The Breaking

by Imogen Keeper

  “I want you,” she whispered against his lips. She didn’t know how, but she knew he needed those words. They rushed out. “I want you. Even without all these people, I want you.”

  He growled, and the vibrations rippled along her every nerve. His grip tightened, clutching her against his body. She should have been scared at the ferocity of his coiled muscles. From anyone else, she would have. His grip was like steel.

  It didn’t matter. She knew him. It had never felt this way with Utto. It had never been this right. His body moved over hers, sinuous and sleek. Maybe she even stopped breathing.

  He moved her as if she weighed less than air. His lips were a drug, and her heart blocked out noise. Her brain stopped.

  His mouth moved to her neck, and she whimpered against the onslaught of desperation.

  His lips roved down to her collarbone, and she moaned, shifting, and writhing. Searching for something, everything more. She wanted him everywhere.

  She tried to help him get the positioning right, or maybe she fought against him, or maybe they were dancing, an ancient, hip swirling, steady rhythm. One minute she wanted her breasts against his chest, and the next it was her throbbing core that needed his touch.

  Restless hands and even more desperate hips. When his nose trailed along the shell of her ear, his fingers raked up her thighs, his teeth grazed her neck, she couldn’t breathe.

  She turned her face to the side and vaguely registered the thousand faceless men. One man stood closer, less than twenty feet away. His eyes were shadowed in the darkness, but his gaze was steady, locked on hers, stillness surrounding him, like staring at death. She shivered.

  Her fingers closed at the nape of Ajax’s neck. He growled against her, grazing her skin with his teeth, his fingers clamping around a nipple, strumming it like a virtuoso. She moaned, torquing her body to get more into his mouth, closing her eyes against the watching specter.

  When she lifted her eyelids again, she saw them, Ajax and her, both of them, in holographic reproduction, repeated across the entire club, glowing bluish, moving, and beautiful. Like a single exotic beast caught in a dance.

  “Ajax, I need to taste you.” She was on fire. Surely it wasn’t healthy to be this hot. She’d combust and be nothing but a pile of ashes smoking on the floor.

  His growly purr did nothing to cool the burn.

  His cock pressed hotly against her belly. She’d never wanted anything in her entire life as much she wanted him inside her, right now.

  His chest vibrated a low rumble that sent a flood of heat swirling. He stroked a finger down her belly, down between her thighs, over a place so sensitive she bucked against him.

  It wasn’t enough. She didn’t want his finger inside her. She wanted his body inside her. He pressed a second finger in beside it, and she groaned. She wanted more. She wanted all of him. Every last bit… which meant Bonding.

  No!

  She tore her mouth from his, turned her face away from him. Never again.

  Her eyes settled on that man in the crowd again.

  She needed serum.

  “Now!” She pushed his hands away, dropping to her knees.

  He shook his head, the way he did when she’d surprised him, disbelieving, awed, admiring. Like she was the best thing he’d ever seen.

  Magnetic heat pulsed between their bodies. For a brief moment, embarrassment coursed through her at all the strangers who could likely see right between her thighs, at her bottom pushed out toward them. She glanced across the club, at the darkened figures, saw the familiar shadow of the man nearby, watching, and the twenty holograms of herself, on her knees, pilgrim to the muscled man-god that was Ajax.

  The thrashing of Utto’s Bond grew wilder, but she refused to give in to its demanding, threatening pressure. Her chest ached, but somehow she knew it was an ache that Ajax could heal.

  He was so beautiful that it made her stomach clench and her chest hurt.

  The tip of his cock glistened under the blue light. She laved her tongue over the hot, velvet crown, and the flavor blasted through her senses like an explosion. Sweet and intense and ridiculously good.

  She moaned around him as she sucked him down deep, pulling him into the back of her throat.

  She scraped nails over his abdomen, traced them gently over the skin of the heavy sack between his thighs, reveling in the gasps and groans tearing from his throat.

  She looked up at the black mask covering his beautiful face. His eyes were still on the crowd, but when she increased her pressure, bobbing her head up and down, his head tilted back, neck arching, muscles bouncing.

  His hips bucked infinitesimally, and she knew the strength it took for him to hold his body still.

  This man was so sweet. Too sweet. But he really didn’t need to be so gentle. A part of her wanted from Ajax what she’d never wanted from Utto. She wanted his power, his need, his frenzy.

  She hummed around him and sucked harder.

  He exploded in her mouth with a curse, and a grunt, and a buck of his hips, and then all reason left her mind. She swallowed him down, and her own body erupted anew.

  There was no heaven like the feel of him inside her. She swallowed down everything he had to give, even as the cells in her body detonated in a violent, screaming blast that left her shuddering. Her eyes rolled in a vision-darkening, ear-splitting, deafening roar, exploding around the anchor of Ajax.

  19

  You will be mine.

  In every possible way.

  Holy shit. With ears still exploding like a godsdamned supernova, Ajax forced his eyes open. So many people staring at him. Oh, gods. She kept on sucking even after there was nothing left, and the heightened sensation made his whole body shudder, muscles twitching, toes curling in his boots.

  Gasping, he dragged his gaze away from the sight of her pretty lips wrapped around his cock, and back up to the crowd staring at them.

  The commentator’s voice pulsed into his muddled mind, words drifting across his consciousness. “…hell of a blowjob.”

  Wincing, he stroked a hand through Feola’s hair, tugging slightly so she’d release him. Her glittering gaze caught his, and slowly he pulled out his still-rock-solid cock. Cold air hit his skin, and he hissed, yanking his pants closed.

  The dark silhouettes in their seats had him lurching to his feet, casting a hand out to steady her. He jogged across the stage to grab the robe.

  “Let’s go.” He wrapped it around her shoulders before anyone else could spend one more second with their eyes full of her glorious, perfect, beautiful body.

  The lights brightened across the theater’s seats, and Shepherd appeared, a brow raised in all its sardonic glory. “That was quite a performance.”

  Ajax opened his mouth to tell him to go fuck himself, but Feola spoke first.

  “Are you going to take us to the ship?” she murmured, voice coasting across the airwaves to his ears, husky and slow in the aftermath.

  He flexed his fingers into fists.

  “No,” Shepherd said. “I have… larger problems to contend with.” He paused for a moment, then stepped closer to Ajax, voice lowering. For a moment, the façade slipped, and along with it the affected gestures, the elegant tilt of his head, and Ajax glimpsed a seasoned, pragmatic man. “Upranimus hired bounty hunters. One of them is especially good. A Vestige named Torum. He’s known to be fairly ruthless and efficient. Watch your back, healer.”

  It wasn’t anything he didn’t know, but it settled something like determination at the base of his spine. He nodded.

  Shepherd gestured toward the hallway off the side of the stage, where a pair of guards and the commentator waited.

  The guards kept their gazes averted in the vacant hundred-yard stare of a seasoned bodyguard, but the commentator leered at Feola as they approached, dropping his gaze down her cloaked body. “Shit, that looked like one fantastic fucking bl—”

  He didn’t finish his sentence. Ajax grabbed his arm and twisted it behind his back in a si
ngle fluid motion.

  “What the hell are y—” the commentator sputtered.

  The guards didn’t even break their stance, didn’t even twitch an eye muscle.

  “What did you just say?”

  “I-I didn’t… I didn’t mean anything. It j-just looked li—”

  Ajax tightened his grip, pulling up on the commentator’s arm, just shy of unseating his shoulder. “You were about to say you’re an asshole, right?”

  The commentator whimpered. “What?”

  Ajax tugged the arm harder.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m an asshole, man. Let me up.”

  Ajax didn’t release him.

  “I’m an asshole.” After a pause, the commentator cursed. “I’m an asshole!”

  Ajax let go, and the commentator dropped to the ground. “That’s what I thought you said.”

  One of the guards gave him a short, tight nod.

  Ajax raised his brows but didn’t bother commenting.

  Feola’s brow wrinkled as she preceded him through the door so the guards could take them to their new ship.

  About an hour later, Ajax sat in the pilot seat, staring out the viewscreen of their new ship.

  It was the color of dried bile, rusty, and about eight decades old, but not in bad shape, all things considered. It had been dismantled and reassembled a few times—probably before he’d been born. Enormous seams scarred the hull where it had been grafted together, different colored metal and faded paint jobs in a patchwork quilt of ship-skin.

  He didn’t want to imagine what its engine looked like.

  It was noisy, clanking, and groaning. Archaic.

  Space glittered and seduced, dark and fearless. It used to hold an allure for him, dragging at him, making it almost impossible to tear his eyes away. Now... he felt a tingling sense of awe, but nothing more.

  Perhaps a lingering smattering of something akin to trepidation at its sheer enormity. Or maybe his meager-to-the-point-of-meaningless size in comparison. But less so now.

  Feola sat beside him, clutching the arms of the copilot’s seat. She’d barely spoken since they’d left Pilan. Neither had he, for that matter.

  “You’ve been quiet. No nausea? No renewal of the…?”

  “Not yet. But it’s only been a couple of hours, right?”

  The digital reader on the dash said it was approaching midnight.

  “I want to throw away his vials.” She didn’t look at him. Her voice was musing, unemotional.

  That makes two of us. He shook his head instead. “I’m not sure that makes sense. It might be nice to have a steady supply on hand.”

  “Never. Not after...” Her dainty hands tightened into claws. “I can’t ever tolerate the taste of him again.”

  It was just professional curiosity. It got the better of him. He couldn’t help himself. He had to ask, “What do you mean?”

  “It tastes wrong. His serum. It’s not right, what it does to me. It’s an addiction from him. It always was. Something was always off about the way I responded to it.” She flushed and chewed her lip. “Now I know… after… It’s different with yours.” She chewed her lip, going silent.

  What he wanted to do was puff out his chest, thump his fist against it, and strut. If cocks could, his would do a happy dance. It wasn’t like he’d played an actively conscious role in producing the stuff, but it made him obscenely proud that she liked the way his serum tasted. Not the type of thing one said aloud, though. “They say that each male produces the ideal flavor of serum for his mate. I wonder if...”

  “He wasn’t really my mate?” Her tone was unemotional. She wasn’t speaking in metaphors.

  He frowned.

  “Is that possible?” Her eyes burned. “It was never right. From the beginning, it was all sour, tainted by the s….”

  He glanced at her sharply, but she dropped her gaze. He didn’t want to push her too far. “You were definitely Bonded, but maybe….”

  Feola frowned. “I don’t care what the reasons were. I just know that tasting him again would make me sick. I don’t want to. Not after you.”

  His heart thumped, and so did his cock. The words were sweet in his ears.

  He inhaled, long and deep. “What if we get separated, or captured? We’ve got no idea what we’ll find on this planet.”

  “You could make some, right? I stole Utto’s.”

  He shook off the burst of lurid curiosity. He really did not want to know how.

  To change the subject, he reached out a hand, pulled her to her feet to stand between his spread thighs. She’d dressed in a pair of tight black pants and a black shirt that Shepherd had found for her. He tugged her against him, pressing his face between her warm breasts. She smelled like flowers and like him.

  He wrapped his arms around her waist, and she just melted into his arms. Her hands stroked his hair.

  “Yes, I can make more, but not right now. I mean I could.” It was embarrassingly imperative to him that she know that. “But I’m not sure that’s smart. It’s more important that you’re safe. I just... We aren’t Bonded yet. His serum might be more potent if we get separated, since he’s still your Bonded mate…” Which sucks.

  Even with him seated, their gazes were nearly level. He pulled her lips to his. Stroked his tongue over hers, tasted her, let himself imagine that she’d be his someday.

  “Ay-shocks, I can’t Bond with you.”

  He knew that, but it hit like a blast of icy water anyway. He nodded against her lips, forced a smile even though it felt like dragging sandpaper over a burn blister. “I know. It’s okay.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want that. I do. I want you, but after Utto, I won’t give anyone that kind of power over me again.”

  “You don’t need to explain. When we get back to Triannon after all this is over, after you are safe and free of Utto for good, I’ll see what I can do about ending your addiction. We can do it. It would just take weaning, and it doesn’t make sense while we are running from the Guarda for you to be sick for that long.”

  She nodded.

  “But Feola”—he tightened his grip on her waist, pulling her closer, so she could feel the thick ridge of his cock against her—“I’m going to do everything in my power to change your mind between now and then. I lost you once. I won’t lose you again.”

  She stilled in his arms.

  But he pressed on. “I’d never hurt you. I’d never do what Utto did. There’s something wrong with him. The purpose of the serum isn’t to keep the woman captive to the man. It’s the opposite. It’s to bind us to the woman for life so that we’d die to keep her safe, and her children. It offers protection.”

  Her eyes shifted under his gaze. They gleamed, warm and yellow-green in the light, her pupils dilated.

  “Ay-Shocks.” She stroked her hand down his face.

  He didn’t really want to hear whatever she was about to say, so he shifted her, lifting her up to sit in his lap so her legs straddled him, so that his cock rested against the soft heat of her pussy, like a taunting magnet he couldn’t have. Instead, he stroked his hand under her shirt to bare her breasts. He spoke against her neck, so his words disappeared into her shoulder and her soft hair. “I want to be inside you.”

  She froze in his arms. Afraid? She pushed down, pressing more of that molten heat against him, and all the air rushed out of his lungs.

  “I know,” she said finally, in a quiet voice. “I want it, too.”

  “There are other ways.” He tilted her back so he could rub his face in the soft heat of her breasts. When he sucked a rosy nipple into his mouth, she groaned and writhed on top of him. He would change her mind. All he needed was a little time. He surged to his feet, carrying her toward the bed at the back of the ship. He laid her down. “This time, there’s no rush and no audience. We can take our time.”

  He did take his time, tracing his tongue along every beautiful part of her body that was so different from his. The line from her arm to the bottom of her breasts,
over the ripples of her ribs, along the hollowing dip of her abdomen to the rise of her hip bones. The sinuous curve of her spine leading down to a pair of perfect twin dimples at the base, and her beautiful, perfect round ass.

  He hissed, his hands on her hips, imagining how it would feel to rise up behind her, shove inside of her, take her roughly, unabashedly.

  He closed his teeth over the spot where her neck and shoulder met. She arched against him, pushing back, writhing. She was hungry… for him, and that made his cock swell even longer. Groaning, he slid his hands under her, between her hot body and the soft sheets, to slide his fingers through slippery skin.

  Some day.

  All this pain and ugliness and fear wouldn’t always lie between them.

  Not yet.

  20

  You need to let me go.

  A sat-portal, a relic from a few centuries past, would be their final pass through before they were at the periphery of the galaxy, and near their destination, the planet Araa-Ara.

  When they were within an hour of the sat-portal, Ajax accessed radio connectivity to contact Tam. The ship’s technology was cumbersome, but eventually, he established enough of a connection to tap into Triannon’s comm net. Tam wasn’t available, so he sent him a quick message on the comm, telling him that they’d left Pilan and had taken their chosen trajectory.

  He’d have felt better if someone in the universe, beyond a shadow of a doubt, knew exactly where they were.

  That, and if they didn’t have a slew of bounty hunters on their tails.

  They slowed as they approached and did a cursory flyover Araa-Ara, letting the ship’s scanners analyze it for humanoid life forms. The readings were clean. He hated having to trust the word of a man he’d never met, but Tam trusted Reyback. It would have to be enough.

  The ship spun a lazy arc over the planet, and they watched through the viewscreen. Pale gray, silver, white, and purple. An unknown. He hadn’t spent time on any planet but Argentus.