by Robin Lovett
I start to run out of words. I reach the end of stories to tell. “I didn’t want to do it,” I whisper, staring at my hands, my fingers shaking and my pulse pumping in my ears. “I hated it.”
There’s silence, my will for words at an end. My chest feels empty, like I’ve dumped my heart out and realized there’s nothing left but this vacant hole. The guilt and the shame… I don’t feel them anymore. It feels more like pain, now. Like fear.
The shaking that was just in my hands spreads to the rest of my limbs, and I feel it—the sheer terror that I lived with every day. The fear of Dargule killing all of us. Of watching everyone around me die one by one, and being left alive—being the only one for him to take out all his sadistic urges on.
I shake so hard, my heart racing, I double over and fall toward the floor.
But Gahnin dives ahead of me and catches me. He wraps his arms around me and holds me. He presses my head to his chest and cocoons me in the sheer strength and muscle of his arms and body.
My shaking lessens, and I take a heavy breath against him.
He rubs my back. “You are safe with me now.”
I gasp and cling to him. I wrap my arms around his neck so tight, I never want to let him go. There’s something else in my chest, something inside the emptiness. Something warm and begging to be let out.
“I love you,” I blurt before I know what I’m saying and hold my breath. Just because he’s telling me I’m safe doesn’t mean he still wants to be mated to me. But now I’ve started, I have to tell him how I feel.
He cradles my face in his hands and looks at me with adoring tenderness. “You do?”
“I couldn’t say it before. I was too scared.” And I don’t care that tears are finally running down my cheeks. I don’t want to stop them, because I want him to know. Everything. I don’t want to hide anything from him anymore. “I was afraid you’d find out what I’d done and leave me.”
“My love—” His voice breaks, desire consuming his gaze and tightening his mouth. “You are the bravest person I have ever met.”
A bright moan of joy escapes my lips. “And you love me, even knowing all of it?”
“I do. I love all of you, everything you have endured and everything you have done to survive. To save the people Dargule imprisoned, you took the worst burden upon yourself. You sacrificed so much, because you’re good. It makes me love you more.”
I can’t help laughing a little, disbelieving what I’m hearing. “I’m sorry I pushed you away. I was just so afraid that—”
“You have nothing to be sorry for. You do not have to be afraid anymore. I am here for you. Always.”
I take a shuddering breath, wishing I could breathe in his words and hold them inside me.
He moans, “Assura,” and kisses me. His hands cup my face, his lips mold to mine, and everything I’ve been desperate to express to him pours from my mouth into his.
“Gods, how I love you,” I hear the words sneak from my mouth when I breathe, unsure if he can hear them.
But he does. He buries his tongue so deep in my mouth and twines it so tightly around mine, it’s as though he wants me to express everything I feel for him and more.
It’s too much and never enough. The empty place in my chest, the vacant one where all my guilt and shame were stored, feels warmer. Like he’s filling it, like if I could inhale enough of his kisses, he would heal every broken place inside me.
“I’m sorry I forced the mating on you,” he whispers against my lips. “I should have warned you it could happen. I should have confessed my Attachment to you sooner and explained to you how it worked so that you would have a choice.”
I grasp the nape of his neck and smile. I was in the Ten Systems military; I remember what it was like to have no choice. This is so very, very different. Attachment or no, every cell in my body would be crying out to stay with him, even if I were still fully human. “I have two feet. I could walk away. You haven’t chained me.” But the thought of the one time he did put me in chains has heat spreading low in my body. “Though we could play that game again sometime.”
“Not if I beg you first.” He threads his fingers into my hair and devours my mouth with all the fervency I need. His palm strokes down my neck, and I feel his fangs descend into my mouth.
I suck on them, tasting the sweet syrupy venom. He pulls my body against him, wraps my legs around his hips, and he’s hard, rubbing through our clothes, contacting me in the place where I am aching to have him inside me, needing him filling me. All of me.
I pull at his leather waistband, my shaking fingers desperate to have him.
He undresses me, lowering the zipper of my suit. His hands glide over my chest and my arms, savoring the feel of my skin, loving the feel of me.
This is real. He loves me—the real me and everything about me.
There’s another piece of it, something else I’m afraid of, but there’s nothing that could make me interrupt him. I need this too much. My body and my heart are crying for this. I feel his every touch, his every kiss down to my soul, like a balm to heal all my wounds.
“I almost forgot something,” he whispers and stands.
My body aching with the loss of him, I watch him press the button and close the door. It eases something in me, and I understand.
Privacy. The luxury we have never had.
“Are there cameras in here?” he asks.
I shake my head. “Not in an officer’s quarters.” I should probably figure out who it belongs to—someone locked inside the hangar, but they can wait a little longer.
A blissful, sensitive smile bends his lips. “We’re alone. No one is watching.”
“No one is watching,” I sigh. After how many times, with no choice of our own of being watched, it is heaven. This is between him and me. It is only us now.
No one can take that away from us.
He comes to me and lies me back, removes his clothes, and rests his body against me. We are gloriously naked and skin to skin, as though in a bodily communion.
He trails his lips down my chest and sucks my nipples until I’m squirming from the pleasure it ignites in my core. He dips his hand between my thighs and sinks his fingers deep within me. From his lips clasping my nipple to his thumb on my clit, the simultaneous stimulation sets me off.
Since the mating bond awoke in me, the orgasms are unlike anything I’ve felt before. Even with the desidre. Or with his venom.
A lightning through my senses, filling my brain with ecstasy that shoots off like sparks and drives climactic waves through every corner of my body—that never retreat.
He lifts his mouth from my nipple and sinks his fangs into my thigh. His venom pumps into my clit and the swollen opening where his fingers thrust in and out in a torturously slow rhythm.
He replaces his fingers with his mouth, and I feel worshipped and adored. His tongue and lips like soothing fire, burning away all my pain and guilt with pleasure and love.
Then he is over me, his chest against mine, and his cock buried inside me.
I cry out and cling to him, pulling him in deeper, ever deeper, begging my body to take as much of him as I can hold.
He urges my mouth to his throat and whispers, “Please.”
I’d almost forgotten my new fangs, which are protruding and aching from my gums. I strike, and he groans so hard as my venom pours into him, his body seizes in climax.
He loses his control, and his carnal desire, the animal instinct to obey his body’s visceral need to mate, overtakes him.
He pounds into me, his pelvis ramming against mine, setting me off again. My mouth goes slack, my fangs slip out of him, and he returns my bite, pouring bliss into my vein as his hot come heats me from the inside.
He orgasms, again and again, and the bliss of him, the pleasure of being what he wants, what he needs, combine with the trust of knowing he has committed to me. This is forever…
I freeze beneath him. Something’s not right. Something inside my head.
Something he doesn’t know. Something I’ve forgotten to tell him.
He pauses over me. “What’s wrong?” he asks, breathless, his gaze hazy with lust.
“I…” I push him away. “Stop.”
He pulls out of me, leaving drops of his come on my thighs, and shifts to my side. “Did I hurt you? Was I too much?” There’s a thick fear in his voice.
I put a hand on his chest to ease him. “No, no. You’re perfect.”
He covers my hand with his and kisses me. “Tell me, my love, what is it?”
My love.
Gods. I have to close my eyes to soak it in.
I never thought I could hear someone call me that who wanted me for their own—for life. I would’ve thought before it would make me feel confined or restricted. But not with him. It makes me feel…free. Free to be loved and valued in every way.
“There was a part of me that liked it,” I blurt, still unable to open my eyes to look at him. “As much as I tried to make it easier for them, I liked manipulating the torture techniques. I didn’t like making them feel pain but…” I swallow, trying to put this need of mine into words. “I liked controlling what they’d feel. I don’t know if I always liked it, or if I learned to like it because Dargule made me do it so much. But I did.”
I open my eyes to stare at his chest and whisper, “I still do.” I shudder to admit it, but I can’t hide this from him, or myself. I am not a coward. I meet his eyes. “The way I dug my fingers and teeth into you before—the way I used the knife on you—I want to do that again.” I flex my fingers against his gold skin, watching his flesh give beneath my nails, and I want to do it harder. I want to inflict all my urges on him, to have him experience the things I want him to feel.
He deserves to know. Before he really agrees to this, he needs to know that I’m not wholly good, the way he is.
But there is no revulsion on his face, only love, even…desire.
I don’t understand that at all.
He runs his thumb along my lower lip, grazing my fang. He stabs his thumb on my fang and then drags it across the tip.
I gasp and look down at his thumb. “What did you—you’re bleeding!” Red dots trickle in a line over a cut from my fang on his skin. “My fangs can cut you?”
He nods. “And if you’ll notice, I liked it.” He presses his hardness into my thigh, so I can feel it throbbing against me.
“How is that possible?”
“Ssedez fangs are the only thing capable of penetrating our skin. It has to be that way or our bite, our venom, the pleasure of it, would be useless.”
It makes sense. I’d never thought of that.
He holds his thumb up to my mouth again. “Now, lick the cut.”
I run my tongue over it, swallowing his blood, and shuddering at how much I like the taste of the coppery drops. But when I take my tongue away and look at his thumb again, the cut is gone.
“The tongue, the saliva, heals it,” he says.
“Wow.”
“What I’m saying is…” He puts his mouth to my ear and whispers with a seductive rasp, “I want you to make me bleed.”
It makes me flinch how much I want to. “Are you sure?”
He closes his eyes and nods slowly, emphatically. “Please.”
I’m in disbelief that this could be possible, that I could find someone to love me—all of me, even the vindictive parts of me. “Really?”
He opens his eyes and implores me. “I’m begging you.”
“I love you,” I blurt, unable to not say it again.
“And I love you.” He cups my cheeks. “But are you going to deny me? However much you want me to beg, I’ll do it.”
That makes me smile. I think I might like that, to see him on his knees, begging me to hurt him. “Maybe next time.”
I run my nails down his chest and flick my fangs across his skin, admiring the red cut I make.
He moans and rolls to his back, urging me on top of him. “You can do that to me forever.”
“I will.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
GAHNIN
She pleasures me with her fangs, until I’m so raging with lust for her, I have to bend her over the bed and fuck her until she’s so full of my come, it’s dripping down her thighs and onto the floor.
Then we do it again.
The mating frenzy has begun. It usually lasts a week or more. Among the Ssedez, we would be given quarantine, time alone for days to satisfy it, with nothing to do but eat, sleep, and make love.
But alas, we have a ship to run and ex-prisoners to care for. We’re incapable of leaving the bed for the rest of the day, but we eventually have to leave our precious privacy.
We help Lennina escape from the hangar, along with three other crew members sympathetic to the rebellion. They’re so relieved to hear Dargule is in prison, they demand to see it for themselves.
I send a message to my commander, Oten’s ship en route to the Fellamana planet with repair supplies for the Origin. He arrives at our ship the next day and boards with his new mate, Nemona.
She and Assura stare at each other for quite a while. It’s uncanny, seeing two human women who have been turned Ssedez next to each other.
Nemona holds out her hands to Assura. “Congratulations.”
Assura grasps her hand, too. “For what?” I’m surprised there isn’t more affection between them, but I understand better how much intimacy was between Assura and Jenie that did not occur with all her human crew mates.
I’m also surprised Assura does not understand what the congratulations are for.
“Your mating!” Nemona smiles knowingly at her.
Assura’s smile in her golden face radiates. “I guess it’s obvious, isn’t it?”
Oten puts a heavy, sure hand on my shoulder. I hold my breath. This is where he’ll judge me for ending my mourning for Tiortan a century early. Not that his opinion would change anything.
He tries to speak. “I am—” He has to cough to get through his words. “I am overjoyed that your mourning is over, my friend.”
The relief his words bring relaxes a tension I did not know was in my chest. I don’t know what to say. He puts two hands on my shoulders and looks at me with many inexpressible things. “I will tell everyone it is a miracle and something to celebrate that you did not have to endure another hundred years of loneliness.” He knows about my private pain of losing a mate and a child. He knows the torture it’s been for me for too many decades longing for this to happen again. He does not judge me for ending my mourning sooner than is traditional. “Your mating is a momentous thing for you.”
I am unable to not embrace him. “Thank you.”
He pats my back and murmurs a phrase in Ssedez, “When the heart is full, life is fuller.”
I tell him about the Ssedez prisoner Assura has done her best to care for. We update Nemona and Oten with everything happening on the ship.
“Have you heard about the Origin?” Nemona says heavily. Whatever it is, by her tone, it sounds bad.
Fear widens Assura’s eyes. “What?”
“The Hades bombed her, destroyed her as it was leaving the planet. Everyone is okay, but the Origin is gone.”
Assura gasps, and her eyes fall closed. I wrap my arm around her shoulders.
“Do you have plans for what to do next?” I ask.
“Well.” Nemona crosses her arms. “We’ve got the Hades now. I think she deserves a re-naming and some renovation, but she’s the best at stealth, and her defenses and weapons can’t be beat. We could do worse.”
Assura nods. “We have to figure out what to do with the rest of the crew.”
“Some will join the rebellion; some will not.”
Nemona’s gaze remains serious on Assura. “What do you want to do with Dargule? He’s your prisoner.”
I know what I’d do with him: hang him by his toenails and poke at him for days, weeks, make him bleed and suffer all the tortures he’s inflicted on so many others.
“We can execute him,” Nemona offers.
Assura shakes her head. “Don’t kill him. Not yet. We need to find out what information, if any, he has sent back to the Ten Systems about us.”
“Very true. You’re right.”
“In fact…” Assura bites her lip, then a vindictive grin curves her mouth. “Let the other prisoners have him. Zeigan and the rest should determine his fate.”
I squeeze Assura’s shoulder, and Nemona nods agreement. “Done.”
“As for us.” Assura glances at me. “I’m wondering if we could have a leave. Some time to just…” She hesitates as if not knowing what to say.
“Be?” I offer, stroking her cheek. “You have been through a lot. You deserve some rest.”
She gives a slow smile, and her eyes soften. “I do.”
I look to Oten. “Commander, I ask for official leave for a new mating.” It is customary in the warrior’s code to receive from two weeks to a month for such an occasion.
Oten nods, “Permission granted. You may take my light cruiser and return to our planet to be near your family, if you wish.”
Nemona adds to Assura with a blissful smile, “The Ssedez planet is beautiful. Filled with restful, peaceful people.” Her gaze is filled with a longing. “We’ll be visiting often. Go.”
I’m conscious of the fact that Oten and Nemona are only a little over a week into their mating and have received no such leisurely leave. “Commander, do you—”
“Nemona wants to return to her crew,” he says. “We’ll have our reprieve at some other time in the near future.” He glances at her like this is an agreement he is holding her to.
“Yes,” she smiles. “It can’t come soon enough.”
Assura and I do as Oten offers and leave for my home planet within the hour.
Once off the Hades, the relief in Assura is visible. We stand in a viewing window on Oten’s ship as we float away from the Hades, watching the ebony starship fade into the distance.
