by Kit Rocha
Had anyone ever touched her like this? He knew she’d dated in Eden, placid, polite dates that ended at her front door. Sometimes he had watched the surveillance videos, barely able to contain the need to find those men and eliminate them before they could hurt her.
And they would have hurt her. Eden’s moralistic strictures spurned physical hedonism and tactile affection. Sex was meant to be sterile. Perfunctory. A woman’s duty, especially when she’d received dispensation to procreate, but not something she should enjoy.
Kora felt. She couldn’t hide it. She shivered and flushed and sighed with pleasure, and when he shifted his hand higher to cup the soft weight of her breast, she did all three at once. Her head fell against his shoulder and her lips parted, and he knew—he knew. No one had ever touched her like this. If they had, they would have tried to shame these reactions out of her.
He was glad no one had tried. He didn’t have time to go back into Eden and kill them.
“Ashwin.” Her breath tickled over his ear and then his cheek. She whispered his name again, barely audible in the near-silence of the room, and kissed him.
The pain, which had settled to a low hum, spiked wildly.
Kora. Agony.
Hurt was an insufficient word. Acid slid through his veins, the ghost of remembered pain, no less severe for being manufactured by his mind. It boiled higher with the sweet, hesitant brush of her lips over his, like a final, desperate warning.
Agony. Kora.
His cock was hard. Extremely, atypically hard. So hard that the next rock of her hip against him drove a hoarse, unintended moan from his throat, and he could no longer separate what felt good from what felt bad. It was all sensation, all heat.
All Kora.
He locked both hands on her hips and hauled her up, breaking their kiss for a miserable, endless moment. Then he settled her on his lap, astride his cock, with only a few layers of cotton and his painfully tight jeans separating them as he dragged her to him.
Her lips parted. Before she could question, before she could say anything that he’d have to answer with a lie, he drove his hands into her hair and kissed her again. It was Kora’s turn to moan, and he drank in the sound as she braced her hands on his shoulders and rocked against him.
Eager. Desperate. He dropped one hand to her hip and helped her smooth out her rhythm, guiding her to roll her hips in a steady, maddening tempo. When she’d caught on to the motion, he slipped his hand beneath her shirt again, cupping her breast as his thumb found her nipple.
Her teeth sank into his lower lip as she shuddered.
She needed more. A strategic application of sensation, enough to break through the walls holding in her pain. Ignoring the throbbing need in his own body, he watched the color rise in her cheeks, waited for the moment her head fell back and her lips parted on a gasp.
Then he pinched her nipple.
She came with a halting cry of shock and relief. Her nails raked his shoulders as she rode him through the pleasure, and Ashwin focused on each burning line to distract him from pondering how thin the fabric of her pants was. How wet. How little separated her clenching heat from his fingers and tongue.
It wasn’t necessary. He’d achieved his goal without adding the complication and temptation of stripping her naked. But as she shuddered and gasped in his lap, Ashwin found himself battling a newly awakened and utterly alien emotion.
Carnal curiosity.
Unlike the wanting, his curiosity was precise and explicit. The list of things he needed to know was well-ordered and action-oriented.
He needed to know how she would react if he stripped off her clothes. If she’d still be shameless when he placed her on the chair and knelt between her spread legs. If the flush rolling down her neck would cover her whole body when he pressed his open mouth to her pussy. If she’d turn shy when he worked his tongue into her. If her thighs would close on his shoulders. If she’d dig her nails into the back of his head, whisper his name when she came. How all of those things would change the second time. If she’d grow more languid with every orgasm, or more tense. How many times she could come before she begged him to stop.
And that was just the first thing on his list.
Kora cupped his face between her hands and kissed him again. Her tongue touched his, retreated, and returned for a more thorough, lingering exploration. The intimacy of it spilled through him, and for a selfish moment he let himself wallow in just...being kissed. Sweetly. Wonderingly.
Like he was a normal man.
But the pain still burning through him was a harsh reminder that he wasn’t. So he took her shoulders and gently pulled her back. “How do you feel now?”
“Better.” Her eyes were still glazed, dreamy. “Can I stay?”
“Yes.” The answer came immediately, before he considered the implications. Surely someone as protective as Gideon would be alarmed to find Kora missing from her bed—but it was just as likely that the guards watching over the family knew exactly where she was. Letting her spend the night in his bed could work in his favor.
And if it didn’t...he didn’t care.
“Thank you. For everything.”
Ashwin wrapped his arms around her and rose in silence, unsettled by her gratitude in the face of his deception. When he reached the bed, he let her slide to the floor and turned her toward it. “I still have work to do on this equipment, but you should try to get some sleep.”
She gripped his hand. “Just for a little while?”
She seemed so vulnerable. Undone. The strap of her tank top had slipped down her arm. Her hair fell in a disheveled mess around her shoulders, the strands still tangled where he’d twisted them around his fingers. Tiny, seemingly inconsequential incongruities, but for a woman as efficient and in control as Kora, they were screeching dissonance.
He knew how to take her apart, but not how to put her back together again.
Her fingers clenched around his. Her muscles tensed, as if she was already drawing in tight to brace herself for rejection, and her uncertainty scraped him raw. He’d accepted the imperfect reality that her pain was intolerable to him. But if even her discomfort left him this unsettled…
Stop lying to yourself.
Placing his hand between her shoulder blades was dangerous. Guiding her onto the mattress was reckless. Stretching out beside her was foolish. Every spark between them was a lit match in a room full of explosives, but without access to the full truth, she only saw the comforting warmth of the flame.
She cuddled into his side with a soft sigh, and Ashwin wrapped one stiff arm around her, giving her his shoulder for a pillow. The position felt awkward at first. He was acutely aware of the weight of her head, the angle of her neck, the way her breasts pressed against him, the feel of her hip under his hand. He froze when she shifted with a sleepy murmur. Her hand settled on his bare chest, and her toes brushed his ankle.
Then she stilled as her breathing slowed into the steady rhythm of sleep. Her warmth melted through the stiffness in his body until his muscles relaxed and he started to enjoy the pressure of her body against his.
None of his domestic handlers had wanted this. Even the ones who had fancied themselves in love with him had been more interested in fucking. He’d always wondered how they fooled themselves into believing they wanted anything more than the endorphins and pleasure from intense sex when they revealed themselves every time they slipped from between the sheets and crept back to their own beds.
He never blamed them. In all honesty, he’d appreciated being spared the necessity of asking them to leave. Makhai soldiers could get by on a minimal amount of low-quality sleep for periods that would critically damage a normal man, but even he needed rest sometimes. And resting with someone else in his bed? With someone else touching him?
Unfathomable.
Not for Kora. She drifted to sleep in his arms as if it was the only place in the world she wanted to be, and he couldn’t process the reaction it produced in him. He had no context
for this messy, chaotic clash of emotions. They seethed out of the boxes he’d built to contain anything not necessary to survival—sweet satisfaction at her trust, sour apprehension at knowing he couldn’t be trusted...and the dark shiver of foreboding, because the Base would stop at nothing to claim her if they knew what she was.
Lying to himself had been easier. He understood why humans did it, now. If they felt this many conflicting things all the time, it was amazing they weren’t crushed under the uncertainty of it.
He needed to get away from her and rebuild those boxes. It was the objective, rational truth. Clearly and unequivocally the safest course of action. For her and for him.
But he was a Makhai soldier. His safety had never mattered more than the mission.
Chapter Eight
Kora dreamt of the desert.
She wandered for what seemed like hours, searching for something, but all that stretched before her was nothingness, vast and unforgiving. The sun beat down, and the rock and sand beneath her bare feet had to be scorching, but she couldn’t feel it. She couldn’t feel anything.
Time stretched, compressed. A revelation danced at the edge of her awareness, but every time she tried to turn and confront it, the knowledge danced away, off into the dreamy distance. Finally, she spotted a flash of color in the middle of the barren expanse, a hint of green. Of life.
It was a rosebush, small and fragile, with one single bud. It was still tightly closed, its blood-red petals just beginning to unfurl. She reached for it, eager to touch the velvet curve, but she pricked her finger on a jagged thorn instead.
It hurt, more than it should have, more than anything had ever hurt before. It was pure anguish, a torture sharp enough to cut and deep enough to kill. And it seethed all around her.
Kora drew in the breath to scream, then woke with a start.
Ashwin’s room. The blankets clenched in her fists smelled like him, still carried his heat. Early-morning light streamed through the window, gilding his back as he sat at his desk.
She dragged in another deep breath as her father’s voice flashed through her mind—just a dream, wanting to become a nightmare. Odd words to comfort a frightened child, but psychology was never Dr. Ethan Middleton’s strong suit. He’d been a brilliant man, but not a warm one. How he had ever come to adopt and raise an orphaned baby girl on his own was an eternal mystery, one he’d never seen fit to solve for Kora.
She rolled onto her side as Ashwin spoke. “Bad dreams?”
“A little.” She slipped her legs over the side of the bed and sat on the edge. “Brains are funny sometimes.”
Whatever he was working on beeped softly, and he reached for a tiny screwdriver. “I wouldn’t know.”
Because Makhai soldiers didn’t dream. At least, that’s what the Base doctors claimed—that by eliminating unnecessary emotion and preoccupation, they’d also eliminated the subconscious need to process those emotions during sleep.
It was, like everything else they said, a load of complete bullshit.
“You dream. Everyone does.” She rose and started to cross the room, but stopped when she caught sight of the angry red furrows cut across the backs of his shoulders.
Lines left by her fingernails. Her cheeks heated as the memories flooded her in a rush, flashing through her like the stolen moments they were—Ashwin’s hands on her bare skin, his lips beneath hers, his low, rough moan vibrating against her mouth.
She’d come to him selfishly, for the comfort she had no right to seek anywhere else, not while the others were mourning the loss of their friend, their brother. But the need for solace had quickly given way to something far more primal—desire.
She wanted him. She’d always wanted him.
And now, here they were. Kora bent and brushed her lips over one of the welts on his shoulder. “I scratched you last night.”
His hands stilled, the panel on whatever he was reassembling only halfway fastened. “I don’t mind.”
“I know.” Below the scratches, sweeping lines of ink marked the entire expanse of his back with wings and a skull wearing a black beret, all backed by spikes and a twisting strand of DNA—the emblem of the Makhai Project. Goose bumps rose on her flesh as she traced one line out to his shoulder. “I never understood why you all do this. It’s a secret project, and you’re supposed to be invisible. But the first thing you do is mark yourself as Makhai.”
“There are plenty of ways to be invisible.” He tilted his head forward in invitation, and she slid her hand up to the back of his neck. “If I don’t want people to know, I don’t let them see it.”
It was a rationalization, not a reason. An excuse for why it was okay for him to wear this ink, not an explanation. “But why did you get it?”
“Because that’s what Makhai soldiers do.” He glanced back at her. “We aren’t close. Most of us work alone, on extended missions away from the Base. The other soldiers fear us. The COs fear us. People who aren’t even sure we exist fear us. But we don’t fear each other. And we’re not ashamed of what we are.”
Her eyes stung, and she had to swallow past a lump in her throat to speak. “It sounds like you’re all bound together, in a way. I’m glad.” She buried her face in the hollow of his neck and wrapped her arms around him. “You should get to have that.”
He stiffened, but only for a moment this time. Then his fingers brushed the back of her hand. “We’re loyal to the people who don’t treat us like monsters, Kora. If anything ever happens to me—”
“I have people,” she cut in. “My family, and the Riders. You don’t have to worry about me, Ashwin.”
He gripped her hand harder. “They don’t know the Base. If anything happens and you need our kind of help, you go to Samson. Promise me.”
She knew Samson from the Base, of course, and he and Ashwin had always been friendly, if not friends. But this was more than a suggestion, or even an instruction. Ashwin’s voice nearly trembled with a desperation that raked over her, turning her guts to acid.
Something was wrong. “Ashwin?”
He released her and picked up the screwdriver again. With quick, precise movements, he finished screwing the casing into place. “Do you know what this is?”
Kora straightened and turned her attention to the machine on the desk in front of him. She’d been so focused on him, on all the tiny little things that reminded her of the intimacy they’d shared the night before, that she hadn’t really looked. It was sleek, a drab silvery gray that looked like the winter sky before a storm.
Beyond that, it looked like the boxy camera units used for security in the city. “Some kind of drone. Surveillance?”
“Yes.” He tipped it up so the pinhole camera pointed at them and reached for a nearby tablet. “Do you know about the isotope trackers?”
“The what?”
His fingers flew as he pulled up a wall of code on the tablet and started typing. “I thought with all the illegal snooping you’ve done, you’d have run across it. Eden still uses physical trackers on their operatives, but those are easy to cut out. The Base has had a more sophisticated method in place since before the Flares.”
The last of her lazy contentment vanished, replaced by a hard knot in her stomach. “You got this from the Base?”
“Technically, it was decommissioned. Incapacitated during a reconnaissance mission.”
The knot exploded with tendrils of fear that snaked through her. “So you took it?”
“Eighteen months ago.” He swiped the screen again. The code disappeared, replaced by an image of the two of them reflected from the camera. “This was a basic reconnaissance drone. After I repaired it, I modified—”
“Turn it off.” She covered the camera lens with her hand. “Now.”
He tapped the screen, and the image went dark. “It’s not broadcasting, Kora. The Base won’t see this footage.”
Her heart kept pounding. “It’s theft of resources—misappropriation, if you’re lucky. Ashwin—” He had to know. How
could he not understand? “It’s treason. If they find out, they’ll kill you.”
“Not for theft of resources. I’m too valuable an asset.” He took her wrist and gently drew her hand away. “But this part? This is treason.”
He touched the tablet again. An image reappeared, this time only their outlines, lit up with color. Ashwin’s was bright blue, so vivid that it seemed to glow in its intensity. Kora’s was dim against the white background of the image, a red so faint it was almost pink.
“Isotope trackers.” His words made sense now, and she reached out, her fingers stopping just shy of the tablet’s surface. They’d tagged him in a way that couldn’t be removed—by injecting him with a radioactive isotope easily traceable with the right technology.
With this technology.
She met his eyes. “You’re going to use this to find the deserters?”
“Yes. Regular enlisted soldiers show up as green. Elite soldiers as purple.”
“And everyone else is red?”
He looked away, a furrow forming between his eyebrows as he studied the screen. With an abrupt nod and a flick of his fingers, he made the image vanish again. “Once I finish recalibrating the settings, it should only take a few hours of sweeps before I can pinpoint their location.”
A strange chill settled over her—anger with more than a little fear. “You’re right. This is definitely treason.”
“So is knowing about it at all.” He set the tablet on the desk and pushed his chair back. “The Base doesn’t care how many Riders are injured or killed in apprehending the deserters. They’d prefer that I use Gideon’s resources over theirs, and you know that’s all his men are to them. Resources.”
So calm, so logical. Anything to justify his current course of action. “There has to be another way.”
“There are plenty of other ways. Slower ones.” He grasped her hips and pulled until she was standing between his knees. “This isn’t the first time I’ve committed treason. And I have a good reason to do this. I don’t want to see any more of your friends killed.”