by Elise Jae
It doesn’t matter that we’re both fully dressed, or that we’re in the war room where any of the brotherhood could barge in on us whenever they chose.
I want her.
She’s glaring at the board. And I watch as she digs a peg from the mess of the table and presses its suction tip among the lights that denote the sightings.
“There’s something here.”
I didn’t realize she knew I was watching her. Forgot just how sensitive the bond is.
“Some way they’re getting out of the Caldera without tripping earlier sensors.”
“I think that—”
“Wait.”
I can feel the importance of what she’s going to say—just as easily as I can feel her irritation at my interruption.
“I don’t want you to have to explain this twice.” I send out a call for the brotherhood and turn back to her. “Whatever this is, the others need to know about it too.”
“Shouldn’t you be the one to tell them?”
“This is a partnership. Completely. You said I have all of you.” I gently tug her arm, walking her to me.
“Yes.”
“That includes your mind. And I’ve always wanted that too.”
“What makes you think they’ll care what a dancer has to say.”
“They would care, even if that was all you were, but you aren’t.”
Her raised brow and the skeptical shimmer through our bond felt like a question.
“Laurel told Ric who told me about your job back on Earth.”
“Oh.”
“I already knew you were the perfect woman for me. That’s just sealed the fact that you’re the perfect woman for the job we’re going to do together.”
“Protect the sian race?”
“Exactly.” I have to grit my teeth. She’s so close, and I want to pick her up, set her on the table and take her.
She knows.
Her lips twist in a half smile, half wince.
“The reason it’s hard to stay focused, is because I want you just as badly as you want me. It builds. I feel you wanting me, which makes me want you more and you feel that which makes you want me more and so on.” She reaches up, cradling my face with her hand. “It doesn’t go away, we just learn how to manage it better.”
And that’s why it doesn’t seem to be affecting her as much as it is me. Because she’s done this before.
“Didn’t mean to interrupt. I thought you’d called me.” Arc is in the doorway, a half smile on his face. “Under other circumstances, and were you other people, I’d be happy to sit back and watch, but this time, I’ll have to pass.”
Kimba rolls her eyes at him and moves back to the screens, sorting through more information as we wait for the rest.
But only Trench and Richter arrive. The others send their excuses.
Three are enough.
“Find anything interesting in your latest dead body?” Arc asks as Trench sits two meters away from him. “Or do you just like playing with corpses.”
“I’d offer to dissect you, but there’s nothing in your skull and the rest of you is piss and wind.”
Kimba leans into me. “Are they always this mean to each other?”
“They,” I say loudly enough that they stop bickering, “Iike to sab each other verbally, because I won’t let them do it with knives.
“They’re the only ones among us who are biological brothers.” Ric adds.
She looks between them, “I suppose I can see that. There’s something similar about their chins.”
Both men suddenly look very concerned about the mentioned anatomy, and it shuts them up.
Richter lets out a big yawn and asks, “What are we in for, boss?”
I don’t need to set anything up for Kimba. She’s spent years performing to others, years before that charming and selling her entire race. So I nod to her, and join the others on the couch.
Trench gives me an amused glance, but they all stay silent.
“We haven’t been able to find anything on the man who tried to hire me yet. But I noticed something odd in the location markers of where the monsters are popping up.” She moves to the map behind her, it’s lights flickering as a preprogrammed simulation cycled through. And I sit back to watch.
KIMBA
I’d never had a problem speaking to crowds, or in small groups. It was one of my “greatest assets” according to Edan. And it was damned helpful now.
Pointing to the normal incursions I don’t look back at my little audience. “This crescent shape, here, shows the normal areas the monsters are triggering your sensors. You’ve got three known exit points from the underground cave systems you’ve managed to block off, but the rest seem to come over the edge of the interior caldera, right?”
I don’t wait for a confirmation.
“But outside of this crescent, you have these.” I tap each of the pegs that don’t fall into the general scatter. “Five abnormalities that could be a serious problem.”
When I look back, Arc has leaned forward, elbows on his knees, a scowl twisting his face. “I’m confused. Are you, or are you not, one of Margot’s dancers?”
“I am, and I was. But I was also a cop on Earth. Just for a few years. I hated it. It was supposed to be about protecting and serving. Instead it was about arrest rates and harassing the homeless.”
I liked the patterns and the statistics. I liked the part where solving a puzzle could save someone, or at least provide closure.
The FBI had considered recruiting me, but my partner had torpedoed that.
“Look at your map. They’re clustered here. But these outliers.” I pointed to the pinpoints that were well outside of the normal range. “They’re testing you. I think they’re looking for a way to get around you. Maybe ways to get further into the Zone, past some of the initial sensors.”
“I wouldn’t put it past them.” Trench scowls at the board before he looks at me. “Why didn’t we put that together?”
“You’ve been looking at it with each occurrence.”
“We still should have noticed,” Arc says, interrupting me, but I don’t look at him.
I look at Drift. He raises his brows, an invitation to continue.
“I checked. Each of these happened during a storm. If I had to guess. You’d have chalked the oddity up to them getting confused in the snowstorm.”
None of them look particularly surprised, or ashamed at the accusation.
“And from what you’ve told me, they’re smart enough to manage it.”
“They are.” This time it’s Arc who’s leaning forward, but he hasn’t looked at the map. He’s glaring at me.
That’s when I realize, at some point, I switched to speaking their language. I don’t think Drift mentioned it.
“How long have you been here?” Richter asked, lips twitching as if to hide a smile.
Trench answered for me. “She came with one of the very first transports. Married a statesman, he died three years later. She’s been at Margot’s since then, well… until Drift stole her.”
Arc snorts. “How do you go from police, to mail order bride, to dancer?”
“To second in command of the Shadow Zone Brotherhood.”
I’m not the only one who turns to Trench when he says it.
He’s lounging back in his chair, looking for all the world as though he hadn’t just said something no one else had thought of.
“We always knew what Drift bonding would mean. You can’t have one of them without the other. So…. she’s just as in charge as he is. Except for the whole public-facing part. I don’t think many people would understand if we mentioned that a human woman was the one who figured this out. Not until the majority of the population is finally bonded.” He turns as though Arc has asked a question. “Only one in fourteen hundred of the sian men who are of-age have bondmates.”
Richter scooted forward. “And until you have that bond, you don’t really know what it’s like.”
Arc sco
wls and turns back to me. “So, we pay attention to those outliers. We look for more patterns with snow storms, and…. then what?”
“I don’t know.” I shrug, ignoring the warmth down my spine—I’d forgotten what someone else’s pride felt like. “But we can’t ignore the caldera, simply because someone’s trying to kill D.”
The look Arc gives me bordered on suspicion. “Okay, what do you want us to do to start.”
I glance at D. This is his territory, and I’m about to trample all over it, but he doesn’t look like he has a care in the world
“We should start by checking these locations.” I point to the map over my shoulder. “See if there’s anything there, anything they have in common.”
Trench and Richter bounce ideas off each other, Arc asks me a few more questions about my previous employment.
None of them look to D.
He lets me talk, lets me answer their questions. He only speaks when I look to him for an answer I don’t have. And when he gives it, he stops, turning their attention back to me.
TEN
DRIFT
That night, we’re alone in the house again. Just me, her, and a mountain of data. If her help wasn’t invaluable, I’d have been jealous that she was paying more attention to it than she was to me.
I don’t know how I could do this without her. Don’t know where I would be if some other woman had been in her shoes.
But I don’t have to know because no one else was.
She looks up, meeting my eyes and smiles.
That smile is one of my favorite things in the world.
“I didn’t realize it was so late.”
I don’t point out that it was already getting dark when we ate dinner hours ago.
Standing, she joins me, slipping her fingers in mine, and presses up on her toes, lips raised, asking for a kiss.
I happily give.
“Are you okay? With… all of this?”
She nods against my lips and then moves away, dragging me by our interlaced hands, downstairs.
“I never wanted you to feel pressured.”
“I don’t. I haven’t.” She says over her shoulder as she leads me to the couch. “Everything you’ve done has been… if anything, a little too lenient, in fact.”
She smiles, pushing me back onto the cushions.
There’s enough moonlight bouncing off the snow that I can see everything, even though she hasn’t turned on the lights. It’s one of the curses that came with my maker’s experiments. Only in the deepest of darks are my eyes able to get any peace.
But right now. It’s a very good thing I can see.
A good thing I can see the smile and watch the way she moves.
Kimba’s grace has nothing to do with her ability to dance. It was the other way around.
She moves across the floor as though floating an inch above the ground.
When she stops, head cocked to the side. “Can you see me in there? I mean really see me? Because I want you to. I want you to watch me loving you.”
“But you can’t see me.” Even with the light filtering through the windows, I’m in full shadow.
“I can see you better than the times we were in the pitch dark.”
“The moonlight is that perfect level. Like some higher power deigned that we get down and dirty on your couch.”
I can’t stop myself from chuckling as she slings a leg over top of me to straddle me.
“This is serious business.” She leans fully into me and captures my mouth in a hungry kiss.
She’s right. This is damned serious.
Every fiber of my being screams it. Tells me the lust flowing through my veins is possibly more hers than mine, which only drives the feeling further into me.
“Kimba?”
She pulls away from me, just long enough to say “Yeah?” And uses the motion to rock against me.
I have to grit my teeth before I speak. I’m painfully hard, and I can’t think straight when she does that.
“Are you sure you want to do this? Every time we do, the risk you’re pregnant gets higher.”
She searches my face, and I know that what I’m feeling is a mixture of my own worry and of her confusion over the worry she’s feeling through me as well.
“I told you. Edan couldn’t. I came here wanting them. I know you want them…. why are you so unsure?”
“Because you spent four years at Margot’s.”
When she could easily have found a new bondmate and had the children she’d expected when she came to my world.
A moment passes and I see understanding dawn.
“No man was worth the risk. Not before you.”
I’ll accept that because there’s no deceit in her tone in the way she’s looking at me. No deception in the feelings coming through our bond, and there are so many of them. But there is one that shines a little brighter than the rest of them.
Hope.
And maybe… just maybe, the feeling that goes with it is love.
The kind of love I’ve wanted all this time.
The kind I didn’t think I could find. But if there was ever anyone who would be able to give it to me, it was going to be Kimba.
She dances.
No flashing lights to distract, no other men ogling.
I love the way she moves her hips.
I’m so glad she made me take this time around to see her. So glad I can memorize every line of her body. The soft curve from her breasts into her waist and then out again to her full swaying hips.
As she makes her way closer, crossing the gap that kept her dances from being what I—and everyone else watching—wanted them to be, she drags her hands up her stomach. Caressing her breasts, she leans toward me, still too far away to touch.
She’s wearing three times the clothing she would for a normal dance, but It’s so much hotter this way.
She sweeps her shirt off, over her head, tossing it to the side, before I have the chance to tell her as much.
The black lace against her skin, even in this light, isn’t enough to hide the dark shadow of her nipples.
I have to shift in my seat to keep from reaching for her.
To keep from beckoning her closer.
No matter how much I want her, I know patience will reap its reward.
It’s no wonder men paid exorbitant amounts in the attempt to make her notice them. No wonder Margot had told him about the men she’d had to throw out of her club.
No wonder she’d taken the time to warn him about what she’d to do to him as well.
Kimba was the kind of perfect that people would die for a taste of.
And I would die to protect her, to keep her. To simply have every opportunity to love her.
Turning, she hooks her hands in her pants and in a shifting wiggle of her hips, she walks backward, using the movement to slowly shimmy them down as she bends at the waist.
It’s not a routine I recognize. Even though she doesn’t have a pole to work with this time, I have a feeling, this is something she came up with just for me.
As she lifts herself back to standing, I catch the barest glimpse.
Her panties are wet—a promise.
She kicks her pants away in a fluid motion, and the look she turns on me makes my mouth go dry.
Two more steps, and she leans forward again, hands on my knees, swaying so her perfect breasts are easily in reach. And I brush them with the back of my hand, wanting more, knowing I already took more than I was supposed to.
She tsks her tongue, and I feel her laughing disapproval.
Dragging her hands up my legs, she uses the movement to push my arms back, “Don’t act like you’ve never been the man in the chair before.”
I can’t deny it, so I don’t.
“Behave.” She turns a wry smile on me as she brushes a hand over my cock.
“You never let me dance for you before.” She leans forward, brushing her breasts against my chest.
“I never needed that from you
”
“But I always wanted to do it.”
“Then you can dance for me any time you want.” I traced a knuckle under her jaw.
Pulling back, just enough to bite my finger, she twists, kicking a leg up, to turn. And when she brings it back down, she’s leaned against me, back to chest, half seated in my lap.
“Every time I danced, it was for you.”
My cock is painfully hard, but the way she moves—her ass rocking against me—provides some relief.
“Do you like teasing me?” I ask, as she takes hold of my hand, slides it up her body in much the same way she had just done with her own.
“Yes.”
She releases me when my hand cups her breast, and I don’t need any encouragement.
The lace catches against my too-rough hands, so I slip the fabric down, manipulating her breasts so they spill from her bra, the easier to fondle.
But when I swirl my fingers around her nipples, she laughs, flinching away as the movement tickles her.
And my abdomen clenches with want, once again.
She slides down me, twisting as she does, until she’s on her knees in front of me.
It takes her two seconds to unseal my pants, and I raise my hips as soon as she tugs, letting her pull them the rest of the way off, as I wrench my shirt over my head and throw it to the far side of the room.
Eyes on my cock, she doesn’t seem to notice. Dragging her self forward, her skin sliding up my thighs, she pauses, only long enough to nuzzle my length, and kiss the tip of me.
I won’t be able to stand much more of that, so I grab her under her arms, and this time I’m the one dragging her along me.
She laughs as I do, wriggling until she’s straddling me, arms on my shoulders, arms at the perfect height for feasting.
But she distracts me before I get the chance.
It’s a small shift of her legs, but it draws the wet lace of her panties across me.
The groan it elicits is one of pure frustration.
Such a faint barrier, but a barrier, nonetheless.
I twist the clasp at her back and slip the straps of her bra from her shoulders. "I want to fuck you."
"Do you?" Hands on my chest, she rocks her hips into me. "How badly?"
