Close Obsession

Chapter 1

Chapter One“Welcome home, darling,” Korum said softly as the green landscape of Lenkarda appeared beneath their feet, and the ship landed as quietly as it had taken off.

Her heart hammering in her chest, Mia slowly got up off the seat that had cradled her body so comfortably. Korum was already up, and he extended his hand to her. She hesitated for a second, and then accepted it, clutching his palm with a death grip. The lover she’d thought of as the enemy for the past month was now her only source of comfort in this strange land.

They exited the aircraft and walked a few steps before Korum stopped. Turning back toward the ship, he made a small gesture with his free hand. All of a sudden, the air around the pod began to shimmer, and Mia again heard the low humming sound that signified nanomachines at work.

“You’re building something else?” she asked him, surprised.

He shook his head with a smile. “No, I’m un-building.”

And as Mia watched, layers of ivory material appeared to peel off the surface of the ship, dissolving in front of her eyes. Within a minute, the ship was gone in its entirety, all of its components turning back into the individual atoms from which they’d been made back in New York.

Despite her stress and exhaustion, Mia couldn’t help but marvel at the miracle she’d just witnessed. The ship that had just brought them thousands of miles in a matter of minutes had completely disintegrated, as though it had never existed in the first place.

“Why did you do that?” she asked Korum. “Why un-build it?”

“Because there’s no need for it to exist and take up space right now,” he explained. “I can create it again whenever we need to use it.”

It was true, he could. Mia had witnessed it herself only a few minutes ago on the rooftop of his Manhattan apartment. And now he had un-created it. The pod that had transported them here no longer existed.

As the full implications of that hit her, her heart rate spiked again, and she suddenly found it hard to breathe.

A wave of panic washed over her.

She was now stranded in Costa Rica, in the main K colony—completely dependent on Korum for everything. He had made the ship that had brought them there, and he had just unmade it. If there was another way out of Lenkarda, Mia didn’t know about it.

What if he had lied to her earlier? What if she would never see her family again?

She must’ve looked as terrified as she felt because Korum squeezed her hand gently. The feel of his large, warm hand was oddly reassuring. “Don’t worry,” he said softly. “It will be all right, I promise.”

Mia focused on taking deep breaths, trying to beat back the panic. She had no choice but to trust him now. Even back in New York, he could do anything he wanted with her. There was no reason for him to make her promises that he didn’t intend to keep.

Still, the irrational fear gnawed at her insides, adding to the unsavory brew of emotions boiling in her. The knowledge that Korum had been manipulating her all along, using her to crush the Resistance, was like acid in her stomach, burning her from the inside. Everything he’d done, everything he’d said—it had all been a part of his plan. While she had been agonizing over spying on him, he had probably been secretly laughing at her pathetic attempts to outwit him, to help the cause he’d known was doomed to failure from the very beginning.

She felt like such an i***t now for going along with everything the Resistance had told her. It had seemed to make so much sense at the time; she’d felt so noble helping her kind fight against the invaders who had taken over her planet. And instead, she’d unwittingly participated in a power grab by a small group of Ks.

Why hadn’t she stopped to think, to fully analyze the situation?

Korum had told her that the entire Resistance movement had been wrong, completely misguided in their mission. And despite herself, Mia had believed him.

The Ks hadn’t killed the freedom fighters who had attacked their Centers—and that simple fact told her a lot about the Krinar and their views on humans. If the Ks had truly been the monsters the Resistance portrayed them to be, none of the fighters would have survived.

At the same time, she didn’t fully trust Korum’s explanation of what a charl was. When John had spoken about his kidnapped sister, there had been too much pain in his voice for it all to be a lie. And Korum’s own actions toward her fit much better with John’s explanation than with his own. Her lover had denied that the Ks kept humans as their pleasure slaves, yet he’d given her very little choice about anything in their relationship thus far. He had wanted her, and, just like that, her life was no longer her own. She’d been swept off her feet and into his TriBeCa penthouse—and now here she was, in the K Center in Costa Rica, following him toward some unknown destination.

As much as she dreaded the answer to her question, she had to know. “Is Dana here?” Mia asked carefully, not wanting to provoke his temper. “John’s sister? John said she’s a charl in Lenkarda...”

“No,” Korum said, shooting her an unreadable look. “John was misinformed—I’m guessing, deliberately—by the Keiths.”

“She’s not a charl?”

“No, Mia, she was never a charl in the true sense of the word. She was what you would call a xeno—a human obsessed with all things Krinar. Her family never knew that. When she met Lotmir in Mexico, she begged to go with him, and he agreed to take her for some period of time. The last I heard, she got someone else to take her to Krina. I imagine she’s quite happy there, given her preferences. As to why she left without a word to her family, I think it probably has something to do with her father.”

“Her father?”

“Dana and John haven’t had a very happy childhood,” Korum said, and she could feel his hand tightening on hers. “Their father is someone who should’ve been exterminated long ago. Based on the intelligence we’ve gathered about your Resistance contact, John’s father has a particular fetish that involves very young children—”

“He’s a pedophile?” Mia asked quietly, bile rising in her throat at the thought.

Korum nodded. “Indeed. I believe his own children were the primary recipients of his affections.”

Sickened and filled with intense pity for John and Dana, Mia looked away. If this was true, then she couldn’t blame Dana for wanting to get away, to leave everything connected with her old life behind. Although Mia’s own family was normal and loving, she’d had some interactions with victims of domestic and child abuse as part of her internship last summer. She knew about the scars it left on the child’s psyche. When they got older, some of these children turned to drugs or alcohol to dull their pain. Dana had apparently turned to s*x with Ks.

Of course, this was assuming that Korum wasn’t lying to her about the whole thing.

Thinking about it, Mia decided that he probably wasn’t. Why would he need to? It’s not like she could break up with him even if she found out that Dana was held here against her will.

“And what about John?” she asked. “Is he all right? And Leslie?”

“I assume so,” he said, and his voice was noticeably cooler. “Neither one has been captured yet.”

Relieved, Mia decided to leave it at that. She had a suspicion that talking to Korum about the Resistance was not the smartest course of action for her right now. Instead, she refocused on their surroundings.

“Where are we going?” she asked, looking around. They were walking through what seemed like an untouched forest. Twigs and branches crunched under her feet, and she could hear nature sounds everywhere—birds, some kind of buzzing insects, rustling leaves. She had no idea what he had in mind for the rest of the day, but she just wanted to bury her head under a blanket and hide for several hours. This morning’s events and the resulting emotional upheaval had left her completely drained, and she badly needed some quiet time to come to terms with everything that happened.

“To my house,” Korum replied, turning his head toward her. There was a small smile on his face again. “It’s only a short walk from here. You’ll be able to relax and get some rest once we’re there.”

Mia shot him a suspicious look. His answer was uncannily close to what she had just been thinking. “Can you read my mind?” she asked, horrified at the possibility.

He grinned, showing the dimple on his left cheek. “That would be nice—but no. I just know you well enough by now to see when you’re exhausted.”

Relieved, Mia nodded and focused on putting one foot in front of another as they walked through the forest. Despite everything, that dazzling smile of his sent a warm sensation all throughout her body.

You’re an i***t, Mia.

How could she still feel like this after what he had put her through, after he had manipulated her like that? What kind of a person was she, to fall in love with an alien who had completely taken over her life?

She felt disgusted with herself, yet she couldn’t help it. When he smiled like that, she could almost forget everything that happened in the sheer joy of simply being with him. Underneath all the bitterness, she was fiercely glad that the Resistance had failed—that he was still in her life.

Her thoughts kept turning to what he’d said earlier... to his admission that he’d grown to care for her. He hadn’t intended for it to happen, he’d said, and Mia realized that she’d been right to fear and resist him in the beginning—that he had indeed regarded her as a plaything at first, as a little human toy he could use and discard at his leisure. Of course, “caring” was far from a declaration of love, but it was more than she’d ever expected to hear from him. Like a balm applied to a festering wound, his words made her feel just a tiny bit better, giving her hope that maybe it would be all right after all, that maybe he would keep his promises and she would see her family again—

A squishy sensation under her foot jerked her out of that thought. Startled, Mia looked down and saw that she had stepped on a large, crunchy bug. “Eww!”

“What’s the matter?” Korum asked, surprised.

“I just stepped on something,” Mia explained in disgust, trying to wipe her sneaker on the nearest patch of grass.

He looked amused. “Don’t tell me... Are you afraid of insects?”

“I wouldn’t say afraid, necessarily,” Mia said cautiously. “It’s more that I find them really gross.”

He laughed. “Why? They’re just another set of living creatures, just like you and me.”

Mia shrugged and decided against explaining it to him. She wasn’t sure she fully understood it herself. Instead, she resolved to pay closer attention to her surroundings. Despite growing up in Florida, she wasn’t really comfortable with tropical nature in its raw form. She much preferred neatly paved paths in beautifully landscaped parks, where she could sit on a bench and enjoy the fresh air with minimal bug encounters.

“You don’t have any roads or sidewalks?” she asked Korum with consternation, jumping over what looked like an ant hill.

He smiled at her indulgently. “No. We like our environment to be as close to its original state as possible.”

Mia wrinkled her nose, not liking that at all. Her sneakers were already covered with dirt, and she was thankful that the wet season in Costa Rica had not officially begun yet. Otherwise, she imagined they would be trekking through swampland. Given the highly advanced state of Krinar technology, she found it strange that they chose to live in such primitive conditions.

A minute later, they entered another clearing, a much larger one this time. An unusual cream-colored structure stood in the middle. Shaped like an elongated cube with rounded corners, it had no windows or doors—or any visible openings at all.

“This is your house?”

Mia had seen structures like this one on the three-dimensional map in Korum’s office earlier today. They’d looked very strange and alien to her from a distance, and that impression was even stronger now that she was standing next to one. It just looked so incredibly foreign, so different from anything she’d ever seen in her life.

Korum nodded, leading her toward the building. “Yes, this is my home—and now it’s yours too.”

Mia swallowed nervously, her anxiety growing at the last part of his statement. Why did he keep saying that? Did he really intend for her to live here permanently? He’d promised to bring her back to New York to finish her senior year of college, and Mia desperately clung to that thought as she stared at the pale walls of the house looming in front of her.

As they approached, a part of the wall suddenly disintegrated in front of them, creating an opening large enough for them to walk through.

Mia gasped in surprise, and Korum smiled at her reaction. “Don’t worry,” he said. “This is an intelligent building. It anticipates our needs and creates doorways as needed. It’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“Will it do that for anyone or just you?” Mia asked, stopping before the opening. She knew it was illogical, her reluctance to go in. If Korum intended to keep her prisoner, there was nothing she could do about it—she was already in an alien colony with no way to escape. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to voluntarily enter her new “home” unless she was sure she could leave it on her own.

Apparently intuiting the source of her concern, Korum gave her a reassuring look. “It will do it for you as well. You’ll be able to go in and out whenever you want, although it might be best if you stayed close to me for the first few weeks... at least until you get used to our way of life and I have a chance to introduce you to others.”

Exhaling in relief, Mia looked up at him. “Thanks,” she said quietly, some of her panic fading.

Maybe being here wouldn’t be so bad after all. If he really did bring her back to New York at the end of summer, then her sojourn in Lenkarda might prove to be exactly that—a couple of months spent at an incredible place that few humans could even imagine, with the extraordinary creature she’d fallen in love with.

Feeling slightly better about the situation, Mia stepped through the opening, entering a Krinar dwelling for the first time.

The sight that greeted her inside was utterly unexpected.

Mia had been bracing for something alien and high-tech—maybe floating chairs similar to the ones in the ship that had transported them here. Instead, the room looked just like Korum’s penthouse back in New York, right down to the plush cream-colored couch. Mia flushed at the memory of what had taken place on that couch just a little while ago. Only the walls were different; they seemed to be made of the same transparent material as the ship, and she could see the greenery outside instead of the Hudson River.

“You have the same furniture here?” she asked in surprise, letting go of his hand and taking a step forward to gape at the strange sight. She couldn’t imagine that furniture stores made deliveries to K Centers—but then he could probably just conjure up whatever he wanted using their nanotechnology.

“Not exactly,” Korum said, smiling at her. “I set this up ahead of your arrival. I thought it might be easier for you to acclimate if you could relax in familiar surroundings for the first couple of weeks. After you feel more comfortable here, I can show you how I usually live.”

Mia blinked at him. “You set it up just for me? When?”

Even with rapid fabrication—or whatever Korum had called the technology that let him make things out of nothing—he probably still needed a little time to do all this. When would he have had a chance to even think about this, given the events of this morning? She tried to picture him making a couch while capturing the Keiths and almost snickered out loud.

“A little while ago,” Korum said ambiguously, shrugging a little.

Mia frowned at him. “So... not today?” For some reason, the timing of this gesture seemed important.

“No, not today.”

Mia stared at him. “You were planning this for a while? Me being here, I mean?”

“Of course,” he said casually. “I plan everything.”

Mia took a deep breath. “And if I hadn’t been in danger from the Resistance? Would you have still brought me here?”

He looked at her, his expression indecipherable. “Does it really matter?” he asked softly.

It mattered to Mia, but she wasn’t up to having that discussion right now. So she just shrugged and looked away, studying the room. It was somewhat comforting to be someplace that at least looked familiar, and she had to admit that it was a thoughtful thing to do—creating a human-like environment for her in his house.

“Are you hungry?” Korum asked, regarding her with a smile.

Making food for her seemed to be one of his favorite activities; he had even fed her this morning when she’d been afraid he would kill her for helping the Resistance. It was one of the things that had always made her feel so conflicted about him, about their relationship in general. Despite his arrogance, he could be incredibly caring and considerate. It drove Mia nuts, the fact that he’d never truly acted like the villain she’d thought him to be.

She shook her head. “No, thanks. Still full from the sandwich earlier.” And she was. All she wanted to do was lie down and try to give her brain a rest.

“Okay then,” Korum said. “You can relax here for a bit. I have to go out for an hour or so. Do you think you’ll be all right by yourself?”

Mia nodded. “Do you have a bed somewhere?” she asked.

“Of course. Here, come with me.”

Mia followed Korum as he walked down a familiar hallway to the bedroom that was identical to the one he had in TriBeCa. She noted the location of the bathroom as well.

“So everything here is stuff I know how to use?” she asked.

“Yes, pretty much,” he said, reaching out to briefly stroke her cheek. His fingers felt hot against her skin. “The bed is probably more comfortable than you’re used to because it utilizes the same intelligent technology as the chair in the ship and the walls of this house. I figured you wouldn’t mind that. Don’t be scared if it adjusts to your body, okay?”

Despite the tension squeezing her temples, Mia smiled, remembering how comfortable the seat in the aircraft had been. “Okay, that sounds good. I’m looking forward to trying it.”

“I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.” His eyes gleamed with some unknown emotion. “Take a nap if you want, and I’ll be back soon.”

Bending down, he gave her a chaste kiss on the forehead and walked out, leaving her alone in an intelligent dwelling inside the alien settlement.

Less than a mile away, the Krinar watched as his nemesis arrived with his charl.

The gentle way Korum held her hand as he led her toward his house was so out of character that the K almost chuckled to himself. This was an interesting development, the involvement of a human girl. Would it change anything? Somehow, he doubted it.

His enemy would not be swayed from his course, certainly not by some little human.

No, there was only one way to save the human race.

And he was the only one who could do it.