She didn't know how long she had stared at the adjacent wall. It must've been a long time because she had memorized how many grooves were in the white paneling. Sixteen grooves connected the large square pieces. They were always clean, shining under the artificial lighting high above.

Even through the huge glass dome she was kept in she could see the forty-five tubes. Each one bathed the room in perpetual day.

At this point, she forgot what darkness looked like — craved it, just to remember.

Artemis wanted to see more than just the space she was forcibly kept in. It had been a long time since she still had a will to fight. A will to escape back to her old life. Her old life being full of paintbrushes and blank canvases yet to be transformed.

In her prison she could stare at four blank walls that surrounded the bubble of her cage. Here there was only the clinical white on white and little colors to admire.

Her captors had left her to sleep off the injections they gave her for the ultrasound. An ultrasound that drove a stake of fear into her heart, ice flowing in her veins in its wake. This wasn't the way she wanted this to happen. A place like this was no place for a child. A child that had been created when they implanted her with the semen of an alien.

Doctor More had been ecstatic.

He had gone into detail how she was the first successful implantation in trying to hybridize humans with a creature from outer space. One they called...a Predator. Yautja — such a weird word — was what he claimed they were truly called. The father of the child that grew within her was an alien, one who was also being forcibly held in this stark white cage.

Somewhere in this place was an alien, a living breathing alien. Every time the scientists would see her they would chatter amongst themselves with excitement about the "creature" and how he was a "monster". She had never seen the alien and was curious to see what he looked like. Maybe it would help her to gain back some strength to claw her way back to her old life. Or maybe, what she really wanted to know, she would find out what their lab-born child would look like.

Despite her child being implanted within her, she felt a motherly bond that grew in strength. This baby was hers and she would not let them take it away from her.

They didn't feel the little kicks. They didn't have to deal with the side-effects of growing a life inside of them nor did they get to feel the bond that formed between mother and child. All of those Ivy League assholes hadn't the faintest clue the means a mother would go to protect her child, her baby.

Artemis knew for a fact that she was four months along, the little life in her growing rapidly. Many hours were spent lying in bed with her rounding tummy on display as she rubbed it in gentle circles. She would talk to it and sing. Amazingly, this helped her to keep her sanity. At least the baby seemed to like her affection since she'd get strong little kicks from wherever it was inside of her womb at the moment.

It was this that kept her going now. This child gave her strength. She would protect it with every ounce of strength she had.

• • •

Rhage watched from the shadows as the door to his prison opened. Standing on the other side were three large guards with another behind them carrying a small white clothed shape.

A human woman, he saw, whom they placed on the floor with her back facing to him. One whiff of her scent had ice chilling his veins. He finally understood the reason behind being held captive and it filled him with rage.

The door shut behind the humans and he was left to sit there, only able to study the unconscious female in the center of the room. A click alerted him to his hands and ankles being freed of their shackles.

This was a test.

Did they expect him to kill her? A pregnant human? To do so would be dishonorable. The very act would label him a Bad Blood. It would also be worsened since the female carried his scent, a natural occurrence due to his pup growing inside of her. These humans were idiots. They knew nothing.

Crossing the room in silence he knelt on the other side of her so he could see her face.

Being careful to not scratch her with his black claws, he swept her dark hair out of the way. A soft gently shaped face slept peacefully before him, a smattering of freckles dotting her face. Dark thick eyebrows framed long dark lashes that fanned across her delicate cheek bones. Every part of her was soft and so very different than the many females he had sired pups with previously. Her skin was pale, the result of her being kept locked up such as he, he concluded. This poor female had been bred with his seed like cattle.

In her deep slumber an arm cradled her gently curved belly. With his sensitive hearing he heard the tiny thumping of his pup's heart.

Several emotions swirled within his great chest. All of them a sign of weakness that would crumble his resolve. At least one of them was worthy of giving in to.

It was rage. Rage for this female's will and honor taken away from her.

To attack the weak was dishonorable.

When his careful planning finally paid off there would be no survivors but the female carrying his pup and himself. He would take her in and protect her. Doing this he would work to restore her stolen honor and take part in raising the hybrid. In his society it was the females that raised the young, the males largely absent from their young's' lives, but with her he would be her protector so it would be different.

He so very much wanted to lift the fabric hiding her maternal swell and assure his pup that his sire wouldn't abandon it.

For now he would restrain his urges, urges that had never been there before about a pup. To touch the female while she was asleep, vulnerable and unknowing, would be dishonorable — he was no dishonorable male. Elders such as himself knew better. They knew how to carry themselves honorably in every situation Paya threw at them. Cetanu, the Black Warrior, knocked at his door constantly but by Paya's grace and his own strength he had kept death at bay.

Now, in the face of a new situation, he was to learn new lessons that he didn't know he needed to learn. Perhaps he was finally reaping the benefits of an honorable and decorated life.

Here in these four walls where he was kept in partial darkness he had meditated much, each time a long mental exercise in training himself. Pushing the limits of his resolve and to quell the rage that he had carried for centuries as a youth. That rage and thirst for blood had been trampled long ago but since being held here by the humans it had resurfaced.

What kind of Elder Hunter allowed himself to be captured? His weakness was the reason. The reason why he was in this predicament to begin with. His weakness was why there was now a human that carried his pup. This pup was not made out of the instinctual need to breed or even love, as the humans did in their society.

Rhage's pup would be born of a weak sire.

For the first time in a long time he was upset, upset with his own failings.

The female was suffering because of him. To her kind, having a pup was an emotional experience and the mother would stay in its life until her meeting with death. Humans thrived on emotion and didn't have that stamped out like his at a young age. Their society was different than hers and he truly felt sorrow for her.

These scientists would try to take the pup once it was born and he knew it would tear her apart. A bond formed between a human and her unborn pup, the bond only strengthening when she first held it.

Whoever she was, she didn't deserve this.

His plan of escape now included her. There was much she would go through and he would have to strengthen his resolve and quell the unwanted emotions in order to get them both through his mistake. She would have to be strong for the trials ahead.

The female began to stir from her slumber. Soft throaty noises filled the silence of his cell as she began to wake up. They were noises he had never heard before, his predatory instincts taking over and making him more watchful of the small human.

As silent as a jungle cat he retreated back to the shadowy corner of his cell where he sat upon his provided cot, the metal groaning beneath his weight. He leaned against the wall watching the female sit up in the middle of the room. Her dark hair fell to curtain the opposite side of her face, a hand reaching up to sweep back the tresses that blocked his view that faced him. The beating of her heart increased slightly while she took in her surroundings.

From his cloak of darkness Rhage sat and waited. Waited for her to notice his presence.

• • •

Artemis awoke to darkness. She was in a cell similar to hers — only this one was just a large rectangular room and not a dome, large parts of the space was cast in heavy shadows. The lighting was low and most of the room was dark. It was very quiet, too.

Too quiet.

Wrapping a protective arm around her middle she rose to her feet and tried to peer into the dark shadows of the room. A rapid clicking noise, similar to a woodpecker or frog, drew her attention to the far corner where a bed much larger than hers sat. Twin blazing green eyes gazed back at her from the shadows; the almost lime-green orbs staring into her very soul.

Fearfully she took a step back when she noticed how inhuman they were and how they were at a height taller than her.

More clicking filled the room and mixing with her rapid pants as she struggled to not scream. The scream wouldn't come out no matter how hard she tried. Words and even sound completely escaped her.

Was this the alien Dr. More and his colleagues raved so much about? It had to be!

Those eyes had a predatory nature to them, similar to a hawk or even a tiger, watching with an intensity that sent shivers through her body. Sitting in shadow she could faintly see the outline of the alien's body. He was one big mother fucker, too. A vague outline of his body highlighted bulging biceps and a super jacked body to go with them.

The alien sat there in complete silence just...watching her. He sat so still that if it weren't for the occasional blinking of his eyes then she would've taken him for a statue instead of a living being.

This...Yautja?...was fucking massive. He was easily eight-feet tall, at the most. The male creature was not someone she wanted to piss off judging by how big he was. Did he know that she carried his child? Was he able to smell her fear?

She sure fucking hoped he couldn't smell her fear. She didn't know how he would react.

There had been a few times she heard the scientists talking about how his species were scary trophy hunters — their entire civilization obsessed with hunting for glory in some kind of species-specific pissing contest between each other. They were supposedly very tribal despite having such technology that far exceeded what humans were capable of. Frequently she had heard talk that when the Colonial Marines ran into the Yautja that it was bloody and full of casualties.

And here she was, locked in a room with one of them.

Artemis was four months pregnant, unarmed, and with no way to escape. They had locked her here with a feared alien species...who was also the father of her unborn child...their unborn child.

She let that sink in for a few moments as he continued to stare her down like a zoo animal.

Did his kind have paternal instincts? A need to protect their own no matter what? Surely the fact that she carried his child meant that he wouldn't hurt her...right?

Drawing a deep breath and steeling her nerves, she took a shaky step forward. Her chest rose and fell rapidly as she worked to calm herself in the face of such a scary being. She had to be courageous, strong, for both herself and her baby. Instead of cowering in fear, she was going to stand tall and show him the might of a woman who faced the personification of death.

The massive Yautja said nothing as she stopped at the outer edge of the shadow he concealed himself in.

Exhaling the deep breath she had held she met his lime-green gaze head on. She trampled the nausea that rose in her stomach and faced death himself. The father of her child.