A sound. Ahead and to the right. A breath she didn’t catch in time. A small, involuntary, wet sound that tells me everything about what my voice is doing to her in the dark.
“When I find you —” I turn into the central spine. Bare feet silent on the deck plates. Unhurried. “I’m going to put you against the wall. Not gently. My hands on your hips, pinning you. I’m going to hold you there and put my mouth on that freckle at your throat and taste your pulse jump under my tongue, and I am not going to move until your hands are in my hair pulling me where you want me.”
Her heartbeat. Louder now. One corridor away, maybe less. The rhythm of a body that is hiding in the dark and listening to a male describe what he is going to do to her and wanting every word of it and the wanting is filling the corridor like heat from an open engine.
“And when your hands are in my hair, I’m going to go lower. The collarbone. Both tips of my tongue tracing the bone from your shoulder to the center. You felt the tongue on your skin already — you know what it does. Two points. Independent. Imagine that on your neck. On your chest. On the curve underneath, where the top keeps showing me what it’s barely holding.” I stop at the junction where the central spine meets the crew-level ladder. Taste. She went up. “Now imagine it lower than that.”
The scent spikes so hard I have to close my eyes and breathe through it. The concentration of her in the air is a physical thing — it presses against my tongue, coats it, and my whole body responds. My ridges are so dark they are radiating heat through the gauze and my pupils are slits and my claws are half-extended and scraping the ladder rungs as I climb, and I do not retract them because the scrape is a sound she can hear, and the sound is telling her I’m coming in a language older than words.
“I’m going to strip that lucky top off you, Lorri. With my teeth or my claws, your choice, and then I am going to put my mouth on every single inch of skin that’s been hiding under it. I have been thinking about what’s under that top since you walked into my hold. I have been thinking about it while you bandaged my arms and while I typed the incident report and while you sat across my table asking about my tongue like you didn’t know exactly what the tongue was for.”
I reach the crew level. The corridor stretches ahead. Amber. Dark. Her scent pooling in the warm air like something spilled.
“And then lower. I am going to go lower. I am going to spread your thighs and put my mouth on you, and you are going to feel both tips of my tongue, and I am going to taste you — the real taste, Lorri, the one that’s been building in the air between us all evening — and I am going to stay there until your thighs are around my head and you are shaking and you can’t remember any word except my name.”
From somewhere close — behind the crew quarters hatch, maybe, or the storage alcove — a sound that is not a gasp and not a moan and not a word. The sound a body makes when it has been listening to promises in the dark and the promises have gone past the brain and into the blood and the blood is answering.
“You’re going to beg,” Low. Almost a growl. The predator-register that comes from the chest, not the throat. “Not because I’m going to make you — because you’re going to want to. Because my tongue is going to find the place that makes you lose your mind, and I’m going to work it until you are begging me to stop and begging me to never stop at the same time. And I’m going to listen to every sound you make. Every gasp. Every moan. Every time you say my name. And I am going to earn every single one.”
Her heartbeat is a drum. I can feel it through the deck plating. Through the bulkheads. My body is tracking her the way a navigation system tracks a signal — constant, precise, the bearing narrowing with every step.
“And then, when you’ve come against my mouth and you think you’re done —” I stop. The crew corridor. She is close. Very close. Within ten feet. I can taste her as if she’s in the same room because the ventilation has carried her to me undiluted, and the taste is — I grip the nearest bulkhead, and my claws leave gouges in the metal. “— I’m going to use my fingers. And I am going to make you come again. Harder. And you are going to let me because you will not be able to do anything else.”
I give her three near-misses. Not kindness. The chase.
The first: crew quarters, head. She is behind the door. I can taste her — concentrated, close, the scent so dense it’s almost tactile. I walk past. Slow. My footsteps are audible. She hears me pass, and her heartbeat drops a fraction. She thinks she’s won the round.
I give her four seconds of that before I double back and walk past again. The second pass is slower. Closer to the door. She can hear my breathing. Slow. Controlled. The breathing of a male who is in no hurry because the hurry is for prey, and she is not prey. She is the reason the hunt exists.
Second: storage alcove. Her scent pools there — she was in it; she’s gone. Moved while I was at the head. She is counter-tracking me. Adjusting position based on my footsteps. Using the ventilation ducts to pull her scent away from her actual location, the way she used the evacuation drills — not just hiding but running the game. She is playing this with the strategic intelligence of a female who survived a childhood by being invisible, and I want her so badly my vision has tunneled to the narrow, crystal-sharp focus of a male whose entire sensory system is calibrated to one person.
Third: the narrow section. Between crew quarters and the cabin. The trail is blazing. The arousal thick enough that my hands are clenching and my jaw is locked and my hips ache with a need so specific it has a shape and the shape is her body pressed against mine and moving. She is within fifteen feet. She is broadcasting want at a volume she doesn’t know she’s producing. The not-knowing is the most erotic thing I have ever experienced. Her body is screaming for me, and she doesn’t even realize how loud she is.
“You’re good at this,” I say into the dark. “Better than anyone. Better than the drill officers. Better than anyone who has ever tried to find someone.”
From close — very close — breathless, bright, brave:
“That’s it? Nine years on this ship, and you can’t find one human?”
My whole body floods with heat. The bravery. The play. She is hiding in the dark, trash-talking a male who has just spent ten minutesdescribing in explicit detail what his forked tongue is going to do between her thighs, and she isenjoying herself.She is having fun. She is laughing in the dark as she moves and taunting me, and the taunt lands in my chest like her hands on the ridges.
I have wanted this my whole life. Every year of empty. Every physician who said differently. It had never been broken. It was waiting. For a female who hides in my ship and calls me out while I hunt her.
“One more corridor.” My voice is raw. Every layer stripped back to the animal underneath. “One more turn. And then I am going to find you, and I am going to put my hands on you, and I am going to make good on every single thing I just said. Every. Single. Thing.” A beat. “And you’re going to wrap your legs around me and sayplease,and I am going to take you apart so thoroughly that you will feel my mouth on you for days.”
Silence. Silence that is the sound of a female in a dark corridor pressing her hand over her own mouth and failing to contain the sound underneath it.
HORATIO has not spoken. Not once since the hunt began. The lights at my preference. The ship at the configuration I need. HORATIO knows what this means — not to himself but to me. Nine years of one mug. One plate. The appointment. The emptiness his captain wore like a second skin. Tonight it ends, and HORATIO is honoring it the only way he knows how: by being exactly the ship I need without being asked.
The corridor dead-ends at the cabin hatch.
I come around the turn.
She is there.
Back to the wall. The dead end behind her. Stained lucky top. Wrecked hair. Gauze at her temple. Flushed from her cheeks to the neckline of the top. Breathing hard. Her eyes — hazel, wide, blazing in the amber light — find mine and hold.
Her chin is up.
