But that thought stayed.
There was something she needed, and she had to have it from that ship.
But which ship?
She shucked her clothes and slid into bed. Her eyes closed and Yori’s face drifted up. He had been her best friend and her leader. She had kept his secret, and he had kept hers.
She had not betrayed him, but she had betrayed the woman who had been mind-wiped and implanted with the software that had turned her into a cycle spy.
Nobody knew that.
Oh, they knew that she had been the one to help turn that young woman into a cycle spy, but they had not known what that woman had done or why she had ended up on a slaver's ship. There was a cover story implanted in Jessica’s brain, and she had let Jeval into that section of her brain but not the rest of it.
The young woman whom she had betrayed had been the daughter of a Federation officer—and she had also been a member of the resistance down on Old Earth.
“I betrayed her to save Yori. It was a shitty bargain but what else could I do?”
What elsecouldshe have done?
The Federation knew that the Old Earth resistance had in its ranks one of the higher-ranking Federation’s offspring. What they didn’t know was that there were two people in the resistance who were offspring of the Federation’s members.
She had saved Yori because without him, the resistance was nothing and she had known that she was either going to die or be sent to a slaver planet.
She had known it, and so she had shut away her memories so that they could not touch the most important ones. She had not given up Yori, and she had yet to unearth that big secret, the one that Jeval had found when he had done the mind walking with her.
He had cornered her later that evening and told her he had never come across anyone who was so able to stay closed off before and he was curious, but he was also willing to leave it alone and let her be because she was a good fighter and he knew Talon wanted her as a crew member.
Sleep was what she needed, but it eluded her. She rolled over on her belly and her clit pressed against a rise of the sheets and covers. Desire throbbed along her nerve endings.
Talon and her attraction to him were becoming a serious issue and maybe that was causing her to think that there was something else she needed, maybe she was driving them into danger—whether it was danger that Talon relished or not—for no other reason than she was running from her feelings for him.
Her fingers tangled in the sheets. Her bottom lifted and her hips ground in a lazy circle. The pressure on her clit increased, and her top teeth sank into her lower lip. She swallowed hard as a heavy and intense throbbing began in her lower belly, and a liquid heat spilled from her inner folds and smeared along her inner thighs.
Her fingers clutched the sheets more tightly, winding into them as her ass cheeks clenched and she ground her front against the thick wad of her bed linens, wishing that it was Talon’s body below hers, that they were making love.
She came, but it was a purely physical thing with no real release or relief.
She rolled back over. Her eyes stared at the ceiling, and she sighed. Her body was lax and her limbs heavy, but her mind spun along like a wheel. She was too tired, so very tired, and yet sleep seemed so far away.
