Page 42 of C is for Captive

She smiled up at him, her face open and trusting as he took himself in hand and guided his shaft to her entrance, and then he pushed inside, slow and steady. She was so tight, so wet, so perfect, and he had to force himself to go slowly, to let her adjust to him. He watched her face for any sign of discomfort, for any trace of fear, but all he saw was pleasure.

Her eyes were half-closed, her lips parted, and a soft moan escaped her as he pushed deeper and that helpless, needy sound threatened to shred his control. He pulled back and then pushed in again, a little deeper this time, and she moaned again, her legs tightening around him.

“More,” she breathed. “Please, Brannik. More.”

She arched against him, her hands gripping his shoulders, her body accepting him, taking him in, and he moved within her in a slow, deep rhythm that was more possessive than any chains, more binding than any promise. Each thrust was a question and an answer, a declaration of a belonging he’d never thought to find. His gaze never left her face, memorizing every expression, every gasp, every flutter of her eyelids.

And then he lowered his head to kiss her neck and his fangs brushed against her throat. She cried out, a raw, broken sound that was half pleasure and half release. He froze, but she tangled her fingers in his hair and held him there.

“Don’t stop,” she begged, her voice hoarse with need. “Please, don’t stop.”

So he didn’t.

The pleasure built, a slow, inexorable tide, pulling him under, and he let it go. She gave herself up to it, to him, to the rhythm of their bodies and the beat of their hearts, a frantic, desperate dance in the quiet hum of the stolen ship.

When her release came, it was a shattering thing, crashing over her, and leaving her breathless and boneless and utterly sated. He followed her with a deep, broken growl he couldn’t have suppressed if he’d tried, his body shuddering against hers.

They lay wrapped together in the aftermath, their bodies slick with sweat, and the only sounds were the ragged gasps of their breathing and the steady hum of the engine. He felt more content, more whole, than he had in years.

Eventually he propped himself up on an elbow, studying her face. “Are you all right?”

She nodded, a small, breathless motion. “More than all right.”

She smiled and curled against him, warm and drowsy. Neither of them spoke for a long time, but then she traced one of the old scars across his chest and gave him her most innocent look.

He waited.

“So. Was that worth twenty-five years of brooding?”

He stared down at her, and her mouth twitched.

“I have not been brooding for twenty-five years.”

“Twenty?”

“No.”

“Fifteen?”

“Amy.”

She laughed and tucked her face against his chest, and the sound of her laughter was the best thing he’d ever heard. He wrapped both arms around her, smiling into her hair.

Fourteen hours to Valkesh. Thirteen now, or even twelve. But he no longer felt the need to check. The planet would still be there when they arrived. Whatever waited there—answers, another empty trail, evidence of his mother or only the ghosts of people he’d never known—he would face it.

Tomorrow. Tonight, she was falling asleep in his arms. And for the first time since he’d left Tuor, what was ahead of him mattered less than what he already had.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“There’s nothing here,” Amy said. She stood in the wind at the top of the ridge, and the wind stole the words out of her mouth and flung them down the empty valley, and nothing at all answered back.

Valkesh was a sparsely inhabited planet with a small, mostly native population, and a peaceful air. They’d found the northern trading routes Krebb had mentioned, leading from one small settlement to another, and landed just to the north of them in a bowl of grey rock between two mountain ranges. They’d left the little cargo vessel crouched between them like a beetle in the vast stony bareness, and then they’d walked north. Away from the few towns marked on the charts and towards the interior where Krebb’s overheard words had pointed and where, according to every instrument they had, no living thing had any business being.

Half a day of walking. And this. The ruins they’d seen in the images.

She pulled her borrowed jacket tighter. The air was thin and cold and smelled of dust and stone and something faintly mineral, like a knife blade held to the tongue. Below them, the valley floor showed the bones of what had once been more than emptiness—low walls, tumbled and half-buried, laid out in the ghost of a pattern too regular to be natural. A doorway that led nowhere, standing alone. The stub of what might have been a tower. And over all of it, blown up against the walls in soft grey drifts, the fine bitter dust that swallowed footprints as fast as you could make them.

“People lived here,” she said.