Separated Starlight (NightPiercer Book 2)
Page 6
His amused smile didn’t waver. “Where are you going?”
“To sit down.”
Bennett strode to the front of the room and braced his hands on either side of a desk. The desk was dead center of the front row. “Your spot is here.”
Gaia help both of them if she ended up in Operations. One of them wasn’t going to survive.
“We have assigned desks?” she asked innocently.
He had that predatory look on his face like he was enjoying watching a bug upside down in a puddle of water. “I suppose you think your odds of passing are quite good and you’re getting started early on being my problem child. I applaud the boldness.”
Her skin crawled, and her heart started to beat a little too hard and fast. “Captain Tsu did say every command officer needs at least one pain in the ass to disrupt their ego.”
Bennett’s grin widened a bit more. “That spot is currently taken by Commander Rainer. If you want the job, you’ll have to take it from him.”
She seethed, but couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t a snarl or a too-far insult.
He glanced meaningfully at the desk.
Fine. She didn’t break eye contact. Bennett knew enough about wolves to hold her gaze, that horrid smile lurking around his expression. Whatever game he was playing, he’d tricked her into playing it.
She hooked her heel around the chair, drew it close, carefully breathing around her pulse. She kept her temper in check as she lowered herself onto the seat, yielding dominant position to the Commander. His scent shifted again to something thrilled. Not quite aroused, but he was enjoying this all the same.
“Commander,” she said, trying to keep her tone dulcet.
His scent shifted—she’d caught him by surprise. “Lachesis.”
“What are your scores?”
“That’s a rude question on this ship.”
“Is it? It’s not on Ark, and Rainer offered his without hesitation,” she said mildly. It was a rude question on Ark, but he wouldn’t know that.
He chuckled. It send terrible shudders over her nerves, and her heartbeat spiked higher, and her vision started to dim around the edges. “Above Average Raw, High Practical, Very High Emotional.”
Well. Fuck. That particular combination plus total asshole was downright terrifying. No wonder he wasn’t married yet. Crèche probably had no idea how to pair him.
“Don’t turn around,” he told her. “If you look behind you, you fail.”
Intrigued, she asked, “Is that an order?”
“Yes. Do not turn around, do not speak unless I explicitly grant permission.”
The other proctors observed, and didn’t seem to think there was anything strange about Bennett looming over her, giving a bunch of random, weird orders.
“Am I clear?” he asked.
If Bennett thought he was playing some werewolf dominance game, and that was going to get him into her pants, he was wrong. Oh, he carried himself with an authority that could have made a she-wolf pant, because she-wolves loved power and prestige, and his power and prestige mingled with a smoothness that just pleased everyone it brushed against. The effect on her? Less than zero.
Except maybe now she’d like him better if she didn’t have to talk to him.
“Monitor her,” Bennett told one of the proctors. “She is not to turn her head.”
“Sir,” the proctor said, moving into position to stare at her.
Other students filed in around her. Bennett spoke to them, directing some to sit in specific places, or asking innocuous questions that gave rattled-sounding replies. The scent of the room ranged from nervous to flat-out cold-sweat terrified.
“Have to sit next to the princess,” the human on her left muttered under her breath. It was a female voice and scent, although it was tricky to tell based on how many scents were in the room and she couldn’t turn her head to match scent to face.
A werewolf male sat behind her. Bennett re-appeared and tapped the desk next to her. Movement to her right, and the scent of a nervous human male. Nervous in the sense he didn’t want anything to do with her.
Bennett tapped her desk with his fingers. “Lachesis, take your hair down, please.”
She opened her mouth to say excuse me, then caught herself.
“Down and unbraided, please,” he repeated. “Quickly. We need to get started.”
She reached up behind her head, pulled out the two pins securing her bun, and laid them on her desk.
Bennett watched, his expression and scent intrigued.
She untied the string at the base of her braid, set that down on the table, and pulled her fingers through the braid to loosen it, then shook it out, unable to suppress the shudder of pleasure at her hair being freed from its constriction.
His scent of intrigue mingled with real desire. Intense enough that the male wolves around her coughed and squirmed. She kept a straight face and prayed he’d get away from her.
He obliged her by nodding, expression unchanged, and moved away.
She had to sit in a funk of Bennett-arousal, and then the two males around her also were aroused and fearful as hell.
Yuck. The scent of juvenile male horniness. Sort of like onion and garlic breath coated in grease.
Bennett fanned his proctors out around the room, except for the one ordered to mind her. He stood dead-center at the front of the room, hands clasped in front of himself. Behind him, the screen flickered, and a list of their names unfolded in two columns.
“Palms,” he said.
Everyone pressed their palm into their desks. A timer popped up on her screen.
“Good luck. Your time for the first phase starts now,” Bennett said.
The test that appeared before her was a jumbled mess of questions. Some multiple choice, true/false, logic problems, whole long tickets that she suspected were drawn from actual complaints and real scenarios over the years. Those were the worst: entire chains of tickets and messages back and forth with people arguing about their sides of the story, and she had to actually discern what the truth of the situation was.
It did not help that the male next to her reeked of fear and near-panic, and the male behind her occasionally stank of how horny he was, and the human female next to her smelled angry/vaguely pissed off, and that clock was ticking down while she wrestled with protocols she’d never heard of, and scenarios from sections she barely knew existed, much less what they were complaining about.
She didn’t finish the first phase. The second phase involved separating them in groups of three, taking them into other rooms, and sitting them down to deliberate over more ticket scenarios that the proctors and other Operations officers acted out based on real tickets and actual conflicts.
Her brain tried to explode from the crazy.
“Lachesis,” the proctor supervising said to her after the first scenario was acted out, “your opinion?”
She didn’t say anything, and just gave the proctor a look like she was an idiot.
“Don’t stonewall,” the proctor said, mildly irritated.
Lachesis sighed and elbowed the guy to her left, hoping he was smarter than a box of rocks. Unfortunately, he wasn’t, and just snarled, “What do you want? She’s talking to you!”
Lachesis face-palmed. Then she held up three fingers, and laid them against her shoulder, before drawing her finger across her lips.
“She means Commander Bennett ordered her to stay silent and you don’t have the authority to override that,” the smarter member of the group sitting to her right said.
The proctor flushed and left the room briefly before returning with Commander Bennett. He took a seat in the corner to observe. “You may speak, Lachesis.”
Could she start with accusing him of shaking all their cages for his sick entertainment?
“Opinion?” the smarter person on her right asked, annoyed.
“I think this is a stupid conflict and everyone involved should be punished for wasting time on it.”
Lachesis sighed, exasperated. “This kind of petty bunk-level trash is pathetic. I’d be embarrassed to waste my superiors’ time with it. If Operations really wastes their time on nonsense like this, they need an intervention.”
The person on her left asked, “So what do you think the people involved should do?”
She rolled her eyes. “Seek out someone else to mediate it instead of crying up the chain of command.”
“What if they don’t have anyone?” Bennett asked, interjecting.
“You mean, they have no one on the whole damn ship that can help them?” she asked the Commander. Like me, perhaps? Are we talking about me, you asshole?
Bennett shrugged.
She turned to the two proctors pretending to be embittered rivals. “If everyone in your collective lives is an asshole, then you’re the assholes. Request a referral to Counseling on guidance for repairing your dysfunctional personal lives and substandard conflict resolution.”
“Could you shut up!” the person on her right hissed. “You’re married, but some of us need to pass this!”
Lachesis gestured angrily to the proctors. “I just gave you the right answer, and if it isn’t, it should be. Otherwise this is going to be the rest of your life, in middle management Operations hell dealing with this shit all the time.”
“I want a career, you dumb dog!”
The dumb person sucked in through his teeth.
Lachesis blinked, clicked her tongue once, and turned around to the proctors with a shrug. Now her Operations test had everything. Horny teenagers, creepy proctors, stupid tickets, questions she couldn’t answer, and now slurs. She crossed one knee over the other and leaned back against her chair. Fuck this test and everyone in it.
Bennett placed his hands on his knees, grinned, and stood up, his scent swirling with delight. “You’re right. The people involved were referred to Counseling and informed they were the problem.”
“What?” the person on her right exclaimed.
Bennett left the room.
“What did he mean?” the person on the left mourned.
This entire test seemed to be a random mess, and she was over it. She’d been over it before she walked in, but she was clearly failing, had absolutely no idea what was going on, and no longer cared.
And she was on too much medication to drink after all this was over, so a cup of tea at Rainer’s it was.
The final phase was switching desks and being presented with someone else’s test. And being told to correct or complete a random assortment of questions.
And of course none of her “random” assortment were Crèche, Engineering, Telemetry or Crew related—the things she had a grasp on. It was all QuarterMaster and Supply and conflict resolution.
Yep, she was definitely going to enjoy some tea after this…
Useful or Used
Rainer came back.
“Not what I expected to see,” he said, his scent clear and bright thanks to her being in wolf form. He carried the scent of where he’d been (the market, Engineering, the bridge, presumably, because she smelled Tsu as well), stress, dominance, authority, the unfamiliar scent she could only define as prestige, his pleasure at seeing her, and how he’d like to demonstrate said pleasure to her.
She pressed her snout into her forepaws and slicked her ears while sighing. Making tea had been too much work. She’d shifted into wolf form and hung out on the rug, trying to smell sunlight, but really she’d just smelled feet.
Feet were better than smelling the stench of Bennett.
Rainer crouched down next to her. “That bad.”
She twitched her ears. Eh.
He ran his hand along her spine. She squirmed and clacked her teeth at him, grazing his sleeve with her fangs.
“Such fine fangs,” he said, tone low and rough and his scent turning into hot desire. His hand pressed over her hips, pushing her down onto the rug, then moved to the base of her tail before lifting off her.
She swatted him with her tail.
He growled, then stood to pull off his shirt.
She popped to her feet as his hands moved to his pants. She shifted up into human form, red hair cascading around her breasts and shoulders.
His eyes gleamed, and he froze, hands not moving for a second, then he plunged both hands into her hair, and pulled her in for a hot, dizzying kiss.
Skin-on-skin contact shocked her, sending charges through her breasts and across her shoulders. She gasped around his tongue. Her nipples burned against the smooth skin of one side of his chest, while the other rubbed against the marbled, melted skin of the other, every lump and ridge teasing her nipple and breast.
Her pulse accelerated as fire licked over every part of her, through her, reaching up inside her pleading for him to fill her. His hand knotted in her hair, the other moved to grip her naked ass, while he growled with pleasure at the soft flesh that greeted him. Her body heated another couple of Kelvin as slickness dampened her thighs and the torment of not having him right then, and the rigid length pushing against her belly and not inside her, gripped every bit of her awareness.
Her mind dimmed, and the want suffocated her.
“Lachesis,” his voice seemed to come from far away.
Why wasn’t he kissing her? Damnit, some part of him needed to be inside her.
She opened her eyes, stared back at him, realized she was breathing very hard and her pulse was doing some unsteady, uncomfortably-nauseating pitter-pat in her throat.
Well. Hell.
“I’m fine,” she panted, feeling absurd. She’d never swooned in anyone’s arms before. Although swooning in his wasn’t entirely the worst thing she’d ever dealt with.
“Should I be flattered?” he asked, tone low, his scent concerned but not too apologetic. His hand had loosened on her hair, but not her ass. And the rest of him hadn’t relaxed either. Nor had the wetness that felt like it was trickling down her thighs in slick rivulets.
She inhaled, and just got a nosefull of his scent, which just made that swoon-inducing flush lick over her again, and her pussy soak itself (again), and her heart flail as it tried to keep up. He shifted, and his marbled skin rubbed her nipple, and she bit down a faint moan.
Instead, she managed to say, “I’m just worn out from the exam. Too much stress. I just came from the exam to steal your tea.”
She pulled herself away from him and walked, unsteady and thighs soaked, to find her clothing. Maybe she should just take a shower.
He watched her, admiring her ass and thighs, not moving to get dressed again, or adjust himself. “And sit on my rug?”
His tone sent a shudder through her. He wanted her to sit somewhere else.
She clutched her shirt in front of her breasts and willed herself to not just beg him to get undressed and help her forget everything, and stop caring about anything, because that was dangerous. All of this was dangerous. All of this was confusing.
Her body was not confused. Her lizard brain knew exactly what it wanted: Rainer’s cock buried inside her and his teeth wrapped around her throat while she gleefully accepted he was the most spectacularly dominant male she’d ever seen.
Which was exactly why her lizard brain was not in charge and could never be allowed to be in charge.
“I wish I could smell the sunlight on it,” she said wistfully.
“Are you going to need a shower, or shall I bathe you with my tongue? Which form would you like? No sex, nothing strenuous. Just a nice relaxing… bath.”
Right. Nice and relaxing. She pulled on her pants. He clicked his teeth, didn’t bother to put back on his shirt, and went to brew tea.
She sank down onto the couch, put her feet onto the edge of the coffee table. From here she could see some of the shadowboxes containing the stones from Earth.
Was she just a trophy? Did Bennett know about Rainer, or did Bennett know what to say to her? Maybe both we
re true.
She was going to need to decide quickly what to do—mostly because she and Rainer couldn’t go on like this. This was the very definition of inappropriate relationship. She had until the Entry exams came back. If she somehow passed, she’d maybe have until after Aptitude. Tsu’s promise had an expiration date, even if he had said it didn’t. Bennett would just point out the crew wasn’t accepting her (true), and that she spent all her time in Rainer’s quarters (also true), so it was time to put up or shut up.
Except staying with Rainer meant accepting what came with being Rainer’s wife.
Rainer brought over two cups of tea. He still didn’t have on his shirt, but his lower body had mostly receded like grudging tides. She tried not to stare, and averted her gaze north. The smooth, tangled plasma scarring and various surgical nicks and marks mingled with the grafted skin. Her nipples perked at the memory.
He pretended not to notice the flare in her scent. “So you failed.”
“Pretty sure.”
“But you don’t know.”
“It was such a cluster. From the instant Bennett walked in with the proctors. He went right for me, called me his problem child and told me that job is currently your job, so if I want it, I need to get rid of you.” She sipped her tea. Bennett had meant the last part literally.
Rainer chuckled.
“It’s not funny,” she said tartly. “Then he made me sit in the front of the room, told me not to speak or turn around. Then started to order everyone else around, but I got special treatment. Then he made me take my hair down, which brewed a really nasty patch of horny young male and snarky what-is-she-doing-here.”
“Not surprised. You saw what your hair just did to me.” He glanced down at his lap, shifted slightly to accommodate the obvious reaction the memory conjured, then back at her.
“Did it for Bennett too,” she grumbled.
Rainer’s demeanor turned cold, hard. “Did he act inappropriate? Did any part of him twinge?”