The First Starfighter by Grace Goodwin (lightweight ebook reader txt) 📕

as if someone wasn’t meant to be staying long enough to need anything. Or they just didn’t care what condition their prisoners were in over the long term.

So much had happened since I arrived on Velerion. Had it only been less than two days? I’d been woken from sleep—on Earth—to find Alex at my door. My fighting partner in a video game. He told me it wasn’t a game, but a training simulation and that I was the only person so far to complete it.

I was the first Starfighter.

God, I’d been blinded by Alex’s good looks because I took longer to pick out a bra than I did to agree to go with him to another planet. Another planet!

Maybe I’d been thinking with my hormones. My nipples had spoken for me. Something to make me feel less like an idiot for agreeing to come to space.

I stopped, growled, then spun around and walked the ten feet the other way. He’d said we were pair bonded. We’d said the vows. He’d pricked me in the back of the neck. I had a tattoo that matched his.

I stopped and put my hand to the spot. I still hadn’t even seen it!

Then I’d had sex with him, after a little make-out session in a control room. I’d gone into it with full consent. Not once but twice. The second time, we’d gone at it all night long. More than once. The number of orgasms and positions—

God, I was worse than my mother! She picked men just as fast. Heck, she’d even gotten a tattoo with the guy just as fast. And she’d been screwed over, too.

Again. And again. It was like the first sixteen years of my life I’d learned literally nothing.

Trust hot men. If the orgasms are good, you don’t have to use your brain.

Gah! I wanted to beat my head against the rock wall. More, I wanted to beat Alex’s head against the rocks. The floor. With my fists. I hated him and I was in love with him and that lovely little factoid made me despise myself almost as much as I hated him. Almost.

Sure, my mother had made mistakes. Yet Mom hadn’t gone to another fucking planet. And Mom had been drunk as a fucking skunk when she brought her loser boyfriends home. I’d been stone-cold sober the entire time, which meant I’d had a clear head. Good judgment. Riiiiiiight.

Oh, and she hadn’t been with a guy who turned out to be… a double agent? A spy? Definitely an asshole. Alex was Velerion, but he was on the bad guys’ side. He gave me to Queen Raya. Literally drove right up to her front door and delivered me.

Ha! For once, I was the package!

I laughed, wiped a hand down my face. I had to go through it all again because it should be in a book.

The perfect guy picked me up and took me to space, fucked me into believing everything he said, then delivered me to the Evil Queen so I could rat out not only Velerion, but Earth?

Fink or die.

No Starfighter skills were going to get me out of this one. I couldn’t fly myself to freedom from this cell. I couldn’t promise anything, because I sure as shit wasn’t going to have her blow up either Velerion or Earth.

Hell, no. I wasn’t going to hand her Mia and Lily, who were going to be following me soon. Since they would finish the training program, they’d likely be the first ones she’d kill.

After me, of course.

Alex hadn’t just betrayed me. He’d betrayed his planet, the other planets that would fall after. Every would-be Starfighter doing the training program now would be targets.

I was angry. Furious. Pissed. How dare he turn against such good people! Yeah, humans were also assholes, but that didn’t mean they needed to have their planet blown up.

I dropped back down onto the rock bed. Defeated. Crushed. I’d trusted Alex. Pushed away all my reasoning when it came to him. Heck, my body was still achy from how thoroughly he’d taken me the night before.

A bonded pair was just a term. Bondmate a title. Nothing more. I might be tied to him through Velerion customs, but he wasn’t mine any more than I was his. He gave me to Queen Raya.

I’d rather die than crawl back to him in any way. And, it seemed, dying was looking like the best option.

Alexius, Private Quarters, Asteroid Syrax Base

“My bondmate is going to die,” I said, seething. Spinning on my heel, I swiped everything off the table before me. Papers and dishes went flying, crashing to the floor.

Nave and Trax didn’t blink. They’d been undercover long enough that a rage didn’t even rile them. It was fucking hard to pretend to be evil all the time when at your heart, deep in your soul, one longed for good. For peace.

We were in our shared quarters on Syrax, assigned when we’d first embedded ourselves within the Dark Fleet. We weren’t hiding on the asteroid base. We were welcomed because they thought we were loyal to Queen Raya. Traitors of Velerion.

I’d been just like them, pretending to be a double agent, feeding them information carefully curated by my commanding officer over the course of months. Just enough to make them believe we were traitors, not enough to endanger anything vital to Velerion. We’d had to buddy up to members of the Dark Fleet. Wear their fucking uniforms. Work our asses off integrating into society here on Syrax, carefully learning about what the plans were for Velerion and the rest of the universe. Queen Raya’s plan for domination was what nightmares were made of.

And often filled mine.

I’d had to leave Syrax to claim Jamie from Earth. I sure as fuck hadn’t told them the reason for doing so. I’d lied to General Surano, my leader on Syrax, and said I’d been called back by General Aryk, my official commander on Arturri. That was a lie. I hadn’t