The Bonding

by Imogen Keeper

  That would be the least of it, though. Most warriors knew they’d go through life alone and Tam had grown accustomed to the expectation. He’d spent his entire life confident that he might never have a mate, never have love or children.

  Now, he’d become one of the few lucky enough to find a mate, to bond with her, only to have it all taken away, all the hope and joy and love. It would hurt so much more to lose her now than if he’d never had her to begin with. She wasn’t just a hypothetical mate either. She was everything. His only family in the world.

  Her need had grown stronger. Tam could feel her need and anxiety cresting, as a couple officers walked by. He stifled the surge of irritation as he recognized one of them, Utto, smirking like an ass as usual. A nasty prick with a big family, blue hair and a bad temper.

  He and Ajax waited as the group finished walking past.

  “Convince her not to,” was Ajax’s only advice.

  Tam smiled and smacked his friend on the back. “I intend to.”

  As Tam left Healing Bay, he noticed a young woman with long pink curling hair, standing in the hatchway. He greeted her in her language but made no promise to bring Nissa tomorrow.

  They were leaving early on the morrow for their mission to Triannon. Their departure date just got moved forward.

  There was nothing Nissa could do if they stayed except pace and worry. At least that was what he told himself as he strode from the room, past the girl who looked so much like his mate. She stammered, and Ajax paused at her side. The way his body angled, the way his eyes tightened slightly as he looked at her, body just a few inches too close—Tam recognized the signs. Ajax had a crush. Who could blame him? Fuck, let the gods go easier on Ajax than they had on him.

  Tam didn’t break stride but he couldn’t stop the smile from curving his lips at the thought of Ajax making a move on the pink-haired woman. He deserved something good in his life. Ajax was the best man Tam had ever known.

  As he stalked down the halls toward home, he sent out a message to the men who would go on their mission. Departure, first thing tomorrow morning.

  13

  Without you,

  I would float away.

  Into the ether.

  NISSA WOKE sometime after dark, achy and anxious, the forest on the digital wall dark, bathed in soft moonlight. For a few moments she’d allowed herself to enjoy the simple comfort of their bed, the smell of him.

  Since Tam had woken her that first time, she’d never awoken alone. He’d always been in bed beside her, warm and solid and safe. And hard if she wanted him to be. Frequently she woke to him spreading her thighs, licking and sucking and biting until she came, or pressing his thick cock inside.

  Sometimes they fell asleep still connected and woke when he began to thicken, their bodies recognizing that enough time had passed and she needed him again. Even sleeping, Tam took care of her, moving to ease the uncomfortably hollow, achy feeling, the heat that burned between her thighs if she’d been too long without him.

  Two to three hours was usually all she lasted. Sometimes they held out a bit longer and the extra sleep always helped. She couldn’t wait for the night she managed to sleep all the way through. Ajax had thought it could be months before that happened but eventually they’d be able to go as long as a couple days.

  When Tam left daily for meetings, he sensed her need through their bond, always returning promptly with a grin and a kiss and those wonderfully clever hands.

  She groaned. He’d been gone longer than three hours. This had to be deliberate. Was he punishing her? She checked her comm but he hadn’t responded. Where was he?

  She could feel him on the other side of the bond. Anxious and frustrated and sad. Her heart ached for him. She knew she was the cause.

  Her body resented her own fingers when they slipped inside to find herself hot and wet, and no matter what she did, she couldn’t stop the ache.

  Her hands shook and she felt as if she might be sick. She considered going in search of him but she remembered the hungry looks she’d gotten the day she’d arrived.

  A cold sweat covered her skin and moisture pooled between her thighs. Her nipples were on fire as she paced their quarters. She didn’t know how long passed before she heard the hiss of their hatch opening and there was Tam, wearing exercise shorts and a shirt. His weapons were, for once, held loosely in a bag, which he lowered to the floor next to their hatch.

  She’d expected him to have calmed after the ferocity of their last coupling. If anything, for just a split second, she saw naked pain in his eyes.

  Quick as a flash, though, it was gone and his touch was so gentle when he drew her into his embrace that Nissa was certain she’d imagined it.

  “More pods came today,” he spoke softly, trailing a hand down her cheek. Nissa rubbed her face in his palm, pressed her breasts against his stomach, surprised by his unexpected words. She’d stopped visiting Healing Bay. It had become too painful to scan the pods daily, waiting to hear who had the blue-tinge. Instead she waited for word of a healthy recovery, trusting Tam to keep her informed.

  “You know what my mother and father look like, from my memories?” she asked him, still resting her face in his hand and stroking his chest, reveling in the feel of his warm, strong muscles. Her cravings and sickness had muted in his presence, as though her body understood she would have him momentarily, but still her pussy clenched and dripped.

  “Yes,” he said and that was enough. Nissa didn’t need to ask anything else because she knew if they’d been retrieved, he’d tell her.

  She rose on tiptoes and pulled his face down to hers to press a kiss to his lips, sighing at the taste of his warm mouth. He smelled strongly of spicy sweat and musk and male and she wondered how much she wanted him because of the addictive nature of the bond and how much she wanted him because he was just so intensely masculine. Because he was so big and warm and good. Because he was hers.

  He closed his hands on her bottom and lifted her up to straddle his waist, walking them toward the bed. She pulled the sweaty shirt over his head and sucked at the tongue he thrust into her mouth, sliding her hand between their bodies to grasp the thick ridge of his cock.

  He didn’t waste time with foreplay—she was so ready she was dripping. Once he was inside, though, he took his time, riding her slowly, stroking her softly, kissing her long and deep.

  Their bodies moved, sinuous and sleek, toward an orgasm that rolled inexorably, washing over every nerve in her body. Unlike last time, he didn’t make her scream or grunt or cry. He whispered loving words of praise in her ear, fingers playing over her body like a virtuoso. When it was over, he did it all over again, only this time he used his tongue to lave her body until nothing was left of her that he hadn’t touched or claimed.

  As sleep sucked at her consciousness, his semen tingling inside her, his cock still lodged heavy within her, his arms wrapped tightly around her, she wondered if somehow she’d float away without him.

  14

  Blood for mortar.

  THEIR DEPARTURE was uneventful, Tam having successfully evaded the press with his change in timing.

  When they’d been on Tam’s ship, she’d been too dazed amid the fog of the spell their bond had woven around them to consider the feel of travelling through space. She’d been unconscious after entering her own cryo-pod. Then while she’d been on Sierra-Six they hadn’t been in motion.

  If she’d been pressed to describe what she imagined space travel would feel like, she’d have probably expected movement, like the constant pressure she’d felt on the train through base, only amplified untold times to account for the increased speed.

  The sensation of moving through space in the midsized craft they took to Triannon, however, was of...nothing. There was no palpable sense of motion after their original acceleration away from Sierra-Six. She couldn’t detect even the indefinite rocking she’d felt while aboard boats on the green seas at home.

  It was unnerving. The ship echoed with s
onar pings that sounded like the creatures in the seas surrounding Trian. Every room glowed eerily, an unnatural blue from the digi-screens that covered nearly every bulkhead, and the surfaces were all dark on the inside, dark metal-grated floors, dark metal walls, black work surfaces and chairs. There were few windows on the ship, so the entire crew tended to stay in the main control room which boasted a full half-circular view of space.

  Looking out the window gave her a sense of vertigo that made her stomach lurch and her knees tremble, as if she would be sucked into the great yawning vacuum of space. The alternative was nearly as bad, the claustrophobia of the bone-deep knowledge that there was no escape available.

  If the ship faltered, their lives were over. It was easier to focus on her goal. Find Triannon and pray there were gods left who hadn’t abandoned her planet, that Triannon existed, thrived in the absence of her people. That they didn’t need her.

  Ten warriors had joined them on their premature departure for Triannon. Ten males, armed for war, standing head and shoulders above her, and attempting to avoid eye contact with her.

  It was perplexing and irritating, and combine that with the humiliation of having to excuse herself with Tam every few hours to go satisfy the chemical cravings that made her feel as if her loins were on fire, Nissa’s mood wasn’t good. Something about the close quarters seemed to have increased the frequency of her cravings as well. There had been no stretching of the bond.

  They all knew what she and Tam were doing when they left and according to something Tam had said, she thought they could probably smell what they were doing, or at least what was happening between her legs. Which was too embarrassing to consider.

  She should have asked Ajax how long she’d need Tam with such frequency but they’d left so quickly, a full day ahead of schedule, that she hadn’t had time. She imagined she’d have gotten a non-answer from Sierra-Six’s main healer, anyway.

  Tam didn’t help the problem either. The smirking bastard gladly grabbed his cock at the slightest indication of interest from her, and she was interested all the time. He knew it too. That smell thing again.

  Even now, as they all stood gathered around the digi-screen in the ship’s main control cabin discussing their arrival at Triannon, Tam cast a self-satisfied glance in her direction. His look said, I know what you need. Just hang on a few moments more. Nissa resisted the impulse to kick him.

  The digi-screen blinked violet, chartreuse and white behind him. Black space hung thick and sullen beyond. In the distance a red dot, barely discernable to the naked eye, marked their destination. Triannon. Yesterday, their ship’s navigator, Tycho, as Tam had introduced him, had found her planet, a tiny red speck in the eye of their telescope. She’d never felt so jubilant in her life as the moment he’d announced confirmation that Triannon still existed. She’d stared at that red speck for hours, piling dreams on top of hopes under wishes that covered nearly debilitating anticipation. Whatever they found, the planet lived.

  “Base needs hard recon,” Tam said. “Four of us will mobilize on the ground. The rest stay here with Nissa.”

  One of the other warriors, Sero, smiled grimly, running the tip of a blade along his thumbnail. Nissa had rarely seen the dark-haired man without the blade. He spun it constantly in his hands. “I’ll go.”

  Nissa frowned, trying to pay attention to the conversation. Her brain clouded and between her thighs, she pulsed with the initial warnings of the bond.

  Jingo stepped forward as well. Tall and slender in comparison to the others, he moved with almost feminine grace, like a dancer, lithe and fluid. His hair hung down his back, pale, honey-brown and shining gold when the light hit it. Nissa had never heard him speak and he didn’t now, merely met Tam’s eye. The two nodded to each other.

  Then Kaleus stepped forward, his skin as dark as eeffoc and his hair nearly white. His eyes were small and set so deeply she could scarcely tell what color they were. He was the most heavily muscled of all the males in the room, his arms so thickly banded that they didn’t lay flat against his body but stayed in a perpetual bend, as though permanently ready for attack, which he probably was. “I’d like to go as well,” he said, his voice so deep that all the fine hairs on Nissa’s body shivered.

  Which reminded her of the heat pooling in her core.

  She shifted uncomfortably, her cheeks heating, sorely annoyed that she was the one with an addiction. She eyed Tam’s hard, muscled body in his clinging flight-suit. Weapons covered most of his torso but they couldn’t disguise the broad shoulders or the sleek, round curves of his backside.

  He shifted his feet, casting a wary glance in her direction from under thick black slanted brows. Come to think of it, the bulge in the front of his pants implied he was as desperate as she.

  He gave her another searching look. She scowled back. “I’m going.”

  Tam shook his head. “No. Nissa, you have no training, no weapons. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “I refuse to stay behind.” She tilted her head back, giving him the haughty glare she’d learned from her queen mother. “You can’t leave me anyway.” She paused and with a secretive smile delivered her winning argument in a seductive purr. “I need you too frequently.”

  The warriors were visibly discomfited by her statement, gazes dropping to the floor, Tycho scratched the back of his neck and Sero’s knife suddenly became very interesting to him. Kaleus asked about the evening meal and several warriors gleefully grabbed the conversational gambit for escape.

  They were all inclined to pretend she wasn’t addicted to the serum of their brother- in-arms. She couldn’t tell if it was a courtesy born of chivalry, a tacit agreement not to mention it because they all wanted their own little serum-addicts with a poignancy approaching pain, or simply because it made them all so profoundly uncomfortable that they preferred to ignore her affliction.

  Either way it was the first time anyone had directly referenced her bodily needs aloud in the three days they’d been aboard the ship.

  She took grim satisfaction in watching them look away. Oh? Makes you uncomfortable? Tam’s eyes were hot and more than a little irritated. She cocked her head to the side. “Besides, I know the layout of the city, if it’s still there. I know the language and I know their customs.” She met his eyes evenly. “It’s my planet.”

  “That assumes that nothing has changed in the last five hundred years,” Tam said, voice cautious, even, hard. “Which is an unreasonable assumption. Whatever we find there, Nissa, the planet will be vastly different than when you last saw it.”

  “I’m going.” He kept his face still but she knew him well enough to know his thoughts, whether she read them in his eyes or felt them through the bond. She watched as Tam evaluated leaving her with a stockpile of his serum, considered staying with her aboard the ship and refusing to allow her to land on Triannon, and ultimately decided to let her go.

  “Fine. The five of us will land outside the main city in a grav-bus. We spend the night on the ground. Do recon in the dark.”

  Tycho spoke from the digi-screen, his yellow hair pulled back in a bun from an angular face. His eyes were a warm, liquid brown. He seemed to be the kindest of the warriors and of all of them he met Nissa’s eyes the most frequently. For that alone she was grateful. He’d also shown her the first coveted glimpse of Triannon. “Tell us of the planet’s terrain.”

  She tried to think what would be most useful to them in landing the grav-bus that would take the smaller crew aground. “Most of the world is covered in the green sea. It winds through the land. The rest is covered in the red forests.” She couldn’t help but smile, picturing her own feet standing on the surface of her beloved home. Only a matter of hours. The need receded a bit in the face of memory. “Trian sits close to the planet’s equator so it is never cold there, but far to the north or south it becomes cold and frozen. There are mountains and plains elsewhere but around Trian only forests.”

  “There is only one city?” Sero asked.

&n
bsp; “Several centuries before I was frozen we had a large population and huge cities. That was when we began to explore space travel and the pods were made. We became overpopulated. The elders decreed space travel to be an abomination because of the toll it placed on our planet’s resources. The greatest threat, they said, was our population. Steps were taken, the space programs closed and our population was forcibly decreased.”

  “Forcibly?” Tam’s jaw was hard.

  “Mandatory sterility procedures were implemented in most circumstances. It took many generations but the population was curtailed.”

  “That’s barbaric,” said Kaleus, softly, his eyes dark.

  The other warriors too looked stunned, for them, which meant they clenched their jaws and squared their shoulders. Sero stroked his blade, blue light glinting along the deadly tip. No doubt they imagined all the females who could have been born, ripe for Bonding and breeding.

  “Is it?” Nissa regarded them in turn. “Which is more barbaric? Forcing a population reduction or allowing the planet to be destroyed?”

  No one had an answer for that, so Nissa continued. “When I entered the pod, our population was around twenty thousand.”

  Sero whistled, his blade spinning a complicated arc. “Tiny.”

  Nissa nodded. “In comparison to the Tribe, yes. Trian is tiny. But our planet is healthy.”

  “Was,” Tam said and Nissa stifled the desire to hiss at him.

  “Why did you enter the pod?” Tycho asked in a gentle voice. She met Tam’s eyes but his face was unreadable. They deserved to know. They were giving their time and service to her cause, and possibly their lives. She rubbed her thighs together under the dress. A few minutes. She could wait a few minutes.