Atlan. What are you waiting for?” The Prillon was pacing me. Circling. His gaze filled with horror and rage and hatred, all directed at himself. We were one in that moment, and I knew my gaze matched his. Broken. We were both broken.
“You can’t beat me, Prillon. But you already know that, don’t you? That’s not why you’re here.” I threw the taunt, knowing it for truth. He wanted to feel the pain. To attack with nothing held back. He couldn’t kill me. Not without a second Prillon warrior to back him up. And I wouldn’t kill him. He was a warrior, an honorable soldier who’d survived the same horrors I had. Death matches were not allowed in the pit, so fighting me was the closest he could get. But I could make him hurt. Bleed.
Feel.
Two more steps. Three. Screaming voices fueled us both, but there was one sound that drew my beast’s attention away from the match and my gaze lifted to scan the crowd before I had processed the instinct. I never looked away from an opponent in the pit. It was a rookie move. A stupid one. But I had no choice. My beast forced my hand.
It was a woman’s voice. A female.
My beast awoke, practically howled as fire rolled through my veins and my cock grew hard.
I shook my head, trying to blink away the urge to hunt down that voice. To claim her.
She was probably one of the Academy cadets here for training but leaving tomorrow.
I should ignore it. Let her go. She wasn’t my matched mate. Couldn’t be.
I didn’t have one.
Another reason my beast was so edgy. There seemed little hope I’d be able to hold on long enough to discover a mate that my beast would want to claim. Of the warriors here, only Warlord Braun understood the monster inside me, raging to break free. Every moment was an act of discipline. Every step. Every breath. The beast seethed, and I held him down with an iron fist, my will the only thing standing between me and execution.
The fighting pits helped release some of the beast’s restlessness, the hunger. But my time as a Hive drone hadn’t dimmed the beast’s fury, as it had with Warlord Rezzer.
Feeling helpless to resist the Hive’s commands, the constant buzzing in my head that never completely went away, that just made me edgier. The battle against the internal enemy was constant. This Prillon before me was the latest outlet available, and I planned to make him miserable. Beat him bloody. Let the beast have some fun. Give him what he wanted.
I saw the hopeless rage in the Prillon warrior’s golden eyes. He was new here. I didn’t know his name, but I didn’t need to. I recognized the wrath, the trapped feeling. We all did. Every single warrior banished was here on The Colony, not by choice, but because we’d been contaminated with Hive technology. Captured. Tortured. Modified.
We were no longer wanted by the people on our home planets, the people we’d sacrificed for. We were too dangerous.
Me, especially.
I wanted to hate the policy that required all contaminated warriors to live out the rest of their lives here, either working in the mines or protecting those who did, but I couldn’t. The truth was that we were dangerous. Unstable. The Hive implants had strange effects on some warriors. And some, like me, never quite got them out of our heads. For me, the constant hum never left. Not even here, where the planet’s defense systems were designed to keep out Hive communication frequencies.
But then, from what I’d been told, the Hive were here, hiding in the caves below the surface. Someday, there would be a reckoning, and then I’d hunt them, kill them. Tearing drones in half with my bare hands would bring me nothing but pleasure. Other than a mate’s warm, wet pussy—which I had no hope of enjoying—killing the Hive was all I could think about.
Unfortunately, Governor Rone, the hard-ass Prillon warrior who ran Base 3, didn’t feel turning me loose in the caves was a good idea. Not even during simple training runs for a new batch of Coalition Academy cadets. The training program was experimental, the caves below the surface a perfect simulation of several planets that were battle zones, hotbeds of Hive activity.
The Governor was right. First sight of a Hive here on The Colony, or of their leader, the Prillon warrior, Krael—the fucking traitor—and the beast would own me. There would be no coming back, no control.
By the gods, I wouldn’t even try. I’d eviscerate them with my bare hands and howl with joy while doing it.
Fueled by my thoughts and the coming fight, the beast rose within me, eager and strong. I pushed back. Fought for control. Focused on the threat before me. His face. His fists. The lightness of his steps in the soft dirt. He was not a young, inexperienced fighter. He was a Prillon warrior in his prime. Strong. Fast. Deadly. And he’d just arrived after his own personal hell with the Hive.
Not that it would save him from a solid beating, but it would at least make the fight interesting.
We paced. Ready.
I heard her again. My cock, already hard, throbbed painfully.
The beast clawed at my insides, fighting to break free. Not to fight the Prillon. For her.
It wanted her.
Fuck.
Gods help me if she was the mate of a Colony warrior, or some innocent young cadet barely more than a child.
Keeping the Prillon on the edge of my vision, I scanned the crowd again. Found her.
Stilled. Stopped breathing.
By the gods, she was beautiful. Golden hair was pulled back from her face, and my first instinct was to break it free from whatever held it. Her eyes were like glaciers, too blue to be real. And she was human. I recognized her species from meeting Governor Rone’s mate, Rachel, and because the warrior who had saved my life before coming here, one of the bravest fighters I’d ever met, was a female from Earth. A female who had earned my loyalty and respect. Commander Chloe Phan.
But her eyes had been dark. Her hair black. And she’d been small and mated to a Prillon warrior and a human I respected, the human who’d saved my life, Captain Seth Mills. I’d known the fearless commander wasn’t mine. But the knowing had been easy. My beast hadn’t been interested in her as a potential mate.
This human was completely different.
Fascinating.
Every curve was outlined to perfection by a tight black uniform, and I recognized the design as belonging to one of the instructors from the Coalition Academy on Zioria. Her hair was golden, her eyes a liquid blue that made me feel like I was falling. Her lips were a pale pink, and she was tall. Curvy. Her breasts were large and would be paradise in my hands. My mouth. I wondered what she tasted like. Her skin. Her kiss. Her hot, wet pussy juices flowing over my tongue as I made her scream.
She was not a child but a woman who knew what she wanted.
Our gazes met. Held. Locked.
The Prillon warrior paced. I ignored him. He was irrelevant now. My beast had other priorities. If my opponent wanted to bleed, he’d have to find another to entertain him.
I wanted the female. And from the way her gaze lingered
