by Selena Scott
“Do you remember the first time we met?” she demanded.
“I— yeah. We were further up in the mountains. We rescued a deer shifter and goat shifter.”
“No, do you remember the first time you and I met? The moment? The exact moment?”
His eyes searched hers. “Sure. You didn’t say anything to me. Not even a hello. Alec said, ‘This is Kain, my brother-in-law. And this is my sister, Valentina.’ And you just stared at me. Like I was an idiot. And then you walked away. And Alec said, ‘She’s as gentle as a spring rose once you get to know her.’ And we’d laughed.”
She nodded. She remembered all that as well. “Do you know why I stared at you like that?”
He shook his head, his eyes never leaving hers. She was calming down outwardly, but he had the feeling that the storm wasn’t over. “Because of your smile. None of the other shifters ever smiled. Herta is so painful. But there you were, hands in your pockets and an easy grin on your face. You played cards with Alec that night. Made him laugh. He was always chatting with you and you were always joking or playing or whistling or singing. Or spitting pistachio shells.”
“Wait. Slow down, Val. I’m confused. Are you saying that you felt like I took Alec away from you because I had his attention on those trips? That’s why you were so sad?”
“No. I’m saying that I wanted your attention on those trips.”
“Oh.” He blinked as the realization dawned on him. “Ohhhhhhhh.”
He took a step forward and she took a step back, a little frown on her face. “What is that dumb smile on your face for?”
“I’m relieved.” The dumb smile went even wider.
“Why?” Another step back for her and another one forward for him.
“Because I thought I’d done something bad to you by accident. But turns out you just had a crush on me.” His arms went around her and she batted him away.
“That’s not what I was saying.”
“Oh, really? Because it sounds like you are saying you were sad because you wanted me. But we weren’t together yet.”
“I was sad,” she said fiercely, almost viciously. “Because there wasn’t any light in my life and you’re practically made of light.”
He immediately sobered. A flash of her lying on the ground, covered in blood, slammed into him. She’d been so alone in Herta. So alone she could have bled out on the forest floor. They probably never would have found her. So alone that she’d longed for a sweet word, a smile, a joke. She’d longed for love and it had made her waste away.
There was a volcano in his heart and it was about to erupt. He couldn’t stop it. He took two steps away from her. And then another two. He was eight feet away when he turned back. What he saw broke him even further. She was staring at him, wearing his hoodie, her braid over one shoulder, and her eyes so big and fierce and fragile all at once.
He couldn’t think. He could only erupt. Love was in his heart like fire. Like lava. And then it was all up in his chest, in his throat. His tongue burned. He opened his mouth. He couldn’t keep it in. He couldn’t swallow something this hot back down.
“Don’t go back.”
He heard himself say the words and almost didn’t recognize his own voice.
She pulled back as if he’d slapped her.
“What?”
Part of him screamed at himself to take it back, Kain, you selfish bastard. But he didn’t. He took a step forward and said it again. “Don’t go back.”
“To Herta?” She was looking at him like he’d just spoken Greek. Like she couldn’t believe what he was saying. Hell. He couldn’t believe it, either.
“Yes. Don’t go back to Herta.”
She was like a rag doll when he picked her up and put her in the car, put her seatbelt on. She stared at the side of his face as he clicked the belt.
“Let’s go home.” His head was buzzing. “We’ll talk about it there. Let’s just get home.”
His legs were like rubber as he walked around the hood of the car and slid into the driver’s seat. He’d know what to say when he got home. Everything would make more sense and then he’d be able to better explain—“Don’t go back.”
Damn it, he’d just plowed through it again.
His hands gripped the steering wheel and he didn’t turn the car on. He just stared at her through the blue-black light of the car.
She stared back, completely still, until he heard her seatbelt click. And then they were reaching for one another. Tugging at each other’s clothes as he dragged her onto his lap. He had her shirt up and her breast in his mouth as she fought one leg out of her pants, tangled but free. Next were his pants which they just shoved down enough to get them out of the way.
She bit his neck, hard, as she sat down on him, trying to take him in. He lathed her nipple and reached for her clit when she couldn’t take him quite yet. But she pulled his hand away from her and yanked his head back to get access to his mouth. They kissed fiercely, their tongues sparring, their head pushing into the other’s space. He tried for her clit again, but she held his hands aside, merely worked herself down onto him.
Her body was readying itself, getting wet and softening for him and she pushed down an inch and then another. She felt a little sting from the forceful intrusion of his size and she relished it. She worked herself onto him taking another two inches so fast he threw his head back and groaned, eyeing her wildly. He planted his hands on her hips and worked her in circles and together, they jammed her down so that he was seated fully inside her.
“Yes,” she whispered into his mouth and for a wild second, he wasn’t sure what exactly she was saying yes to. He clamped his arms around her and held her hips a few inches above him, fucking her from below. The car rocked from his intense movements and the windows began to steam.
He shouldn’t say it during sex. He knew he shouldn’t. He tried to swallow it down, the words. But then she let her head rock back and he felt the end of her braid tickle his knee and his love for her wasn’t something that left him any choice. This wasn’t a game. There weren’t rules. “Don’t go back,” he whispered fiercely and forced her down on him hard.
Her thighs trembled and he felt her squeeze around him, a surefire sign that she was close. She picked up her head and dropped her forehead to his.
“Tell me to stop,” he told her. “And I will. If you tell me, I won’t ask again.” Their gazes were locked and Kain felt like she could see right inside of him. She could see every embarrassing thing he’d ever done. All his mistakes. All his victories. She could see Kain Keto, everything he was and everything he wasn’t. This was what he was offering her in exchange for her homeland. He was giving her himself.
She saw it. Then, in that moment. What he was extending. He was offering her a life with him. Holding it out with those perfect, blunt hands. She couldn’t take it. She wasn’t sure her body would let her. But she didn’t tell him to stop either. And her silence was louder than a gunshot in the car.
He understood. Thrusting up and swiveling his hips, Kain forcefully checked his own need and concentrated on her. He tipped his hips and went from thrusting to grinding. He worked himself against that spot of hers that she loved so much. The one they’d found together.
“Don’t go, Val.” She tightened around him and her fingers tightened on his shoulders, threaded their way to his hair.
“Don’t go back.”
Her moans filled the car and he could feel her rhythmically squeezing him, still rising. He tightened his hands on her and suddenly pistoned his hips into her, giving her all the friction her body was screaming for.
“Stay,” he whispered in her ear and gave her everything her heart was screaming for. “Stay with me.”
Val’s world ended. Her life as she’d known it was over as that orgasm and his words destroyed her in equal measure. It was pleasure so arresting that her nervous system just gave up and surrendered. She wasn’t in control of her body. Of her hands or her noises or her face. She just gave
her entire self over to Kain and let him take her to exactly where she wanted to be. When the ecstasy waned, and her lungs were reintroduced to their good friend air, Valentina collapsed forward. She buried her mouth in the sweaty hot skin of his neck and felt him softening inside of her. She realized he must have come as well. His hands traced her back.
“Shit,” he murmured when she started to move off of him. “So messy. I should have waited until we got home. I’m sorry, baby.”
She didn’t want him apologizing to her. Not about this. Something that had been so perfect.
She didn’t say anything, though. Not until they were all the way back home and she’d dragged him into the dim kitchen. She nudged him forward until he was sitting on the counter and he gave her a quizzical expression but didn’t say anything about it. She rooted around in the fridge. “Cold lemon chicken noodles or cold pizza?”
“Both.”
She grinned at him and then smiled more when she saw that his pants were still undone from their loving. Actually his whole self looked undone from their loving. His hair was messy and his eyes were the least calm she’d ever seen them. His fingers tapped out a rhythm on his knee as she brought the food over and inserted herself between his legs.
She fed him the way he had before with the ravioli. Two bites Kain, one bite Val. They didn’t speak as they worked through the food. Valentina put their dishes in the sink, washed her hands and filled up a glass of water. She downed half of it and handed the rest to Kain.
Holding out her hand, she led him from the kitchen toward the bedroom.
“Val.” He tugged her hand backwards.
“Okay,” she said, before she’d already turned toward him.
“What?”
“I’m saying okay.”
His eyes searched hers, his pupils whisking back and forth like birds in the sky.
“You said ‘don’t go back’.” She cleared her throat. “And I’m saying okay. For now.”
“Okay,” he replied, his voice hoarse.
“Okay.”
Kain picked her up immediately, rushing toward the bedroom door and slamming it closed behind them. They didn’t speak another word that night. They didn’t have to.
CHAPTER TEN
Kain replayed that conversation over in his head a hundred times over the next few days. A thousand. They hadn’t talked about it again. He knew that pushing her right now was not a good idea.
He tried to just be elated. To be filled with the ever-growing happiness that had filled him that night. He’d felt that he’d never feel another emotion in his life. All he’d feel was happiness. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that he hadn’t been fair in the way he’d asked her.
He was worried that he’d played on her loneliness. He’d offered himself up as an epic solution to her pain, but at the astronomically high cost of giving up her homeland. And now Kain had everything he’d ever wanted and she had half of everything she’d ever wanted.
It just didn’t sit well with him.
He needed to talk to someone about it. Someone who’d made that very same decision before, but on their own, with no pressure.
Kain found himself in John Alec’s kitchen a few hours later, a glass of iced tea in one hand.
Alec stared at Kain with wide, ecstatic eyes. “You’re kidding me.”
“No. She said okay.” Kain had spared the sexual details but he’d told Alec the story. “But it doesn’t quite feel right. She doesn’t want to say yes, you know? She just doesn’t want to feel lonely anymore. That’s not really a choice. It’s two things that suck and she chose between them.”
“She chose to be with you. That’s not a thing that sucks.”
“Yeah, but she’s giving up Herta to do it. She loves Herta. How can I ask her to change her life so completely? She can’t be a warrior here.”
“She’ll do what I do. We’ll cut back and forth and continue rescuing enslaved shifters.”
“You know that we need someone on the inside for that to work. If she’s not in Herta, feeding us the intel, we’re never gonna know where the hell to find the shifters in the first place.”
Alec sighed, scrubbing a hand over his face. “Then we change the operation, Kain. We figure something else out. We’re not going to sacrifice Valentina on the altar of these missions. We can change things so that she doesn’t have to live there. Especially not if she’s alone and in danger and wasting away.”
“God, I wish I could just go live there.” He put his head in his hands and stared down at the table for a second. When he looked up, Alec was staring at him in a very odd way.
“You would do that for her? If it weren’t for the Struggles, you’d move to a different world for her?”
“Of course,” Kain answered immediately. “No question. I thought you of all people would understand moving to another world for the woman you love.”
Alec’s eyebrows went up to his hairline. The two men held one another’s eyes. Alec cleared his throat. “I knew you two were getting closer. But I didn’t realize…”
“Yeah.” Kain scratched the back of his neck and adjusted his hat. “I’m still getting used to it. It’s not new, I don’t think. But yeah. I’m not sure what to do with it yet.”
“Just give it to her. She’ll know what to do with it. Trust me. The worst place for it to be is in your clumsy hands.”
Kain had to grin at that. He was distracted, laughing, his nose in his iced tea. It might have been why he didn’t sense Valentina on the porch.
She bounded lightly up the stairs of her brother’s house. She’d come to talk to him about the same thing that Kain had. How to make peace with her decision. Even though her heart already had, she was worried. She wanted some brotherly advice. She paused, though, when she heard Kain and Alec talking. Alec was advising Kain to give something to her. But she hadn’t heard what it was. She stretched for the doorknob to go inside.
“All those months ago,” Alec said to Kain, “when I asked you to get close to her, when I wanted you to convince her to stay here, I never thought it would work out like this.”
There was a strange buzzing sound in Valentina’s ears and she was hot all over. If Kain responded, she didn’t hear it. All at once, she was just a stupid, Hertian girl on the wrong fucking planet. Why had she ever thought she could navigate Earth? She was meant to live on Herta where the dangers were imminent and deadly, but at least she knew what they were. There was pain, she was certain there was pain in her chest. But she felt nothing but foolishness as she pushed open the door of Alec’s house and stepped through.
The two men turned to her in shock and Alec immediately rose. Kain’s face had gone white. Valentina looked down at her own hand in confusion; apparently she’d unsheathed her katana. Because she was pointing it at her brother’s chest. Her face was made of stone.
“Is it true?” she asked Alec, completely ignoring the man who’d pretended to care for her. Who’d tricked her.
Alec took a step toward her. “What did you hear? I can’t explain it unless you tell me what you heard.”
“You asked—” she couldn’t bring herself to say his name, “him to make me stay here.”
“I did, but—”
She was snatching Kain’s car keys from the kitchen table and running, sheathing her katana as she went.
“Val! Wait!”
She heard Kain screaming for her. She heard his footsteps pounding, but she was fast. And she was in the driver’s side of his car and pulling away in seconds. He threw himself in front of the car.
“Stop!”
She slammed on the brake.
“Val, you have to listen to me—”
She swerved around him and was gone down the driveway. She’d driven a car twice before and both of those times Kain had been in the passenger seat. The experience had been fun and romantic and exhilarating. This time, the road was blurry with her tears and she knew she was going way too fast back to his house.
But she didn’t
have time to waste. She knew he would follow her. And she needed the rest of her weapons, she needed the tool to cut through to Herta, and she needed to get the hell out of this world.
***
“Alec, you bigmouthed ASSHOLE.” Kain had never cursed out his brother-in-law before but he’d never been this furious before either. He sprinted into the wood, kicking off his shoes as he went and prayed to God that she was going where he thought she was going. Kain was shifted and sprinting in his bear form in seconds. He was too close to the road and too close to other people as well, but he didn’t care. He just needed to get to his house fast.
But he wasn’t fast enough. He shifted back the second he saw his car idling in his driveway, the door flung open. He sprinted into the house, utterly naked, and knew immediately that she wasn’t there. Some of her clothes were gone. All of her weapons. And worst of all, the portal tool was gone.
She was gone. He steadied himself in the doorway of her bedroom. She’d gone back to Herta.
***
Two days later, Valentina fell in a puddle of exhaustion to the ground. Her only goal had been to get as far away from Kain as possible. So she’d cut into Herta, closed the portal, picked a direction and hadn’t stopped walking for all but the three-hour break she’d taken the night before.
She was exhausted, starving, and so thirsty her tongue was expanding in her mouth. Good thing her nose had led her to this stream. She cupped water in her hand and sipped it. It tasted clear and sweet. Just like all the water on Herta. When she’d sated herself, she rolled over and eyed the night stars. Clear and glistening. She’d missed this sky. This perfect sky.
It was good to be home, she reminded herself.
She couldn’t ignore her exhaustion anymore, though she was terrified of trying to sleep. Every step she took, the pain of what had happened had followed her, but it hadn’t set up shop yet. She knew that the second she stopped, it would bloom inside of her.
So she busied herself setting up her bedroll and scouting out the area for any signs of other people, and rustling up a little food. She found a small stand of early season apple trees. They’d go well with the peanut butter she’d brought.
