And damn, he felt good—smelled and tasted good, too.
Prickles of awareness skittered along her skin, and pleasure coursed down her spine straight to her core. That needful ache only intensified, leaving her slick between her thighs. She moaned against his mouth, nipping at his bottom lip as her hands clutched the waistband of his pants.
Just as quickly as he’d initiated it, Thargen broke the kiss, pulling his mouth away. When she moved to follow, one of his hands caught her hair, holding her head in place.
She opened her eyes to look up at him just as his tongue swept across his lower lip. Fire danced in his eyes.
“That’s all you get, terran.”
Son of a—
Yuri glared at Thargen. “Oh, you’re playing so dirty, vorgal.”
His smirk was equal parts wicked and tortured. “That makes two of us.”
“I can show you dirty.” Grinning, she slipped her hand into his pants.
Thargen growled and pulled her hard against him, trapping her hand between their pelvises before it could get any farther.
She chuckled. “Or you could put your hand in my pants and feel how hot and wet I am for you instead.”
He sighed heavily, and a faint tremor ran through his arms. He dropped his face into the crook of her neck and shoulder and breathed deep. “Fuck, Yuri, you—”
Somewhere not far off, branches snapped and vegetation shook in a burst of sound. Thargen’s head jerked up, his body going rigid, and Yuri’s racing heart skipped a beat. Before silence could settle in to reassure her that there was nothing out there, that all was well, that it had only been an old, dead branch falling, someone screamed in pain.
Her eyes widened, locking with Thargen’s. Those sounds had come from downriver—the direction from which they’d fled the crashed ship, the direction in which they’d laid the majority of their larger traps.
“Was that one of the pits?” she whispered; even that felt too loud now.
Thargen straightened, tipping Yuri upright, and turned his head toward the disturbance. “Yeah.”
She’d felt useless while he’d dug those deep pits. The ground had been too tough for her to make much progress, even with the shovel they’d taken from the skeks days ago. But she’d done her part by gathering long branches and clumps of foliage to conceal the holes—and by sharpening some thick sticks for him to stick in the ground at the bottoms of those pits.
Sticks that would easily puncture flesh when someone fell in.
A horrifying thought chilled Yuri’s blood, making her shiver. “Thargen, what if that was one of the slaves? What if we—”
He pressed a big finger over her lips. “Shh.”
Another cry rose between the trees, not as loud but just as pained. Even less distinct was the voice that answered it a moment later, too faint for Yuri to make out the words. Thargen’s pointed ears twitched.
Yuri could just make out the babbling of the river, and which was steady beneath the sound of a gentle breeze sighing through the trees. And somewhere out of sight, the murmur of strained voices.
“We need to go check it,” Thargen said, lowering his finger.
“We?”
“Yeah. Just like I’ve been showing you, terran.” He tugged one of the deactivated hardlight axes from the loop on his belt and held the haft out to her. “Stay low, quiet, and on my ass.”
She closed her fingers around the weapon’s grip, swallowed, and nodded. Her stomach was knotted and fluttering for entirely different reasons than it had been a few moments before. Because yeah, it could be other escapees out there, but she knew in her heart that wasn’t likely—not after what Thargen had told her about those slave collars.
What would be worse to find at that pit—slaves, smugglers, or skeks? Somehow, the unknown was less unsettling than her inability to decide which of those things she’d prefer. Whatever they were, they were too close.
Thargen swung the skeks rifle off his shoulder, taking it in both hands, and moved toward the voices without even a hint of hesitation. Yuri followed immediately behind him, grateful that his pace was slow and deliberate.
Thargen’s path led them across terrain that had become quite familiar to Yuri over the last five days. She could almost liken it to a video game starting area, where new characters could get their bearings and pick up a few skills, the sort of place veterans knew in and out after countless playthroughs. This chunk of alien forest had become the real-life version of that for her.
And now, her novice stealth skill was about to be put to the test.
Maybe I should’ve grinded out a few more levels instead of lusting after my tank…
The voices grew more distinct as Yuri and Thargen advanced, though she couldn’t quite make out their words. She forced her breaths to remain even, now more aware than ever of how she placed her feet with every step. Her eyes darted up and down constantly, torn between watching Thargen, the ground in front of her, and the surrounding woods. She repeatedly adjusted her two-handed grip on the haft of her axe. The weapon felt overly heavy, her palms clammy, fingers weak.
Though it wasn’t visible through the vegetation, she knew the pit was directly ahead—another fifty meters, maybe. Those voices were still going, one in hushed whispers and the other in something between hissing and shouting, the latter broken occasionally by sharp intakes of breath and agonized groans. They were speaking Universal Speech.
Thargen veered upslope well before the pit came into sight, and Yuri didn’t question him. The new course brought them onto a small ridge overlooking the spot where they’d dug the pitfall. They crouched and moved up to a boulder at the edge of the ridge, where they pressed themselves against the stone and peered down through the trees.
Well, we can cross off two of the three S’s.
Even though the clothing of the two aliens down at the pit was dirty and tattered, the orange accents on it were unmistakable. Not skeks or slaves—smugglers from the Zulka gang.
“Didn’t expect them to be out this far,” Thargen said, his voice little more than a low rumble.
Neither had Yuri. She hadn’t forgotten about the smugglers, not at all, but after the storm, the skeks, and days of hard hiking and harder work just to keep themselves marginally safe and fed, the smugglers had become something of a distant concern.
The smuggler kneeling beside the pit looked like a borian, though he clearly wasn’t Taeraal—this one had red-orange hair right out of a New England autumn. He was holding one of those large auto-blasters that had been strewn about the ship’s cargo hold, and Yuri didn’t doubt that it would fire very real, very deadly plasma bolts when he pulled the trigger. The borian was currently looking down at his companion, who was in the pit. From this vantage, she could only see what she thought was an arm and a leg of the second smuggler. But that one’s strained voice, a whisper right on the cusp of becoming a shout, was quite clear now.
“Just get me out of this fucking hole, Auris!”
“Shut up, Garegon,” the borian replied, his voice lower, calmer, and much harder to make out. He lifted his head to scan his surroundings; Yuri reflexively ducked behind the rock, heart thundering.
That name, Garegon, sounded familiar. Was that…was that the kaital who’d been with the onigox and volturian at Starlight Trance?
“You try shutting up when you have a small tree run through your guts,” Garegon snapped.
Thargen eased over to Yuri’s side of the boulder, flattening his hand against it just over her head and leaning over her to peer around its side. He was only centimeters away, big and powerful and radiating heat, a living shield from all the fear and uncertainty threatening to close in on her. While Thargen was near, she’d be okay. Everything would turn out all right. Bloody, probably, but ultimately all right.
He was silent for what felt like a long while. Yuri stared at his chest, which swelled and relaxed with his deep, slow breaths. Though he’d taken to wearing shirts since the morning he’d talked about his Rage, t
he fabric did little to mask the muscle beneath. If she just put her hand out, she could touch his chest, and she’d feel the powerful thumping of his heart beneath her palm. And if she looked a little lower, or dropped her hand a little lower…
“Only see two,” Thargen said as he sank back into a squat.
Yuri’s eyes darted up to his face.
Yuri, this is so not the time to let that sexual frustration run rampant.
“Me too,” she forced herself to say, “Not that I got a great look. Forest is pretty thick around here.”
“That’s a good thing.”
She frowned, settling the haft of the axe across her thighs. “So…what do we do?”
“You stay here, quiet and out of sight. I’m gonna go take care of them.”
Her gaze dipped briefly to his rifle, but she didn’t say anything. This was a stealth mission, after all. The goal was to avoid drawing attention to this slice of mountainside they currently called home. Firing the loudest gun in the history of the universe would take out those smugglers quick and easy from all the way up here—but it would also give every smuggler and skeks on this side of the galaxy a pretty good idea of where Yuri and Thargen were.
“Be careful,” she said.
Paired with the wild light that had sparked in his eyes, Thargen’s grin was outright wicked. “No promises, terran.”
Before she realized what she was doing, Yuri grabbed the neck of Thargen’s shirt in her fist, pulled herself toward him, and smashed her mouth against his. Thargen stiffened for a moment, but that was all it took for him to give in; her hulking, savage male practically melted against her.
The instant she felt him lean closer, felt his lips demanding more, she forced herself to pull back. Her tongue slipped out to run across her tingling lips as she met his gaze. That light in his eyes was only more intense.
“Wrong answer,” she rasped.
Baring his teeth, Thargen leaned forward, tipping his forehead against hers. “Be right back, zoani. And that’s a fucking promise.”
That wasn’t exactly what she’d been after—but considering the fire his words lit in her lower belly, she accepted them. The thrill of getting him to give in, even in this small way…well, that was something she’d have to explore further when they didn’t have enemies within throwing distance.
She smirked and gave him a shove—not that he budged—releasing his shirt. “I’m holding you to that.”
He lingered there for another second or two, nostrils flaring with a deep inhalation; she had no doubt that he was smelling her, no doubt that his low groan afterward was one of appreciation. When he finally pulled away and left, she let herself fall back against the boulder, fully aware that she would’ve likely fallen on her ass and tumbled right off this little ridge were the stone not there to bolster her.
Yuri willed her heart to slow, her breathing to ease, and her mind to focus, reminding herself that Thargen was currently crouch-walking his way into a dangerous situation. The reminder only helped the latter of her struggles—now she was fully focused on Thargen being at risk.
For once, it was easy to ignore the ache at her core; the tightness in her chest was more than enough of a distraction.
You’d better be careful, damn it.
Taking up the axe in one hand, she turned toward the rock and peeked around it.
Thargen slipped in and out of sight as he crept down the slope, vanishing behind trees, rocks, and dense foliage. He seemed to be giving the smugglers a wide berth; his current trajectory would put him at least thirty meters to the left of the pit, by Yuri’s reckoning. But that made sense—that route would make it harder for them to hear him thanks to the added distance while allowing him to circle around to the thicket near the pit, which would provide him some cover on his final approach.
Yuri pressed a hand against the boulder and leaned aside just a little farther to bring the pit into view. Both Auris and Garegon were in the same places as before—not that the kaital was likely to go anywhere without help—but the borian seemed even more alert now, head turning from side to side as though he were carefully scanning his surroundings. As his gaze shifted up toward the ridge, Yuri eased back behind the boulder.
Was Auris just worried his companion’s cries had alerted nearby skeks, or was it possible that he’d heard Yuri and Thargen speaking even though they’d kept their voices so low?
Borians looked a lot like elves from many fantasy settings back on Earth—if elves were around two meters tall and had the physiques of world-champion swimmers. Did they have the same heightened senses, too? She was pretty sure they did, but she’d never made it far enough into nursing school to take any of the courses on alien species, and knowing all the racial bonuses from RPGs sure as hell wasn’t going to help her now.
Drawing in a deep, steadying breath, she glanced back toward Thargen’s projected route. Panic sparked in her chest as she raked her eyes across the landscape, seeking some sign of him, any sign of him, and a hundred possible scenarios flitted wildly just beneath her conscious thoughts. How could he just be gone?
Talk about overreacting.
That was her voice in her head, her thought, but its cold, practical tone dampened her panic before it could fully take root.
Yeah, this situation was scary—but so was almost every situation she’d been in since leaving Starlight Trance with Thargen that night. It felt like a lifetime had passed since then. And when scary became normal, it lost some of its power. Regardless, her mother had always said Yuri had a very solid spirit at her center that would keep her strong through bad, stressful times. This was nothing new—not really. She and Thargen had been through worse together already.
After a second calming breath, she slowed her eyes and really looked. The forest colors had become so familiar that they seemed to bleed together, but she wasn’t looking for the forest’s colors. She was looking for Thargen’s colors.
A flash of gray amidst the vegetation farther downslope caught her attention—Thargen’s shirt. For being so brawny, he sure could move quickly and quietly when he wanted to.
She peeked out at the smugglers again, only leaning far enough for one eye to look past the boulder.
Despite his alertness, Auris hadn’t moved, not even to ready his auto-blaster. That had to be a good sign, right? But her heartbeat gradually quickened as she watched Thargen continue his silent journey, her eyes constantly shifting from him to the smugglers and back again. It became a little harder to breathe every time he was blocked from view by some obstacle—which seemed to happen with increasing frequency as he moved closer to his destination.
“Not going to survive this if you leave me here much longer,” Garegon said, calling Yuri’s attention back to the pit.
“You’ll die quicker if I pull you out and can’t patch your wounds,” replied Auris. The first signs of irritation had entered his tone, echoed in his movements as he lifted his right arm to access something on his wrist.
Though the projection that flickered into view over the borian’s arm was much too small and far away for Yuri to make out any details, she knew it was the screen of a holocom. She flexed her left hand absently. After two years of wearing a holocom on her wrist, she felt almost naked without one now. Seeing the borian’s was just a reminder of how oddly light and off-balance her arm felt due to that absence.
“They’re just uphill from us,” Auris said. “Not much longer.”
Yuri’s blood turned to ice; she barely managed to duck behind the rock again before her whole body froze.
They’re just uphill from us.
So he had heard Yuri and Thargen? Did he know Thargen was sneaking toward him even now? Was this Auris sadistic enough to use his wounded companion as bait?
Swallowing thickly, she leaned over to search for Thargen again. He was closer to the smugglers than her, and he must’ve heard Auris’s words, must’ve known he was walking into a potential trap—one laid in response to his. But where was he now? She cou
ldn’t see him again, couldn’t spot any movement down there that wasn’t caused by the wind.
And even if she had been able to see him, what would she have done to get his attention?
“What if the skeks come back before then?” asked Gargeron.
“Keep your mouth shut, and they won’t,” Auris said.
Yuri’s mouth was suddenly dry, and her throat constricted. Tension bristled in the air, charging it with an ominous, unsettling energy even stronger than it had held preceding the thunderstorm. The forest seemed preternaturally quiet—a silence that would gladly betray Thargen’s slightest sound, that would turn the high-pitched thumps of Auris’s auto-blaster into deafening booms.
A flash of movement caught her attention, jolting her heart. It was Thargen, everything below his shoulders hidden by the uneven ground beyond which he was walking. He vanished into the thicket a moment later.
“Where the fuck is Mortannis?” demanded Garegon.
Mortannis? Wasn’t that the oni—
A branch crunched just behind Yuri, slowly—as though a great weight were gradually being settled over it.
Yuri’s back stiffened, and that ice inside her was suddenly so cold it burned. She slid her thumb to the depression on the axe’s grip. She sprang to her feet, squeezing hard to activate the blade as she spun to swing it at her uninvited guest.
She saw a huge body and red skin in her peripheral vision before she’d fully turned. A huge hand caught her forearm in a viselike grip, stopping her swing in an instant. Yuri clenched her teeth and turned to look up at the face of a towering onigox—the same one from Starlight Trance. The bastard with the hose.
A bronze-scaled ilthurii stood just beyond him, reptilian eyes narrowed.
Mortannis’s lips stretched into a wide grin. “I’ve missed you, terran.”
Later, Yuri wouldn’t be sure whether any conscious thoughts crossed her mind in that instant. There was that fear, of course, as cold as ever, but there was something else there, too—something deeper. Maybe it was just that old fight or flight instinct buried in every human, roused to action by a surge of adrenaline. No matter the science behind it, she’d only have one way to think of it later—it was her what would Thargen do moment.
Savage Desire (The Infinite City Book 4) Page 29
