"Wolves mate for life," Sebastian said. Something hot and wet coursed down my neck. I angled my chin, giving him more room to taste me.
Everything about him, about this, felt so right, but it couldn't last. Sebastian's pretty words weren't enough to assuage my fears. "Let's wait until we're on the ground and our lives aren't in danger."
"If Bunting and my dad know what happened on the shuttle, we'll never be safe again." I hated to admit it, but he was probably right. "That means you'll stay with me until we figure this out."
He backed off, leaving a cold void. I took a deep breath and held it, fighting against the urge to unzip from my sleeping bag and follow him across the hall to his bunk. I needed the time and distance to think.
"Where will we go?" I asked.
"I have a few places in mind," he said. "It all depends on where we land."
I missed when we were wolves. I wanted to hear histhoughts. In our human forms, I felt like he was shutting me out. Again.
"Mate,"my wolf whispered. That was the only word in my head. The rest were all emotions and the memory of Sebastian's alluring scent.
"Don't shut me out," I said.
He made a point of searching his cubby, as though looking for something. "My dad's never been on the space station, but he could have paid anyone to put a bug in our bunks."
"He didn't even know we were coming here until a week ago," I reminded him. "When would he have had time?"
Sebastian shrugged, relaxing his posture even though there was nothing for him to lean up against in minimal gravity. "True. In that case, I have a resort in Hawaii. I'll try to land near there. We can't stay, though. Dad will come looking for us."
I waited for him to continue, but his gaze fixated on his monitor. The spacewalk had begun.
I pulled myself closer to the bunk's monitors by their handles and watched as Mari exited the space station through the door nearest our docked shuttle.
Almost an hour later, she returned to the airlock. After she followed the decompression procedures, she met us in the space station's central room. The camera angle hadn't been ideal, and Sebastian prodded Mari for details.
"I entered the shuttle through the bay door," she said to explain when she'd disappeared from our view. "The airlock wouldn't budge. How important were those experiments? They looked basic to me."
I almost laughed at Mari's confused frown. They were experiments a dog could do in space. I'd questioned the large equipment with thick handles, and all Dr. Bunting could tell me was, "It'll make more sense when you're up there."
I thought he'd planned to deprive us of oxygen, but no. He'd expected us to be wolf-shaped and possibly with the intelligence of a wolf, not a human.
We still had some secrets, at least. We were both as intelligent as humans in our wolf forms. I would venture even more intelligent. We could communicate with each other mind-to-mind, which was sci-fi level extra.
"I imagine they'll send another team to complete them, since we failed," Sebastian said. "Any risk of it breaking apart on the way home?"
"I saw nothing to increase your risk. There was a dent near the airlock, which might be why it won't open. Something might have hit the side, but it didn't look like an explosion. No scorch marks."
Sebastian nodded. "Thanks for checking."
"Such a strange array of experiments, though," Mari said. "Did they change their minds at the last minute?"
"Change their minds how?" Sebastian asked.
"Sending humans." Mari shrugged her shoulders and chuffed a nervous laugh. "Those experiments were made for dogs."
Sebastian chuckled, and Dom joined in.
"Privatized space travel is for the dogs." Dom gave Sebastian a friendly tap on the shoulder. "Come on. Let's find a good re-entry point for you."
Dismissed from their conversation, I returned to mybunk and tried to bury myself in my book. The words blended on the page, and all I could see were the oversized handles and simple lab tables we'd loaded into the experiment bay.
My grandma had always spoken of the wolf goddess who hid her secrets on the dark half of the moon. I whispered a little prayer of thanks to her. Somehow, she'd kept our secrets, too.
CHAPTER 7
