where you belong, you are all venom, no bite.” She stuck her finger through the cage, wiggling it at me, and I was tempted to snap it between my teeth just to prove her wrong. “If you were better behaved, I would let you out, you know. We miss you ever so much in the ballroom. No one dances quite like you, Atlanta. Such a shame that you have chosen this fate for yourself. But perhaps…are you ready to make nice yet?”

  “You should not toy with her like that, Lieja.” A deep, cool voice rumbled from the darkness behind her. “She’ll remember it when you let your guard down again.”

  From the shadows, a man emerged. Or, something like a man. An alien man, I guessed. He must have slipped in while Lieja had me distracted. He was tall and had orange skin that clashed terribly with Lieja’s. It made her look even more garish next to his subdued coloring. She was lemon yellow; he was the color of a desert, of rust. He raked his fingers through the inky black waves of hair, smoothing them back so the white streak at his temple looked especially striking. His eyes were black too. The darkest things I’d ever seen. They combed over my body like he was memorizing my every curve, and for a moment, his lips parted softly. Almost in awe.

  He was unlike anything I’d ever seen before, and for a moment, my jaw dropped in the same way.

  Then, he closed his mouth again and set it into a thin, sharp line as Lieja laughed.

  “Do not be ridiculous, Apex. She will not have the chance.” Lieja twined her arms around the man—Apex’s—torso and stared up at him with glimmering eyes. “And you would protect me from the little snake even if she did, would you not?”
br />   “If you were lucky.” Lieja stroked Apex’s chin lovingly, puckering her lips up toward him, but he seemed unmoved.

  It was strange, but I felt…almost sorry for him. Lieja had a harem of dozens of alien men, aliens of all races and shapes and sizes, but none of them looked like him. She brought them down sometimes to play audience while she jeered at me. Always, they laughed like whatever she was saying was the cleverest thing they’d ever heard—but this one didn’t. He didn’t fawn over her like the others did either.

  He must have been new, I decided. Maybe he was even here as unwillingly as I was. But I could see why Lieja kept him around anyway—that much was pretty obvious. He was ten times handsomer than any of the other men in Lieja’s harem, and he had a look about him that was almost…dangerous. Even beneath his black linen-type shirt, I could make out the way his muscles rippled as he moved. I had no doubt that if he wanted to, he could snap me in half like it was nothing.

  If I’d had someone like him at my beck and call, I certainly wouldn’t have been keeping twenty-odd other boyfriends strung along too. That was for sure.

  “Is she not so small and scrawny, Apex? She was beautiful when she danced, of course, but here in her little cage…does she not look positively pathetic?” Lieja batted her eyelashes at Apex, then shot me a smug grin.

  “She is small, yes,” Apex admitted.

  I braced myself. Here came the latest round of abuse. Lieja liked to bait her paramours to ridicule me almost as much as she liked insulting me herself. Tiny, ugly, too skinny—I’d heard them all.

  It didn’t change the fact that I’d caught almost every member of Lieja’s harem checking me out when they didn’t think she was looking, though.

  “And scrawny. And pathetic.” Lieja looked pleased as she egged Apex on.

  “No,” Apex said.

  This time, it was Lieja’s jaw that dropped.

  “What do you mean, no?” she snapped at him.

  “Perhaps I do not understand the joke.” Apex’s voice was measured and diplomatic. “You put her in a cage, then call her pathetic? Makes little sense to me.”

  “Of course she is pathetic because she is in a cage!” Lieja’s voice shot up an indignant octave. “That is the point!”

  “I still do not understand.” Apex shrugged. “Are you not in a cage as well, Lieja? Or is your tenure here on Nightmoor voluntary now?”

  I blinked, then smirked a little. I’d been told that Nightmoor was a prison planet, but it hadn’t yet occurred to me that it meant Lieja was probably here unwillingly. At least my cage was a real one. Lieja’s might have been gilded and full of courtiers to keep her happy, but it was kind of funny to realize that she was a prisoner too.

  “That is cruel, Apex.” Lieja’s face puckered, turning sour and bitter as lemons. “I am hurt that you would say such an awful thing about me. And here, I thought you wanted to come down and see the human so we might have some fun.”

  “Forgive me, my queen. You know that we specters do not have the best senses of humor.”

  Normally, if any of Lieja’s other harem members had burned her so badly, she would have backhanded them by now. But this one…he must have been something special, because she only released him from her embrace and backed away, pouting.

  “Never mind, then. But in the future, we will have to work on that if you intend to stay here on Nightmoor to keep me company.” Lieja gave me a final, nasty look, then turned away to leave the dungeons.

  I expected Apex to follow her, but instead…

  He lingered.

  His black eyes met my green ones for a long moment, like he was trying to communicate something to me telepathically. Whatever it was, unfortunately I didn’t get the message. I hated to break it to him, but humans didn’t have the same kind of crazy superpowers that other alien species must have had.

  When his eyes left mine, though—that message, I received loud and clear. His gaze washed over me almost possessively, claiming every bare inch of my skin. I was suddenly hyperaware of how little clothing I was wearing. Just the harem pants I’d been dancing in on the night I tried to kill Lieja and a tight, low-cut top.

  I should have hated the way he lingered over my breasts, which were bound tight to my body and pushed up by my top, and my stomach, flat and bare. I should have, but…

  I didn’t.

  If it had been any of Lieja’s other boyfriends, I would have wanted to kill them for looking at me that way. But him…he could have looked at me like that for an eternity, and I only would have been flattered.

  It was honestly, well…kind of hot.

  “That collar looks heavy,” he finally said. His eyes glinted devilishly as they focused on the metal that encircled my neck.

  From the doorway, Queen Lieja laughed, and just like that, suddenly it didn’t matter how hot Apex was.

  He was no different from any of the others. Not really. He might have challenged Lieja more than her other lovers, but he was still on her team.

  At least it made him a lot easier to hate.

  My guards in the dungeons both had two heads and four arms each. You’d think with that many brains, they’d be a little smarter, but I was pretty sure they just used what little mindpower they had to come up with new ways to creep me out.

  “Not so fancy now, are you, little human?” the green one said from his left head while his right one made kissy faces at me.

  “Maybe you want some company in there tonight, huh?” The blue one grabbed his package with one set of hands and pantomimed smacking my ass with the other while thrusting his hips violently.

  “Not tonight, boys.” I sat against the back wall of my cell where my chain was tethered and imagined kicking them both in all of their mouths. But getting any closer to them was a bad idea. It only encouraged them, which was the last thing I needed.

  “Try again tomorrow?” one of the heads on the green guard suggested.

  “She’ll give in eventually.” The blue heads both winked at me as the guards turned to leave. “Night-night, princess!”

  As soon as I was alone, I sprang into action. What was left of my food went into my pillowcase with the rest of my stores. From beneath my pillow, I grabbed the jagged piece of rock that had fallen away from the wall in the corner on my second day in the cell. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. When I finally got out, it would make a good weapon.

  Until then, I needed it to dig.

  Initially, I’d thought I might tunnel my way out. The ground beneath my feet was dirt. I didn’t think it’d be that hard to carve a hole into the floor up against the back wall and crawl through it to freedom. But then, just a few inches down, I’d hit more stone on the first night I tried. As it turned out, the floor was just dirty—and unfortunately, after a week in the cell with no good way to shower properly, so was I.

  As soon as I got out of here, I was finding a place to take a bath. A nice, long one with hot water and bubbles and a comb for my hair. Once upon a time, the vibrant pink that I’d dyed it back on Earth had made my hair my greatest vanity. But now, every time I looked at it, the pink looked dull and ratty, and without a beauty salon in sight.

  But first, I needed to get free of my chain so I could start working on picking the lock on my cell.

  I turned the stone over in my hand and gripped it tight, ignoring the way the jagged edges cut into my palms. As long as I washed the cuts off after, the scrapes and scratches were a small price to pay for getting the heck out of here. I’d given up getting the collar off days ago. Just like Apex had pointed out, it was made of heavy metal. It couldn’t be broken or pried apart.

  The place where my chain met the wall was another story, though. Queen Lieja’s palace was a little more run down than the fabulous feasts and festivities she held here suggested, and the dungeons were no exception. If the walls of my cell were coming apart in the corners, I had a chance at breaking my chain’s anchor away too.

  I slammed the stone against the wall as hard
as I could. My efforts were rewarded with a little spray of crumbling rock where my tool had hit. Over the last few days, I’d made good progress. Now, I could get the anchor to wiggle in place. Just a few more well-placed hits, and I was pretty sure it would come free.

  After chipping away at the wall for a little longer, the anchor seemed loose enough that I could chance pulling on it. Gripping my chain in my sore, bleeding hands, I placed a foot against the wall and tugged as hard as I could.

  On my first try, I got nothing. Maybe the chain was anchored deeper than I thought?

  But then, on the fifth tug, something slipped in the stones and I tumbled backwards, landing hard on my butt. The metal anchor on the chain clanked onto the ground next to me.

  Free. Or, at least, a little bit closer.

  I’d take it.

  My next task was a little harder, though. I’d picked the lock on my bedroom door back home dozens of times—and the ones on my windows as well. When Savannah and I misbehaved (or, more accurately, when I did something that our parents deemed “inappropriate” and they punished us both despite the fact that we were both adults), they liked to lock us in the house. Jiggling the tumblers of a lock with a bobby pin back on Earth was one thing, though. Dealing with alien locks forged with advanced technology, and not a bobby pin in sight? That was going to be more difficult.

  I reached through the bars of the cage’s door and felt around the locking mechanism with my fingers first. There was definitely a keyhole, but without anything to jam into it, I wasn’t sure how I was going to force it open.

  I glanced down at my jagged stone tool, still lying on the floor where I’d left it. It might have been a little big, but if I could force it into the keyhole until it chipped away enough…