Saved By The Warrior Hero Page 22

  And I will what? She already despised me. Every time I saw her look at me, it was as though she was planning how she might like to try to kill me next. Healer Adskow had told me time and time again that I needed to give up on her. Sedate her and keep her under with all the other broken females we were currently transporting back to Lunaria so they could recover from their wounds, both mental and physical, in safety. Hers and mine.

  But she was not broken. She was strong. I was not exactly in a position to bargain right now.

  “Well,” I finished lamely. “I will be very cross with you.”

  Then, without another word…I turned off the lights.

  It took my eyes a few seconds to adjust to the darkness. It was the same as the dark Haelian and I had found her in—a windowless, lightless room in which she had been chained to the wall by her neck. There was no telling how long she had been kept there for.

  No telling, perhaps…until now.

  “Thank you.” Her voice was small, only but a rasp of a thing. When my night vision finally arrived, I could see that she had turned her head to stare at me. Her gaze was inquisitive.

  For once, it was not full of hate.

  “I thought that perhaps the light was hurting your eyes,” I explained. “It is no problem. I am sorry I did not think of it sooner.”

  “Thank you,” she said again.

  At least she was speaking instead of snarling at me. All things considered…that was certainly progress, at any rate.

  “Will you eat? Your body is weak from your time with the Rutharians. You need food to regain your strength.” I crouched down and placed the plate of food on the floor, then slid it her way.

  “My strength…” she repeated. “All the better to kill you with.”

  I did not mean to, but I laughed.

  It was a joke at my expense. At the expense of my life, in fact, if she turned out not to be joking—and her past actions did imply that she felt rather strongly on the issue.

  But it was still a joke. It gave me more hope for the female. She had not been broken—and somehow, her sense of humor had not been either.

  “Until you eat, I will continue to be stronger than you,” I reminded her. “It will make killing me that much more difficult.”

  She hesitated for a moment as though she was considering it. When the battle taking place in her mind between feeding herself and continuing to starve was over, I was pleased to see that eating had won out in the end. She descended on the plate ravenously, scooping food into her mouth with her fingers as quickly as she could. I doubted she even tasted a single bite of it.

  It did not matter. At least she was eating. That, too, was progress.

  “May I ask you a few questions?” I did not want to push things, but I was eager to learn more from this female now that we were on speaking terms.

  “Don’t care.”

  “How long were you kept on the base we found you in?” Learning how long she had been interred there would help us determine the date of her abduction—which in turn, would help us learn whether or not we could send her home.

  “Don’t know,” she said simply in between bites.

  I frowned. That had been a dead end—but perhaps my next question would fare better.

  “How were you captured? Do you remember when it happened?”

  “Don’t know,” she said again.

  Blood. This was going to be far more difficult than I had hoped.

  “Were you taken by the Rutharians directly? Or were you given to them by a third party?” Kloran’s wife, Bria, had been taken by rogue slavers and sold to us illegally. Sawyer, Haelian’s wife, we thought had likely been captured by the same slavers and given to the Rutharians as some sort of bribe. But Alyse had been abducted by the Rutharian king himself. Knowing how this female had been taken would at least allow us to start building a pattern.

  “Don’t know.”

  I bit back a growl. This was getting me nowhere.

  “Were there ever any other women with you on the base? We did not find any others, but perhaps you saw some passing through at some point.”

  I braced myself for yet another don’t know, but this time, she hesitated. She even ceased in shoveling her mouth full of food.

  This time, she knew something.

  Finally, I had asked the right question.

  “My people are called Lunarians,” I explained to her. “Your captors, the Rutharians, are our enemies. They take females like you. Hurt them. Keep them enslaved. We rescue them. If you know of other human females who were taken, please, you must tell me, so we may rescue them as well. Did you ever seen any other humans move through the base where we found you?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. Her voice was an almost silent hiss in the darkness. “Many. So many. More than I could count.”

  Her words made my heart sink into my stomach.

  It was as bad as I could have possibly feared.

  “Do you know where they were taken?” With the way Lunarian politics were shaping up, it was imperative that we rescued as many females as quickly as we could—before Lady Idria managed to turn the support of our mission to ash beneath our boots.

  “No,” the female said. Then, she shot a question back at me. “Do you really help women? You save them? You don’t hurt them?”

  “Yes,” I told her. “We help them. We really do.”

  There was a long silence before she spoke again. When she did, her small, fragile voice held a tremble in it.

  “My sister,” she said softly. “She was taken with me. Please. Can you find her? Can you save her?”

  “We wish to save every human that has been taken by the Rutharians, yes. But we will need information from you if we are to locate her. You will have to tell me everything you know.”

  She slid the plate back toward me abruptly. I could feel her silver eyes boring into me through the dark.

  “Promise me you’ll rescue her.”

  “Yes,” I told her—though I knew it was a large vow to make. “I will do everything in my power to see your sister safely returned to your side. You have my word.”

  “Then I’ll talk,” she said plainly. “I’ll tell you everything I know.”

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  Saved By The Warrior Hero

  Lunarian Warriors: Book 3

  Roxie Ray

  © 2020

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  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and events are all fictitious for the reader’s pleasure. Any similarities to real people, places, events, living or dead are all coincidental.

  This book contains sexually explicit content that is intended for ADULTS ONLY (+18).