My hips are instinctively rising as he stands over me, and I know he is not missing that motion. I am so wound up by the adrenaline of being caught, of fighting, and then of being captured. All that energy has to go somewhere, and it wants to manifest sexually.
“Everything is allowed,” Drako murmurs. “All things are permitted. But the consequences for them are often unpleasant.”
I had forgotten how intoxicating his presence is. There is a darkness in this man. He does not deny it, as some weaker men would. He doesn’t pretend it is not there even as it is on full display for all who know him. He wields it artfully like a rapier, and I feel myself being seduced by him and his energy without him having to bother to touch me at all.
“I missed you,” I whisper softly.
He looks into my eyes, searching to see if I am telling the truth or trying to manipulate him. Then he remembers, I don’t have the constitutional wherewithal to do manipulation. I tell the truth, always, impulsively. When I am happy, I smile. When I think something is funny, I laugh. When I am angry, I stab a guy. And when I find myself immersed in his essence and remember how the chemistry between us works, I tell him I missed him.
“I missed you too,” he says. “You are messed up in that head of yours, aren’t you. You don’t know who or what to be loyal to. You’re Thor’s good girl, running about in ditches with him, following his every order, breathing in mud if he tells you…”
“How did you know about all that?”
“Surveillance footage,” he says. “We didn’t see it at the time, but we reviewed it later. We had a network of drones across this side of the planet. You were never going to escape. Watching you try was amusing to us all.”
I feel a surge of embarrassment and humiliation. We were never going to escape. They let us run to toy with us, the same way a cat lets a mouse run, because it is amusing to see how it might try to get away.
I think perhaps we knew that on some level, Thor and I. But we did our best in case there was some slim chance of what we might call escape.
“You love us both,” Drako says. “But you’re not the same person with each of us.”
“That’s not true. You just bring out the stabby in me,” I say.
Drako reaches down and cups me between my legs, squeezing my pussy in a brutish kind of way that satisfies some need of mine immediately and makes me both relax against the bed and moan. I am far too easily sexually controlled, and we both know it.
He speaks, the devil that he is, and he makes me that kind of offer.
“I am willing to let him live, if you promise to be good for me.”
“But you don’t want me to be good for you…”
“And there, little one, is the problem,” Drako agrees.
He massages my pussy while thinking.
“Let me make another arrangement,” he says. “You accept the punishments you are due, and I allow Thor to live.”
He knows he can say and do whatever he wants right now. I want Thor to live more than I want anything. More than I want to go home again, and I want that badly too.
“Deal,” I say, because it is the only thing I can say. I have to accept whatever terms he offers me, and this is likely the fairest I am going to get.
“Then come with me, and take your punishment, and know that it is essential for us both to play our roles in this thing.” He slides his hand away from my sex and offers me it instead to take as he helps me rise. Very gentlemanly, given he only has one properly functioning arm thanks to my earlier stabbing.
I don’t know why Drako seems slightly reluctant to punish me. He loves any excuse to be sadistic. It’s quite literally his whole thing.
“What’s wrong? Did you miss me?”
Drako turns to me, his eyes bright under dark brows. “In your absence, I discovered that I had come to love you, and that I would have torn this planet apart atom by atom if it were necessary, to find you.”
“Oh,” I say.
“You do not need to tell me you love me,” he says. “Save it, if it is true. After all, I am about to do a series of terrible and entirely unseemly things to you.” He flashes that dark, rakish grin, and I feel myself melt.
CHAPTER 13
Drako leads me from the room, through the halls of the ship. The Vikar vessel is much like I imagined it to be. The fittings are sparse, and there are few points of finery anywhere. The floors that we are walking on at this moment are a kind of mesh, and if I look down, I can see to the floor below, and the one beneath that. It makes for a dizzying kind of optical illusion.
We pass a few crew, all of whom are wearing black uniforms with red insignia. They greet Drako with great deference, and avert their gazes from me entirely.
