by V. K. Ludwig
His thrusts turned short, jerky, nothing but his corona rubbing over my clit. Until he groaned so deep, I startled.
“Fuck,” he moaned, along with words my chip couldn’t translate.
One rope of cum after another shot from his cock, coating my pubic bone and belly. He grabbed his cock and rubbed his head over my skin, spreading his seed, leaving his glistening mark.
Once the trembles left his body, he rolled halfway off me and pressed my head into his chest. “This was the most beautiful thing, Katie.”
“It could have been even nicer,” I said, my voice an odd mix between satisfaction and disappointment. “I appreciate how you want to take things slow, but I am ready.”
My head elevated by half a foot as his chest expanded in a deep inhale, then came down slowly before he said, “There’s just something I need you to know before we do this.”
I pushed myself up a bit. “You dance on poles along the Jal’zar for extra credits?”
He gave a playful shove against my shoulder. “Look at you being all provocative again.” His smile slipped off faster than he had conjured it up. “The thing is, Katie, that —”
Bam. Bam. Bam.
“Mom,” Grace’s voice pushed through the door. “K’terra said there’s an emergency for Melek.”
“Of course there had to be…,” Melek said and climbed out of bed. “Fate just won’t grant me a perfect moment.”
He pulled his briefs back up, looking every bit like what you don’t want your teenage daughter to see walking out your bedroom.
“I hate leaving you like this,” he said. “Can I come back here after? Spend the night with you?”
“I’d love that.”
At that, he was out the door, stumbling around the living room in search of uniform pieces. I grabbed a shirt from the laundry pile and wiped his cum off my stomach, then tugged all fabric back in place.
The moment I stepped outside my room to wash Grace’s grin flashed even through the darkness of the room.
“Just don’t expect me to call him dad,” she said with amusement thick on her vocal cords. “I’m going back to sleep.”
Granted, she had her own idea of what must have happened in that room. Boy was she wrong. My gaze followed behind Melek as he left the apartment with his healer pack, but somehow got stuck on the dresser. On that glass bowl at the center, where that media sphere from the marketplace rested.
Something that had left me cold for several suns, but now had my fingers itch with curiosity.
Sixteen
Melek
* * *
A breeze of depleted air sucked the moisture from my pores, the metal grids squeaking underneath my sure steps. I followed along the main platform of the abandoned dock. A place that once held the entire personal fleet of the three noble houses, but now served as a dispensary for everything illegal.
And since there was no such thing as illegal on Odheim, the dealers promised bliss and content to every miserable soul that passed them. Even the corrupt guards, only there to keep the filth of this planet from oozing into the open.
I ignored the spheres of souldust winking at me as I passed them, still good and high on that thing called Katie. She had already fallen back to sleep when I returned that night, coming clean once more not an option. Instead, I kept watch over her, shifting her ever so slightly as soon as an approaching nightmare tugged on her features. Grace’s only comment when I came out of her mother’s room that morning was walk of shame, whatever that meant.
“Healer,” a female Jal’zar crooned.
She walked up to me with a limp in her step, a thick scar running from her ankle halfway up her calf. Old war injury probably, and her filed down fangs confirmed it. Tattered clothes sat tight against a swollen abdomen.
“I’m bonded.”
That tasted better on my tongue than Adora’s cooking, no matter the lack of accuracy. As far as I was concerned, I was devoted to Katie, our first mating inevitable — if fate would ever allow me a chance to tell her the truth.
Before the Jal’zar had a chance to grab for my cock, I took her hands into mine and guided her aside. “Come to the backdoor of Brot Adnak tomorrow morning. Two ICs and I’ll inject you.”
She pulled her hands from my grasp and hissed. “Your kind disgusts me. My stomach’s churning more than my egg sack aches, and you believe I have credits?”
I looked her up and down, reading her misery written in scabbed puncture wounds along her side, which peeked through the holes of what might have been a dress at some point.
“Here.” I rummaged through my pocket and handed her the credits since I’d unfreeze my account anyway. “Tomorrow morning. If you show up early, the madam might feed you.”
Her eyes must have ached with the way she glanced down at the credits; her chin held so high I spotted the dirt collecting underneath her chin. She took it with a hiss and disappeared back into the shadows of old cargo crates.
When the platform split, I took the ramp up to the old maintenance panel, just like K’terra told me. The air was slightly less stagnant there. A telltale sign of the more expensive goods, namely slaves.
I stopped at bay twelve and glanced over my shoulders before I stepped inside. Holograms of females rotated on platforms, which lined the walls to my left and right, making my stomach roil.
“Hello?”
“Back here,” a voice came from behind a million screens stacked and lined up across a desk.
After several suns away from everything shady, this place had my toes curling inside my boots. I approached the desk and glanced around, finding a young Vetusian swiping and flicking holographic codings.
An oversized hoverchair sucked his slender statue into the cushions, and a scar ran from his temple over his eye, stopping beside the nostril.
“What do you want?” he asked, clipped. “If you’re looking to get your hands on a sphere of souldust, then you’re on the wrong level, brother.”
Given my eyes, I couldn’t blame him for his comment.
“The Empire froze my account,” I said. “Someone told me you could access it? Transfer the credits onto a temporary holder?”
A smirk too dark for someone that young came over his face. “Lots of people say lots of things. Messing with the Empire’s databank is risky business, the punishment making execution look like a trip to Earth.”
I bit down a scoff. “How much?”
“Sixty.”
“Sixty credits?” That wasn’t nearly as bad as —
“Sixty percent of however much we transfer.”
Fuck my life.
“You’re kidding, right? Are you telling me I walk out of here with less than ten-thousand while you keep the other thirty?”
“Or you walk out with whatever you came with, minus those credits you handed that Jal’zar female.”
At that, I shrunk back, something dark spreading inside my chest. I glanced around, scanned the holograms. Sure enough, the same female hovered at the center of the wall.
“She works for you?”
He snorted a laugh but otherwise kept his eyes fixed on the code. “Everyone works for me in some way or another. So? What’s it going to be?”
I folded my hands in front of my arms, uncertainty gnawing on me. Sixty percent was a rip-off, but Katie and I needed the credits. I still hadn’t repaid Adora for the nanites. Eventually, I’d have to pay out the occasional bounty hunter.
“How long will it take?”
“A quarter argos. Two-hundred-and-sixty Heliar clicks. Fifteen Earth minutes. Make up your mind, brother, because I have things to do.”
“You spend a quarter argos and rack up thirty-thousand credits?” I stepped away for a moment, pushing my hands into my pockets before I’d swing them around his scrawny neck. “By the Three Suns, I went into the wrong stratum.”
If he showed a reaction, then he hid it well. His wrists continued to rotate and rearrange patterns of code, his pupils darting in all directions at
once as they tracked it.
“Alright. How do we do this? You read my DNA?”
“Silver column behind you,” he said. “Place your hand onto the sphere.”
I turned around and did as told, but he remained in his chair. “Are you going to do this or what?”
“Already am, healer Melek,” he said, the dryness of his tone putting an itch at my throat. “Arrested seventeen times. Ten out of those for possession of an illegal substance while serving the Empire. Five for disgracing your color in public. One for indecent exposure. And one for… stealing hover carts from the Odheim infirmary and using them in an unsanctioned drag race around the Imperial Assembly?”
At that, he looked at me for the first time, but only for a fraction of a moment before his eyes returned to numbers and swirls.
“I brought them back,” I mumbled. “That makes it borrowed, not stolen.”
I turned away and walked along the platforms with holograms rotating above them. A Jal’zar female, barely mature. Another from Heliar, the bruises in her face poorly edited. A slender female, one hand covering her breasts, and the other covering…
Shock squeezed my aorta.
By the Three Suns, no…
My heart burst inside my chest, mixing with that darkness. It turned black and thick and wrong and choked my arteries with the side effects of Garrison Earth.
The human female trembled all over, her eyes downcast, pupils flicking from left to right and back again. Underneath her knotted hair webbing dull around her shoulders, a tranq pad rested on the back of her neck.
I reached my shaky hand out for her. Wanted to help her off the platform, give her my shirt, and take her far away from this place. But my fingers only broke through streams of light, touching nothing but thin air. And yet her tremble wrecked right through me.
“Her name is Sophie.”
I swung around, my hands clenching into tight fists.
The young Vetusian stood behind me, adjusting his cock through his green pants as he stared at the woman. “Infertile; otherwise, she would have made me a fortune with a new link. It’s a shame, really, but she’ll recoup it over time at the brothel.”
He climbed onto the platform and walked around the hologram. His gaze slithered from breasts to buttocks to mating cleft, disgust driving bile up my esophagus.
“She’s on Odheim?”
“Currently in transit,” he said. “I tried linking her for the longest time, but even the most desperate Vetusians aren’t interested in females not able to give them daughters.” He pinned me down with impeccably green eyes. “Have you ever mated a human? Fucked them? Made love to them?”
I shook my head.
“Females aren’t usually my thing, but I’m considering having her,” he said, stroking a hand over his chin. “Yeah, I think I’ll have her before I send her to auction.”
My entire body itched so hard I wanted to storm out the bay. Fuck the credits. I couldn’t have this guy make thirty-thousand credits on me, so he’d smuggle Earth women off-planet and sell them into slavery.
But the moment I lifted my foot, an alarm went off at the back of my head. It screamed inside my skull, resonating from my parietal bones until it formed the hum of one word.
Link.
Fear stalled my heart.
“You said you tried to link her?” I asked, forcing the jitter from my voice.
“Would you like her?” He jumped off the platform and stalked around me, sucking in his lower lip, tensing every muscle in my body. “Your kind isn’t usually entitled to their fated one, but there’s not much I can’t make happen. Of course, you couldn’t live on Earth since the CAT is searching for her.”
CAT. Short for Counter Abduction Team, the word confirming this insanity.
The guy dragged one finger over my stomach, and dread poisoned my veins. More fingers joined as he stroked over my chest, saying, “I’d pay well for the company of a Vetusian like you.”
I struggled a lump of disgust down my throat. “And then she’ll be mine?”
“In all Imperial databanks,” he said and fanned out his arms almost in praise to himself. “I delete all old programming traces, making it look as if she was yours from the very start. We usually choose females who originally matched a sgu’dal, since the system never connected their links. Makes it easy. Quick.”
My heart clenched between joy and rage, fighting for dominance inside my chest, making it falter, start back up, then ram against my ribcage. Katie and my link had never been broken, never compromised. She was destined to be mine ever since I sucked my first breath of air, and the realization of it nearly brought me to my knees.
I wanted to go home and claim what had never belonged to Kidan in the first place. He’d bought that link, probably unknowing that her sgu’dal fated one had made the assignment to Garrison Earth.
“So?” the Vetusian asked. “Think you can come up with the credits?”
I struggled my lips into a smile. “Only the transfer for now.”
This changed everything.
With the manipulation of our link, justifying Kidan’s death with self-defense became a viable option. We could return to Earth, and finally start that life I had wanted for us. The one Katie and Grace deserved.
I needed proof.
I needed… him.
“A shame,” he said with a shrug and went back behind his screens. The moment he flung himself back into his hoverchair, his eyes first widened then flicked to me. A strained smile. “Almost done.”
There wasn’t a unit of fat on his body and even less muscle. One precise grab and a blow against his temple, then I could make my way out through the ventilation system. Interrogate him. Get proof. Contact Kael.
Earth here we come.
Inching closer toward the gap between wall and desk, I gazed around for a backdoor, a vent, or anything he could escape to before I got my hands on him. A curtain blocked a doorway behind him around the corner, the boxes poking out from underneath telling me getting through there would require climbing.
“… … … Okay?”
The pitch of his voice ripped me out of my thoughts. “Huh?”
“Your credits are transferred,” he said and tapped against a wristband connected to a machine, holding my gaze throughout. “I have to step outside and grab a merchant, so we can make sure it worked. I’ll be back in a moment.”
It wasn’t the way his shoulders stiffened as he squeezed by me that tipped him off. Not the way his flat chest heaved either. No, it was the way he stared at me, giving me his entire focus and attention. What did he see in my file? That I had killed a client of his?
A moment passed in slow motion.
I grabbed his arm, pinned it against his back, and slammed his face against the wall. Adrenaline rushed through my veins, that liquid hope mixing into it, turning it combustible. I wanted to kill him. For stealing my female. For selling my female. For hurting my female.
He let himself fall to the ground and crawled through my legs. His soles slipped on the excess fabric of his pants as he simultaneously pushed himself up to run. Arms flailed and paddled for traction.
The moment I dug my hand into the back of his shirt, he spun around, rounded his back, lowered his head. One blink later, I stood there with nothing but a shirt in my clasp.
I tossed it to the side and kicked my legs into motion. Powerful strides thrust me forward, stretching along the metal grid, which quaked underneath the force.
The hacker dodged rusty containers, ducked underneath maintenance cranes, and sidestepped the dealers and crooks. But it wasn’t until he reached a stack of cargo boxes that I caught up with him. My heart pumped like never before, the rushing of blood like a symphony of justice in my ears.
In my mind, I already saw him tied to a chair. K’terra and the other Jal’zar would circle him. Send one prick after another between those ribs which were so visible on his skinny body. He would scream. He would cry. But most of all, he would talk.
&n
bsp; I reached my arm out.
Fingertips brushed pale skin.
Then that sucker squeezed himself through the galaxy’s tightest gap between rotten cargo. With no way to fit, I jumped onto the first container. My muscles smoldered; my lungs seared. I ignored it all, pushing through the pain and up to the next ledge.
Once on top, I jumped down from cargo to cargo, the rusty metal dinging underneath my weight. The moment I had metal grids underneath me again, I commanded my heavy legs back into a sprint.
I wouldn’t let him escape.
Wouldn’t let Katie down a third —
A stab into my side deflated my lungs, the pain infiltrating every nerve ending of my chest before it burned up and down my spine like hot friction. Another prick dug into the opposite side and lodged between my ribs. The Jal’zar next to me pulled her mouth into a blood-lusting grin, wiggling her tail and my torso right along with it. Her tail claw detached with a crackle.
My knees hit the ground, the unforgiving metal grids underneath me, cutting into the joint. I blinked the dirt-crusted faces of the Jal’zar females in and out of focus, their tails flicking, protecting the guy who had them on his payroll.
I watched him turn into a supply tunnel just as the Jal’zar giggled and walked off, leaving me behind with blood soaking the shirt my anam ghail had given me.
Seventeen
Katie
* * *
I sat at the dinner table and tap-tap-tapped my finger against the edge of my plate, the meal at the center cold and untouched. Dead silence hung over the room. Not even the spoons dared to clink or clank.
“I should have gone with him,” K’terra murmured.
“He’s fine,” Adora said, the smile on her face not making up for the lack of conviction in her frail tone. “Perhaps he got held up. The old dock isn’t easy to navigate for someone… with his…”
Her voice trailed off, and I finished what she couldn’t. “For a sgu’dal.”
Eyes pulled from bowls, grains, and meats, pinning me against the backrest of my chair. They held concern for Melek and pity for me, right along with that question nobody dared to ask. What if he skipped three dealers, but not the fourth?