Viper (Naga Brides Book 1)

by Naomi Lucas

  I grit my teeth. I know females are rare, but this other one isn’t my problem—or Gemma’s. “Another naga will save her.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “Yes, I can. If she hasn’t been caught, she soon will be, and I assure you there are many malesss right now—”

  “That makes it so much worse. She doesn’t want to be caught by a male, Vruksha. I didn’t want to be caught. If she’s running, she won’t stop, and if she’s been out there all alone for nearly two weeks… I can’t imagine the state she’s in.”

  “We’re not going after her. Nagas will fight to the death for a mate. She will come to no harm.”

  “But you’ve said so yourself… there are evil naga males. What if she’s been caught by one and is running from them?”

  Tension streaks down my spine, and I slip my tailtip from Gemma’s leg to coil around her back, closing her into a circle of my making. I understand she may care for those in her past life, but she should forget them and move on. She never will, not if she sees them and they remain near.

  I tear my eyes from her pleading ones and snarl at my spear. “We destroyed the evil ones long ago.” Thoughts of my father rise to my mind, and the way he’d stare off into the forest for hours as if he was waiting for my mother to come slipping out of it. I remember the sadness that always followed when she never did.

  My mother was never a victim to a Death Adder or a Black Mamba or a Boa, but so many others were. I lost my sisters because they feared for their lives and chose to flee instead of becoming victims.

  “Can you be sure of that?” Gemma whispers.

  I snap my eyes back to her. “Yes. We were thorough.”

  “Thorough enough? What about Zhallaix?”

  I bare my fangs, hearing the Death Adder’s name. “He is dead.”

  “If you do this for me…” Gemma sinks her teeth into her lower lip, stealing my attention briefly, but it’s the lost expression that remains etched on her face that has me questioning… “If you do this for me, if you help me save her, I’ll stay.”

  “You never had a choice,” I remind her.

  Her face scrunches. “I could make your life a living hell by fighting you.”

  “I’ll bind you.”

  “And I’ll scream, kick, and battle you and us every single day until you have no choice but to relent. You’d become what you destroyed.”

  I hiss, frustration and anger pouring out of me. “You are not being fair.”

  “Neither are you.”

  Fury to match my rising rage meets me in Gemma’s fierceness. I believe her threats, knowing she could deny me the life I want so badly with her. The affection, the company, the warmth, and the love of having a mate to coil up with in a shared nest. She could take that all away, and though I’d fight back, reminding her constantly why it would be easier to give in, I know she’d only come to hate me.

  Because the humans are still out there. The other nagas are as well.

  And there would be no peace inside my den or outside it until that changes.

  “I am nothing like those rabid males,” I grate.

  “Help her,” she begs. Gemma reaches up, and I go stiff, bracing for her to try and squirm out of my circle, but she cups my face instead, pulling me down. “Please do this for me, as your mate.”

  She seeks to call me mate now? Anger swells up inside me. “You ask much of me.” I can’t help but lock her in, gripping the crate on either side of her. I press into her, my anger growing.

  She leans up and places a kiss on my lips. “I know.”

  It’s gentle, soft, a whisper of a touch, and a tendril of her warmth. It’s everything. I know she’s manipulating me but her lips move, and I’m now the one who’s lost, deepening it, uncaring. Because if I don’t, I’m afraid she’ll slip through my circle of limbs and vanish.

  And I will become my father.

  If I can’t make her happy, then what kind of mate am I?

  I cup my hand behind her head and capture her completely, sinking my tongue into her. Gemma’s taste floods my mouth, reminding me of everything I have to lose. How fragile what I have really is.

  Her hands fall from my face to grab my shoulders. She presses her nails gently into my scales there.

  Something in me snaps.

  I grab hold of her dress and tear it down her arms, freeing her breasts. She startles as I fill my hands with them and squeeze, pinching her nipples between the sides of my fingers as I do. “Female,” I say, desperate and furious, “you will be the death of me.” I don’t give her the chance to respond, recapturing her mouth. I slide my hands down her body and grasp her butt, lifting her onto the crate.

  I push my hips between her legs, and she opens up for me. Reaching under her dress, I tug off her undergarment. The weak ties holding it in place snap and fall away. I throw the annoying scrap across the bunker.

  Holding her open, I line up my tip to her hole and thrust my member into her to my pulsing knot, groaning as I push against her tight flesh keeping me out.

  “Vruksha,” she cries, digging her nails into my arms.

  “You ask too much of me, female. You seek to manipulate me,” I snarl, pulling out and thrusting back into her. Her lips part, but I don’t allow her to speak, furious.

  “You want to risk your life, again, and you haven’t even recovered!” My hips snap. My tail curls around her hair and pulls it back until she’s forced to lie on the crate. She gasps and her back arches. I rise over her, thrusting harder. Mastering her.

  “And now you want to go after another female and bring her back to our den. I won’t share you!” I roar. This time when I pull out, I shunt forward with brutal strength, pushing the entirety of my bulge into her in one go.

  Gemma cries out, gaspy and harsh. Guttural, animalistic noises rip from my throat. Pleasure surges up my spine, and her hips tweak from the pressure I’m putting on her. Her legs tense around me, flailing from the force. She doesn’t ask me to stop, and I don’t. She lets me take my frustration, my lust out on her beautiful body.

  Her sheath clenches around my bulge, and my tail drops, uncoiling from her hair. It straightens out behind me as far as it can go, climbing up the opposite wall, knocking things over.

  Her hands fall to grab my hips as she buckles.

  Sweat beads my brow from her little movements, teasing my aching prick into a furor. It grows.

  Brutally, I rut her, enraged that she seeks to manipulate me. She gifts me hitches and moans, and I take them. My thrusts grow wilder, her cries louder. Seed swells my bulge painfully, and I can’t hold back.

  I bring my tailtip back to me, thrashing, spilling inside her. I drop atop her, catching my body with my hands, as I give Gemma everything. She takes it. She takes it all.

  “We will sssave your friend,” I breathe heavily into her ear. “But you will stay with me, you will obey me, you will never run again. You will not ask about the Lurker technology again, nor about the humans in the facility, you will never return there. You will never leave this planet, and every night, you will wait for me in my nest, open just as you are right now. You will forget all else.”

  Gemma whispers my name.

  “I’m not done,” I growl, rising on my elbows, pinning her with my gaze. “We will go after your friend, but she cannot stay here. This den is mine, and only what is mine is allowed inside it. If she cannot be found, and cannot be saved, thisss,” I point between us, “isn’t going to change.” I span my fingers and tangle them into my female’s hair.

  Gemma purses her lips, lips that are red from my ravaging. My body pumps more seed, and I spill a little more inside her.

  “Thank you,” she gasps. It’s all she says.

  It hurts.

  I rut her again, harder this time.

  Twenty-Four

  The Hunt for Daisy

  Gemma

  Vruksha checks the ties on my shoes for the third time.

  I grasp his hand. “They’re fine. I can man
age.”

  “I don’t want anything more to happen to them,” he snaps. He’s been angry since the tunnels, and so have I, but there’s no solution until we find Daisy. I don’t know what’s happened, why she would steal the skiff, but I have to find out. I can’t do anything knowing that if the roles were reversed, Daisy would help me. I know she would.

  And what if she’s not trying to escape from something? Maybe she’s not running from a naga or our old coworkers. What if she’s looking for me?

  And risking herself doing so.

  I barely know Daisy but after what we’ve been through—being betrayed by our peers—she’s the closest friend I now have. I may be all that she has too.

  War and tech be damned.

  It’s nice being ignorant of what’s happening until it’s not. Daisy could’ve been suffering, alone, exposed, or worse and I’d only given her a handful of thoughts while I rested in warm pelts and let Vruksha care for me.

  While he made me cry out in bliss…

  I clench and wince, throbbing from Vruskha’s recent attentions. He’s upset, and I’ve made him that way. He’s a vicious alien—that I think might be in a rut—and I often forget that he’s a different species now.

  I can’t help that I’m in heat just being around him… The way I’m acting. I like what he does to me...even if it makes me ache afterward. I shake my head.

  And all I cared about stupid war tech that may or may not be useless. I scrub my hands over my face. I want it to be useless. I’m hoping it’s useless, but I can’t quite convince myself. Still, Vruksha’s right. It doesn’t matter. He and the other nagas have hidden it. They’re guarding it, wherever it is, and for now, that works for me. Until I know more, or something happens, it’s enough.

  “They’re mostly healed,” I say, wrapping my hands around the walking stick Vruksha found for me. It’s sturdier than any stick I’ve sourced so far.

  He rumbles and drops his hands from my shoddy makeshift shoes. None of my new clothes are great, only held on by ties that never seem to get tight enough, but they’re better than nothing, and each day I fiddle with them, they’re more wearable.

  Vruksha grabs his spear and ties our supply bag over his shoulder.

  I swallow, rubbing my thighs together. They slip, still wet with his seed.

  I care for him.

  A lot. It’s beginning to hurt how much I care. I press my palm to my chest, to the tightness there.

  He hisses and slips up the steps, and I drop my hand. I follow behind him, watching the way his long tail moves back and forth. A creak sounds in my ears, and a ray of light bathes us, temporarily blinding me.

  I inhale the fresh air, making my way up the last of the steps, using the wall to guide my spotted vision. It feels good.

  Freedom.

  The moment I step outside, Vruksha’s tail coils around me and lifts me off the ground.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  He brings me to his arms and cradles me within them. “I’m not letting you walk. You are too slow even when your feet aren’t hurt. I want this to be quick. I do not like the idea of you being out here where you can be further hurt.”

  “Then what’s the point of the shoes?” I jest.

  He scans our surroundings. “Protection,” he answers me dismissively, ignorant of my teasing. An orb comes up to hover beside him. “Are there predators nearby?” he asks it.

  The orb does its thing and we wait. Bears, a coyote this time, a snake, and pigs. Always pigs. My stomach sickens.

  “What snake?” he asks.

  The orb hums, and a hologram appears. It twinkles in the sunlight, making it hard to see the image. But something appears, a familiar broken tail and scarred face.

  “I thought he was dead,” I whisper.

  Vruksha hisses, holds me closer, and goes silent for a time, watching Zhallaix. “I always think that too, but he never is. As long as he keeps away, he can live with the pain of his wounds for as long as he likes.” And at breakneck speed, Vruksha surges forward.

  My hair flies as he slips us through the airport’s ruined orchard and into the thicker forest. I grip his hand that’s cradled around my arm. “Slow down. Your tail is still healing.” But my words are lost in the wind.

  He doesn’t stop.

  The day was already halfway over when we left the bunker. Vruksha needs nothing but his spear, but I’m not so easy. He packed two day’s worth of rations. He’s not planning to search for Daisy long.

  I turn from the glinting scales on his chest to the blurry landscape. I know it well enough now that it’ll become less flat as we get closer. But when the trees close in and the overgrowth thickens, I’m not prepared for the fear that wells up in me.

  Sooner than expected we reach the area where the pigs were, where I almost died. Where I ate raw fish…

  Vruksha slows down, working his way through the foliage, careful not to let any branch, leaf, or twig touch me.

  I can still hear the snorts and snuffs of the hogs like a ghost in my ears, reminding me how close I came to being eaten alive.

  “Don’t stop,” I whisper. “Not here.”

  Vruksha pulls me into his chest, and I close my eyes, turning to press my brow to him.

  “They’re dead,” he says as if he knows. “I killed every last one the drone missed. Do not be afraid.”

  He makes me feel safe.

  For a time, I lose myself in the swaying of his arms, feeling the air on my skin. I wake from a fitful doze when he sets me on my feet sometime later.

  He’s taken me inside the ruin of an old building. One without a roof, with half-crumbled walls and metal piping sticking out everywhere. He sets me under a large slat of cement, leaning against one of the sides, forming a small alcove. I rub my eyes. Vruksha fills up the entire entrance, trapping me within.

  “Why have we stopped?”

  “Night will be upon us soon, and you need to eat and drink. I want to check your feet,” he mutters, clearly still unhappy with me. It bothers me. A lot. I feel like I let him down.

  But time is precious.

  I knew it was a long shot, but I can’t help worrying. I know we’re vaguely headed for the facility, but it feels like we’re wandering aimlessly, a skiff could travel anywhere…

  My heart thrums as we stare at each other. The ache between my legs hasn’t gone away, and I crave him. He doesn’t judge me, and I never realized how much I’ve been holding back all these years, fearing judgment.

  My chest tightens.

  Vruksha curls his tail under him, and he settles just under the opening of our alcove, placing his spear nearby. He reaches for my legs, and I give them to him. In the waning daylight, he unravels my bandages, checks my wounds. Most are nothing more than red blotches now, scabs, and yellowish-green bruises, but he’s adamantly keeping track of how fast they’re healing.

  I lean against the side of the building as his hands prod my skin, aware of how they linger and inch up my legs.

  “If I’d been hurt like this on The Dreadnaut, I would’ve opted for the pod,” I laugh.

  “Pod?” Vruksha lifts my foot and begins wrapping it back up.

  “It’s a medical thing,” I say to fill the silence. “It eliminates the need for so many doctors and nurses since they’re all needed on the frontlines. And so the rest of us get the cold love of a health pod. It’s an oval-shaped device humans lie in when they’re sick or injured, and the pod—which runs through AI software—heals you. They also put you under, stabilizing you for long distances of travel.”

  “Ah, yes. I know what you’re talking about.”

  I peek at him as he sets my freshly bandaged feet aside. “You do?”

  “I’ve seen something like it, once, where a—I think it’s called hospital—used to be.”

  “I didn’t think we had tech like that back then.” We lost a lot in the centuries following the end of Earth.

  “It was broken. There were human bones all around it.”
<
br />   Silence falls between us as the shadows give way to full darkness, and the only light comes from the moon rising through the trees. It would be peaceful if it wasn’t for Vruksha’s brooding, blocking much of my view. I reach for the bag slumped off his shoulder and dig out a ration.

  His eyes never leave me.

  I take a shy nibble, suddenly feeling like nothing has happened over the past two weeks and this is our first night together in his bunker all over again.

  “Tomorrow…” I start then stop.

  Vruksha continues to stare at me.

  My fingers tangle. “Tomorrow, we should head for the facility and start there.”

  “No. Tomorrow, we’ll get close and I’ll check out the facility, search for her tracks. We are not entering the facility’s grounds.”

  “She…won’t have any tracks. She stole the skiff. And what if Peter and the others found her? They’ll take her back to the facility.”

  “She hit the trees, breaking them. I can climb to the tops and know which direction she went in, and if they found her first, then we return to our den.”

  “I need to speak with her.”

  Vruksha growls. “That’s not what we decided, mate,” he lingers on the word. “If she is safe, that is all you need to know. If she is within the facility and back with the other humans, there is nothing left that you or I can or will do for her.”

  Silence settles between us again. I finger the wrapper of my ration, hating it.

  “Get some sleep,” he says, startling me.

  “You should be the one to rest.” I sit up. “I can take the first watch.”

  Vruksha grabs his spear and ducks out of the alcove with a hiss. “I’m going to scout.”

  He slips away, and I stumble out, going after him. “Wait!”

  Vruksha twists back and catches me just as I trip and fall.

  “Female, you will hurt yourself further,” he growls.

  I push off his chest. “Why are you upset? What’s wrong?” I hate seeing him this way.

  “Everything,” he quips, squeezing my shoulders, steadying me while being brutally honest. He grabs me against him and carries me back to the shelter.