Page 27 of The Captain’s Bounty (The Collectors #2)
CHAPTER NINE
Lissa ran down the corridor directly behind Bruwes, exactly as he’d told her.
They reached his room long enough for him to grab his boots and two shirts.
She scrambled without a word into the one he tossed her.
Already, they could hear the sizzle of the cutting torch coming through the docking hatch.
Shoving his feet into his boots, he threw on his shirt then hit a wall panel, and a drawer popped open. He stuck a sheathed knife in the back waistband of his pants, sloppily hiding it under his shirt, and then holstered a plasma gun.
Grabbing her arm, back out the door they went, running for the tech bay.
“I don’t suppose we’re going to the escape pod,” she panted as he slapped the panel.
“No pods,” Bruwes grunted, slapping the panel again. No chirp, no light. Dead.
“So, no escape,” Lissa said, mostly to herself as she stared her mortality in the face. She’d done a lot of that lately, but this time, it felt much more final.
“We’re not dead yet.”
“We might as well be.”
Bruwes threw her a side-long glare, then lunged and slammed his huge hands against the door.
Before she could remind him how pointless that was, he gave a heave, distracting Lissa with a surge of entirely inappropriate thoughts as she admired the flex and roll of his broad back.
And then the door began to move, groaning metallically as Bruwes himself grit his teeth in silence.
A few inches, a few more, opening steadily under his force, but oh so slowly.
Somewhere down the hall, the airlock hatch slammed to the metal floor.
“They’re in!” Lissa gasped.
Bruwes grabbed her arm and pushed her through the opening he’d made. A tight squeeze, but she made it. Throwing himself once more against the door, he growled, “Go!”
The others were already in the space ahead of them.
One of them—his name escaped her for the moment—jumped to help Bruwes with the door, giving Lissa a little time to assess their surroundings.
This was either their cargo hold or the room where they stored their scraps and waste, it was hard to tell.
Piles of scrap—hull plates from several different makes and models, scorched ship parts (including a burnt-out jump coil), and less identifiable things, semi-sorted by composition—were everywhere, forming a kind of loose maze with scarcely enough room to walk between them.
“Are you armed, Kelys?” Bruwes asked, coming up behind her at last.
The man nodded, retaking his position behind one of the taller mounds of slag.
“We all are,” Demin added.
“Why did we come here?” Cory asked, checking the power gauge on the handguns she held. “We’re trapped in here.”
“We’re trapped no matter where we go,” the doctor answered.
“But here we have the most cover,” Bruwes answered. “Who are they?”
“Looked like a scav ship,” Kelys said swiftly building heavy crates up into a barricade big enough for two to hide behind.
Aldar immediately took cover, loading and checking one of the biggest handguns Lissa had ever seen.
“They didn’t even bother to hail us. Not that we could have answered at the time. ”
They are here for us , it said.
That’s what she felt too, though for the life of her she didn’t know how they could know where she was.
Cameras on the docks , it said resigned. It’s no secret what ship took you or why, I doubt it’s a secret that this one has no… jump coil .
“They might be happy just taking our supplies,” Kelys said hopefully.
“Scavs don’t leave pesky survivors behind to complicate their salvage rights,” Vullum wryly countered.
“Nor will they leave us behind if there truly is a bounty on our heads as the Soldri said. If Me’Kava is the contractor of that bounty, I seriously doubt they’ll care if we’re brought in alive.”
“Life scans positive,” said a muffled voice from the other side of the tech bay doors.
Bruwes seized Lissa’s arm, ducking with her behind a massive parts junk pile. He powered up his gun as the torch went to work on the heavy door.
“It’s not even locked,” Vullum scoffed, taking refuge with the doc and his mate. “Lazy fucking scavs.”
“They want me,” Lissa told him.
“They want all of us.” Crouching, he aimed his gun at the door, waiting.
She grabbed Bruwes’s leg, needing his attention, needing him to take this seriously before they were all of them killed. “Trade me.”
If his attention was what she wanted, she had it now. He snapped around, the red filling up the whites of his eyes as deep offense consumed his darkening features.
“I will never –”
She cut him off before she lost her courage. “You can come after me later, if you want.”
Grabbing the front of her shirt, he yanked her to him and kissed her fiercely.
She could feel his tension, his temper, and his determination in the harsh, unyielding crush of his lips.
Breaking the kiss just as furiously as it had begun, he glared into her eyes and said again, low and guttural, “No. You’re mine. You will go with no one else.”
You’re mine…
Her breath caught, almost choking her as she touched her tingling lips with her fingers.
Did he only mean she was his captive, his to turn in for the bounty reward…
or did he mean it in the most literal, tummy-churning, heart-stumbling way humanly possible?
Did he mean he wanted her… as his and his alone?
Taking hold of her other hand still upon his thigh, he firmly readjusted her touch, placing her hand right over the bulge of his cock. “You will stay right here. Mine, until the funeral pyres take us both.”
Readying his plasma gun, he faced the door again, taking aim with the others and muttering under his breath, “Do not distract me again, or it’ll be my belt that waits for you when this is done.”
She wasn’t afraid of him or his belt. She wasn’t afraid to spend hours in the corner, or tied to his bed with her ass in the air as she waited for him to express his disapproval.
All she could think about was… well, not this moment, but the one doomed to come right after it.
When the scavs finally cut through the bay door and everyone started firing.
She didn’t want to watch him die, knowing she was the cause of it. She couldn’t bear to be the one who brought Bruwes not just to his knees, but to his grave.
“Here they come,” Vullum called out as the door gave out a squeal of shifting weight right before it broke apart.
The middle of it, reduced to nothing but a heavy metal slab, fell to the grated floor of the tech bay with a deafening bang and the, scavs came pouring in through the red-hot outline of the opening they had made, blasting away with their plasma guns even before they had targets.
Lissa hit the floor, covering her head with both arms, feeling the pulse and throb of plasma peppering the face of the heap of hull plates she and Bruwes hid behind.
That’s when she saw it, Aldar flying backwards with sizzles of jumping electricity chewing into his chest and shoulder.
She saw Cory rise up, sending out a wave of covering fire as her mate, the doctor, darted out to drag their fallen crewman behind a barricade of scrap that was already heating up and melting together under the attack.
God, she had to stop this.
I can stop it . The haughty confidence of the entity’s inner voice faltered ever so slightly. But you are already injured and my power will undoubtedly do more damage .
I don’t care! We have to do something!
Then we will , it said, filling her heart with second-hand conviction. Be ready .
Ready to fight or ready to die? She was afraid to think about that too much, afraid to freeze and cost everyone their lives. She had to move now, before she lost her nerve.
She rolled away from Bruwes first, and as fast as she was, he still snagged her shirt with one wild sweep of his arm.
Except it wasn’t really her shirt, it was his, and all she had to do was let her arms go limp as she scrambled up, leaving her bare-chested and him cursing at the handful of cloth that was all he caught.
Time seemed to slow as the being within her took over, blurring her vision and turning her blood to fire as the being inside her began to charge.
Somewhere at the fuzzy edge of her perception, Bruwes was reaching for her, the other crewmen shouted for her to get down, and the scavengers were circling around to get a clearer shot, but they were strangely insignificant.
She could feel the heat of alien determination crashing through her an instant before the alien being exploded through her mind, usurping control of her thoughts and her intentions.
Bright red bolts of ungodly power erupted from her every pore. It came from her eyes, her screaming mouth, burning through the palms of her hands. If her skin wasn’t actually melting away, it damn sure felt like it.
Bruwes tackled her, but her arms still stretched out, the being inside her slapping her hands to the unyielding floor grates.
Pure fiery heat burst from her soul, shooting through her arm, snaking across the floor as runnels of light that split and stabbed into each of the scavs, knocking them over.
Their bodies jumped and quivered and shook. Lissa shook too, and then her racing heart stopped. She felt it happen, felt the stillness growing huge and heavy in her chest, and realized what it meant.
Help , she tried to say, but her body was not her own. And yet, it was completely her own, she suddenly realized. She could no longer feel the being inside her. He was gone.
And so too was she. Diminishing in sensation and awareness, sinking down into herself as her body wilted under Bruwes, collapsing flat upon the grates.
Blackness crept in around her, the burning heat in her flesh dwindling to a comfortable haze, the pain fading into the background as her eyes closed against her will.