Aliens’ Vice by Alexandra Norton

“There was new maturity in her dark eyes. New confidence that wavered only briefly. A sudden urge to dismantle it—dismantle her—rose in me. Could she tell?”

LAYLA
It’s been ten years since Kak came into my life. We had a rough start—sharing your body with a possessive alien who comes to you in passionate lucid dreams is no walk in the park.
I tried to fight it at first, but together we’ve grown into the perfect organism: two souls in one body. Perfectlysynced and molded to each other’s needs. We made it work, and he’s mine.
But our comfortable life is thrown into upheaval by the unprecedented return of Kuthil Ash Kharn, the alien who implanted a shard of himself inside me all those years ago—the shard that became Kak.
Is it even him? Or has a decade back on his Home world turned him into someone…something… else?
There’s a new darkness inside the newcomer that’s impossible to ignore, yet it draws me like a moth to a flame. I want to run the other way and continue my idyllic life with Kak, but I can’t. Not yet. Because I just learned that people are dying. And the aliens seem to be involved.
Now, I’ve got one last job to do. And I need Kuthil Ash Kharn’s help to do it.
Will Kak and I get through this? Or will the inexplicable pull Kuthil Ash Kharn has on me fracture what took us a decade to build?