She flew to pieces in his arms, her slick, tight core clenching around his cock, as tight as the squeeze of a fist. It was more intense than anything he’d ever felt before. He roared as his climax ripped through him. Agonizing pleasure drew every part of him taut and shaking. Hot seed surged from his body in powerful jets, filling Hadiza—marking her, claiming her. She was his. His to take, his to fuck, his to love.
When the last shuddering tremors of orgasm faded from his body, he slumped, bracing himself on his elbows so that he wouldn’t crush the beautiful human laying boneless and sated beneath him. He drew in ragged breaths, waiting for his heart to slow. Slowly, gently as he could, he pulled out of the tight clasp of Hadiza’s body. She made a small, pained sound as the head of his cock pulled through her narrow opening.
Errol dropped to his side, pulling her immediately into his arms. Her pressed his face into the fluffy black nimbus of her hair, inhaling deeply of her scent. “Are you okay?” he asked, afraid of the answer.
She twisted in his embrace and wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling herself snugly against him. “More than alright,” she said softly, her lips moving against his throat.
Errol lay quietly, at a loss. “The intoxication…”
“I didn’t feel it,” she answered. “Lyra told me that when she and Asier…” she trailed off into an embarrassed silence. “Well. After the first time, the effect of the intoxication goes away.”
Errol frowned. “That doesn’t happen with any other species.”
“No. But Lyra also told me that the toxin doesn’t hit other females as hard is it does humans.”
That was true. In most cases, the Scaeven toxin offered partners a moderate euphoria, an enhanced arousal. It didn’t render the recipient into a single-minded procreation monster the way it did with humans. Seeing other females under the sway of his toxin didn’t turn its Scaeven possessor into a mindless rutting monster the way it did with a human—with Hadiza.
But what they’d just shared hadn’t been anywhere close to mindless. He’d been gloriously, ferociously present for every touch, every taste, every sound. It’d been too good and too potent—and too brief. He’d never felt the like.
He pressed his face into her hair again, inhaling deeply. The power of her scent washed over him, but there was no drugging stupor, no helpless oblivion. He was still there. She was still with him. He stroked a hand down the sleek plane of her back to grasp the curve of her ass, marveling at the softness of her skin—and at his ability to touch her without losing his mind.
“Your tribunal is in three rotations.” Hadiza’s pained whisper broke the delusion he’d wrapped around himself.
She wasn’t here because of some wondrous emotional bond. She was here out of guilt and obligation. She was trying to save him from a fate as good as death. He released his hold on her.
Hadiza clung tighter to him, throwing her leg over his flank so that every inch of her soft figure was pressed against the hard planes of his big body. “We have three more chances to seal the bond,” she continued, her whisper growing softer, breathier, as she rolled her hips against him. The scent of her increasing arousal spiced the air.
His cock thickened. Her hand slid down to grasp him. He groaned, deep in his chest, hips thrusting instinctively. “Ach, rourra.” He ran his hands over her body, making her gasp when he pinched her nipples, making her keen when he slid a thick finger into her wet heat. “You’re too good,” he said on an agonized whisper as he thrust his cock inside of her again. “Too good for me.”
She was so tight, so hot, so wet, and so responsive. She arched and moaned, she raked her nails over his hard skin, sank her teeth into his shoulder. He thrust into her, harder, faster, watching as pleasure glazed over her eyes. He wasn’t good enough for her—but he could at least give her this. He could make her come, twist her body up with pleasure, again and again. If they were bonded, he’d spend the rest of their lives trying to give her a fraction of the joy she gave him.
He’d given her one orgasm after another, making her come until she begged for respite from a pleasure that had become too much. Heart aching, Errol held onto her and tried not to think about the future. Hadiza lay soft and pliant in his arms, her velvety skin dewy with sweat. She smelled of sex—her arousal and his seed slicked on her thighs, dampening the pallet beneath them. His skin scent was all over her, hers all over him. He inhaled deeply, trying to lock the scent in his memory.
They knew time was up when the temperature began to drop. The sweat dried on their skin, and gooseflesh rose over Hadiza’s entire body. Shivering, she clutched onto him. “It’s almost time for me to go,” she said through chattering teeth.
Holding onto her, Errol fetched the robes she’d worn into his cell and wrapped them around her. Within moments, the thermal fibers reflected her body heat back at her, easing her shivering.
“Asier asked me to pass along his apology,” Hadiza said as she pulled the hood over her face. “He’s programmed the sanitation cycle to run right after I leave, to destroy the evidence of our, um…”
Her face was covered by the priestess’s robes, but Errol could picture the flush darkening her cheeks, and he smiled. “Humans are shy with these conversations,” he said with a grin.
“Well, Keplerans are,” her voice, half-amused, half-mortified, emerged from the cover of the robes. “Lyra and Sofie seem to have no problem with it.” She huffed out a little self-deprecating laugh. “Anyways, as soon as the cell door closes behind me, close your eyes and mouth. Try to plug your ears and pinch your nose shut if you can do both. You’re going to get doused with disinfectant.”
A low tone sounded inside the cell.
“And that’s goodbye.” Hadiza’s heavily shrouded figure shuffled forward and she wrapped her arms around his waist in a brief hug.
“Goodbye, rourra. Return to me.”
“I will. I promise.”
Chapter Sixteen
The light cycles were so strange on Varan. The massive moon orbited a colossal gas giant, which orbited a yellow dwarf star. But even as the gas giant Scaevos rotated its sun, Varan was both orbiting Scaevos and rotating on its own axis, so daylight came and went at odd intervals—dark when their side of Varan rotated away from the system’s central star, but also blocked intermittently by Scaevos as Varan’s orbit looped behind the gas giant.
Lyra had drafted up a chart that allowed her to predict light phases with perfect accuracy based on Varan rotational degrees—calculating all the times into both Arabic and Crurian numerals. In medical school, Hadiza had been obligated to take a Crurian mathematics class, and it had nearly melted her brain. Once she passed the final exam, she’d promptly forgotten everything about it. But Lyra’s mind was damn near a calculator, and she switched between Crurian mathematics and human mathematics without batting an eyelash.
Hadiza watched with a mixture of enchantment and envy as Asier stared down at his mate and her recently completed chart, blatantly awed by her cleverness. Love and desire shone in his golden raptor eyes.
Sofie bumped Hadiza’s shoulder. “So cute they’re almost sickening, right?”
Hadiza smiled at the young woman. “I wouldn’t mind some sickening cuteness, myself.”
“Well, hey, keep it up with your jailbird lover and you might just get it.”
Hadiza was getting used to Lyra and Sofie’s frankness to the extent that she only flushed a little at the jibe.
“Aren’t you a doctor?” Sofie demanded, looking at Hadiza’s reddened cheeks. “How can you be so flustered by normal biological functions?”
“I’m a trauma surgeon, not a gynecologist. And I’m usually discussing other people’s biological functions, not my own.”
Sofie gave Hadiza a searching look. “Keplerans aren’t known for sexual prohibition…”
Hadiza scoffed. “Not the upperclass.” The Euro-descended Kepleran upperclass were as sexually liberal as any other developed Alliance outpost. But the laboring class Keplera
ns, descended from a mixture of Afro-Arab-Carib refugees, held onto their people’s old Earth customs, even if they’d become muddied and mixed over several generations. Polite laboring class people didn’t talk about sex. Laboring class women didn’t admit to having sexual partners. Everybody entertained a polite fiction that a man and woman who’d coupled were merely in it for the emotional companionship.
“Upperclass? Is Kepler’s class system very rigid?”
“Don’t grill her, Sofie,” Lyra said, dropping onto the settee next to Hadiza. “Sofie’s studying Intergalactic Affairs. She’s obsessed with cultural differences.”
Hadiza glanced at Sofie, then looked up through the glass dome over their heads, at the alien forest surrounding them. “You’re attending university here? How?”
“I’m telecommuting under a false identity, on an IP routed through a non-Alliance human territory. Nerio University thinks ‘Sofia Hale’ lives on Proxima b.”
“Wow. Nerio. Good school.” The planetary university in Mars’s capitol city was on par with the still revered Earthbound Ivy Leagues.
“Well, we managed to give ‘Sofia Hale’ the same academic record as ‘Sofia Hallas’ without actually crossing data,” Lyra said. “Before we had to make our quick getaway, she was a student at Copernicus.”
“Cristo.” Another impressive school. “Congrats on the brain,” Hadiza said to the younger woman, earning a bright smile.
“You’re not exactly a moron yourself,” Lyra said to Hadiza. “It’s not very common for an enlisted corpsman to get an officer’s commission and a full-ride to the Interplanetary Defense Academy’s medical program.”
Hadiza frowned. “I never told you that.”
“Scaeven tech makes hacking pretty easy,” Lyra admitted. “And we already have a line into human territory through Sofie’s school connection. While you were gone yesterday, I looked you up.”
Hadiza’s cheeks heated again at the oblique reference to her time spent in Errol’s cell. She assumed everybody was imagining her fucking him. And why not? The thought of it consumed her own mind, all the time. How long until the next rotation, when she could see him again? Where was Lyra’s sunlight chart?
“Anyways,” Lyra cut into Hadiza’s sweaty daydream, “the reason I bring it up is because we could use human medical expertise.”
Hadiza straightened, mind immediately clear. “What’s happened?”
“Nothing yet. There’s a human woman who’s due to deliver a Scaeven child soon. She lives on a different moon, Narik. Her situation isn’t… it isn’t like ours,” Lyra gestured between herself and Hadiza. “She didn’t want this. Asier thought it would help her to be with other humans and maybe have a human doctor examine her. The delivery itself is a concern. Errol found a glitch in the Scaeven medical programming that doesn’t read female human bodies accurately. Shortly before I arrived here, there was a birth that went badly. Another human woman. The medical AI fucked up—read the woman as male, the baby as an invasive parasite. They—” Lyra hesitated. “They both died. The mother and the child.”
Hadiza considered this somberly. She couldn’t help but wonder at her own fate, should she be carrying Errol’s son. Terror mingled with hope. She set them both aside.
“The programmers swear they’ve fixed the glitch,” Lyra continued, “but I don’t trust the AI robotics not to take out her liver instead of performing a proper c-section.”
“So you want me to perform the c-section? Manually?” Though she’d never performed the procedure before, she didn’t doubt her capability if it came down to it. It was just that, even in human facilities, cesareans were performed by robotic AI.
“Yes. Her mate has already been reaching out for alternatives to the Scaeven AI, trying to illegally import human medical AI, but time is running out. Are you willing to do it?”
Hadiza though of all the women who’d been trapped in the traffickers’ hold with her—who hadn’t been saved by an honorable Enforcer. “Yes. I’m willing.”
Lyra nodded. “We’ll depart for Narik immediately after you leave Errol.”
“How long until—” she cut herself off, embarrassed by the eagerness in her voice.
Tactfully, neither Lyra nor Sofie commented on it, though wicked amusement gleamed in Sofie’s eyes.
Lyra’s gaze turned distant, a sign that she was doing complicated mathematics in her head. “Approximately three Earth standard hours until Asier can sneak you back into the prison.” Her gaze sharpened, focusing back on Hadiza. “Maybe you should get some sleep. There won’t be time for it afterwards.”
Hadiza shook off the suggestion “I have to do some research on cesareans.”
“You need to get some sleep,” Lyra pressed. “You haven’t slept in a while.”
“I’m honestly not tired. The irregular light cycles are messing with my sleep patterns.”
“When was the last time you slept?” Lyra asked.
She thought back. “Right after…” she fought the blush that wanted to consume her face. Come on, you’re a fucking doctor. “Right after I left Errol.”
“So it’s been nearly a full rotation—almost three days,” Sofie said. She and Lyra glanced at each other significantly.
“What?” Hadiza prompted.
“Has your birth control implant, uh, ejected?” Lyra asked.
“I don’t have one. I was in the transition period between getting a new one when the traffickers captured my ship.” Birth control implants had to be replaced every ten years. Before having a new one installed, the body needed a few days to recover from the excision of the old one. “What does my sleep pattern have to do with anything?”
Lyra hesitated. “I think, maybe, Errol would want to explain it to you.”
“If it’s about my health, I want to know now.”
“It’s not dangerous. It’s not urgent,” Lyra said quickly. “Just…tell Errol you haven’t slept in three days.”
As Lyra had pointed out, Hadiza wasn’t exactly a moron. Obviously the disruption to her circadian rhythm had something to do with pregnancy and the matebond. She scowled at the other woman.
Lyra only laughed. “I raised the stubbornest kid this universe has ever seen. You’re not going to glare an answer out of me, Doc.”
“I’m not stubborn,” Sofie objected.
“No, of course not.”
She came to him again, giving her body over, comforting him, binding them together. Even if he didn’t get her with child, there was something between them that would never let him go. It was more than sex, more than biology. He’d felt it back on Daalinalikiniri-din-kaal, whenever she’d insisted on treating his injuries. When he’d come back from the markets to find she’d solved every single one of the puzzles he’d gotten her. When she’d gotten angry for him, over the way his mother had treated him. He loved the kindness and the generosity that radiated off of her like sunshine. He wanted to wrap himself in her sweetness. He wanted to be the shelter that kept the hard, ugly parts of the world away from her.
He loved her. And he was too selfish to let her go. So he accepted that ugliness within himself, and hoped that Hadiza’s goodness would be strong enough to burn it away.
As she lay in his arms, filled with his seed, her skin smelling of him, Errol could feel only vicious pleasure. Mine. It hummed through his veins, simmered beneath his skin. Mine. And then the pleasure gave way to the fear—that she wasn’t his and never would be. That, in a very short time, she’d be gone from his life forever. He’d never see her again. He’d never see anything again, except black skies and falling ash.
“I haven’t slept in several days,” Hadiza murmured.
Errol’s self-pitying thoughts scattered. “Are you ill?” He drew back so that he could see her face, look into her eyes.
“No. I don’t think so. Lyra said you would want to know. That you would explain it.”
Errol had the sudden sensation of being struck over the head by a hammer. His grip clenched on Hadiza, and
she squeaked as he hauled her against his chest. He couldn’t speak. His throat was a tight knot, his lungs caught in a vice.
“Are your eyes glowing?” Hadiza’s voice came out strained, and he realized he was holding her too tightly.
Forcing himself to release her, Errol blinked hard, willing away the pressure behind his eyes. The glow faded to a faint gleam that gilded the edges of Hadiza’s face as he stared down at her.
“You might be—” he choked on the last word. He couldn’t get it out. He stared at her, helpless.
“It’s alright.” Hadiza slid an arm over his broad torso, hooked a leg over his hip. She clung to him tightly. “I think I know what you were going to say.”
Errol dragged in ragged breaths, careening wildly between ecstasy, uncertainty, guilt, and hope. She might not be pregnant. Humans were used to an extremely regular light cycle, she’d been dealing with a lot of stress, the lack of sleep could just be a symptom of that. It was too soon to hope.
He blinked hard again, swallowing convulsively until his breathing and his heart rate were under control. “Carrying a Scaeven child affects the mother in a lot of ways. There is a viral agent in our semen—”
“What?”
Guilt rushed to the fore. “There’s so much I should have told you. I should have warned you—given you more of a choice—”
She pressed soft fingers to his mouth. “Hush. Tell me about the viral agent.”
He nodded, swallowing again. “It changes you, makes you just a little bit Scaeven, makes you compatible for the child. And for me. If you’re carrying my son—” blinding hope swept away the guilt “—you’ll need less sleep. You’ll heal faster. You’ll live longer.”
Moon Struck Page 19