Page 10 of Fifth (Intergalactic Warriors #5)

“We tried that. The preserve folds back on itself when the crowd is bored.” He spared the drones a swift glance. “They are bored.”

“So we go through.” The words left her before she could stop them. Her body recoiled. “Locus. If we go through, one of us dies.”

He straightened, gaze shifting toward the foliage that hid the sky. When he looked back, decision already lived in his eyes. “There is a way to take a place that kills and make it carry you. You do not fight the design. You use it.”

Her voice broke stormier than she intended. “How many pits have you climbed out of?”

“Enough.”He stepped forward, testing the treacherous surface. The ground sagged beneath his weight, groaning as though the earth itself resented their presence.

Hannah’s pulse spiked. Sweat slid cold down her spine while heat crowded her chest. Her knees threatened to fold, but pride locked them straight.

The urge to grab his arm, to cling like a child, clawed at her, and she crushed it down, forcing herself to stand steady.

She hated the fear, hated that he could likely hear it in the drag of her breath, but she couldn’t stop staring at him, willing him to be enough for both ofthem.

“Wait.” Her voice cracked, visceral with the fear she had tried to bury.

Her nails bit into his skin as if clinging were the only thing keeping her from unraveling.

“I can’t do this,” she gasped, shame burning as the words tumbled out.

For a heartbeat she wanted to curl into him and vanish, to stop pretending at strength.

The admission left her shaking, exposed in a way the slavers had never managed.

“Trust me.” Quiet, certain, not a request.

He set his weight fully on the thin band of soil. It dipped, then held. In that breath of space, he moved—pivoting, seizing her waist, setting his body between her and the pit borders. The world dropped.

Hannah’s stomach ripped loose. Air tore past her ears.

She shouted. The ground vanished, the sky tilted, and only his arms crushing her made sense.

They didn’t fall clean. They slammed against a wall of teeth.

Stone grated. Metal tore skin. Pain lit her shoulder as jagged edges caught.

Locus twisted, taking the bite across his back, and the force of his turn slung them sideways.

He caught a ledge with onehand.

The pull on her body was violent enough to spark stars. Her shoulder socket stabbed. Her lungs locked. She clung with legs cinched at his waist, arms knotted around his neck, because the pit’s wall was slick and studded with death.

“Breathe,” he ordered near her ear. The command struck the part of her brain that still obeyed. She dragged in air. The stench was rank and metallic, old blood mixing with new. She gagged, swallowed hard, pressed her face into his neck to steal cleanerheat.

He held them with one arm. His body was a column trembling with exertion, not weakness. He wedged his toes into a seam, muscles bunching and releasing in brutal rhythm as he made the pit wall bear theirload.

She forced her eyes down and regretted it. The base was a grinder of spikes and bone. Ribbons of cloth—yellow, blue, stained brown—snagged on the metal. She swallowed again, nearly losing the water he had givenher.

“Do not look.”

“Too late.” Her voice shook once. She steadied it with hate. “Someone designed this.”

“Affirmative.” His grip deepened. “I will make the designer’s trap carry us out.”

“Tell me how.” Her voice wavered, anxious for any structure to cling to, something that could handle her panic. Rules meant order, and order meant survival. If he gave her steps, she could force her body toobey.

“You already are doing what you should. You are wrapped around me.”

Heat flooded her face. She panted against his throat, breasts crushed to his chest, thighs tight at his hips. Sweat slicked his skin beneath her palms. She clung harder, hating that some traitor inside her thrilled at the way his breath broke when shedid.

“What next?”

“I will move in increments. Iwill not reach with the arm that holds you until my legs are pinned. When I tell you, shift right, then left. Follow exactly.”

“I don’t know if I can coordinate.”

“You can. Because you are angry.”

She blinked, throat raw. “What?”

“You have been holding it in since the cage. Every jeer, every drone, every taunt from the guards. Anger sharpens you.” His breath warmed the edge of her mouth, the words intimate as a kiss. “Angry people listen when the anger is pointed. Point it for me. Use it now, Hannah.”

Her chest tightened at the sound of her name on his tongue.

He had seen through her, laid bare the fury she had been trying to mask, and the truth of it rattled her.

All the fear, all the shame, all the hunger twisted together until she shook with it.

She hated that he could name it so easily.

And hated more that she needed him to. For a moment she broke, trembling against him, rage and want spilling together until she couldn’t tell one from the other.

Her lip curled. Asound that wasn’t a laugh scraped her throat. “Fine. I’m furious. Use it.”

“Good.” He pushed, grinding her harder against him. His thighs flexed, solid and inexorable. She locked her calves tighter to keep from sliding. “Right.”

She shifted. He followed. The micro-change let him wedge his foot deeper, bumping them the width of a hand. She sensed it like a pulse between her legs. Heat climbed, shame chasing it, pulling a sound from her that had nothing to do withfear.

His breath toughened. “Left.”

They climbed.

Not graceful, but brutal and exact. He moved in relentless bites.

When a ledge crumbled, he released and found another before gravity remembered them.

When her arms shook, he told her to rest her chin on his shoulder for three breaths, then lift.

When a spike jutted near her calf, he shielded her with his thigh, metal screeching across his skin.

She smelled his blood, hot iron and salt, sharp and undeniable, smearing her knee as it mixed with her sweat.

“I am fine,” he said before she could speak.

“You’re bleeding.”

The sight of his blood smeared against her skin jolted her. Fear spiked, sharper than the ache in her shoulders. She couldn’t bear the thought of him falling because of a wound she had ignored.

“It will stop.” His voice was calm, but there was a tremor in his body where she clung.

“What if it doesn’t?” The question tore out of her, sharper than she meant, fear twisting her chest.

“It will.” His angle shifted by inches, steady despite the strain. “Do not waste breath on a wound I can close once we are out. Iwill not fall. Not with you.”

Her mouth thinned. “I’ll waste breath on anything I want.”

“That sounds like you.” His grunt carried effort. “Right.”

She obeyed, mouth brushing his jaw, stubble rasping her lips. Heat bloomed beneath her tongue. He made a sound as if biting back a word. Not a curse, but something else. She didn’t ask. She didn’t trust herself to hearit.

They climbed past slick algae. He tested it, rejected it. Shifted toward rusted metal hammered into stone long ago. Hooks and braces bent into sharp mouths. Amisstep would shredthem.

“You knew we had to do this,” she said. “The gate only opens if we go through the pit.”

“Affirmative.” His mouth tightened. “The men who built this preserve understand power. They make buyers watch a choice. It keeps them paying.”

Her lips curled. “I hate them. Hate everything about their games.”

“Good. Hate is fuel.” His tone was flat steel, unyielding. “They will be dealt with. Iwill see it done.”

A shiver worked through her arms where they clung around his neck. She wanted to ask how, wanted to demand details, but the fire in his eyes warned her that answer would be for another day, and that it would be nothing gentle.

He tested a brace with palm, knuckle, wrist, heaving on it. It held. He shifted her, flipping her so she was pressed to his back and hooked his fingers on the brace.

“Hold.”

“I am holding.”

“Harder.”

She locked down. Her belly pressed tight to spine. The center of her pulsed, mortifying and alive. She closed her eyes against the sensation. His body burned. She wanted to be anywhere but here, and yet, exactlyhere.

“Now.” He drove power through his legs and pulled. The brace screamed but held. He rose the height of his arm and planted a foot on an old handle.

Time narrowed. Sweat slicked her back. The tang of corroded metal thickened the air. Her hands skidded, then corrected, fingers biting the cords at his neck. He slipped once—areal slip—and her heart crashed, then surged as he corrected like gravity was only rumor.

“How much farther?” Her voice cracked, half-plea, half-demand, the strain breaking through.

“Do not ask.” His answer came like iron, unbending.

“I need a number. Ineed something to hold on to.”

“You do not.”

“Yes, Ido. Give me something.”

A breath. Two. “Ten hand spans. Maybe twelve.”

“Fine.” She gritted her teeth. “Give me ten.”

Her words clung to the dark, thin air. Below, the pit answered with the scrape of shifting spikes, metal groaning as they began to lift and rise faster than Locus was climbing.

They angled upward, reaching not just hungrily but with lethal precision, as if the abyss itself meant to spear them before they ever saw therim.