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He had merely been using words to pull Loki’s mind back to the present.

Sharpening his gaze, Loki motioned towards the north end of the alley where they stood, indicating he wanted them to get moving again. While the location had been fine for a short rest, it was far from secure.

Anyway, they were back on the clock.

Anale took lookout duties at the front. Ontari, who was ex-Adhipan, stood a half-dozen meters behind them, keeping his gun aimed at the other end of the long passage.

“Stay with her,” Loki told Mika.

He motioned with his head towards the female human.

He didn’t look at her himself, but his mind made a mental picture of her anyway.

In terms of her physical appearance, she looked a fair bit like her biological daughter, their new comp-tech protégé, Dante. Her light felt significantly different, however, in ways that Loki’s light unfortunately wanted to explore in painstaking detail.

On a purely operational level, Loki felt a slight rush from the victory at having found her at all. None of them expected to find her?much less to find her alive.

The human had been resourceful.

Smart. Wise, really. Well beyond her years.

Even Illeg, who could be sometimes gruff towards humans, noted that this woman must be highly intelligent, also like her daughter. Her situation was hardly enviable when they found her, but Loki could not help but admire her for having found any means of survival at all, when so many like her died with scarce a whimper.

The woman explained to them, in an offhand but endearingly embarrassed way, that when the human bandits came to her, she determined who their leader was, and attacked his second-in-command with a knife, managing to slice him on the arm. When Illeg asked herwhyshe’d done it, she explained that she figured there was probably some tension there, since there often was between first and second in command.

She thought aggression might get the leader’s attention.

Her ploy worked.

Amused, intrigued, and?Loki bristled at the thought?no doubt, turned on by her, the warlord offered her a choice. She negotiated, still holding the bloody knife.

In the end, he opted to keep her alive as a permanent part of his crew.

She’d convinced him she was worth feeding?no small feat out here. She termed it as “worth a longer-term investment,” which Loki found a curious choice of words.

The human female was attractive.

A little too attractive for him, at least right then.

Loki needed sex, and badly. It wasn’t this woman, he told himself. It was him. He’d been looking at seers in his team a little too long, even before they found her.

Of course, he knew that was rationalization.

Partly, at any rate.

He hadn’t looked at any of the seers in his unit the way he looked at her. His light didn’t react to theirs with anywhere near the intensity he’d felt since meeting her. Truthfully, he couldn’t remember reacting toanyonethe way he’d been reacting to her. Not in decades, at least. Maybe not ever.

Still, he knew his more general need for sex must be making this worse.

He didn’t normally bed males, but he’d even been looking at Jax the other day, noticing the muscles on the seer’s shoulders and back while he washed off in the river following their initial scout of that human enclave at the northern end of Prospect Park.

Those had been momentary things, though, fleeting.

He had scarcely been able to tear his light off the human’s since he first laid eyes on her. He still couldn’t seem to keep it away from hers.

Even as he thought it, he caught her looking at him, her dark eyes appraising.

Whoever these assholes are, they’re all pretty hot.