Brute: A Dark Sci-Fi Romance Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Epilogue

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  Brute

  By

  Loki Renard

  Copyright © 2018 by Stormy Night Publications and Loki Renard

  Copyright © 2018 by Stormy Night Publications and Loki Renard

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Stormy Night Publications and Design, LLC.

  www.StormyNightPublications.com

  Renard, Loki

  Brute

  Cover Design by Korey Mae Johnson

  Images by Shutterstock/nazarovsergey and Shutterstock/alexaldo

  This book is intended for adults only. Spanking and other sexual activities represented in this book are fantasies only, intended for adults.

  Chapter One

  Pyxel

  “Where is it?”

  “I’m not telling.”

  My breath catches in my throat as burning eyes settle on me with grave displeasure.

  “You should answer my question, little human.”

  “You should go to hell.”

  Rebellion is easy when you crave the consequences of your actions so badly you are willing to do anything, say anything just to find a limit. I have been alone for a long time. I am not alone anymore. My solitude has been replaced with a tyrant interrogator, a confessor who will discover every one of my sins and punish me accordingly. I have crossed him. I have tricked him. I have lied to him and I have tried to cheat him. If I had gotten away with it, I’d be rich now. Instead of money, I have the wages of my sin, and they are about to be written in my soft flesh with rough strokes of his powerful frame.

  I feel my lower secret self, the dirty little places no respectable woman ever likes to have displayed in such lewd fashion, swelling with anticipation and desire. This creature is like none I have ever met before. He demands obedience. He commands compliance. My rebellion and my lies are swept away before him. There is no fooling this male who is so much more than any man ever could be. My flesh weeps with desire, but still I cannot give him what he wants.

  “Behave yourself,” he growls, one hand at my throat, the other at my sex. I am caught in his grasp and in the consequences of my own deception. “Tell me what I want to know.”

  He is utterly alien. I owe him nothing. But he is going to take everything. Because he is a warrior and a conqueror, and it does not matter how alien he is, it is a universal constant that a naked woman spread before such a creature will not receive mercy. She will take the hard flesh already pressed between her thighs.

  I want him. I crave him. But I know that he will give just as much pain as pleasure. And I know that I will earn every bit of it. I have been a very bad girl, and it has just caught up with me in a way I never thought it would.

  Just how did I get myself into this situation?

  Oh. That’s right.

  * * *

  Hours earlier…

  Crash

  “Earth stinks.”

  Farti holds his nose and screws up his face. His upper lip curls, baring the fangs that emerge under his upper lip. They’re supposed to be intimidating, but they’re about a quarter of an inch long and when they’re set in a face that has the head to body proportions of a teddy bear with about twice as much fuzz, they don’t do much for his credibility. His fur is a soft red plush. He has short pointy horns, little hooves for feet, humanoid hands, and a tail that wags when he doesn’t want it to.

  He’s three feet tall, two hundred and forty years old, and he’s made me richer in the last year of working with him than I got in the ten years I spent in the Vatiri Special Forces.

  Everything he lacks in height and intimidation, he makes up for in pure business acumen. I’m the muscle in this operation. Tall, even for a Vatiri, there are parts of this ship I have to crawl through in order to access them. I can’t wait to stretch my legs. I can’t wait to make some money.

  “Are you listening to me?” Farti’s complaints draw my attention down again.

  My nine feet in height means that occasionally, when he’s very serious about something, he hops up on my knee so he can look me in the eye. I am strictly forbidden from finding that cute.

  Right now he’s stomping around my feet, irritated. “I thought the supplier was meeting us here.”

  He doesn’t care about the view, which is exquisite. We’ve landed at the verge of a great red and gold canyon lush with trees. A river winds below, and above the sky is bright and blue and big. So big I can almost forget how much bigger everything beyond it really is.

  This is a nice planet. It does smell, well, organic, but you get that in the pockets where life still flourishes. Most of the universe is dead. Very, very dead. This is the scent of decay and growth curling into our nostrils. In the soil beneath the grass that ripples out around my feet, life is thriving.

  “Where. Is. She?” Farti stamps his feet and lets out a nickering sound of irritation.

  “She’ll be here, I’m sure,” I say. I don’t care if she’s late. This is just another run for us. Another pickup followed by another delivery. Things have gotten a little boring of late. When I served in the Vatiri marines, hardly a day went by that you didn’t have a limb lopped off and have to go in for regeneration. I’ve had all my limbs attached for months upon months now. They’re starting to get that worn, lived-in look. I could do with a shiny new bicep.

  “How can you be sure? You don’t know her. She’s human. I hate humans.” He wrinkles his nose up in a way that exposes the little pointed parts of his fangs all the more. “You can’t trust humans.”

  I haven’t dealt with humans much. They’re relatively rare in the universal sphere of things. I looked them up on the ship’s computer as we came in. They’re what’s called a junior species. They never made it out of their solar system independently, but they were discovered somewhere around 34.5938.45, when the Nefari visited. Two envoys. One of them didn’t use the sanitizer before first contact and transmitted a virus that in Nefari results in a small but embarrassing rash.

  It wiped out ninety-five percent of Earth’s humanoid population within a week. A few people did have a natural resistance by some miracle and the Nefari were so ashamed at the results of their actions, they helped rebuild enough of a city to get the species restarted.

  The rest is history.

  Earth is too far out of the way to get a lot of attention, so it’s been left to run wild. A few intrepid species like to venture out here from time to time, post interstellar media snapshots of the wilderness.

  It cost us a quarter of a year’s profits for the fuel to get here, and it took us a year to come this far. It’s been a long voyage and I hope we get more than a day or two here. I need to remember what it feels like to stand on a planet and breathe air that hasn’t been filtered a thousand times.

  “I’m going to hail her,” Farti says. “Don’t go too far. There’s predators here and I won’t be able to come and find you.”

  The thing I like about Farti is that he doesn’t even pretend to be brave. He expects me to be there to guard his fuzzy little ass, and he compens
ates me well for it.

  Chapter Two

  Pyxel

  Ow.

  Ow.

  Ow.

  Every step is a reminder of what happens when you get stupid and sloppy out here in the canyon-plain-jungle. I was heading out to meet my marks, a little too fast for my own good. The skimmer I’ve been riding for the past year had been showing signs of breaking down for a while, but I fixed it with tape and wire.

  I was skipping over the canopy on my way here, about ninety feet up in the air when the tape and the wire decided they weren’t friends anymore. The nice thing about falling through a forest is that there’s lots of stuff to stop you on the way down. The not so nice thing is that a lot of it is much harder than it looks from the sky. Fluffy clouds of green turn to prickly sharp sticky things when you’re plummeting through them at terminal velocity.

  Fortunately, I was wearing my leathers. Unfortunately, I fell through a particularly open patch of jungle. Fortunately a tangle of vines caught me before I came to a landing on my face. Unfortunately, leathers don’t stop you twisting your ankle on a vine. It’s not broken. It just hurts. My boot will keep it stable enough, and I’ve cut a bit of branch to use as a crutch to keep most of my weight off it, but this is not a great start to what was always going to be a hell of a day.

  The jungle isn’t easy to get through. It’s dense, and the trails people hack through don’t last long. Maybe three or four days at most. It’s been at least a week since anyone came through here. I picked the canyon for a reason. It’s far enough away from my house that they probably won’t be able to find me once they realize I screwed them over. And it’s a nice scenic spot for visitors. They get taken in by the view of the verdant great canyon and they get into a goofy happy mood and they believe whatever you tell them. It’s hard to fathom that this place was ever a big dry hole in the desert, but my ancestors have been coming to this spot for hundreds of generations. Back then, it was most notable for being a hole, but then the climate shifted and this whole area that used to be nothing more than dust and dead things turned into the canyon lake and the surrounding jungle plains. Just have to be careful not to accidentally step off the edge.

  As I battle through the underbrush, I remind myself that the money is going to be worth it. And keeping the few artifacts that haven’t yet been pillaged from Earth to be sold in intergalactic tat shops safe from the people who think my world is a jumble sale is worth it too.

  I’ll use the payment to buy a new skimmer. And fix the leak in the roof. And lay in some freeze-dried supplies for the winter. I’ve got about ten places to put every buck they’ve got for me, and I’ll make damn sure to spend it before they realize that what’s in my backpack isn’t what they’re looking for.

  “Sorry! Sorry! I know I’m late!” I shout out as I come through the bushes. It’s good to announce your presence. Some of these traders are jumpy and can start firing off their high spec matter destroyers if they get startled. I’ve seen a man who looked like Swiss cheese after an accidental discharge by a party of panicked interstellar tourists.

  “Stop there!”

  A rough male voice booms out. I stop at the verge of the forest, my feet turning to lead. I hope they’re not one of the paranoid species. They suck to deal with—and they’re really hard to scam.

  “It’s me!” I call out. “The trader!”

  I can’t see the person coming toward me, but his presence announces itself in the fleeing of small woodland creatures. Perhaps that’s a dramatic take on it, but the rough command shocked me. This is my world. My jungle. My goddamn clearing to walk through. What does he mean, stop?

  “Step out of the bushes.”

  “That’s what I was trying to do,” I mutter under my breath as I hop forward.

  As I do, I find myself looking at the midsection of a very tall alien man. And I mean very tall. I am 5′5. He has to be at least nine feet. He towers like a tree in front of me, and manages to make the canyon laid out behind him look like a reasonably sized hole. He’s built like a bull. The width of his shoulders must be at least three times my own. His hips are narrow in proportion, but still wider than my entire body. A shock of instinctive fear rushes through me as my body reacts like I just walked out in front of a tiger. The adrenaline of being confronted with something physically far superior and much more dangerous makes my heart beat faster, my pupils dilating to take in all aspects of him.

  He is dressed in some kind of mercenary garb. Not the high-end armor that I’ve seen some of them wearing, impenetrable force fields and whatnot. He’s gone low tech, like me. But I don’t think it matters. His skin is the color of brushed aluminum, and I’m pretty sure if I touched one of those massive biceps that are bigger than both my thighs, I’d find that skin is closer to hide.

  I shouldn’t stare. It’s rude. But I can’t help it. He is the strangest looking nonhuman man I have ever seen. His eyes have dark pupils, but the iris around them glows reddish gold. His nose is prominent and jutting, but in proportion with the strong brow and great square jaw. His hair is thick and silver, falling around his ears and down the back of his neck in a shaggy riot.

  He’s handsome. Hot. He’s fucking gorgeous. He’s everything, however you describe that melting, desperate yearning an attractive person can give you with their mere presence.

  I wasn’t expecting this. Most aliens are pretty gross to look at. Holes for noses, slimy skin, extra orifices, that sort of thing. Evolution is blind. She doesn’t care how goofy something looks as long as it works well enough to push the next generation into existence. But on this guy, she did some of her best work. Holy fuck. I forget about the throbbing pain in my ankle and the trinket in my bag. I forget my own damn name.

  “You are Pyxel.”

  “Uhhh…” What should be an answer in the affirmative turns into an incoherent drawl. He takes it to mean I don’t understand him.

  “You speak intergalactic tongue? Or you only read?” He makes a scribbling motion with his finger. “I write?”

  The hottest man in the universe is talking to me like I’m a moron. Of course I speak intergalactic. While I stand there, dumb, he pulls out a device, taps a note on it, and shows it to me.

  Are you Pyxel?

  I nod.

  He smiles. He’s come a million miles, he’s utterly alien, and yet patronizing. Condescending expressions are apparently common to our people.

  “Good,” he says. “I will write to you.”

  I stare. He writes it down and shows it to me. I nod.

  It’s occurred to me that this is going to be much easier if he doesn’t realize I can speak. Hard to be accused of lying if you never said a word, right? Never thought being tongue-tied would be a negotiating advantage, but here we are.

  Come with me.

  He accompanies the text with a gesture toward a ship that seems way, way too small for him. My home is bigger than that thing.

  I follow after him, hop-skipping to try to keep up with his long legs.

  He turns partway there to see what’s taking me so long. When he sees that I’m hobbling, his expression shifts instantly. The neutral of his handsome face is replaced with extreme displeasure. His glowing gaze hones in on my leg.

  “You’re hurt.”

  He doesn’t type it out. He says it and gestures toward my leg. I figure it’s safe to pretend to understand enough to understand, but I can’t answer him.

  I attempt to mime what happened. It’s kind of hard to explain with your hands how your piece of shit skimmer tried to murder you ninety feet in the air, and I can tell he’s not understanding a thing I’m trying to impart. It doesn’t matter. We’re not here to talk about my leg. I’m here to rip him off with some old scrap I found in one of the warehouse ruins.

  We get a lot of aliens down here chasing lies. A good story knows how to travel, and the one about this trinket seems to have made its way across lightyears to find this guy and his bank balance.

  I grab my pack off my back,
pick the sack out, and hold it out to him, miming him giving me money in return for the goods.

  He shakes his head and makes a gesture toward the ship. He wants me to go with him.

  I shake my head. I’m not going any further with this. I want this transaction over so I can disappear back into the jungle.

  “Come,” he repeats. “I fix your foot.”

  I shake my head again, make a motion with the bag, and hold out my hand for the credits. All he has to do is push a hundred tokens into my hand and we’re done. I’ll hop on out of here and disappear into the jungle. He’ll never find me. By the time he realizes what he’s got is a fake, I doubt he’ll even be in the same galaxy.

  “Foot,” he repeats. “I fix.”

  “No.” I shake my head and wave my hands. “Take treasure.”

  He twists his face up. He thinks I don’t understand him. I don’t know how stupid he imagines me to be, but he’s obviously working on another way to communicate his desire to play nurse. I don’t need it. It’s just a sprain. It’s the least of my worries.

  “Foot,” he repeats, encouraged by my speech. He bends down and tries to reach out for my leg. I pull it away, hopping back in irritation.

  “Oh, for crying out loud, just pay me so I can get out of here, I don’t need you to fix my foot.”

  His brows rise as he does. “You speak intergalactic.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Then why did we just spend the last ten minutes making gestures at each other?”

  “Because I didn’t come here to talk. I came here to sell.”

  He folds his great arms over his chest and looks down at me with unreserved irritation. “Your leg is hurt.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Let me fix it for you. We have tools that can knit bone in seconds.”