Captive Desire

by Robin Lovett

  I sneer at him. “You know how the script ends, right?”

  He hums lightly. “With you catatonic and kept alive for the pure purpose of experiencing pain. To test new torture devices, of course.”

  I inhale hard and let a vindictive smile show. “It ends with you begging us not to kill you.”

  “Oh sweet Assur,” he says with a stilting stop to the word sweet, like he doesn’t know its true meaning. “By tomorrow, you’ll be so far gone with fever from the toxin on this planet, you won’t even remember your own name.”

  Part of his plan is apparently to deprive us of the antidote to the planet’s atmosphere. I grit my teeth. I will find a way to escape before that happens.

  “It’s perfect, really.” Dargule sighs, looking around at the trees. “They tell me they’re not sure what effect the fever will have on the human body, so we need test subjects. And here you are.”

  He doesn’t know that he’d be sexually torturing us. He’ll be surprised, then.

  “No antidote will work completely,” I warn. “You won’t last a day on this planet even with it.” He’s not someone who goes for sexual things. He seems to have a hard-on only for pain. So when the desidre starts to affect him, he’s not going to be able to satisfy it.

  With luck, it’ll motivate him to leave the planet.

  He clicks his tongue in the negative. “That’s because your pathetic crew and the Origin’s out-of-date tech didn’t give you the antidote we have.”

  I scowl. That’s entirely possible.

  He taps his fingers impatiently. “Now, as fun as this tête-à-tête is, I have to find the rest of your rebel crew. But do not fret, dear. I will return.”

  My lip curls in disgust, and I have the urge to provoke him into revealing more to me—his motives, his strategies. He loves to brag.

  But I need to help Gahnin more.

  Dargule turns his back, and I slide to my knees beside Gahnin.

  I brush his cheek. “Gahnin?” I whisper, not wanting anyone to hear me.

  His eyes crack open, and for a moment, he just stares at me.

  There’s something in his gaze that reaches inside my chest, wraps around my heart, and makes me feel both stronger and more afraid at the same time.

  He reaches up to put his hand over mine.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  He croaks, his voice tight. “Just a bit of pain.” His body quakes, like with an aftershock.

  I’m worried, but at least he’s able to move his arm and speak. But I decide humor is better. “Wimp.”

  He chuckles, then winces. “Correct.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Gahnin

  It takes me a few hours, but the pain eventually subsides enough, I am able to sit up.

  Assura relays everything Dargule said.

  Four guards are posted around us, each at one corner of our electromagnetic prison—or whatever it is made of.

  The guards are far enough away that we are able to talk quietly enough so they cannot hear us. It’s a lapse in judgment that they are not spying on what we’re saying, or perhaps a sign of just how cocky Dargule is about the quality of his trap.

  Which turns out to be justified.

  We try pieces of items we have on us to deflect the static of the bars. All our efforts get us is a burned hole in my boot and an incinerated button from her suit. We inspect the floor, guessing it must be made of the same energy, though it feels different—in addition to the obvious fact that it doesn’t cause us to pass out from pain—more solid somehow. There are no cracks or weaknesses.

  By the middle of the night, we’re forced to admit, we’re fucked.

  And by the time the sun comes up, the topuy will wear off, and we will be vulnerable to the desidre. With zero privacy. With our worst enemies watching.

  We sit side by side looking up, through the cage bars, into the night sky at the planet’s moons heading toward the horizon. The light from our static cage bars casts striped lines across our faces.

  “We need a strategy,” she says.

  “I have zero ideas.” I’m depleted actually. Physically, I feel awful. But that’s not what bothers me. It’s how this circumstance is going to affect Assura, with us being trapped alone again with nothing but the desidre for company. I do not want this for her, or me. More chemically induced sex is not how I wanted our relationship to go.

  Not that it is a “relationship” or anything resembling it, but I cannot stop my brain from dwelling on her.

  She does not seem bothered, though. She’s all planning. “When I was in the jungle, the worst time of day for the desidre was midafternoon, when the sun was hottest.”

  “Not sure how that’s helpful.”

  “I found that if I avoided giving myself an orgasm all morning while it was less awful, then by afternoon, I was delirious with the fever.”

  “Wait. There were times when it was worse than others?” I groan. “I thought it was just all misery all the time.”

  “Well.” She sighs heavily. “It did make orgasms feel like…well…almost as good as yours.”

  That makes me smile for the first time in hours. I cannot decide if it’s good that she does not glance my way to see. It makes me remember the other awful part about this situation. “There has to be a way we can satisfy it without having to have actual intercourse.” Not that that makes the other stuff any less problematic for her, but somehow, it seems less deceitful.

  She stiffens. “Why? Feeling shy now?” There’s a bitter tinge to her voice.

  “No, it…” I scrub a hand through my hair. “We’ve already forced you to be unfaithful enough. It breaks my heart for you to have to do it again.” If my mate had cheated on me the way Assura has cheated on Jenie with me…I would have been in danger of doing extreme violence.

  And I’m not sure, if Jenie tried, whether I would feel right about defending myself.

  A sour taste brims in my mouth, and my stomach knots like it’s been filled with acid.

  Mating bonds are so sacred to the Ssedez. Being unfaithful is biologically impossible for the males and so rare for the females, I know no one who’s ever done it. I have only heard stories.

  “Unfaithful to what? My hand?” She laughs.

  My heart trips over itself. Surely, she cannot be so without feeling. “To Jenie,” I whisper, shocked.

  She turns to face me, her expression half in shadow, but the glow from our prison lets me see she’s surprised. “Jenie?”

  I have to swallow hard to say it. “You are in love, yes? Mated? Or soon will be?”

  Her expression softens, and she grasps my hand. “Oh, my Ssedez. It was what we call a casual relationship.”

  “Casual?” I have misunderstood and betrayed my concern for her. I am not supposed to care about anything concerning her—and I am failing.

  My vulnerability grips at my anger and pulls at my chest. I do not understand this woman or these humans or any human. “What is casual about love? There is nothing more powerful in the universe.” I have lived with the grief of losing it for ten decades. I am both marked and scarred forever.

  She leans her head on her knee, and her expression is full of sensitivity and patience. “I love her for the extraordinary woman she is. She is glorious to share a bed with. But I never had any desire to be exclusive with her or to have a commitment from her.”

  This translates into nothing I have experienced before. I have seen other unmated Ssedez warriors engage in such relationships. But I have never succeeded. “So, you have not cheated or been unfaithful with me?”

  She grasps my hand. “No. I’m free to sleep with whoever and whenever I like.” She says it with lightness almost like it is a joke.

  But there is nothing funny about it to me. “That means that what you and I have is also…”— I have to swallow before I can say it—“…casual.” The acid eating at my stomach, rather than lessening, gets worse. It starts to burn in my gut. There is nothing casual about the Attachment th
at is still brewing inside me for her. It is a force of nature, one that I can try to deny or avoid. One that I must conquer.

  She hesitates but eventually agrees. “Yes, this is casual.”

  I stare off in the forest. “It is also chemically induced.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We have been lovers only because of the desidre.” I say this because I need it to be true. That is the only reason I still crave her body like an addiction.

  She stops breathing, so I have to look at her. “That…is…” She stutters with confusion, and her voice morphs to indignation. “Do you honestly believe that? You think the only reason we’re like this”—she gestures back and forth between us—“like a damn lit fuse waiting to go off, is because of the desidre?”

  “Of course it is,” I assert but cannot stop from noticing how her breasts are propped up against her knees, from remembering what they felt like in my hands.

  She tosses her head back and stares at the stars. “You know, they say it’s the desidre, but I haven’t felt like having sex with anyone but you, and the Fellamana told me the desidre should make us want to have it with anyone who breathes. Why is that?”

  My breath stops, and I do not want to answer. “I do not know. I have never indulged in casual sex.” It would have been disrespectful to Tiortan’s memory. Still is.

  She drags her gaze down to mine, and there’s a mischievous glint to her eye, like she knows something. “You are what we call a serial monogamist, Gahnin. You need to wrap your logic around sex as recreation, not only something to indulge in when one is mated or committed or whatever.”

  I try; I do. But it’s as though my brain is a computer and the entry code is wrong. Like my instincts do not acknowledge this concept as possible. There is no reason I can think of for sex unless it is because I want her to be mine.

  “Besides.” Her voice lowers and thickens. “There was no desidre or pressure from the Fellamana that last time. We’d more than satisfied the desidre during the games. We didn’t have the toxin for an excuse then.”

  Oh Gods. “In the hallway…against the wall…” I have to close my eyes to keep from reaching for her. It’s like I’m there again, driving inside her so hard, even her tight ass shakes from my hips slapping against her.

  “When you forced me to beg before you would fuck me.” Her tone sounds rasping, so full of sex, if I was not already getting hard, I’m now stone.

  My mouth is open, my breath coming fast. She makes me want her again with the full of my yearning to bury myself inside her. It’s always there, simmering beneath the surface, even in our most life-threatening moments.

  She uncovers it, so I have to clench my fists to keep from grabbing her and pulling her beneath me.

  I stare up at the stars, too. “Do you know what you do to me?”

  “I want to know.” Her hand graces my chin and urges me to look at her. “Without me having to beg.”

  Her mouth is right there, in front of my eyes. I stare at it, and she parts her lips. Her lush human tongue licks across her lower lip, and I remember how those lips felt wrapped around my cock. And how she looked with my silver come dripping down her chin.

  She leans forward and kisses me.

  It’s like the answer to every prayer I have had since I met her. She wants me. Her mouth sucks on my lips and pulls on my tongue like she’d devour me if she could. Her plump lips are full between my teeth as I nibble across them—grateful I have been able to keep my fangs from descending so I may have the pleasure of her mouth on mine.

  She climbs over me and straddles my hips. She’s high on her knees, her head above me, her hands cupping my face.

  I cling to her back, run my hands down her torso, and sink my fingers into her ass. Damn, I wish we had no audience, so I could get her naked.

  Even in the faint light, the guards can see us.

  She lowers her knees and brushes the apex of her thighs against my hardness through my leather.

  I groan and hold her against me. “Like that. Harder.”

  She obliges, grinding her hips into me, sliding her hot cunt up and down the hardened length of me until I’m hopelessly, helplessly grinding back.

  “Beg me,” she whispers against my mouth.

  I growl through my teeth. “If there were no guards, I’d have you on your back and naked already.”

  She lifts her mouth and stares in my eyes. “That’s not begging.”

  I have to think about it, and I wonder if she’s serious. If I beg, would she have sex here and now anyway, despite our audience? Do I want her to?

  Gods, yes.

  It’s surprising to discover, I do not care who sees us, only that I get inside her. “Please, let me fuck you.”

  She sinks her teeth into my lip and clamps down hard. I flinch but moan at the same time. She can bite me anywhere, as hard as she wants. A craving sprouts in me for it.

  I snake my thumb inside her mouth and stroke her little teeth. “Bite me.”

  She holds my hand away from her mouth. “Not unless you beg.”

  My brain stutters. My instinct is to order her to do it, to feed her imperatives like I want to feed her my cock. But I force my thoughts to work backward. “I need you to bite me. I need to feel your teeth on my skin.”

  She strokes my thumb along her lip, deliberately still, denying me her bite.

  I cannot take the games. The longing in me is like the need for a volcano to erupt. Except I need her to do it. “Please, Assura. I’m begging.” My words are oozing desperation, but I do not care.

  “Good boy,” she croons, and bites down on my thumb, sending pleasure searing through my veins.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Assura

  I bite him so hard, on human skin, I’d taste blood.

  But not on him. His cock hardens between my thighs; it jerks and throbs against my clit, even through our clothes.

  I drag my teeth down the length of his thumb with excruciating slowness, and his breath echoes in fast, shallow drops against my neck. He likes this. A lot.

  And so do I. I do it to each of his fingers, then bite his palm so hard, he groans loud and low.

  I cover his mouth with my hand. “Shh. Don’t make a sound.”

  “If you say so,” he whispers against my palm, and his obedience is delectable.

  I wish I had a knife with me. “Do you want me to dig my claws into your chest?”

  “Gods, please.” He’s begging for real now, without me making him.

  I can’t help my mischievous smile. I like it. I want him begging me for it, almost as much as I want him thrusting inside me, pounding me to mind-bending orgasm.

  I sink my nails into his pectorals with as much force as my arms can bear. My biceps are shaking with the tightening of my muscles, and I grit my teeth. My fingers sink into his flesh. He rocks against me. His sighs are ragged. If we weren’t surrounded by guards, they’d be low cries and moans of pleasure.

  He grasps my forearms and presses my nails in even deeper. Then, with the force of our combined strength, I drag them down his chest.

  He gasps so hard, he stops breathing, and I fear he’s going to come.

  The sensation of scraping my nails across him, taking the full force of my strength out on him, is blissful. I grind my hips against him, the pleasure mounting in me, too.

  But I don’t want us to orgasm, not until he’s inside me.

  I loose his hands from my arms and push him onto his back. I lean over his face. “Do you want me to fuck you?”

  “Yessss.” His Ssedez tongue hisses around the S like the gold serpents his kind are descended from.

  I wish I could get naked, but with no desire to give the guards more of a show than we already are, I merely unbutton the fuck panel in my suit and send up a prayer of thanks to the Fellamana and their prurient, yet practical, clothing styles.

  His fingers shaking, he yanks open his leather fly and pulls out his cock, and I’m grateful it appears the Ssedez
are always commando. Or, at least, this one is.

  He holds himself at the angle I need, and I lower my hips over him.

  The tip of him notches inside me, and as I sink down, I burrow my nails into his chest again. It’s good. Excruciating, tortuously good. He stretches me to the brink, fills me up, and reaches so far inside me, I have to lean forward at an angle for our hips to meet.

  The base of his cock rubs against my clit, and I can’t hold still.

  I fuck him, shamelessly. I don’t give a shit who’s watching. Dargule himself could be standing outside the cage, staring at me, and I wouldn’t stop or slow.

  I lift my pelvis up and down in a rhythm so fast, my thighs burn. But it’s delicious. The glide of him both inside me and against my clit—he’s a dual torture device made for killing me with orgasms.

  The first climax hits me so fiercely, I fall onto his chest, but I can’t stop. I don’t want to stop. I slide over him back and forth, not slowing my rhythm.

  His neck, his throat, is next to my mouth, his body hard beneath mine, quaking with the thrill of building ecstasy.

  His pulse beats against my mouth, and the temptation to bite him is irresistible. I latch onto his throbbing vein with my teeth.

  It sets off his orgasm, and I cover his mouth to stifle his climactic shout, though he’s impossible to silence.

  I bite harder, as strong as my jaw can. He holds my head to him, like he only wants more, for my teeth to go impossibly deeper into him. I enjoy it—the power, the influence, the ability to set him off by giving in to my urge to cause pain. It’s freeing. It’s…

  Something cuts through my blissful haze. A sound. Almost like…clapping.

  I lift my head, and there he is, his obsidian eyes glittering in the light of the static cage bars.

  “Brava,” Dargule says to me, a sadistic smile stretching his face.

  I’m so shocked, I freeze. I know I thought I wouldn’t care if he was watching. But, now I see him, I feel violated. Like I’ve exposed a piece of my deepest, most valuable part of myself to him.

  He is worse than my worst enemy. He has been my torturer. My jailor. My master. My…