She watched Rentir, who was smiling encouragingly with those too-sharp teeth and trying to beckon her toward the pod at the back of the room. Though they’d been accommodating so far, she had no way of guessing these aliens’ intentions.
She was suspicious of men as a rule; the depletion of resources on Earth had only worked to hasten the breakdown of relations between genders. She’d had to claw her way to the opportunity to fly in the first place, butting up against the shifting political tide that believed women would be better served making way for men in the workforce. Without the powerful endorsement of Lyra Albrecht, heiress to the Last Frontier fortune, neither she nor any of the others on the crew would have ever seen space.
TheCassandrahad been Lyra’s brainchild. The settlement on Lapillus had stacked up enough requisition requests to warrant a delivery mission, and the heiress had purportedly sunk a hefty sum of her own money into the construction of theCassandraand her crew. The woman-only crew had been part of a media frenzy for a year before their departure, bad enough that Cordelia’s ugly history had been dragged out to help pad the twenty-four hour news cycle for months leading up to launch.
She scrubbed a hand over her face, weariness tunneling her vision.
The Albrechts were going to eat her alive for this. Lyra had been one of theCassandra’spassengers. Lyra was going to be the first of the Albrechts to step foot on a colony world, the first to see the fruits of Last Frontier’s labor with her own eyes.Cordelia shook herself. No—they wouldn’t come after her, would they? For as long as they’d been drifting, Lyra’s influential father must be long, long dead.
When she crumpled, strong arms looped around her back and legs, lifting her off the ground as the room spun. Rentir and the other alien spoke rapid-fire to one another as he carried her over to the pod. It opened with a sigh of cool air that stirred the loose hair around her face.
Her eyes rolled in her head as time drifted away from her. The lid of the pod closed over her, muffling Rentir’s reassurances. A soothing alien voice filled her ears with words like water tumbling over stones. Mist that stank of chemicals filled the pod, stinging as it sprayed over the myriad wounds she’d incurred during the crash. She shifted in discomfort, and the voice said something she was sure was chastising.
“Shut up,” Cordelia mumbled, her eyes going heavy again. She’d woken too fast from her cryosleep and had been subjected to too much stress so soon after.
She needed to pull it together. Needed to find the others. There had been ten passengers on theCassandra, including herself. A quarter of that number was crew, the rest a mix of colonists and security. And, of course, the heiress who’d made the mission possible.
They were supposed to land on Lapillus, dispense their supplies, drop off their colonists, and prepare theCassandrafor her return journey.
Several of the women would have stayed on. They’d been the most somber at launch, leaving behind everything they’d known and loved for a world they’d never seen. On Lapillus, they would have had the opportunity to write home, to send video messages back to whoever they’d left behind, even if years had transpired in the meantime. Now… there was no question that everyone any of them had ever loved must be dead.
Guilt churned in her gut, stoking the nausea sparked by the chemicals filling the air. She was the Commander of theCassandra, an honor many argued she should never have been granted after the disaster of theLeto. It didn’t matter that she’d been in cryo, that they couldn’t have foreseen the hack, that something horrific had clearly gone down on Earth. They were her responsibility, and she’d failed them.
Scissors arched over her, dangling from a mechanical arm, and began to cut away at her shirt between her breasts. Yipping in surprise, she reached up and grabbed at the arm, battling to keep it away from the remains of her shirt as it threatened to fall open over her chest.
“What the fuck!” she shouted, trying to squirm away.
Angry beeping filled her ears, and the chiding voice spoke over her snarled curses. A different smell swept through the air, sweet and oddly soothing, and her lids drooped as it swirled in her lungs. Her hands fell away, too heavy to hold up, and the scissors went back to their task. Cold mist sprayed over her bare nipples as the scraps of her shirt slid aside.
Something blocked the light above her. She pried her fluttering eyes open to take in the alien craned over her. There was plain concern in his features as he pressed his hand to the glass. His lips moved, his eyes darting over his shoulder and back to her.
His eyes, though strange, were so kind. Felix had eyes like that. Eyes that made you trust him, eyes that beckoned you in to lean on him, laugh with him, rely on him. Eyes that had dared her to fall in love. If she hadn’t, maybe he would have listened to her when she’d commanded him to get to safety that day.
She moaned, emotional pain cutting through the haze of sedation. Cursed. She was cursed—or shewasthe curse. Everything she cared about fell to ruin at her touch.
Her eyes flitted over Rentir. He was staring down at her, but he was still arguing with the other alien. His gaze softened as their eyes met, and though she couldn’t hear him, she was sure he was soothing her.
“I’ll ruin you,” she rasped, a tear tracking down her temple, and then she knew nothing at all.
CHAPTER 5
“What’s wrong with her?”
Rentir turned toward Haerune, who was quietly watching the scrolling results of the medpod’s assessment on a holoscreen as one of his tentacles rubbed at his brow.
“Nothing major,” he replied. “Several scrapes, two sprains. She’s been exposed to Yulaira’s native bacteria, however, so the medpod is taking precautions and inoculating her against several common causes of disease.”
“She’s lost consciousness.”
In repose, she was beautiful. The harsh lines between her brows and over the bridge of her nose had smoothed out, and her cheeks were flushed with color. Her nude body was so strange, but incredible at the same time. The pod had removed her soiled clothing, revealing the swell of her breasts and the flare of her hips. She had a thatch of dark hair between her legs, obscuring the differences between them. The sight of so much strange, creamy skin set his cock back to its irritating, relentless throbbing.
He wanted to touch her, taste her, and rub his face over every inch of the expanse of her skin until she?—
“That’s the medpod,” Haerune said in a distracted tone, oblivious to the obsessive tirade he’d interrupted. He leaned in toward the holoscreen, his eyes narrowing. “She was agitated, so it put her under a mild sedative.”
Rentir leaned against the medpod, frowning. “What is it?”
“The medpod recognized her species,” Haerune said, turning away from the screen.
