Escape (Project Vetus Book 1)

by Emmy Chandler

  I shove on his shoulder, and he snarls at me, without even pausing in his stroke. “Hey!” I snap, and when that doesn’t do anything I slap him lightly on the left cheek.

  Carson freezes, buried deep inside me, and his eyes dilate until there’s little left of his silver irises. He grabs my right hand and pins it to the mattress, then he starts pounding into me again. When I try to pull arm free, he snarls at me again. More gently this time, but still.

  “Stop!” I shout as my frustration bleeds into anger.

  Carson goes still over me, again, but this time the silver in his eyes swells until his irises look normal. Until he looks…here. As if he’s fully present with me again. His nostrils flare as he takes in my scent, and his brows furrow. “Why are you mad? Am I not pleasing you?” He sounds devastated by that possibility.

  “No, you asshole, you’re not ‘pleasing’ me. Let go of me!” I pull on my arm again, when he looks confused by the demand, and he releases it immediately.

  “I’m sorry, petal. I don’t even remember…” He frowns as it comes back to him. “You slapped me.”

  “Because you weren’t listening.”

  “I apologize. I was lost in my desire for you, and your scent and your wetness indicated that the same was true for you.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re going to have to listen to my words, too, because they speak for my brain, and my brain overrules my body every damn time.”

  “Of course. And what does your brain want to say?”

  A flush burns in my cheeks when I remember what started this erotic conflict. “I…um…want you to roll over so I can ride you.”

  Carson’s lips quirk into a smug smile. “That’s your brain speaking? You’re sure?”

  I huff at him. “Just roll us over, or get ready to finish yourself off with your own damn hand.”

  His smile heats up until the flush in my cheeks trails even lower. He leans down for a long, deep kiss that leaves me panting and clenching around him. Then he carefully rolls us both over, until I’m straddling him, sitting straight up on a cock thicker and longer than I’ve ever worked with, willingly or not.

  “Thank you,” I whisper. Then I lean forward with my hands on his hard, hot chest and I begin to move. “Oh god,” I moan as I slide up and down on him. In this position, he hits all my favorite places just right.

  “Petal…” Carson moans. “Faster, please.”

  “See? That’s all I wanted, and if you hadn’t been such a big baby about been kicked out of the driver’s seat, I might—”

  He grabs my hips, and I squeal as he lifts me up, then slams me back down, rocking me in a circular motion that leaves us both gasping. “Fuck it,” I groan. “Just keep doing that.”

  His hips slam up into me as his hands coordinate the effort by guiding my movements, and in seconds I’m clenching around him, my head thrown back as pleasure washes over me in wave after blissful wave.

  Carson grunts, and I can feel his release inside me, over and over, and each wild thrust rubs him against me again, extending my orgasm until the room starts to go dark around the edges of my vision. He’s holding me up now, while my body still convulses around him, and I’m aware of nothing but pulsing, aching, infinitely satisfying pleasure.

  Finally, he goes still, and I collapse against his chest, riding out the aftershocks that grip us both.

  “Holy fuck,” I whisper, using his left pec as a pillow. He’s still twitching inside me, still hard, and my body doesn’t seem inclined to change that. “Good job. Top marks. I’m just going to go to sleep for a little while. Okay? Wake me up when you’re ready again.”

  What the fuck did I just say?

  “Sleep, petal.” Carson strokes hair back from my face, spreading it over his chest, so that cool air caresses my overheated back. And as I fall asleep, his promise carries over into my dream…

  “Nothing will come near you while I am here.”

  13

  CARSON

  Lilli sleeps beside me. She’s splayed out on her stomach, her back rising and falling with every breath, her long brown hair spread across both her left shoulder and the mattress. I’m exhausted, but I can’t sleep, because I can’t stand to miss out on this moment.

  For the first time since I met her, both Lilli and the beast are at peace.

  She made no conscious decision to stay the night with me. But the fact that she let herself fall asleep next to me, with my scent all over her, has satisfied the beast’s need to mark her as mine, at least for the moment, and that seems to have lulled him into silence for the first time in hours.

  My satisfaction with this moment differs from his. When the beast isn’t growling into my ear, I don’t care about scents and markings. I don’t need to kill every man Lilli’s ever slept with—though I wouldn’t mind coming face-to-face with everyone who’s ever hurt her.

  I just want to be near her. I want to see her smile and hear her laugh. I want to feel her thighs clamp around me. I want to watch her sleep. When my team and I were arrested, I thought I’d lost the chance to have this. To find a woman who would want this with me.

  I want children—or at least one child—just as badly as the beast does. But I want Lilli even more.

  Yawning, I curl up beside her and stroke her hair down her back. She mumbles something unintelligible, then she snuggles up next to me in her sleep.

  My heart beats so hard that my ribs ache.

  Protect her, the beast growls. And for a second, I think he’s mumbling in his sleep as well. Then I hear it.

  Footsteps. Again.

  Invaders, the beast whispers, wide awake now. I roll off the bed as quietly as I can, flinching when the mattress squeals. But Lilli still sleeps.

  The beast grunts with pride, insisting that she spent all her energy on orgasms, and that he had something to do with that.

  He’s not entirely wrong.

  I pull my clothes on as quietly as I can, but Lilli doesn’t even open her eyes. She’s out cold. So I pad down the hall in bare feet, and I’m inches from the front door when I hear the first voice.

  It’s a woman.

  I relax. I know that voice. Sylvie, the female gladiator. The people heading toward us, stomping through the woods in the middle of the night, are friends.

  Enemies, the beast insists, and along with that thought comes a wave of possessiveness so strong that my hands curl into fists, and my knuckle spikes emerge.

  But Lilli isn’t involved with any of the men in her community. They aren’t competition and they don’t want to hurt her. They just want—

  They want to take her home. They want to protect her. From me. And they’re probably still pissed about what I did to Warren.

  They don’t understand what we have. I don’t understand what Lilli and I have either, but I can feel it. Yet all they know is that I lied to them, I attacked Warren, then I snuck in and took one of their women.

  She’ll go with them. She was trying to get back to her friends when those men attacked her, and she’s only here now because she fell asleep, but she will go with them. And they won’t let me near her again.

  Kill them.

  The beast can’t abide the thought of someone separating me from my woman. And for once, he and I are in the same book, if not exactly on the same page. No man on Tethys would let strangers come in and take off with his wife.

  She’s not my wife.

  She’s your mate. She accepted you. She took your seed.

  Spires erupt from my elbows and my face aches as my skull begins to thicken.

  I can’t let them take her. I can’t. If they try, I will fight them. But if I hurt her friends, Lilli will hate me.

  Better that she hate you while she’s with you than love you from afar, the beast insists. But that’s where he and I disagree.

  I take a deep breath, then I mentally tug on the weapons that have erupted from my arms. The beast growls as the spikes and the spires recede into my arms.

  This is a puzzle to be solve
d. Lieutenant Dreyer is right about so many things.

  The only way to keep Lilli’s friends from finding us is to get both of us out of here before they arrive. Based on the movement they’ve made since I first heard them, they’re not actually headed here. They seem to be searching the woods, calling for her. But eventually, they’ll realize how close they are to this building, where I met them earlier. If it weren’t the middle of the night, they probably already would have come to that conclusion.

  Even though I can hear them, I don’t think they’re close enough to detect us, with their substandard human ears. So I just have to get Lilli out of here before they get close enough to hear us leave.

  What the hell am I going to tell her about why we’re leaving? She knows I could dispatch any enemies that stumbled upon us.

  Thoughts racing, I dash past the room full of corpses to find Lilli still asleep in “our” room. “Lilli,” I call softly as I sit on the edge of the narrow bed to shake her awake. “Lilli. Wake up. We have to get you dressed.”

  She mumbles something I can’t understand, then rolls toward me and sluggishly throws her arm around my waist. The fact that she’s reaching for me in her sleep fills me with pride. But that feeling is short-lived, because she’s not opening her eyes.

  “Lilli. Petal, wake up.” I shake her harder this time, and when that doesn’t work, I slide one arm behind her shoulders and sit her up.

  Her head lolls to the side, but her eyes still don’t open.

  Alarm creeps up my spine with skeletal fingers. Something is wrong.

  “Lilli.” I pat her cheeks softly. When that doesn’t work, I pat harder. Her arms lay limp in her lap, her hands open and relaxed. She’s breathing. Her pulse and heartbeat sound normal. But she won’t wake up.

  I fight back the fear encroaching on my thoughts so I can concentrate on identifying the problem. I run my hands all over her, focusing on her skull and neck, looking for some undiscovered injury that might have rendered her unconscious. Was she hurt before I got to her, outside? Did one of those men hit her?

  My vision is better in the dark than it used to be, thanks to Dr. Brennan, but with Lilli in danger, it feels more inadequate than ever. I can’t find any obvious source for whatever’s wrong with her, and beyond first aid, there’s nothing I can do for her.

  If her friends find her here, unconscious, I’ll have to kill them to keep them from taking her. I may have to kill them in self-defense, if they believe I hurt her.

  I need to find help for Lilli, and keep her friends from finding us. But there’s nothing that would keep Lilli’s friends from coming for her, and there are no doctors in zone three.

  But the zone X lab is equipped with everything Brennan could possibly need in order to help her.

  Fuck.

  I only have one move to make, and just minutes in which to make it.

  My heart racing, I squat on the floor next to my bag and dig through it until I find the com device I took from the guard on the shuttle, six weeks ago. Even sick and half out of my mind, I held onto that and to a pistol I can’t use.

  Without the guard’s fingerprints, I can’t unlock it, but just turning it on should send out a signal, as the device tries to connect to the planet-wide system. If Brennan is still looking for me—and she is—she’ll get an alert the moment that device powers up.

  Except the com device’s battery is as dead as the bodies in the next room.

  Dead battery. Think. How can I charge a dead solar cell in the middle of the night? I’d need a source of ultraviolet light, or a contact charging pad. Neither of which I have.

  But I do have an extra battery.

  I’m not a tech guru, but Coleman showed me how to do this once, in the field, when our com died. Maybe I can still remember…

  I dig through the bag again until I find the stolen laser pistol. My hands must remember more than my head does, because I manage to get the solar cell out with no trouble. But I’ve never worked with this model of com device. Must be proprietary. In the end, when I can’t figure out how to get the solar cell out of it, I just smash the damn thing with the pistol grip, then I dig out the guts of the busted solar cell and use the wires sticking out to connect to the cell from the gun.

  “Come on, come on!” I mutter as I wait for signs of life from the com device, praying that I’ve connected the wires properly. That the longer-lasting cell from the gun has at least a little charge left. And finally…the screen flashes. A prompt appears, asking for my fingerprint.

  I lean back against the cold metal wall and exhale in relief.

  Brennan’s watching for that signal. She has to be. Considering how much money I’m worth to UA, she probably has her own device set to wake her up and deploy the troops the instant this device powers on.

  The shuttle will be here in minutes.

  Based on the sound of the footsteps in the woods, so will Lilli’s friends. We have to be ready to go.

  I have to be ready to convince Brennan to bring Lilli with me.

  As the seconds tick by in my head, I round up Lilli’s clothes, but I only have time to get her panties back on and to slide her torn shirt on backward, to cover her torso, before footsteps break into the clearing.

  “There’s a light,” a familiar voice whispers from outside. It’s Warren, the man whose identity I borrowed in order to lure Lilli from her home.

  “It has to be them,” a deeper voice growls. “Warren you get Lilli out of harm’s way. Sylvie, Graham, and I will take care of this—”

  “Um…guys?” Sylvie whispers as their steps crunch closer. “Looks like there was a fight.”

  They’ve discovered the bodies, and now I can see beams from their flashlights, through the bedroom window.

  My pulse begins to pound, and anticipation of the coming fight triggers an ache in my face, as the bones begin to thicken. I was really hoping to avoid this confrontation.

  “This wasn’t a fight; this was a fucking slaughter,” Warren whispers. “If Sotelo did this, he has a weapon.”

  “So do we,” Sylvie says, and as I take up a position in front of the bedroom door, my elbow spires and bone blades slide from the seams in my skin. No knife or length of rebar will give them an edge against the weapon Brennan created. “So did this guy,” Sylvie continues. “But he never even got a chance to draw it.”

  But as the beams from their flashlights angle downward, to help them inspect the corpses, a new sound intrudes on the otherwise quiet night. The growl of an engine.

  “Shit there’s a shuttle,” that first voice growls. “Let’s go.”

  Flashlight beams track through the window again. “We can’t leave Lilli!” Sylvie insists.

  “We don’t even know for sure that she’s in there,” another male voice says. “And anyway, the shuttle’s here for their expensive toy soldier. They have no reason to grab Lilli. We’ll take her home when they’re gone.”

  “What if they just shoot her, because she knows about their classified project?”

  “Why would they bother?” Warren asks. “Who’s she going to tell?”

  But Sylvie has a point. One laser round through Lilli’s chest won’t cost UA a dime, and there are guards who’d kill her just to get back at me for killing the guard on the shuttle.

  What if I’ve miscalculated? What if, in signaling Brennan, I’ve signed Lilli’s death warrant?

  My grip on the doorframe tightens as the flashlight beams retreat and Lilli’s friends flee into the woods. Seconds later, the shuttle rumbles closer, then begins to descend, and a bright light shines through the window as it lands in front of the building.

  “…and remember, do not let him touch you,” Brennan’s voice whispers above the telltale grinding sound as the shuttle ramp is lowered. The low-pitched whine accompanying her words tells me she’s speaking through the com system built into her helmet. “Don’t let anyone you see in that building touch you. He could look like anyone.”

  I back away from the bedroom doorway
as heavy footsteps clomp down the ramp. “Doc,” one of the guards says over his com—a pointless precaution when you’re tracking someone with genetically enhanced hearing. “We got bodies.”

  More footsteps crunch on chunks of the crumbling front sidewalk as they move forward to inspect the corpses. “That’s definitely Sotelo’s work,” Brennan confirms, as beams of light flash in the window again.

  “That doesn’t mean he’s still here,” one of the guards says.

  “He’s here.” Brennan’s confidence in that irks me, even though she’s right. “He turned on that com for a reason. Either he’s drawing us here for an ambush, or he needs something.” I hate how easy it is for her to interpret my actions. But then, she’s been studying me for two years. “Be prepared for either.”

  As I retreat toward the bed where Lilli is still passed out, someone kicks the warped front door open. Two red laser sights appear in the hallway, swinging back and forth as the first guards to come into the building, scanning for threats. Their pistols are almost certainly set to stun, even though I’ve already killed one of their coworkers, because now that they know about my new ability, I’m worth even more to UA. Brennan won’t let them kill me.

  I won’t let them kill Lilli.

  Fool, the beast growls at me. He wanted me to throw her over my shoulder and carry her off into the woods, to keep her safe from Brennan. But that would have been a short-term solution at best, if I can’t wake her up.

  Lilli needs help. Brennan can help her. Even if I have to make a deal with the devil to get her on board with my plan.

  The targeting beams swing to the left as the guards enter the first room, and my pulse races while I listen to their progress, still backing silently toward the bed.

  “We got more bodies!” one of the guards calls into his com system, and amid a wave of heavy footsteps, I see a flurry of red targeting beams. “This wasn’t Sotelo,” that same guard says less than a minute later, no doubt for Brennan’s benefit. She won’t enter the building until they’ve declared it safe. “Blunt force trauma, mostly. Couple of stab wounds, but no slicing or punctures. This was just a prison yard brawl.”