Alien Kraken’s Prize (Starlight Brides)

Chapter 5

CHAPTER

FIVE

BORUMOR

It’s intelligent.

Not an it, either. A female. A female, who is intelligent enough not only to create a binding of sorts for her horrifying wound, but also appears to be able to communicate.

Even more startling—appalling, even—is that she caused my mating secretions to flow.

Something none of my species or any of the species on my planet have done.

Ever.

I can’t stop staring at her, utterly flummoxed by this terrible turn of events.

She is not a pet. Not at all.

Up close, too, without the terrarium wall between us or the bubble barrier, I can make out her features better. Her face is beautiful by any standards, now relaxed in sleep, her skin seemingly untouched by sun or sea. Soft. Impossibly soft.

Her… lower appendages are concerning, yes, but I can’t deny my fascination with the differences between us. My mating secretions certainly do not want to deny it.

This is a problem. A very large and uncomfortable problem.

I cannot keep her as a pet.

I don’t even know where she was found, or worse, taken from. It’d be one thing if she were simply non-sentient, as I assumed. But her talking isn’t gibberish, and she’s constructed herself a bandage from what appears to be clothing.

Now I have a possible intergalactic problem on my tentacles.

All thanks to the ever-meddling Lord Zayros and his obnoxious designs for me and his offspring.

Water laps at the four tentacles still in the swim-through, and I simply stare at the little female, for once in my life completely at a loss for how to proceed.

I am a warrior.

I am the king of Kylassis, the ruler of all the ocean species here.

I am known for my judgment, my justice, and my sense of fairness and duty.

What I am not is an abductor of sentient species.

I bite back a feral cry, frustrated beyond belief by Zayros. He, like nearly everyone, knows all too well my fascination with land species, and now has saddled me with a possible intergalactic war crime if I am to admit that this female is sentient.

My tentacles rasp along the sandy surface, and I narrow my eyes at the Kelfer under the female’s head.

Another rarity, and one I didn’t have a clue was part and parcel of the gift.

Kelfers are from another sea-soaked world, though in another dimension completely. They are sentient, no question about it, and closely related genetically to me and mine.

They sense the world around them through their skin and the acetabulum lining their undersides. Incapable of speech, though not incapable of communication or feeling.

It is strange that a Kelfer has befriended such a creature as this female, much less that it’s allowed her to use it as a pillow.

I shake my head slowly, absolutely out of my depths with this pair.

Mating secretions aside, I need to learn to communicate with this female and deduce where it is she’s been stolen from.

That is step one.

Step two will not be clear until I have answers to that, at the very least.