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Why not?

Because Jesse was tired and had already given me hours of orgasms.

“Hey.” I reached back and stroked the rock-hard flex of his ass. “Go back to sleep.”

His teeth sank into my shoulder, and his hand shoved between us, gripping his cock. He swept the warm, steely length across my butt cheek, slid it between my pussy lips, and paused to tease the tip against my opening.

My nipples hardened against Roark’s chest, and a ripple of pleasure wobbled through me, heating between my legs. Roark grew hard against my thigh, but his eyes remained closed, his breathing even.

Jesse gripped my hips, pulling me back against him, and buried his shaft in the slick heat of my cunt. I was primed for him, wet and wanton, my channel clenching around him as I rolled my hips back and forth in gentle grinding movements, gliding along his length.

He thrust slowly, lazily, in a drugging rhythm, his pelvis lightly rotating, stilling, and nudging again. I wondered if he was falling in and out of sleep and loved the thought of that, wanting him to sleep inside me every night.

His jaw rested against the back of my head, his breaths soft and consistent against my hair. Just when I was certain he’d passed out, his fingers moved over my hip, across my belly, and sank between my legs. He left them there, curling against my folds, even as my movements rubbed the back of his hand against Roark’s cock.

I rocked between them, snapping my pelvis gently, reaching for that blissful spot that would send me over. The friction of Jesse inside me, the peaceful expression on Roark’s sleeping face, the scent of their male musk surrounding me, all of it kindled into an aching precipice of pleasure.

My climax came in a low, quiet tide of quivering rapture, flaring every cell in my body with intoxicating warmth. On the cusp of the orgasm, Jesse’s hand between my legs clenched, and he grunted, his muscles hardening then loosening as he sighed his release.

“I’ll never get enough of you,” he mumbled into my hair.

A moment later, I knew he was asleep, his cock soft inside me, his fingers slack against my mound.

My hunger for them hadn’t relented, my mind and body restless. Why? I suspected it had everything to do with my new ability.

Had I held the telepathic power to kill all along without knowing how to tap into it? Or had some external trigger switched it on? What changed? Intimacy with Jesse and Roark? Were they fueling me through sex? If so, why didn’t sex with Michio have the same effect?

Or maybe it was something I ate? I grinned at the childhood memory of my favorite cartoon sailor gobbling spinach. Wouldn’t it be badass if I could defeat the Drone with a can of spinach and a thought?

Good grief. I must’ve been high on arousal and pheromones or something. A clear-headed, wide-awake, happy high. One that teased a million thoughts through my head.

I thought about the reason I’d left the mountains all those months ago. The hunt for nymphs. The spread of the cure. I wondered if Elaine was alive, and if any nymphs were following Shea and me now. I hadn’t sensed any since we left Virginia. Maybe because we were traveling on wheels, moving at a higher rate of speed, and never lingered in one place longer than a night.

Weighed down with those thoughts, I finally slept, but for the next three days, my energy levels rose to spectacular heights. We stopped frequently for fryer oil and more recruits, but the drive was no longer delayed by aphids. Each time I felt them, the impulse to mentally zap them became automatic. Vibration. Die. Repeat.

As Link led the caravan off the highway and down the main drag of my home town, my effusive high tapered. The chirrup of locusts, the perfume of lilac blooms, the narrow, macadam roads, the old railroad tracks, all of it hit me with an aching swell of nostalgia as my recollection of Grain Valley clashed with the abandoned ruins it had become.

I hadn’t been home in two years and four months, and a deep trembling panic sank into my bones, spreading out through my muscles and shivering my skin. I didn’t want to be here, couldn’t face the memories waiting in that house.

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell Link to turn around. My teeth chattered, my lips numbing with the need to demand he drive away.

But how would I find Michio?

How did I even know Michio would be there?

I just know.

Horseshit. I couldn’t sense him, hadn’t seen him in the dream. I was operating on the precarious whim of hope.

Darwin panted beside me as I leaned against the wall in the rear of the van. I ran my fingers through his coat, over and over, seeking comfort, until Roark grabbed my arms and pulled me across the van and into his lap.