Only we don’t have a moment. The need to be off this ship is an imperative and suddenly I’m laser-focused.
My cock finally gets the message and goes down. I scoop her up into my arms and stride for the tiny shower room. She’s limp and I have to hold her up.
The water wakes her up.
“Which part of give me a moment did you not understand?!”
Her sass stirs a chuckle out of me. I’ve not broken her too badly, then.
Fuck. Don’t think about that. My dick’s getting hard even as the rational side of me wrestles for control. Does she need to see a doctor? What if I’ve hurt her inside? “Are you hurt?”
“Nowyou ask that question?!”
“I’m fucking serious. Are you hurt? I don’t want the fucking doctors touching you, but if they need to…”
“I’m just sore,” she says. “It was, you know, a lot.”
My next chuckle is dry. I wish I hadn’t enjoyed it as much as I did. There’s always been darkness inside me. And taking her like that, so deep, feeds the feral side. She’s still got her eyes closed, which is for the best, but I’m drinking her in, cataloging her features, casting them to memory. I still want to fuck her, but it’s being overwritten by this rampant sense of territory and tenderness.
This has been an episode of crazy since she crashed into my life.
Now I just need her to be safe.
Chapter Seventeen
Zeb
We get dressed in silence. My uniform is waiting. While she arrived naked, a simple dress is waiting on the hook of the cubby, not dissimilar to the one worn by our healers when off duty… only theirs is gray.
Theyreallylike that color.
Through necessity, I’ve learned a lot about the Uncorrupted, their behaviors, and ways. Some of it came firsthand through experience, but a larger body has been passed to me from spies we have in their camps, along with liberated captives.
Their nesting chambers are sick and soulless. Nesting materials are provided but rarely used. Alphas get to fuck omegas when they’ve been good little soldiers. The elites get to rut them through their heat.
Pregnancy is unheard of beyond rumor, but that’s what they ultimately want, to breed their own version of special from their alphas and our omegas. For a society that shunned our dynamic system and the Copper Virus, they’re now hellbent on creating super-beings of their own.
Thank fuck it doesn’t appear to be working out for them.
She still doesn’t meet my eyes, keeps her focus down on what she’s doing. My appearance is messing with her instincts of who I am… and even the alpha she met at the start of the mission wasn’t me.
I mean, he kind of looks like me, mostly… yeah that’s going to mess with her some more.
“You ready?”
I even hate my fucking voice.
“The others…” she fidgets, and her voice drops. “We’re saving them, right?”
Yeah, as if I hadn’t already figured that part out. Omegas don’t have self-preservation instincts, not when there are others at risk. I’ve heard the stories about healers driving themselves to the brink because they have healed too deeply, given too much. Leave any of them unchecked, and they’ll be off on crusades to save the universe.
That’s why they have controllers and mates.
Can I be that man? Me, the zeta with a dozen faces, that might be variations on me, but are never quite me?
It’s too late. I’m too far gone.
She doesn’t know it yet, but Esme is already mine.
