Synnr's Kiss: Fated Mate Alien Romance (Zulir Warrior Mates Book 4) Read online

  Synnr’s Kiss

  Kate Rudolph

  Synnr’s Kiss © Kate Rudolph 2021.

  Cover design by Kate Rudolph.

  All rights reserved. No part of this story may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the copyright holder, except in the case of brief quotations embodied within critical reviews and articles.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Kate Rudolph.

  www.katerudolph.net

  Created with Vellum

  Synnr’s Kiss

  This series is also available in audio!

  Synnr’s Saint

  Synnr’s Hope

  Synnr’s Spark

  Synnr’s Kiss

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  About Synnr’s Kiss

  There's no going back from abduction…

  Luci hates that most of her friends see her as fragile and in need of protection, rather than the strong woman she's growing into. Everyone but Ax, that is. She doesn't want a relationship. But she's more than happy to spend her time with the gorgeous warrior until unexpected intrigue forces them closer than ever.

  Ax will protect his Match…

  Luci owns Ax's heart before he realizes he's given it to her, but telling her that may send her running. When they're stuck together on an unplanned journey, Ax will do everything it takes to keep his mate safe. But she's stronger than she looks and she's not about to let Apsyns torture her… again.

  As danger swirls around them, so do the intense emotions they've been avoiding. To get back home they'll need to rely on each other, but facing their feelings may be even more frightening than fighting the Apsyns determined to end them.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  What’s to read next: Soulless

  Also by Kate Rudolph

  About Kate Rudolph

  1

  Luci: It’s really sexy when you flare your wings like that. Do you ever use them when…

  Ax: When what?

  Luci: When you’re being intimate.

  The scent of danger hung in the air as Axitzar Sube breathed deep. Kilrym was dark tonight. Its moon, Aorsa, wouldn’t give up any light during this war.

  No. Ax was too poetic. The Synnrs of Aorsa cared about the light; the moon itself was dark by nature and had a moon cycle that paid no attention to wars and kingdoms.

  And Ax didn't have time to think more about that. He stood on a rooftop and looked down at the streetlights below him. It was quiet out, but the promise of violence was heavy in every breath he took.

  Something thumped behind him and he spun, wings out and his spark ready to shoot.

  An Apsyn in body armor with gigantic purple wings made of electricity flared out to their fullest stood in an attack stance behind him. The Apsyn didn't give Ax time to do anything but fight.

  Ax was clumsy as a blast of electricity hit him on the arm. He knew how to do this. He had been playing with his spark for years and years. But now he had to target the soldier, not play like a boy. The spark was intrinsic to all Zulir, but he still needed to practice.

  He channeled his power in front of him in a strong blast that sent the Apsyn flying back and tumbling off the edge of the roof. Good. They couldn't quite use their wings to fly, so even if the Apsyn survived he would need to climb the seven stories of the building to get back up.

  But Ax didn’t have a moment to rest. A second Apsyn appeared, followed quickly by a third. They traded blows and blasts, and Ax managed to hit one of them with a critical shot before the second one hit him. Ax stumbled back to his own portion of the ledge, arms flailing to keep his balance as his feet scuttled against loose gravel.

  He managed to put up a shield at the last minute to stop more blasts from taking him out, but this Apsyn wouldn't stop, and Ax didn't have any backup coming. He was cornered and out of options.

  He looked around frantically, hoping for some sort of way out of the situation, but that wasn't going to happen.

  Ax tipped backwards, wings flaring wide to guide the fall. But as he began to soar downwards, the blast of the enemy Apsyn’s spark ripped through him. Ax screamed in pain and lost his concentration and his hold on his wings as they dissolved and let him free fall seven stories down to the dingy street.

  Before Ax could hit the ground, the hologram dissolved around him.

  Ax wasn't free falling off of a roof on Kilrym. He was standing in a military facility in the city of Osais on Aorsa, the moon of Kilrym, and training for the war that was already raging.

  Solan Zadra stood at the edge of the hologram field, arms crossed and a sour look on his face. "Did you want to commit suicide? Or were you hoping to magically gain the ability to teleport?" he asked before grabbing a towel and tossing it to Ax. The light caught on Solan’s new mating tattoo, the design carefully integrated with the tattoo he’d had before meeting his Match.

  Ax wiped some of the sweat off of himself and swung his arms around to stretch his bunched up muscles. "It wasn't like I had another option," he said in his own defense. He only had so much power in his spark. And he doubted that the Apsyns would have stopped coming. What was the point of wings if they couldn't jump off a building every so often?

  Solan didn’t like his excuse. "We train so you can learn to spot other options."

  "Do you really think we'll have that much time to think when we’re out in the field?" Ax hated that he sounded young. It had only been six months since his first mission, and at twenty-three, he was one of the younger soldiers in Solan’s unit. But he had been deemed incredibly intelligent in the Military Academy, and Ax hated that it didn't seem to transfer over so easily to the field.

  "You learn to adapt if you want to survive," Solan warned before dismissing Ax and letting him go to the locker room.

  Ax changed out of his training clothes and headed for the shower, where he stood for several extra minutes, letting the scalding water wash away some of the shame of a failed training session. He wanted to succeed.

  He wanted to prove that he could do this and make his people proud as they fought this war. The Apsyns and Synnrs had been fighting all of his life in one form or another, and he doubted it would ever stop. But this was his opportunity to make his mark.

  The water started to run cold and Ax stepped out of it. He put on his uniform and glanced at his communicator to see that he was being summoned to Major Ozar's office. She was in charge of the training facility and handed out assignments to test young soldiers. She also sent them to remedial t
raining.

  But Ax tried not to think about that.

  Solan would have mentioned if he thought Ax was at risk of being sent away. One failed training session wasn’t enough to doom him.

  Ax was doing fine. He kept telling himself that as he walked down the narrow hallways of the training facility and into the wider hallways of the officer’s offices. Major Ozar's office was bright, a giant window taking up one of the walls and looking out over the city. She sat behind her desk and was looking at a folder when he came in. She nodded for him to take a seat and he did, waiting quietly for her to acknowledge him.

  "Why haven't you put in your genetic material into the Matching database?" she asked, setting the folder down and fixing him with a targeted glare.

  That wasn't the question that Ax had expected. And he wasn't sure what he was supposed to say. It wasn't a requirement to serve in the military, but most soldiers wanted Matches and scoured the database for potential mates.

  Matched units went farther than single soldiers. But Ax wasn't sure he was ready to be tied down with a Matched partner for life. It was more of a commitment than he was ready for. But he couldn't tell that to his boss. He scrambled for something to say. "It's…"

  "None of my business," Major Ozar cut him off, and Ax could not have been more thankful. He really had no idea what was about to come out of his mouth. She slid the folder across her desk. "You have a new assignment. And I want you to think about Matching because we’re going to need all of the power we can get." It sounded like a suggestion rather than an order, but it was hard to decipher the truth when it came from the major.

  But she was right. Matched pairs were much stronger than single soldiers, and that's why they rose so quickly in the ranks. "You think battle is coming?" War had officially been declared when the Apsyns attacked the Synnr queen during a peace summit. But when Apsyns lived on a planet and Synnrs lived on its moon, there was no obvious battlefield from which to launch hostilities.

  "Of course not." But Major Ozar's words were not a comfort. "This war will be fought on every front."

  This was going to be a war of subterfuge and sabotage, of fights they wouldn't see coming and had little hope to stand against. She was right. They were going to need every bit of power that they could find.

  "Look over at the assignment and report there in the morning," Major Ozar told him. And then he was dismissed.

  Ax had a lot to think about.

  Maybe it was time to find a Match.

  Luci Burke was trying her best to not be intimidated.

  It wasn't working.

  The University of Aorsa was the most prestigious college on the moon, and many Synnrs got the best education possible there. She’d been accepted and was now ready to start college just like so many normal nineteen-year-olds back on Earth.

  Normal. Right. What a joke.

  Luci couldn’t call herself normal at all. Not after being abducted by aliens and forcibly experimented on for months. She’d been rescued six months before, but the nightmares persisted. Nightmares a normal nineteen-year-old couldn’t begin to imagine.

  Luci took a deep breath and tried not to think about that. She was safe. She wasn’t at risk from any Apsyns finding her again. At least she hoped not.

  Sometimes her nightmares told her otherwise. Sometimes she dreamed about being stuck in that lab once more as the Apsyns tried to dissect her and figure out what it meant to be human on a molecular level.

  Those Apsyns were dead. She was safe.

  And she was going to college.

  She lived among the humans who had also been rescued from the Apsyns, and she was the first one to try college. Looking around at all of the people walking across campus, Luci was relieved to see that she wasn’t the only human there, but none of them were her friends.

  Emily, Lena, and Zac were all making their own paths by falling for Synnr warriors. And now all three of them had entered the military in one form or another and were ready to fight the Apsyns in the inevitable war that Luci was sure would wreck what little peace she’d managed to salvage.

  Some of the others had gotten jobs in Osais, but Crowze, a Synnr soldier and one of Zac’s mates, had ensured that none of them needed to work for their meals. They had time to heal.

  Thanks to him, Luci had her spot at the university.

  She had passed all the tests. Thanks to a translation implant, she could read and write in the Zulir language. But Aorsa wasn’t Earth, and Luci was keenly aware of every difference. Even the tutor Crowze had hired to help her pass the entrance exams couldn't make up for a lifetime raised on another planet.

  Luci was looking for the correct building to get to her next class when she bumped into a Synnr woman and almost knocked her over. The woman's wings flared out so she could catch her balance, and she pulled them in almost as quickly.

  Luci wished she'd kept them out. Zulir wings were so freaking cool and she wanted to study them, but it seemed kind of impolite to ask people to display them when they didn't want to. The woman appeared to be a little bit older than Luci, though most people on the campus were. Synnrs went to college later than humans, as a rule. They tended to get some life experience before pursuing higher education. As a matter of fact, Luci appeared to be one of the youngest people on campus.

  Fuck.

  She hated being the youngest. She was the youngest among her human friends and the youngest among the students. Was there anyone on this freaking moon she was older than?

  "Are you alright?" the Zulir woman asked.

  Luci clutched her learning tablet to her chest and nodded, shifting her bag over one shoulder as it threatened to fall. "I'm fine. I'm so sorry." She felt like a klutz and she hated it. She used to be coordinated.

  The woman smiled. "It's all right. You look a little lost."

  She looked so nice that Luci wanted to give her a big hug and beg her to be friends. But that wasn’t something that adults did, so Luci just grimaced. "Is it that obvious? I have to get to math class," she said.

  "Me too. My name is Hanna." She gave Luci an inviting smile. Maybe friendships wouldn’t be as hard as she feared.

  "Luci."

  Hanna, it seemed, knew where to go, and she led Luci into the introductory math class they were both enrolled in. They sat beside each other but didn't have much time to talk before the professor, a Synnr man, came in and started lecturing.

  The numbers didn't look the same as what Luci was used to back on Earth, but the concepts were. It appeared that math was math no matter where she was in the galaxy. It was the first time in Luci's life that she was relieved to be surrounded by numbers.

  They listened to the lecture for about an hour before the professor gave them guidance on what to read before their next class and dismissed them.

  Luci followed Hanna out of the class for no other reason than it seemed that the Zulir woman knew where she was going. "That wasn't too bad, was it?" Hanna asked. "Though I remember what my math scores were like in school. This doesn't bode well."

  "I'm afraid that math is going to be my best subject," Luci admitted. "Numbers are numbers, right? That's about the only thing that I feel comfortable with right now."

  "How's that?" Hanna asked. She looked vaguely concerned at what Luci was saying, but still polite enough not to pry.

  And Luci didn't want her to pry.

  There were plenty of people that knew the whole sad story about her life and what had happened, and she didn't want everyone on campus to find out that she was a poor abducted human and victim of the Apsyns. She wanted them to know her as herself. She didn't want pity, and she didn't want to be the object of curious looks. It had to be obvious that she wasn't from Osais. She didn’t need to add more fuel to that fire.

  "That's just how it is," Luci said and hoped that made sense. She looked around, trying to figure out which building had her next class, when she spotted a group of four soldiers walking across a grassy field. "What's that all about?" They were supposed be safe h
ere. Why were soldiers patrolling the campus?

  "Probably just some of the stuff going on with the war. It's nothing to be worried about," Hanna said, so nonchalantly that Luci had to pause a minute to parse what she was saying. How could she be so unconcerned about a war?

  "I think there's always something to be worried about when it comes to the Apsyns." Luci couldn't keep the fear and disgust out of her voice. The Apsyns had tried to destroy her, and now they were trying to destroy her new home. She wouldn't be happy until this whole thing was over. And maybe not after that, either.

  "Why do you think that?" asked Hanna. She leaned closer to Luci and the look on her face was strange—not quite a smile, but like she was trying to fake it.

  "It's a long story," and Luci wasn't about to tell it.

  Hanna's communicator beeped, and she shot Luci an apologetic smile. "I have another class across campus. It was good to meet you. See you tomorrow." And then she was off.

  Luci watched her go and then checked her schedule one more time to see where she was headed. She was going to need to study a campus map if she had any hope of surviving the year.

  When she looked back up, Ax was standing right in front of her, and her heart skipped a beat. She hadn’t seen him since her birthday party, but that wasn’t the entire story. Her cheeks flamed as she thought of that night and all the possibility it entailed. But he wasn’t supposed to show up on campus. There were boundaries.