by Fox, Jaide
He said nothing, but merely gazed at her.
And I’ll bet you’re naked under that sheet, she thought, just as naked as I am. “Well, I hope he’s gone to find out about this ransom thing. When do you expect to hear back from King Kore? I realize you don’t exactly have cell phones in this place, but hey, you never know--he might want us back. And then you rebels would have some money to put towards building a new life out here--if Kore and his Zhala-riding soldiers don’t destroy all of you first.”
But Damon only looked at her strangely and remained silent.
Suddenly Ebony began to get worried. “Y’all are going to give us back--aren’t you? I mean, getting kidnapped once was bad enough. And as much as I despise the harem, at least I get to see my sister and her family when I’m there.”
When he only maintained his silence, her anger began to rise. “Hey! I’m about ready for some straight answers around here!”
“You can ask Fallon. But it will be no use,” Damon said at last. “You will learn your fate at the same time as the rest of us.”
She frowned at him, both in anger and in rising fear. “What the hell are you talking about? I thought this was a simple kidnapping and ransom ploy!” Ebony got up from the bed, too angry to sit still, with the sheet half wrapped around her and trailing on the floor. “Those goddamned Gray Aliens were easier to deal with than you men! At least the Grays didn’t try to hide what they were doing!”
Ebony sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled on the soft leather ankle boots, still fuming. “We have to sit here and wait for Fallon to come back, don’t we?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not going to let me out of here, are you? Not even to see the other women?”
“No.”
“And you’re not going to tell me why I’m still a prisoner in this place, even after all I have been through without trying to escape?”
“No.”
“Wonderful.” She gazed at Damon, and shook her head. “All right. There’s nothing else to do. So--“
He looked closely at her, and started to sit up a little straighter.
“No, no! Don’t you men ever think about anything else? I’m not talking about sex. I want to ask you another question. Maybe you can ease some of the boredom around here by telling me a few things.”
Damon remained on the bed and remained silent, though he continued to look at her.
“Okay. I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’ So: I already know what happened to the women of this planet. Fallon explained it to me--about the virus and how it mutated and killed all the females. What I want to know is why you did it--why you would take such a terrible risk.” She shook her head. “I know what Fallon said, but Damon, what do you have to say about it?”
He shook his head. “Do you think we are crazy, Ebony? Why would we deliberately bring about our own destruction? That was never our intention.”
“Then what was--“
“The intention was to render the men of the city sterile and get King Kore to meet our terms.”
“And your terms were, ‘Allow the people of this world to choose their own path, and not be chained to their station in life just because of who they were born to.’ Am I right?”
“That’s right. And once those antiquated laws were changed, we would give the king and his physicians the antivirus. The male sterility would be reversed and no harm would have been done.”
“But like most of the best-laid plans, this one went off the tracks.”
He looked away. “Yes. It did. Even with all the testing that our scientists did, they did not allow for a possible mutation. They couldn’t have known that its real effect would be to spread to all the females of breeding age or younger and kill every last one of them. When the scientists--ours and Kore’s--finally discovered what it was doing and sent the antivirus to treat the men, all of the women had been infected and couldn’t be cured.”
“Yes. I know. Fallon told me all that. I guess you’re telling me that you both have the same story, so maybe I can believe it.” Ebony shook her head. “I’ve seen some terrible things in my life--back on my own world--but all of you take the cake.”
She looked around helplessly. “I don’t know what to say except I’m sorry. I don’t think you meant to hurt anyone. I guess you thought you were making your world a better place. But, man, you gotta be careful with stuff like viruses. That shit’s got a mind of its own.”
“But there is more,” Damon said.
“More?” Ebony frowned, and shifted about uneasily on the bed. “What more could there be?”
“We should make amends for what we have done. We should right the wrong we have done. But we cannot make up for the deaths of millions of women, however unintentional those deaths were.”
He closed his eyes. “What you do not understand, Ebony, is that our guilt in this matter makes us--makes us all want to die.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Die?”
Ebony tried to study his face, and see his large brown eyes, but he only looked away. “How can your dying make anything better? How can you fix anything if you’re dead?”
He ignored her words. “Fallon suffers the most. He was the one who gave the final order to release the virus.”
“But he jokes around sometimes, and seems to want to live,” she said. “Just last night, after saving me from drowning in that pit, he teased me and tried to make me laugh. Why would he--“
“His true self comes through at times. You are one who makes him forget his pain, and we see small glimpses of how he used to be. But he--and all of us--live forever consumed by guilt. None of us can accept what we’ve done. We could never justify it, no matter how much we intended to do good.”
“Damon--“
He only hung his head into his hands. His long hair fell down over his wrists. “We do all deserve to die,” he whispered. “We should let death take us away, and take our guilt with it. But, even with as guilty as we feel, we cannot bring ourselves to do the honorable thing and end our own lives. The pull of life is too strong--even a life lived in guilt and pain and regret. Perhaps that is our fate as cowards and murderers.”
“So,” Ebony said slowly, “what I’m hearing is that you don’t want to live because of the guilt, but you can’t bring yourselves to die, either. What will you do? Live in limbo until you all simply die of old age?”
He started to answer, and then stopped, and then tried again. “I don’t know,” he whispered. “Right now, none of us knows for sure.”
His pain was so genuine, and he seemed so tortured inside, that Ebony felt compelled to offer him some comfort. “Look, it’s over now,” she said softly, and stood up from the edge of the bed. “I’m here, and all my harem sisters are here. We’re all women, and we’re alive, and the virus is gone. That antivirus worked. We’re fine. Nothing you did can hurt us, or any woman, anymore.”
Ebony pulled the long white sheet a little closer around her and walked over to where he sat on the bed. She stood close to him and put her arms around his shoulders. “It’s all right now,” she said. “You may as well live. Nothing will be helped by your being dead.” She rested her cheek on the top of his head for just a moment.
He reached up and returned her embrace--but then his arms tightened around her and he pulled her down onto the bed, kissing her and kissing her. There was desperation in his kiss, hunger and need.
Well, she might have known something like this would happen--sex could be a comfort as well as a release….
Damon pressed her backward until her lay on top of her, still kissing her breasts and throat and mouth. Then she realized that he was murmuring something.
“No women,” he whispered. “All dead, and at our own hands--no women at all, until now--until you--now there is life, and warmth, and softness, and there will be life again…”
There would be no stopping him now. He threw off the sheet and, indeed, was quite naked--and quite ready for her.
Ebony ga
ve a little gasp to see him in all his glory before her. She didn’t get a long look before he covered her with his massive body, molding the tight, hard muscles to the softness of her curves. Her belly felt imprinted by the ridge of his sex, digging into the crease between her hip and groin.
Though his entire body was rigid with desire, he kissed her quite tenderly and kept himself under control--even though she could feel his passion rising with each passing second and his control would not last for long--and Ebony found she simply could not refuse him, not in the midst of this sort of pain.
Why she felt it was her duty to soothe him, she didn’t know, but she couldn’t stand seeing another person suffer when she could do something about it.
Opening her mouth against his full, sensuous lips, she kissed him back, feeling her body ignite under the onslaught of his heated return. His tongue felt like molten lava, branding the inside of her mouth. He raised himself up and pulled the sheet off of her body so that nothing stood between them.
She hadn’t realized how much of a barrier the sheet was until his skin touched her skin. Black and white didn’t matter except it raised her erogenous zones twentyfold to see his lighter limbs tangling against hers. He seemed to be burning from the inside out. Her skin felt melted against his, consuming her in a conflagration of desire that stunned her.
He pulled her close to him, kissing her as passionately as any man ever had.
Damon groped her breasts, pinching her nipples until they formed hard peaks, and then his mouth followed his hands.
She arched back against the small bed when his teeth dragged across the distended tip. He moved to nuzzle the valley of her chest, one hand skating down her stomach to touch the top of her slit and dragging a long moan from deep in her throat.
He groaned against her chest, hot breath scorching her skin.
Her pulsed beat erratically, forcing blood to flood her clit as it waited patiently for the probe of his finger. When he broke through his reserve and slipped his hand down to encounter her slippery button, she closed her thighs on his hand, trapping him against her sex.
Damon gave her a quizzical look and experimentally touched her clit again, igniting riotous sensation in the bundle of nerves.
From the way they reacted, it was pretty obvious that the delightful part of her body was not the norm for their women, not that it made any difference to her. She was enjoying his experimentation with her clit too much to think beyond her own experience.
“Oh!” she cried when he began rubbing it faster and faster.
He chewed a nibbling path up her throat, releasing her sex as he rose above her.
With one knee he pushed her legs apart and then entered her forcefully, letting out his breath as he did so in something like relief and joy.
Ebony thrust her hips up off the bed, taking in every inch he had to give her. She wrapped one leg around his firm buttocks, reveling in the movement of his backside as he pinned her to the bed.
Her hands seemed to possess a mind of their own—one tangling in his hair while the other enjoyed the flex of his bicep. His hair was just as silky as she remembered. She smiled, loving the thrusting grind of his hips bumping against her parted folds, the drive of his cockhead ridging her g-spot with his strokes.
He dipped his head close to her, smelling her throat, and she rubbed her cheek and the corner of her mouth against his head.
It was not long before the force of his thrusting brought him to climax, well before Ebony could join him; but she only looked up at him with eyes that were soft and wet as his breathing steadied and he rested his head on the pillow beside her face.
“I’d forgotten it could be like that,” Ebony whispered. “Something like love, instead of just screwing.”
“But I am not finished. And neither are you,” he said, raising himself up again. He got to his knees, pulled Ebony up until she was on all fours, and mounted her from behind, again pushing himself into her very strongly and thrusting as hard as he dared. Ebony braced herself with her arms so she would not be knocked face-down, and tried to give back to him all the passion he was giving to her.
His cock curved inside her slick passage, bumping and sliding against sensitive areas. Her pussy began the arduous, slow tightening that signaled her closing in on orgasm.
Damon’s sac smacked against her clit, teasing her.
“Touch me,” she said on a gasp, pushing back against him.
“Where?” he said, gripping her hips. His hands were so large, she could feel they spanned the width of her back.
She’d never considered herself dainty, but the men here had a way of making a woman feel petite and womanly. Shoring up an arm, she reached back with her hand and grabbed his wrist, jerking him to the spot she needed him most.
The moment his hand landed home, his fingers plucked her clit, sending her over the edge within seconds.
Ebony jerked back against him, moaning uncontrollably as he wrung pleasure from her body with his fingers and the thick glide of his cock. Her sex grasped him, driving him into his own orgasm.
He collapsed on top of her and rolled, pulling her on top of his chest.
She snuggled there a minute, breathing hard and feeling a wave of delightful tingles all over her lower extremities as his rough hands smoothed against the bare skin of her back.
It was then she noticed his cock hardening again.
She shook her head. “Oh no you don’t,” she said.
“Oh yes, I do.”
“I cry mercy!”
He grabbed the back of her head and brought her down for a hungry, drugging kiss. “None will be given,” he murmured.
Two times more Damon took her, and only then did he seem to be spent--though Ebony knew it was only temporary. She lay beside him for a moment as both of them tried to catch their breath, and then she slipped out of bed and picked up the sheet to wrap around her again as she walked to the closet to get another towel and washrag.
Ebony spent a little time in the shower once again, luxuriating in the hot water and soap, and then dried off once more and wrapped the towel around her so that she could walk out of the shower room and into the sleeping quarters.
She’d expected to see Damon asleep, or perhaps gone; but she found him with his pants and shirt on and sitting up in the room’s only chair. He seemed to be staring out at nothing, and did not look at her as she approached him.
“Hey,” she said, trying to look him in the eye. “Hey. What’s going on with you?”
He turned his head very slowly to glance at her, but only looked away again.
She sighed. “Don’t worry. I’m not falling in love with you or anything. I guess if I’m not flat-out being raped by that king of yours, I’m feeling pretty good about it. But that’s all it is.”
Ebony started to turn back towards the closet to get the clean blue scrubs, but Damon slapped his hand down on her wrist and held her fast. “We should not have done this,” he whispered.
“Well, it’s a little late to worry about that now.” She twisted her wrist away in an effort to get loose--and to her surprise, he released her. “Are you worried about what Fallon would think? I can’t imagine that he would care. Besides, where I come from this kind of thing is up to me as much as it is you. That means that I get to choose who I sleep with, the same as you do. Got it?”
Finally he looked up at her with a very cold stare. For a moment she felt a little disconcerted. Just how angry was he--and why?
“You are not in the place where you come from, Ebony. You are not on Earth. And in this place, things are very different.
“You have already been claimed by Fallon--a man who is my brother-in-arms. Punishment awaits me. There is no avoiding it.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Ebony rolled her eyes and walked back to sit down on the edge of her own bed, adjusting the towel so that it covered most of her. “The two of you will have to work this out between yourselves. I am not going to do it for you. Have at it.”
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nbsp; She glanced up to see Damon glowering at her. “You don’t understand. This is not a mere fight over a female. I am deeply ashamed of myself.”
“What for, Damon? There have been no women on your entire planet for a long time now. Not many guys have that excuse! Who could blame you? Besides, I sort of like you. And I did give you the go-ahead. So I don’t see where you have anything to be ashamed of.”
His lip curled. He looked like he was snarling in disgust. “Exactly so. The moment a woman touched me, I lost control. This only proves to me--and to the men who might rely on me--that women cannot be trusted and neither, apparently, can I.”