Deceived Page 3

  The king and queen didn’t want these beacons going off all willy-nilly when someone was traveling and simply got lost, for example. These devices were too powerful for that.

  Luckily, I was in the royal family, and I had one. This was the first time I’d ever used it, though, and I hoped against all hope that it actually worked.

  The little device was the size of a small biscuit. It had a little plastic shield on top I had to flip open in order to activate the button, and then I closed the top so the beacon would stay turned on. The shield was to ensure that nobody accidentally punched the beacon.

  No matter where I went now, my people would know where I was.

  Someone would come save me.

  They just had to.

  Chapter 3

  Paige

  The next morning, I rolled over and swung my feet off the side of the bed. Yawning, I stretched briefly. My entire body was sore, but once I started moving around, I’d probably feel better. Ready to face the day, I tried to hop off the bed and stand up.

  Instead, I promptly fell forward and landed on my hands and knees. I cried out in pain, and the door to the room flew open. Then thick, masculine hands were on me, tugging me into the air.

  “Are you injured?”

  I looked straight ahead.

  “You.”

  It was the man from the night before. I had forgotten about the crash, about the climbing, and about the man from Malum. He was holding me in the air and my legs were dangling. No wonder I’d fallen off the bed. I wasn’t made for a bed from Malum. I was much too small.

  “Yes, it is me,” he said. “Are you injured?”

  “No.”

  “You look injured.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “Look, the only thing injured is my ego,” I told him honestly, and that seemed to satisfy him. The platform bed I’d been sleeping on was much higher than my bed back home on Gideon. The alien man looked me up and down, and finally, he nodded.

  “I understand,” he said. “Falling down in front of another person is quite humiliating.”

  “You pointing it out helps a lot,” I said drily.

  “Does it?”

  “No.”

  He frowned but said nothing.

  “You can put me back down,” I told him, and I found myself planted, once more, on the floor of the little cave. I was barefoot, and the cave floor was cold. I wiggled my toes against the hard stone.

  “Are you ready to begin your journey?”

  The man spoke carefully, calmly. He was watching me with a certain guardedness that I recognized in myself. He may have let me stay with him last night, but he still didn’t trust me.

  Fine.

  I didn’t trust him, either.

  Still...what was he talking about?

  “My journey?”

  “Yes, we need to find you a new ship so you can leave,” he spoke firmly with finality.

  “You seem to be in an awful hurry for me to leave Malum.”

  “You should not be here longer than you need to be,” he told me.

  “Why are you so certain that it’s dangerous for someone like me to be here?” I asked, curious.

  For all I knew, this alien guy was off-the-grid crazy. There wasn’t going to be any sort of current, present-day conflict between our two planets. There wasn’t a war brewing on the horizon. If there was, I would have known.

  So, what was the danger he was speaking of?

  The things that this alien had told me before couldn’t possibly be true. The king wouldn’t have attacked the planet. Not this one. Not any. My dad wouldn’t have hurt people the way the alien seemed to think he would have. That wasn’t the kind of man the Gideon king was. He definitely wouldn’t have done it quietly.

  “Because,” the man said. “I am a warrior. I’ve trained for it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Human, what does your planet teach you about Malum?”

  Before I could answer, he started walking. He gestured for me to follow him out of the room, and he led me back to the place where we’d been the night before with the tiny table. Then we went through one more door to the first room I’d been in when I climbed up into the cave.

  The little cave-room overlooked the ocean. I could see the water clearly now, and looking out at the crashing waves, I couldn’t believe I’d managed to survive.

  Maybe he was right.

  Maybe I wasn’t supposed to survive.

  Only, the idea that someone had sabotaged my ship still didn’t sit well with me.

  Who would want to hurt me?

  I didn’t have any enemies. Not that I knew of, anyway. I might have been a princess, but as far as I knew, most of the planet’s citizens like me all right. I showed up for events on time. I always dressed the part. I volunteered a lot, spent time with the kids on the planet, and even helped with the endangered animal population.

  It didn’t make sense for someone to want to hurt me.

  I was harmless.

  We sat down on the floor of the cave. Looking out at the ocean, I took a deep breath. It was peaceful here. I’d admit that much. Not a lot on Gideon was calm or relaxing, but here...

  This was the kind of place a girl could get used to.

  The company wasn’t half-bad, either.

  In another life, I might have tried to make a move on this guy. He was all kinds of wonderful. He was bigger than men on my planet, which was probably the thing that intrigued me most. I was used to humans and Martians who didn’t get nearly as big as the people on, say, Sapphira.

  Apparently, Malums were also kind of giant.

  Without calling me out for staring, the man handed me a bowl. Once again, it was full of liquid. This time, I shook my head.

  “No,” I said. There was no way in hell I’d fall for the same trick twice.

  He looked at the bowl and then back at me, as though trying to figure out why I didn’t want it.

  “It won’t make you sleepy.”

  “You first,” I pushed the bowl toward him. He shrugged and had a sip. Then he handed it back. Somehow, that made me feel better. I was starving, so I wasn’t actually going to turn down free food, but I still felt like I needed to make a little bit of a show about it.

  Reluctantly, I sipped at the liquid. Just like the day before, it was delicious. Why the hell didn’t we have anything like this on Gideon? It was incredible.

  “Who are you, anyway? Are you a chef or something?”

  If he wasn’t, Malum produced incredible cooks, apparently.

  “My name is Ryssi.”

  “Ryssi?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nice to meet you, Ryssi. I’m Paige.”

  He stood and raised his hands. Then he clapped them together three times, bowed, and sat back down. He looked at me as though he hadn’t just done this.

  “Is that a greeting ritual?” I frowned, not sure what I was supposed to do next. I nodded, hoping that would demonstrate that I was acknowledging his clapping thing.

  “It is strange you know nothing of Malum,” he said. “Yet you seem so certain you have all of the answers.”

  I thought of his question. I still hadn’t answered him. He had asked me what Gideon taught its people about Malum, and the truth was that the answer was complicated. It was far too complicated for me to answer in one sitting, so instead of actually giving him any real information, I just pretended I’d forgotten the question.

  It made me uncomfortable.

  “You are a strange person, Paige,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Finish your food.”

  He left the room and I sat in silence, sipping at the meal he’d given me. While he was gone, I looked around the sparsely decorated cave. It was strange to me just how beautiful the cave was. The purple light hung in the center of the room, but then I realized it wasn’t actually purple. The walls of the cave were purple. The rocks weren’t brown or
grey the way the rocks on Gideon were.

  These were a deep, beautiful purple. They looked like amethysts, only deeper in color. I set the bowl down and walked to one of the walls, and I ran my hand over it. How had I never known that Malum was a planet with purple rocks? I felt like that was a pretty big thing to be excluded from our history books.

  “Why didn’t he tell me?” I whispered.

  Surely, my father knew such a wonderful fact. After all, he’d been to Malum many times before our planets stopped talking to each other. Even Jax, my sister’s fiancé, had been to this planet once upon a time. He’d come with his parents when he was a child. Neither of them had mentioned anything about these beautiful rocks to me.

  I touched the walls. Long ago, my dad had come to Malum with my mother. They’d been to many places and explored many lands, but this had always been a place that he’d talked about with disgust.

  Everyone had.

  When Jax talked about Malum, he always looked like he was going to be a little bit sick. He’d made it clear that his memories of this place were bad ones. Both he and my parents had explained that Malum was a place to be feared and hated, and they’d done their best to make sure that the people of Gideon did just that.

  I shook my head, trying to clear it. I just needed to get home. If I could do that, I’d be able to put this little misadventure behind me. Besides, my dad was probably looking for me. After my fight with Jax, the entire kingdom was probably looking for me. It wasn’t really a secret that my future brother-in-law and I didn’t always see eye-to-eye, but that had less to do with the fact that I was heir to the throne and more to do with the fact that Jax was a selfish jerk.

  What did my little sister see in him, anyway?

  I honestly had no idea.

  Piper and I had always fought and argued with one another. I’d always been the one destined for the throne, but I hadn’t wanted it. Piper always felt I was wasting the opportunity.

  Together, we’d made a strange pair.

  We were twins, yet I had been born just a few minutes before her. That had seemed to make all of the difference in the world to her. It had made all of the difference in the world to the kingdom. I was supposed to get married and take the throne one day, but Piper wanted it more than me.

  She always had.

  The alien returned with what looked like a heavy jacket wrapped around his body. I was slightly disappointed to see that he was wearing so many clothes. I’d enjoyed getting to see so much of him in his sparse apparel.

  He had a second jacket in his hand, and he held it out to me. He gestured, as though he wanted me to put it on. I looked at the fabric warily. I’d never seen anything like it before.

  What if it was another trick?

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s for the journey,” he said.

  “Journey?”

  “To get a ship.”

  “What do you mean, journey? How far are we from ships?” I asked, suddenly nervous. “Isn’t there a city nearby?”

  He laughed and shook his head, as though he couldn’t believe I would ask another question that was so silly.

  “Where do you think you landed?” Ryssi asked me, chuckling. “You climbed into my caverns from the ocean, little human. This isn’t exactly a house that says, ‘visitors welcome.’”

  “Okay...”

  “It’s a two-day journey,” he said.

  “Two days!”

  “Yes, and we need to be fast.”

  “Wait,” I told him, remembering something. I reached into my bag and pulled out the beacon. I wanted to show him that I’d called my people, and that maybe we didn’t need to travel at all. If it had worked, and if the castle on Gideon had gotten my message, then we could just stay put.

  No journey required.

  Unfortunately, as soon as the alien in front of me saw the beacon, he paled.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s a beacon. It’s a homing beacon. It lets people back home know where I am.”

  “What the fuck?”

  It was the first time I’d heard the man swear, and it made me uncomfortable. He hadn’t even sworn when he’d found me, which was saying something. So, why now? What was it about this device that had him so upset?

  “Please tell me you didn’t turn it on,” he whispered the words.

  Only, I had turned it on.

  It had been activated, by me, at least six or seven hours ago. I wasn’t sure how long I’d slept for, but it couldn’t have been more than eight hours. Either way, if my people had gotten the message, then they’d be on their way. Before we knew it, someone would arrive to save me.

  “I switched it on last night before I passed out,” I told him. “Why do I get the feeling you think this is a bad thing?”

  He just stared at me.

  “Someone will come for me,” I told him.

  “The only people who own beacons are royals,” he told me.

  Well, so much for not letting him know I’m a princess.

  “I am a royal,” I finally admitted.

  “Fuck,” he said again.

  “Seriously, you’re going to have to fill me in on what’s happening.”

  I finally accepted the jacket he was holding, and I slipped it on. As soon as it was on my body, I gasped. The fabric seemed to tighten around me, sticking to my body.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s supposed to do that.”

  “What is it?”

  “Reflian fur. It attaches itself to your body to keep you warm. It acts as a second skin.”

  “I’ve never even heard of this.”

  “I am not surprised,” he told me. “You have not heard of many things.”

  I glared at the alien. It took all of my self-control not to stomp my foot at him for his annoying comment.

  “Stop with the judgment, already,” I snapped.

  “I am not judging you.”

  “You hate my planet, and you don’t even know anything about it,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “So, the feeling is mutual.”

  I glared at the alien.

  “You don’t know the first thing about me,” I said.

  “You’re right. I don’t know why a princess from Gideon crash-landed on Malum. I don’t know why the hell you turned a homing beacon on when someone was obviously trying to kill you, and I don’t know why you didn’t warn me that someone from your planet is going to come here to finish the job!”

  Chapter 4

  Ryssi

  She was an idiot.

  I had no idea how the King of Gideon managed to create such a gorgeous daughter because she was the stupidest creatures that I’d ever laid eyes on. She had long, gorgeous hair that practically begged to be pulled. Her eyes were bright and curious. Then there was her ass...full and round the way a human’s should be.

  She was going to be the death of me.

  Possibly literally.

  I headed back into my interior cave rooms, angry, and she followed, trotting closely behind me like a lost little kitten. She’d done so much damage, and she didn’t seem to have any idea.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting anything that I don’t want to be blown up,” I snapped, grabbing the amethyst necklace my mother had left me before she died. I shoved it into a bag, along with my other most important possessions.

  Luckily, I’d been a warrior long enough to know that nothing lasts forever, and I hadn’t kept many important artifacts with me. I mostly had the necklace and a few random books I liked. Anything else I owned could easily be replaced.

  Not that I wanted to deal with replacing these things, but I could.

  It would be fine.

  When I’d left the capital city two years ago, I hadn’t planned on ever returning to the place where Malum’s own king resided. Now it seemed as though I had no choice. I had a little princess who needed safety, and unfortunately for both of us, the Malum king was the one person who could protect her.
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  He at least had the ships needed to send her safely on her way.

  “I don’t know who you pissed off on Gideon,” I told her, “but they’re going to be here any minute. You should have told me about the beacon last night.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she rolled her eyes, “but somebody fucking drugged me, and I fell asleep.”

  “Perhaps that was a mistake,” I sighed. I’d been trying to protect her, but that had obviously backfired. This princess definitely needed protecting, but by helping her fall asleep, I’d broken her trust.

  There had been a part of me that thought about trying to seduce her the night before. She was soft and pliable, and I knew she’d feel damn good to make love to. Melting into her would be a wonderful way to help her sleep, but no, I hadn’t done that.

  I’d tried to be honorable instead.

  I took her hand and tugged, pulling her toward a ladder that blended in almost perfectly with the wall. I gestured for her to climb up, and luckily, she did so without arguing or without calling me names.

  Not that I didn’t deserve it.

  I knew perfectly well that I shouldn’t have drugged her.

  I understood that.

  I hadn’t had her consent, and as much as I didn’t like being touched without people asking me, she probably didn’t like someone giving her sleeping medication without asking her.

  She’d been tired, though, and hurt. Most of all, she’d been scared. I’d been able to practically feel the fear radiating off of her, and that had been enough to make me give her something to help her sleep.

  I hadn’t wanted her to lie awake feeling afraid.

  I’d wanted her to get rest and to feel at peace. She was in a new place, and she was on a planet she knew nothing about. I’d tried to take care of her, but I’d completely fucked up.

  Apparently that decision was going to bite me in the ass for a good long time.

  She reached the top of the ladder and the door to the cave opened automatically. The covering slid to the side so that we could climb right on out. Paige climbed out and I followed. I didn’t bother closing the door. I just took her hand. Then I held out my other one.