The Claiming

by Imogen Keeper

  “What’s your plan?”

  “She’s winding out of a heat. I’m taking her underground. I’ll be in and out. But I’ve got the customs guy ready to go. I need you to meet his shipment. His daughter and his wife will be inside it, on their way to Tammin. I offered safe passage.”

  “Done.”

  “I’m going to send you contact information for Shane and Freysa. You can trust them.”

  “Shane’s an asshole.”

  “So are you.”

  Tor laughed. “What else?”

  “Manivietto knows I’ve got men. He took down some of my businesses yesterday. While trying to get the woman back, Shane played my hand. Manivietto can’t know how many, but he knows there’s a presence here.”

  There was a longer pause. Another Klym hum, this one louder and distinctly irritable.

  Against his will, an image rose in his mind of Tor having stopped her from whatever she was doing to him.

  “How many?”

  “Shane showed up with forty of my men, took her back from Polizei.”

  Tor hissed, whether in reaction to his words or Klym, Sanger couldn’t say.

  “What will he do?”

  “Arm up. Pull in armies from the countryside. Increase night patrols, try to smoke me out. I’m pulling men, too. The main thrust of the battle will be in the city anyway.”

  “His men know the city better than we will.”

  “My men know this city better than anyone.”

  Tor was silent for a long moment, thinking thoughts of his own. “She worth it?”

  “Is Klym?”

  There was a long pause of silence. “That you would even compare the two, tells me everything I need to know.”

  Sanger stopped, one block short of the market, watching for any Polizei activity. There was none.

  Sanger headed just to the other side of the market, a dilapidated street front with a broken door and a caved-in wall. “Go finish whatever you were doing to Klym.”

  Tor didn’t bother saying goodbye.

  Sanger pulled open the door, and went to the far back, lifted a rotten collapsed crate, opened a hatch, and climbed down into Didgermmion’s bowels.

  THE UNDERGROUND tunnels ran along an underground river, that had to be at least two-thousand years old. The walls were partially eroded concreate, climbing with iridescent powdery fungus that glowed an unmistakable bold emerald green. Wherever the fungus wasn’t, the cave’s walls were draped with dark-dwelling flowering white vines. He liked it down here, actually. The water kept the temperature cool, no matter how hot it got above, the vines kept the air smelling fresh, and the fungus kept it lit. It was a subterranean haven from Didgermmion heat.

  A thousand of his best soldiers lived down here, in barracks they’d cleaned out. The river led all the way to the closest farm, where they had more soldiers stashed.

  He greeted a few as he walked. Some of these men had been with him since before Plaia’s death, some of them had lost their own wives in his father and Manivietto’s massacre. It hurt to look at them, which was why he usually avoided coming down here, but now he forced himself to meet their eyes without flinching at the memories.

  These were men he’d travelled with, fought beside, bled for. And he’d been avoiding them, avoiding everything that had any chance of triggering memories. They’d stayed loyal though, that was the mystery and the majesty of it.

  He extended his arm to touch his forearm to Jaccobi, one of his officers, drawing him in close. It was a standard warrior’s greeting, but not one he’d given to anyone since he could remember.

  A flicker of surprise passed behind the man’s eyes.

  He got to the end of the hallway that led to the room he used down here when he stayed.

  He opened the door. Down the hall, through another hatch, down a ladder, through a second hallway. The right-hand wall gave way to the river, an open expanse of green-lit water cruising right on by.

  She must be experiencing withdrawal by now. His own body hummed to life, knowing she was close.

  He opened the final door into his private room.

  And there she was. It hit him like a gut punch. The sight of her. The smell. It hadn’t been that long, but it felt like forever.

  Tied to a chair, glowering and shouting behind some kind of gag that had been shoved in her mouth, she was pure energy. Her hair fell in front of her face, as thick and dark as ever. And that hum, that silent cadence she made for him alone, it rose around him, warm as sliding into a bathing pool.

  She must have smelled him coming, because when she saw him, her brows stayed stubbornly lowered. No surprise flickered over her features. Her words were too muffled to make out, but he knew her well enough by now to have a good idea what she’d be saying.

  Shane stood in the corner, leaning against a wall, the green lights glimmering on his bald head, toothpick between clenched teeth, sporting a boner that looked truly uncomfortable.

  He held out a hand toward Sanger, face grim, all five fingers spread wide. “Sorry for tying her up. I just had to make her sit still.”

  Tessa was never still. And wrestling with a felana in heat wasn’t easy if you couldn’t fuck her into submission.

  “I get it.” Sanger tilted his head toward the exit. “Thank you.”

  Shane hesitated, toothpick jutting straight out. With a shrug, he strolled out.

  A vein in her neck pulsed a rapid beat. Her shoulders shifted as she tugged at the ropes behind her back.

  He walked toward her slowly, circling around her to take in the ropes that held her bound. “You shouldn’t have run from me.”

  The ties were tight enough to hold her still, but not enough to hurt her. Shane had done a good job.

  She twisted in her seat, breathing hard around her gag, vibrating with pent-up anger and need.

  He lifted her chin, forcing her to look at him. “You know who I am now?”

  The angry truth flashed through her eyes.

  He bent down, so his face was in hers, so close he could feel the hot breath from her nose, feel warmth radiating from his skin, so close, there was nowhere she could look, nothing she could find that wouldn’t be him. “I am Sanger TaKarian, bastard son of the late Reggio of the Roq of Didgermmion, brother of Tor, husband of the dead, father of the dead, leader of an army. I am the man you spent four days fucking, four days talking to honestly, and you ran off in some idiot-borne fit of temper that resulted in the exposure of my identity, the reveal of my army, and nothing else.” He bent lower, so their eyes were only a breath apart. “I am your Prime.”

  Her nostrils flared, so he took her face in his hand, a thumb pressing into one cheek, his forefingers pressing into the other. Hard enough to make her lips push out slightly around the gag, not enough to leave a bruise, but enough to hurt, just a little, get her attention, help her focus on his face instead of the smell of him as a Prime.

  “Delsanthio, the Boss, he never existed. I made him up.”

  Her eyes narrowed, glittering in the flickering green light bouncing off the rushing river at his back. But her eyes were, if anything, angrier than before, more determined.

  “I don’t know who your brother was, but I didn’t kill him. I don’t kill civilians. So, whatever you think happened, you’re wrong.”

  She garbled behind the gag. He stepped up so he was right in front of her. His dick was already hard, tight in his pants, so he reached down.

  Unbuckled his belt.

  She whined.

  He slid down the zipper.

  Slid his briefs down his thighs. His cock bobbed in front of him, precum glistening in the green light. It had been way too long. For both of them.

  Her nostrils flared.

  Her whole body was shaking, vibrating, not with anger. With need. For him. A better man would probably feel something else, but he just felt the power, the glory of that desire.

  When he touched a nipple, tugging it, rolling it between his fingers, that long neck of hers arched.
She was so fucking beautiful.

  Keeping his motions slow, controlled, careful, he tugged the gag from her mouth.

  She was still tied to the chair, the loops holding her hands back, staring at his dick like it offered deliverance on an atomic level.

  He could untie her, but if he did, he wasn’t all together certain she wouldn’t do something crazy like jump in the river or try to attack him.

  She licked her lips, her legs opening wide.

  “You’re sick because you left me too soon. Just one day more, maybe two. I’d have told you everything.”

  “His name was Jonan,” she broke her silence in a harsh, angry whisper.

  He stepped closer to stand between her thighs, the head of his dick waving only an inch from her lips. “I don’t know that name. But how old was he then? Seventeen? Eighteen?”

  She nodded reluctantly.

  “I didn’t kill a kid, Tessa. It wasn’t me.”

  She twisted toward him, lapping at the air in front of his cock. He dodged her tongue, deliberately withholding, denying, prolonging her torture.

  “It wasn’t me,” he said it again, because this was important. She needed to know that, get that through her stubborn skull, and accept it. He wouldn’t fuck her again until the air was clear. “In your experience with me, have I done one fucking thing that would make you think I kill kids?”

  He held her face still. “Answer me.”

  Her lips mashed together. “I thought I knew you. But then…”

  “You do know me.”

  She stared into his face. “Do I?” Her attention shifted, slid away from his face. Her body making demands. Her tongue lapped out, and this time he let her. It laved along the sensitive tip of his cock, at a bead of fluid that had leaked out.

  “I didn’t hurt your brother.”

  She crooned, and when he pulled his dick out of reach of her questing tongue, she snarled. “How do I know you aren’t lying?”

  “I’m not. Tessa, look at me.”

  Her eyes flew open, her gaze snapping to him.

  He thumbed her lip, stroked the velvet heat. “I’m telling you the truth.”

  Like a junkie on the street, desperate for a hit of coca, she lost focus again, shifting back to his cock, she lapped at his thumb, whining a complaint, a plea, a feral need. Her hands still tied behind her, her moan shifting to a whine.

  Fuck it.

  They’d talk when he’d come, when she’d had enough of him to focus.

  He guided his cock to her parted lips. She hummed appreciation as he slid in, over the wet, soft slide of her tongue, bumped against the back of her throat. He held her face in his hands, fingers threading through her hair, then touching down on her neck, feeling the swell and slide of his cock moving in her throat.

  It never failed to amaze him. She was so slender, and her throat was so delicate, so long and thin, and yet she swallowed his fat cock down, the muscles of her throat clamping and tightening around him, her nose pressing into in the hair at the base of his shaft, his balls coming to rest on her chin.

  She bucked, struggling to breathe and he pulled back, gave her a second, then surged right back in, setting up a rhythm that let her get short tiny breaths on his withdrawal.

  She did more than tolerate the assault, she demanded it, reveled in his fucking of her throat, working together toward one ultimate conclusion, the only thing she needed in that moment. It didn’t take long. He was so close. His balls boiled, the first round of pre-cum coming out in surges to pump right into her stomach. Her eyes rolled back, her throat muscles tightening reflexively as he pumped blasts of thick cum into her belly.

  “Hum,” he said.

  She didn’t disappoint.

  This was them, the connection that went deeper than blood or bone. The hum that sounded for him alone, that gave life to places inside him long dead, the promise that she wasn’t alone anymore and neither was he.

  33

  war

  THE BED in this underground tunnel was surprisingly comfy. The sheets weren’t as smooth and soft as the ones on Sanger’s bed back at the house with the green door, but they were clean and smelled faintly of detergent.

  They felt like the sheets a soldier would sleep on, dense, utilitarian, softened by age, like they’d been washed a hundred times in some kind of massive laundry operation—which Tessa supposed, they probably had been. Though the logistics of how Sanger had managed to set up any sort of laundry facility underneath Didgermmion made her head spin.

  She stretched out across the bed, rubbing her calves together. It felt wonderful to be clean.

  Sanger hadn’t even tucked away his dick after the blowjob that nearly had her orgasm on the spot. He’d untied her, checked her wrist for a while like he truly cared that she’d been hurt, and carried her off to a makeshift shower. Nothing fancy, just deviated chilly water from the rushing river, up through a pipe bolted to the roof of the cavern.

  He’d stripped off her filthy clothes, lathered her in soap that burned the cuts and scrapes from her fall, and then wrapped her legs around his waist, put her back against the wall and fucked her with an intensity no amount of cold water could dim.

  It wasn’t lovemaking. It had no finesse. It was raw and hard, as if he needed it as badly as she did. At the first touch of his cock inside her, the nausea, the anxiety, the cramps, the under-the-skin jitters that had rocked her since she’d left him, had evaporated.

  In their wake, a strange sort of lucidity took hold, and so did his assertions about Jonan.

  His words made a weird sort of sense.

  For the first time since Jonan died, she poked at the memories, analyzed them, questioned her own assumptions about what had actually been said.

  She crossed her elbows in front of her, propped her chin in her hand, and studied him.

  He was leaning against the headboard, his black eyes boring into her like he was trying to decide if she was more likely to slap his face or lick his balls again.

  When she moved closer, every muscle in his body tightened, his thighs cording under the glowing green that climbed the walls.

  He leaned toward her, his own elbows resting on his spread knees. “Say what you’re thinking.”

  Her lips parted, yet still she paused. “How would Jonan have known what the Boss was really up to?”

  His brows flicked up. “What makes you think he knew?”

  “He kept repeating your name as he died. Leyla and I kept asking, who did this? Who did this? Who did this? And he kept saying Delsanthio. The Boss. Delsanthio. The Boss. He said you were controlling guns. He said felanas a few times. He said your name.”

  His neck tightened. “Where was he injured?”

  “The abdomen. A knife.”

  Sanger looked away, his jaw hard, the green of the river shimmering in his eyes.

  “What?” She could tell he was thinking something he didn’t want to say.

  “The Boss doesn’t kill. That’s what Shane’s for. Or Freysa. I give orders. I make deals.”

  She sucked on her lower lip. “Except when you strangle someone.”

  His big hand came up to drag over the hair on the back of his head. “You saw that?”

  She nodded.

  His lips curled in a half-smile that was as grizzly as it was unapologetic. “That man was sniffing your panties, and talking about how your cunt smelled.”

  The possessiveness of his face, the way he bridled with unspent rage at the thought, it tugged at her insides and sent her clit to turbulent throbbing. It was the look of a Prime defending his own.

  “You going to strangle anyone who looks at me?”

  “Maybe.”

  That both terrified and aroused her, an unattractive reaction she didn’t want to examine too closely. She plucked at the sheets.

  “You think Jonan was trying to tell me it was someone else acting on your behalf?” she asked, changing the subject.

  “No.” He bit down on his lower lip like he was trying to
figure out how to word it, scrubbed a hand over his hair again. “You seen a lot of people while they’re dying?”

  “Just him.”

  “I’ve seen a lot. Pain like that…It messes with people’s heads. You get grown men on the battlefield, crying out for their moms. Pain, fear, it all, kind of transports people to their most rudimentary state.”

  Tessa’s eyes burned, and she blinked away the fresh image of Jonan’s boyish face, as it got paler and paler. It had been at least a year since she’d been able to draw up the image so clearly. “Why would he call your name then?”

  Sanger met her gaze, shadows taking over his deep-set eyes, settling in the hollows below his cheekbones. “Maybe he found out what Freysa and I’ve been doing with the felanas. We’ve been helping them get out of the city. Maybe he was trying to help you and Leyla.” He turned away from her, body rigid, staring up at the ceiling.

  “By saying your name?”

  His big shoulders lifted, the light dancing along his muscles. “I think when we face death, when we’re in pain, our brains start to slip from sanity into different parts of ourselves. We quit being our civilized version and slide into something else. A less evolved version of us maybe.” He turned back. “We’re born alone. We die alone, but we learn young that a parent can make it better. They fix that.”

  She stared at his profile. The strong nose. His corded neck. His sharp jaw bone. The way his eyes glittered. He wasn’t talking about Jonan anymore. Or the men on the battlefield. He was talking about himself.

  Her nose burned, and she had to bite down on her tongue to keep from asking what had put that broken haunted look in his eyes. What made him insist he wasn’t a man who got to keep a felana. A man who called himself husband and father of death. He’d lost people. Many of them.

  She ran the heel of her hand under her nose. “So, you’re saying he was using his final hours, trying to tell me and Leyla how we could be safe with you, and instead I’ve spent all this time trying to kill you.”

  The shadow at the corner of his lips intensified. “Maybe…”