Page 8 of Fifth (Intergalactic Warriors #5)

She let her eyes close. She let herself separate sensation from panic and map it the way she would have mapped a new codebase.

Truth escaped. Clear, unvarnished truth.

“My lips are hot. Pulled. Like the skin wants to be touched again because it remembers you. My chest is too tight for air, my skin too thin where the halter rubs. Ican sense every thread.”

“And under the threads.” His voice had dropped, roughernow.

“Under the threads,” she said, the word vibrating where his forearm lay, “it’s like I’m aching for something I’ve never experienced before.”

His hand moved just enough to let his thumb settle in the small valley at the base of her ribs. “What else?”

“My legs,” she said, and heard the rasp in her own voice, “it’s like they’re not mine. They want to wrap around you, and if I let them, Idon’t know what I’ll do next.”

He went still. The kind of still that hunters learn when the air changes. The muscle under her hand flexed once. “You may wrap them,” he said. “I will not take what you do not give.”

The confession fell through her like a stone into deep water. It made a clean sound. It rang. The wanting that had waited in the doorways of her body stepped into the room and took a chair.

She lifted one leg and let it drift until her knee rested over his thigh.

He didn’t hiss. He didn’t shudder. He turned his head and swept his mouth over her hair as if to keep himself from doing both.

The heat of him soaked into the inside of her leg until she flushed all the way to the arch of herfoot.

“More,” he said, awhisper this time, as if the night would break if he raised his voice.

She settled the other knee over his other thigh, the scratchy fabric of the loincloth dragging over her skin.

He was heavy. He was hard. He wasn’t human hard.

He was a substance designed by something that didn’t care how small she was.

She should have been afraid and on a certain level, was.

She was also a fuse waiting for a match.

“Tell me your rules,” she said suddenly. “Tell them to me again.”

He took one breath, then another. “My rules are simple. You do not bleed if I can stop it. You do not fear if I can carry it. You do not starve. You do not bow to any man. You sleep when I tell you to. You wake when I tell you to. You do not touch me because you think I require it.”

“And if I want to?”

“Then you touch me,” he said. “Because you want to.”

She pressed her knees tighter and he answered in kind. The small sound that left her couldn’t be helped. His answering breath turned ragged andsoft.

“Tell me your rules,” hesaid.

“I don’t have rules,” shelied.

“You have one.”

“Do I?”

“Affirmative. You will not let what they have done to you take your mind.”

She stilled. He had seen too much. Her eyes opened to the thin seam of sky and the far light of a star that might have been a planet. Her grandmother had told her that some lights were fixed and some wandered. She couldn’t remember which was which.

“Then that’s my rule,” she said. “You’ll help me keep it.”

“I will.”

He shifted lower, just enough to keep her anchored against him without pinning her.

The forearm across her middle became a hand.

His palm spread over the small rise of her stomach and stayed.

Not wandering. Not claiming. Guarding. Heat sank deeper.

Her spine softened against him as if he’d become a mattress that knew her shape.

“Tell me why you chose me,” shesaid.

“I have told you this already.”

“Tell me again.”

Locus shook his head. “I do not know the appropriate words.”

“Try,” she insisted.

He nodded, then took a moment. “There is a pattern to your face that makes sense to my blood. There is a fierceness in your mouth that makes me imagine how to hold you, how to kiss you. There is a sound in your voice when you fight that makes me want to hear you laugh. There is a way you look at me when you are afraid that refuses to be small. Ihave fought thousands of men. Ihave killed many. No one I have ever encountered made me want to keep them by my side for four hundred years or longer. You do.”

She turned her face into his shoulder because she couldn’t let him see what his words did to her. The skin there was hot and tasted faintly like salt and metal when her lips brushed it by accident. He breathed in sharply through his nose. The breath shivered, then evened again with force.

“Say my name,” she urged.

“Hannah,” he replied at once. Her name sounded different in his mouth, as if his language couldn’t help but polish it. “Hannah.”

She closed her eyes on the second repetition because the sound slipped into places in her she didn’t know how to protect.

“Say the rest,” she said. Her chest tightened with a sudden need to strip him of designations and ranks, to hear something private, something human beneath the alien.

“Tell me who you were when there are no unit numbers.”

He was quiet so long she thought he would refuse.

When he spoke, it was in a voice that remembered a time and place long ago.

“I am the boy who used to run barefoot at night through fields because the ground was cooler then. Iam the son who carried water for my mother and learned to build simple shelters before I ever carried a weapon. Iam the youth who watched stars and wondered which world I might see someday, long before I became an Intergalactic Warrior. And now, Iam yours.”

Her pulse stumbled. To hear him speak of the boy he once was—barefoot in fields, carrying water for his mother—shook her.

It stripped him of the armor and left a man she had not expected, one who had lived before the warrior.

That unsettled her more than his vow to protect, because it made him real.

And real was harder to keep at a distance.

“We should sleep,” she said, although sleep seemed as far away as the stars in thesky.

“Affirmative.” His hand lifted, covered her heart for a count, then returned to her belly. “Sleep.”

The preserve didn’t offer mercy, only restless distraction.

Somewhere past the gate, apredator coughed—ashort, ugly sound that prickled the fine hairs along her arms. Torches hissed and popped, throwing patchy light.

The drones stayed away as darkness deepened and lightened by turns.

Beneath her, the ground’s gentle slope cupped her body, making her think of the old pier that creaked beneath her steps.

Only this time the voice of the wood was replaced by earth, lower and more somber.

She didn’t sleep. She floated in a warm place made by his body and the shape of his arm and the rhythm of his breath. “Locus,” she said quietly when the sky had shifted from black to a dark bruised blue, “are you awake?”

“Affirmative.”

“You didn’t sleep at all, did you?”

“I do not need much.”

“Is that biology or bragging.”

“Biology.” The corner of his mouth moved again, ahuff of heat against her hair. “And perhaps a little pride.”

“Of course.” She breathed out, and the breath trembled at the end. “I’m afraid.”

“Affirmative.” He didn’t say it like a judgment. He said it like a fact they could both put hands on. “You are also ready.”

“How can you know that?”

“You stayed in my arms.”

She could’ve argued. She didn’t. The sky lightened by a shade and her pulse climbed.

She realized her knees were still hooked over his thighs and that he had kept her there all night, taking the ache into his own joints so she would sleep peacefully.

She lifted them gradually and slid her calves down until her shins lay over his.

He caught her ankles without looking and set them gently on the ground on the far side of his body, as if he were laying a gift where it wouldn’t be broken.

“What happens now?”

“You drink. We move. The gate waits.”

“Is there more kissing?” she daredask.

He turned his head. The look he gave her stripped the last veil off the night. “Affirmative, there is more kissing. Not for them. For us. When you ask for it.” He fixed his amethyst gaze on her. “Ask.”