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She couldn’t go anywhere. She was a prisoner on her own ship. Caligher was her warden. She certainly wouldn’t be strong enough to stop him. Those reasons were precisely why it was wrong. Why he stopped himself and walked away before he did something unforgivable.
All of those reasons made him want to do worse.
She thought he wanted to kill her?
Oh no. Not at all. What he wanted was worse than that.
He’d spent years convincing himself that he couldn’t keep a person—shouldn’t even try. Then she’d unwittingly floated her happy human ass in and offered herself up to him.
He took a few moments to get his racing spark under control. The kitchen walls gradually faded from a blinding white to grey… to the soothing darkness of a ship without its light. He’d blown something up in her delicate computer system, and now she was likely freaking out in the engine room behind him. A pang of guilt crept in—
She lied to me.
But she wasn’t a soldier. It was exceedingly obvious that she was a civilian, deposited in his territory by some militant human force.
Caligher’s thoughts moved away from illicit sex and he replayed conversations. She’d been trying to go home—away from him and the war that was about to break out. Some nagging instinct suggested doing the right thing—sending her home so she wouldn’t get swept up and hurt in the process.
Lucca flew a ship with no guns for fuck’s sake.
Caligher’s feelings vacillated.
He’d trusted her and she lied to him. Their entire friendship had holes.
“I’m making maps.”
“Whatever for?” Ternetzis didn’t require maps. Not to navigate. They simplyfeltit—the magnetic tug of everything woven together, turning rote circles around his star.
“You can’t come on my ship. I can’t come on yours. I can’t change where I came from…”
And then pure, telling silence whenever his questions roamed too close to something important.He couldn’t discern what was true and what was a lie and it bothered him. He spent a good, long time obsessing over every vaporous word with morbid fascination.
“I want to let you on my ship, but then you’ll hate me…”
“What haven’t I asked, Lucca? You’re not a human, are you?”
“No,” she’d said.
At least he could write that one off as a lie. That vivid memory had a solid place in his thoughts. Her thirst for punishment had seemed so real—because she was a human and she feltbadabout it.
He barked out in laughter, setting his head against the door and imagining how differently that night might have ended if she’d confessed the truth. How would he have even reacted?
His mind filled with indecent pictures and he had his answer. Her being human wasn’t enough to erase his attraction. If anything, he wasintoit.
He rubbed his eyelids and groaned. Why was this happening to him? Why now? Why like this?
It took a fight to keep his dick sheathed away. He didn’t want to lurk around her ship with his cock out like some mindless monster.
But she’d kept her secret no matter how he attempted to draw it out of her. Then she’d confessed how she wished to go home—into the Outskirts—beyond the Crescent Rim—to a jump point back to Earth…
Realization dawned on him.
* * *
“That’s it!”
He burst in, riding the high of his epiphany.
Lucca was in the same place he’d left her, face mottled with a lack of blood and a bright sheen of tears below her eyes. She stumbled back at his appearance, eyes widening.
