The leader looks between us, trying to read the dynamic of our relationship. Perhaps he sees that there is something between us in the way that our eyes watch each other with such care, in the way that I have angled my body toward hers, ready to do my best to fend off any attacks that might seek to injure her further. Perhaps someone with less stunted intelligence would recognize that caring for someone comes in different forms. He appears to think that the fact that we have any regard toward each other whatsoever means that we are fated.
Seldyn gives her a nod of what appears to be, of all things, respect.
“Now I see why you fight so hard.”
It should be less shocking than it is. In a group consisting almost solely of Velorians, it makes sense that they would treat mating and the bond that forms between two fated beings seriously.
“It’s a rotten thing,” Seldyn continues. “A bond between two differing species. You should have stuck with your own kind.” He looks to me. “We’ll do you a favor, human. If our leader allows you to live, we’ll sever it for you and set you free.”
As they lead us once more from the room, I think that perhaps I was too generous with my earlier assessment. They think soul bonds are sacred, but that bonds between those too different are tainted. What should I have expected from a group that seems so stuck on the supremacy of our species above the others?
Tess walks in front of me, her shoulders slumped in a façade of fear and defeat. For a second, I almost trick myself into believing that she truly feels this. But then, she turns back, catches my eye, and gives me the wide grin I have come to love.
7
Tessie
I can feel his glare on my back as we walk, and when we are once again alone, locked in the same prison cell in which I woke, he turns on me immediately. Jari has an intimidating glare, and I find that it still has the capacity to be frightening even when his hands are bound and he’s covered in bruises of varying severity. He is a Velorian so they will be gone in a few hours if he doesn’t manage to earn himself some new ones. My own will linger like scar tissue until they are given a proper chance to heal.
“What were you thinking?” he asks.
“In what regard?”
“Telling him we’re mates,” Jari replies without pause. “They despise me, Tess. They want information from me. You think they won’t threaten you, knowing that I’ll tell them?”
I do feel a quick pang of guilt at the thought that I may have made this more difficult for Jari as opposed to more simple. That had not been my aim.
“I was trying to be proactive,” I answer. “I was afraid they might move us to opposite ends of the ship or something. It will be much easier for us to, you know, conspire, if we’re occupying the same space.”
Jari makes a noise of displeasure. “Could have backfired,” he says. “They might have moved us apart simply to distress us further.”
I think on his words. That would not seem incredibly unlikely in most situations, but the leader of this small group seems to think himself an evil genius of some sort. “Nah,” I say confidently, when truly I’m still just speculating. “He’ll leave us together to contemplate our grisly fates. More dramatic that way.”
Jari does not argue this point further. He simply sighs and stares at the closed door. “I understand your reasoning,” he says. “But now it would be dangerous to let this ruse slip. Around them, we must behave as though we are mated.”
“I could think of less pleasant partners,” I say, in an attempt to lighten the mood.
He ducks his head, gives me a thin, barely there, smile. “I could as well,” he says. He looks me over, eyes scanning over the space suit, now littered with rips and rumpled places, a few dots of red. “How badly are you hurt?”
I shrug. “The stunning was a bit excessive,” I say. “And I’ve got more bruises than I can count, but it was worth it to get a few good hits in.”
Jari sighs. “That’s where we seem to disagree,” he says. “You have always had a different attitude regarding fighting than I, but here it may truly be detrimental. There’s no point in antagonizing them when we have no plan for escape, or even a feasible means to.”
I clue in on the word escape instead of the rest of the statement. “We need to discuss how we’re getting out of here. I still have my knife.”
He shakes his head. “To try anything now would be suicide, Tess. We need to wait for when they move us to their hideout. Perhaps longer, if we think we’ll have a chance at learning something once we arrive.”
I stare at him, uncomprehending. “There are escape pods,” I say. “I have a knife. They’ll have to feed and water us, or at least water us, and when they do—all we need to do is get the drop on one of them and get to the pod. It couldn’t be any simpler.”
He is suggesting that we risk ourselves for the sake of the mission under the guise of it being a safer course of action.
“You’re trying to be honorable,” I say. “I understand. But let me tell you something, Jari: Prizing honor over all else gets you this.” I gesture angrily downward at the space where my right leg very obviously is not. “This isn’t something to aspire to—it’s something to avoid. You can serve Veloria better by keeping yourself alive.”
Jari absorbs the words. He looks down at my leg and I feel my cheeks redden. I don’t usually mention the injury unless it’s giving me trouble. It isn’t like me to wallow in self-pity. “You can still fight,” he says, softly, gently, laying aside the argument for just a moment to reassure me as a friend, and not a fellow captive.
“I know,” I say. I am hurting and sick and exhausted beyond measure. “I just don’t want us to miss our chance.”
“Do you trust me?” he asks.
“Of course I do,” I answer.
“Then just hold off on the escape. I’m telling you, it won’t work. After the stunt you pulled earlier, they won’t send just one guard to the door, regardless of what their purpose is. They’ll be on high alert.” His hands are behind his back, and he cannot reach me. We are standing close together though, and he settles for bumping his shoulder against my own. It’s warm, and acts as a stark reminder of how cold the ship is. I want to lie down again, to heal myself with sleep the way a wild animal does, my body pressed against the only warmth in the small cell. “We’ve already guessed that it will be a few days before they reach their destination, and it will be a miserable two days regardless—we don’t need to make it any worse.”
“You mean by getting ourselves tortured prematurely?”
“Tess,” Jari says. “Our best option is to wait and see if your comm call yields any results. If not, then we’ll wait for an opportunity at the hideout.”
I feel myself getting truly angry. None of what I have said is getting through to him, and it is plainly obvious from the way he speaks that he merely wants a shot at their leader, or at the very least, more information to give the Prince.
“I’d like to escape as soon as possible,” I say, “And I cannot do it alone.”
Jari blows an angry huff of air through his nostrils and sits down in the corner of the cell. After a few moments of angry pacing, I do the same. I start out in the opposite corner, but sitting there in the dark and the cold, the bitterness of our disagreement matters less and less. Jari is all that I have and I am all that he has. He has always been the less petty of the two of us, and it is he that clears his throat after a few long, silent hours, broken only by the hum of the ship’s engine, have passed us by.
“Tess,” he says. “Give me a story.”
I understand immediately. We are both soldiers, and there are old ghosts in the darkness of sleep. He hopes to avoid it for a while.
It is shockingly easy to keep the anger from my voice when I begin to speak, telling him about the time my older sister and I stole a skiff from the station we’d been living on, and took it all the way to the neighboring station and back without anyone being the wiser. We had been young and naïve and our entire goal h
ad been to visit friends that lived there in person, as we’d grown tired of seeing them only through a screen. We hadn’t realized how badly things might have gone had we been caught. He gives me a thin smile and in return for the bit of my childhood I’ve sacrificed, he gives me a bit of his own. His first shift into his dragon form, his first flight beside a brother. The brother had died a few years later, in the war.
Such stories are filled with too much sentimentality, and in this situation, they cut too close to the bone. We move on to war stories, stories of battle and honor. They bolster the spirit and strengthen our bones, and when I sleep, I am prepared to fight off whatever ghosts might appear.
The days are indeed long and miserable, though they are made less so by the company. However much his stance in this situation has put him on my bad side, I can think of far worse people to be stuck in a cell with. I begin the first night across the room, each of us in separate corners, and wake with our shoulders pressed together, my face turned into his neck. His bound hands do not allow him to sleep on the ground on his back, and so everything he does, he does standing, or sitting, or leaning with one shoulder against one wall.
His shoulders ache constantly and his back is a mess of knots. My own bruises bother me only a bit—I have had worse. My jaw would ache if we were given food to chew on, but there is nothing but the water they placed inside while we were speaking with the leader, left there for the two of us to find. We pass the time in silence more often than not, the way we had huddled beside each other on missions, waiting for some danger to pass. The second night, I sleep with my head on his thigh, the break from the cold cell floor appreciated.
It is the third night, and my voice is hoarse from stories.
“Come here,” I tell him, when his muscles have gone rigid from the prolonged time spent in the cuffs. He turns in the way that I indicate and presents his back to me. There will be no lasting damage. He is Velorian and all but the most catastrophic injury is capable of healing almost as soon as it is dealt. Still, his biology does nothing to ease his discomfort in the meantime. I place my hands on what little of his back I can reach with his armor in the way. He cannot remove it with the handcuffs still locked in place, so I settle for undoing a few of the uppermost clasps. His relieved sigh when I do so lets me know that I am on the right track. I am suddenly grateful that I’d had the presence of mind to strip out of my armor before lying down back on my ship. A space suit may not protect me as well, but it is eons more comfortable.
There is still little of his skin that I can reach, but I do my best to soothe the aches there, rubbing the broad back in front of me with firm strokes, moving up to his shoulders and digging my thumbs into the bunched up, tense muscles there. I think long and hard about whether or not to avoid the spines, knowing that the area immediately surrounding them is a sensitive and pleasurable zone for Velorians, while the spikes themselves can be used in fighting in both their humanoid and dragon forms. As my fingertip circles the top spine at the base of his neck, his breathing hitches a bit in pleasure and I know that the dynamic of the situation has now shifted. I keep going, combining the firm, deliberate massaging of my thumbs into his shoulders with the more light, teasing brush of my fingers around his spines.
“Tess,” he says, his voice curious.
He wants to know if I wish to take this further. If I stop, then I can simply pass this off as a lapse in brain function on my part. Sorry Jari, I forgot about the complexities of a Velorian’s erogenous zones. Won’t happen again. But if I don’t, then the possibility of continuing into unfamiliar territory has arisen, and I’m not quite sure I’m ready for that.
Before I can answer, with my voice or with my hands, thundering footsteps sound in the hallway. I all but leap to my feet, make my steps as silent as I can, and stand carefully on the left side of the doorway. Jari is standing to the right, prominently visible through the small slit in the door, but I have made myself nearly invisible. I crouch and lean forward, meaning to pull the blade from my boot.
I telegraph the move that I am planning to make, and Jari acts just as the door opens. He cannot grab me with his hands bound as they are, but he improvises quickly. Jari moves, and something solid sweeps my legs from beneath me, sending me immediately to the floor. I land hard on my back, lungs emptying of air, just as the cell door opens. He used his tail. I can see it swaying a bit behind him from the movement. The guard tosses in another two canteens and a bit of food that is unidentifiable from this distance, and slams the door closed once more before I can rise to my feet. Through the slot in the door, the Velorian guard says:
“Tomorrow.”
And the word sounds like the slice of a guillotine.
The slot closes, and his footsteps echo down the hall.
Still catching my breath, tears of shock and of anger stinging at my eyes, I turn my glare on Jari.
“Are you hurt?’ he asks.
“Screw you,” I answer. “You want to stay here and play the hero—fine. But don’t drag me into your bullshit.”
“I’m not dragging you into anything,” he says, his voice threaded with false calm. “I’m trying to keep you alive. You couldn’t have taken him, Tess. Not with just a knife. And there were two more waiting in the hall.”
“There was one,” I argue.
“Velorian hearing,” he says. “I can hear their footsteps, hear their breathing, from a lot farther away than you. Keep your anger if you wish to. But had I not intervened you could have … they would have harmed you.”
The revelation that there were more waiting in the wings to pounce makes me flush with embarrassment. I am a soldier, or the ghost of what was once one. I know how to fight and how to shoot and how to live, but there are certain things at which Jari will always be just a little bit better. It is a realization that I have had before, and it comforts as much as it stings.
“Thank you,” I say, my voice a bit slow, a bit halting. “You could have just said so,” I remark, brushing the dust from the seat of my suit.
The look he gives me is completely incredulous. “As if that would have stopped you,” he says, taking a step forward. “You’re infuriating sometimes, Tess. You don’t even think about the risk to yourself.”
“Me?” I say. “You’re the one who’s willing to die for the slightest chance we might find out something useful.”
He has kept moving forward, nearly boxing me into a corner. Jari has always been in the habit of throwing himself almost physically into any argument he’s having. It is no surprise when his body leans forward.
It is slightly surprising when I lean forward in turn and crash my lips against his.
There is heat waiting for me there; passion that has been building beneath both our skins for near on a decade. His hands are still trapped behind his back, but for the duration of this kiss, he manages to wrest control from me, his tongue dominating mine, the force of his lips nearly too hard to be pleasant. He kisses like he fights, with grace and skill as well as strength that nearly overwhelms the senses. I wrap my arms around his neck, dig my fingers into his shoulders for purchase as the wall meets my back. I tilt my head back, trying to win a better angle.
It is not unusual for two soldiers to blow off steam after a battle or a close call, or even simply to break up the boredom of an uneventful posting. People did so all the time and still remained friends and comrades afterward. It was frowned upon to sleep with a squad-mate, but only because it often led to the dynamic of the entire group shifting. A soldier who prioritized the safety of her lover over the mission was not a good soldier. They were perhaps a good person, but not the sort of warrior who was able to make difficult decisions in the midst of battle. Much as I missed the military and the feeling of belonging to something larger and more righteous than myself, I did not miss some of the things that being a soldier caused me to aspire to. I am not ashamed of the fact that I want to live. I am, after all, only human, and self-preservation is an instinct as old as life.
His teeth catch my lower lip between them. They are sharper than my own, and I find that the small spike of pain I receive goes straight to the space between my legs. I want his hands there, but Jari’s are bound and I settle for my own, letting one slip down to cup myself through my spacesuit, searching for something, however slight, to rub myself against. The nails of my other hand dig desperately into his arm, trying to hurt him back, to make him feel what I am feeling. He grips my hand when he sees that it has strayed below my waist and replaces it with his thigh slotted between my legs. The friction it gives me is delicious and as he presses closer, I can feel the evidence of his arousal.
This is wrong. Something about it must be wrong because who else could feel such things in such a situation? Who else could even contemplate pleasure when death might knock on the door in the morning?
Jari pulls away. He seems shocked at how far and how quickly things have progressed. His eyes are wide and pleased. Still, he has pulled back, and I feel the urge to reassure him of my enthusiasm.
“You know,” I say, looking to the ceiling and lifting a brow. “I bet someone’s watching us.”
Jari has fought with me through things beyond imagining. He knows exactly how to read my thoughts from the tone of my voice, from the set of my jaw and the heat in my eyes.
“Let’s give them a show,” he says. “They think we’re mates after all.”
I look to each corner of the room, where a camera may or may not be watching, and feel myself grin. We might die tomorrow, so we may as well steal what enjoyment we can from tonight. But this is different; this has been building since perhaps our first meeting, when both of us had less scars upon our skin. When my lips lock with his again, it feels like the end of a long journey, like a homecoming, like peace.
8
Jari
I ache to touch her, but my hands are useless. Her lips meld with mine, and the feel of them together is like dancing or fighting—or both. Her tongue wets my lower lip, explores the slight points of my sharper teeth. All the while, her hands are doing what mine cannot. My leg between her thighs frees both her hands to explore whatever maps of skin they would like to touch. She removes the pieces of my armor that she can easily reach, unclasping the chest piece and letting it clatter to the metal floor. She fumbles a bit with the arm pieces, and can only undo the upper half, which leaves my forearms covered.
Primal Planet Captive: SciFi Alien Fated Romance Page 6
