The Breaking

by Imogen Keeper

  “I don’t want a few weeks. I want forever.”

  All her anger drained away, faster than it had come. She closed her hands around the large fist hanging at his side. So much power right there, in the sinews and bones of his hand. She searched his eyes. “I’ll try.”

  He nodded tightly, not exactly as happy as she’d have hoped, staring into the distance. Why did this have to be so hard?

  “Let’s get to the hotel.” His face stayed unreadable, but his voice softened. “If we’re going to Bond, we need a safe place to stay. It could take days.”

  The irritation on his face was hardly flattering as he snatched their pack off the ground.

  He hefted it onto his back. “As soon as we have ten minutes to think, we’re getting rid of that bastard’s serum. I’ll make you a stockpile of my own. One thing I won’t tolerate is my mate taking some other man’s serum. Ever.” He said it like he expected her to argue.

  She didn’t. “I’ll wash the vials out for you.”

  He adjusted his pants, checked his straps, pulled his hat on his head, and tied the white length of fabric into a big jaunty bow under his chin.

  He tossed her hat through the air like a disc. She caught it.

  “Come on.”

  He wasn’t happy. No problem. She would be happy enough for both of them. She’d make him happy.

  She’d far rather have Ajax in her chest than Utto slithering around in there.

  28

  If we do this,

  Everything will change.

  Ajax met her yellow-green gaze.

  The prairie spread behind her, lavender and white. Groves of pale blue flowering plants broke clusters of silvery-violet trees, matching the sky stretching overhead, endless and cloudless.

  And then there was her, face flushed pink, hair a brilliant fiery mass. And those eyes, vivid and as piercing as a knife to the gut.

  She looked like a garden, an orangey-pink and yellow-green one, vibrant and lush. Flowers covered her ridiculous hat in every shade between orange and purple. Massive flowers the size of his hand, and the same riotous, happy shades as the tumble of shimmering curls that cascaded down her back. Nothing on the horizon had half her brilliance or a quarter of her color.

  He should be happy. He was happy. She wanted him. He wanted her. They would be together. Bonded. A few months of glory to remember on his deathbed. He’d given up lamenting the unchangeable long ago. If he had to survive the breaking of a Bond for her, then so be it. Harder would be watching her do it, but he’d do it. For her. If he had to.

  And in the meantime, maybe he could change her mind.

  He would change her mind.

  They belonged together. She’d come to see it in time, learn to trust him, understand he’d never hurt her.

  And if not? He’d seen a man after breaking a Bond—Tam. He’d been broken. Weak. Sick. But Tam would have wanted his time with his mate for as long as he’d gotten it. And Ajax had to admit, he could understand that twisted logic now.

  Feola moved to stand beside him. Closed her hand around his. Smiling that glorious wide smile, white teeth, full lips, and all the air left his lungs. She’d be his, to claim, to love, to protect. Fate handed out temptation, a shiny apple in the palm of her hand, the forbidden fruit of mated life. It was more than sex. The Bonding would change the metabolic pathways of their cells. They would be different people after it was over.

  The Bonding would change everything.

  They climbed the hill. The foliage was sparse everywhere on the plain, but it thickened on the hillside, and damn near full beside the winding river, and the remnants of an old rutted and dusty white road that must have led up the mountain to the hotel.

  Feola’s slippers were too thin for the pitted path. As it grew steeper, he moved so she walked in front of him, where he could keep an eye on her footing. The last thing they needed was a twisted ankle.

  The Bonding ceremony would lay them down for hours, possibly days. It varied depending on the couple. Tam’s had taken two days. Feola’s with Utto had taken hours, she’d said. They had a supply of rations in the pack, and there was fresh running water in the river near the top of the hotel. The biggest question was if they’d find enough shelter to keep the blood-sucking birds off their backs at night.

  “I need to ask you for something, Feola.”

  She nodded.

  “Give us a chance.”

  She didn’t speak for so long. Was she ignoring the question?

  But she turned around to meet his eyes. “I just need to know that I won’t be trapped again, Ay-shocks. I need to know that if it’s not working, you’ll let me go.”

  “If you are unhappy, we will sever the Bond.” He couldn’t hide his smile anymore. “But woman, I swear by all the gods, you won’t be unhappy.”

  She chewed on that full pink lip, and of course, his cock raged in his pants, protesting the delay. She turned away, stepping up the white road.

  “I don’t think I’ll be unhappy, Ay-shocks. We should have done this earlier. I’m just scared. He had total power over me.”

  Ajax opened his mouth to argue with her that he wasn’t anything like Utto, but she stopped him.

  “We’ve never talked about it. About what it was like with him.”

  As they climbed, she pulled a long, feathery leaf from a tree and trailed it through her fingers. He didn’t speak. He didn’t really want to hear, but he knew she needed to tell him.

  “At first, I was so confused, I think because of the septusine, and I wanted so badly to love him. To forget about you. But then, it just… I couldn’t. And I think he knew it. Living with him—with Utto, I had no privacy. He tried to make me disappear. I shrank every day, became less me and more him. The physical part wasn’t the worst of it. It was being trapped. No escape. I was stuck on an alien base with no one to turn to, no hope of getting away, ever. He had total control over me.”

  Familiar anger boiled in his heart. Someday he’d see that fucker again. And gods help him, he would make sure he saw justice.

  She didn’t speak for a long moment. He wanted to ask about Rennie… but this was her story. If she wasn’t ready for that, so be it. He’d find out during the Bonding anyway, when their memories passed back and forth.

  He studied her rigid back as she carefully navigated the climb. “It shouldn’t have been like that. That’s not who we are. That’s not what Argentus is supposed to be. My father and my mother loved each other. He survived her death, and my sister’s, barely. I think he only managed because of my brother and me.

  “He used to come home from work for lunch some days, just to surprise us. He loved us kids, but it was my mom he really wanted to see. It was as if they were on a positive feedback cycle, like contact with each other recharged them. I wish you could have met her. She smiled a lot, like you. And she sang too. My father would have died rather than see her hurt, and she for him. It was a partnership, Feola. I don’t really want to think about the serum thing with them, but my dad needed her every bit as much as she needed him.”

  Feola kept her back to him.

  “I’d be giving you equal power over me.”

  She looked over her shoulder and met his eyes, offering him a single sharp nod before her face disappeared again behind a cloud of curls. When she lifted her hand to her face, he didn’t mention it. Gave her the solitude of silence.

  It didn’t take long before they stood at the crumbling entrance of the old hotel.

  “It must have been so beautiful,” she said beside him, eyes shining.

  Finally, in the merciful shade of the grove of trees surrounding the hotel, he pulled off the wretched hat and shoved it into his pack.

  White stones and blue glass tiles. In an arid world, mildew hadn’t made grand inroads. No quakes below the planet’s surface had caused ruptures. No catastrophic storms had destroyed it.

  The building looked as if it had been locked up for safe-keeping and simply abandoned. A few windows were broken,
and white soil covered most of the surfaces. Silvery, white, pale blue, and bold purple vines climbed surfaces. Here and there, trees had broken through cracks and upset tiles, but for the most part, it was shockingly pristine.

  The hotel, he had to admit, surprised him. It shouldn’t have. It may have been built three hundred years ago, but the people who’d built it were hardly barbarians.

  He closed the massive, cracked blue doors behind them as they entered. The ceiling offered no evidence of animal inhabitants. His boot steps echoed off the surface. Feola’s slippered feet barely made a sound.

  “Ay-shocks, look at these tiles,” she said, in the hushed whisper people automatically took on in large spaces.

  He tore his eyes from the enormous blue glass sculpture hanging from the ceiling, pulling her with him so they didn’t stand below it. She brushed white dust from the floor to reveal ornate abstract floral patterns made of some sort of shiny glaze.

  A large staircase stretched before them, spiraling up to the second floor. The walls were all white but covered in fine blue paintings depicting hunters with birds, stars and moons, mountains, streams with fish.

  “Where do you think the birds live?” Feola asked.

  “Hopefully not here.”

  “We’d see poop,” she said.

  He smiled at the way that sounded in her singsong voice.

  “I think so. Let’s keep looking around. I’d like to find a room where we know they can’t get in.”

  They moved through space after space, past blue and white wooden furniture that had barely crumbled despite the centuries passing, even fabric draperies that were mostly intact. A massive hearth sat in the center of one space, circular, under an opening in the ceiling.

  That made him uneasy. Had the birds answered Feola’s song the night before? Had they smelled them? Sensed them?

  He wished for the thousandth time that he had the information in the Tribe’s archives at his disposal.

  The hotel was large and built into the side of the mountains, so the windows all faced out over the plains with the river and the small bursts of trees. The waterfall cascaded down against one side, near a massive terrace. It appeared there had been dining tables and chairs. Some of them were broken, and again, vines and shrubs had made inroads through the shimmering blue tiles, but it all seemed remarkably undisturbed. As if it were just waiting for people to return. How had they kept the birds away?

  As Feola had said, though, they’d see some sort of evidence of a massive population of birds residing in the ruins, and they found none. Maybe the hotel had used some natural deterrent. Or perhaps some kind of invisible laser technology that kept them away.

  Or maybe it was simply Feola’s song that had drawn them the night before.

  They searched all seventy-five guest suites, and the service halls, the main restaurants and meeting areas. Not so much as footprints in the dust. They disturbed the fresh layer of white, powdery soil as they moved through.

  He’d never spent any time thinking about creating a space for a Bonding ceremony. He swallowed a lump in his throat, feeling unaccountably nervous.

  “Let’s pick a room with a fireplace. Maybe we can even remove the dust from the bed.” She flushed violently, and she’d never looked more beautiful. “I liked the one with the blue ceiling. Can we take that one?”

  “Whatever you want.”

  The room had an enormous fireplace and an even bigger bed. They spent a while cleaning out the dust and pulling the covers from the bed. He checked the doors. The locks still held. And the windows had shutters and dusty drapes, which they’d pull at night.

  They gathered wood for the fireplace, stockpiling.

  There was a bathroom nearby. They cleaned the tub and filled it with fresh water from the falls using a bucket. They washed in it and refilled it for drinking water.

  Ajax stood facing the windows. Naked. He’d deposited his weapons in a variety of places around the room so he could get them easily. The chamber was clean. They’d eaten, and he’d put food on the bedside tables within easy reach.

  His heart beat fast in his chest as he surveyed the alien landscape before him. The door snicked, and he turned around.

  Feola emerged from the bathroom, naked, hair damp. He let his gaze roam down her body, over the beautiful, smooth skin of her neck, and her perfect little breasts, nipples hard and tight, over her small waist and the flare of her hips. The patch of dark curls between her legs. They moved at the same time, crossing the chamber. Inches apart, they both paused.

  He felt as insecure as an untried boy. “So beautiful.”

  Her lips parted, trembling.

  He didn’t need to ask why. “I won’t hurt you. I promise.”

  Her eyes filled, and she blinked. “I know you won’t. I was just thinking that it should have been like this the first time. It should have been you. I’m so sorry for—”

  “I should have stopped you.”

  She nodded solemnly. “You should have,” she whispered.

  He pulled her close.

  It didn’t take much, just a hand beneath her ass, and her legs wrapped around his waist, all that warm skin, his for the touching. “I used to dream about this.”

  She didn’t speak, just stared at him, eyes level with his, legs tight around his waist, the hair between her thighs tickling his belly.

  “Well, okay, if I’m honest, I used to think about this and jerk off.”

  Her brow quirked. “About Bonding?”

  He nodded as he crossed the room, to the bed. He lowered her to the mattress. “I used to stay up late at night, imagining how it would be. Where I would touch you, how I would touch you. I didn’t know it was you. Not until I met you.” He shook his head. “You don’t know your own power.”

  Her smile stretched, her teeth touched against her bottom lip, her foot stroked his calf, and his cock twitched against her.

  “Okay. Maybe you do.”

  She laughed as he stretched her arms up over her head, holding her wrists in place with one hand, so he could let his mouth drift down her neck, over her ears. Graze along her collarbone.

  “The Bonding works by changing us. Your body will crave my serum aggressively early on. Later it will steady out. And my body will need proximity to yours.” He trailed his nose through her hair. “I’ll just need to smell you to want you, which is pretty much how it is now anyway.”

  “And you’ll just need to exist for me to want you,” she breathed against him, lifting her hips off the bed. “It doesn’t sound all that different from now. Y-you smile at me, and I get all stupid and weak.”

  “Oh, it’ll be different. Trust me.” He slid his hand down her belly, between her thighs, pressing her legs wide open. When his finger slipped in, she was ready for him. “Gods, you’re so wet.”

  She groaned, long and sweet and low, lifting her hips again so his cock pressed against the smooth, hot skin of her abdomen. “So hard, Ay-shocks.”

  “You know the first thing I thought about you?” he asked, grazing his jaw over the skin of her neck.

  She shivered, the muscles of her abdomen quivering. “N-n-no.”

  “I loved the way you say my name.” He traced his nose behind her ear, lapping at her skin right over a spot near her jaw he fully intended to bite later, right when she was in the throes of an orgasm. He breathed out gently along the skin of her ear, reveling in the way her breath came faster. “Like a song.” He cupped his hand over her cunt. Her heat, her pulse radiated outward.

  She whimpered and pushed against him, so he teased with his fingers, resting just over her slick opening, biting down on her earlobe until she tossed her head and pumped her hips. When he slipped a finger inside, she sighed with relief.

  “I want to hear you sing it when I’m inside you, all the way.”

  She nodded, making strangled sobs as he trailed his thumb in tight circles around her clit. He’d been learning her body in the days since their escape. He did know how to make her pant. H
e sucked her nipple between his teeth, dragging his tongue along the surface until her pants became sobs and she thrust her hips wildly against his hand. He knew how to make her scream too, but that would have to wait.

  She fidgeted and fussed, writhing beneath him. “Please, Ay-shocks. Don’t toy with me. Just do it. I want you inside me.”

  He grinned at her, an evil little smile. “I hate to deny you anything, Feola. But there isn’t a chance in hell that I’m rushing this.”

  He caught her mouth in a rough kiss, easing his finger from her hot wet sheath. She crooned protests into his mouth, nails raking along his back, tugging at his hair.

  He smiled against her fevered skin and trailed slow kisses down her neck, across her breasts, down the quivering flesh of her belly.

  “Spread your legs.” He sat up, looking at her flushed face and beautiful body. Her nipples puckered tight, her thighs scissoring, her hands fisting by her sides.

  She made a sweet, embarrassed squeak.

  “Open for me.”

  She parted her thighs a few scant inches.

  “Wider.” He clamped his fingers into the flesh of her legs, pulling her until she was spread-eagled before him, that glorious, pink pussy gleaming and waiting. All for him.

  With a growl, he dropped his face between her thighs, sucked at her clit, reveling in the way her hands tugged at his hair, the soft guttural cries, the way she rubbed her smooth thighs against his face. She tasted like heaven, sweet and a little salty on his tongue as he stroked up her slippery warm cleft.

  She chanted his name, and nothing had ever sounded better. And then she screamed, and he felt like a fucking god. Her thighs clamped down, her fingers dug into his scalp; it might have hurt, but who cared? Not him. He rode out her bucking hips, keeping his tongue in a steady beat until her screams turned to whimpers and the whimpers became pleas.

  “Please, Ay-shocks. Please fuck me.”

  She didn’t need to ask again. He settled his knees between her thighs. Traced the thick head of his cock against her warm, pink entrance.