AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Don’t worry about Avel. He is much tougher than he looks.”
“He looks pretty tough,” Suli admits. “But Raine is a thousand times tougher than she looks. You should warn him. You should assign extra personnel. You should…”
I cut her dire warnings off with a passionate kiss, enjoying the way she stays tense for a moment before softening against me, surrendering to my dominance and sinking into her place in my arms and my life.
“Do not worry,” I purr softly down at her. “Everything is under control.”
EPILOGUE
Raine
That winged alien bastard has finally left me alone. That’s his first mistake. I’m going to make sure it is his last. No male of any species gets away with handling me the way he did.
This is what I get for trying to rescue someone who doesn’t deserve rescuing. This is what I get for listening to my crew instead of doing what I know is best for them. When we saw Sullivan’s emergency crash beacon activate, I should have turned the ship around and headed as many light years in the other direction as possible. Instead, I let sentiment rule the day.
Now I’m no better than she was.
Within hours of attempting that pointless rescue, I was disarmed, blindfolded, and brought here. Whereverhereis. All I could sense at the time was rushing and gusting of wind. I figured we were moving very fast, and obviously flying. These saurians obviously want to put a whole lot of distance between me and the captain. That’s smart, because the two of us have pulled off some heists and shenanigans over the years that would make their scaled heads spin.
I start to explore. It’s dark, and I don’t have the best sense of my surroundings, but that’s no excuse not to escape. Running my hands over the nearest vertical surface, I note that this feels like a cave. There are solid earth walls all around me, and a passage up ahead. Curious. It doesn’t make a lot of sense for a flying saurian to take me to an underground location.
I take a few more exploratory steps, the floor runs out, and I realize he did no such thing. In a rush of adrenaline, and a flash of light that threatens to blind me as I push past a heavy leathery curtain, I discover that this place is the polar antonym of underground.
I grip the edge of the wall and lean away from the void, my heart pounding as gusts of wind whip my hair back from my face and the ground drops away beneath my feet. I am up very, very impossibly high.
You could fall and fall forever from this vantage point. Without wings, you’d be worse than dead when you hit the ground. You’d be absolutely obliterated, every bone in your body turned to a soft mush. I know this, because I’ve seen the effects of such a fall before. People explode like water balloons if you drop them from a high enough place.
Vertigo assails me, but I don’t let it win. I breathe deep, and I remind myself that there’s nothing to be afraid of. Not here. Not ever. Captain Sullivan taught me that.
Following her over the years has hardened me in ways I didn’t know I could get hard. But I have to admit, seeing her standing naked in that cage was a shock. It’s the first time I have ever seen her in any semblance of what you might call humility. If these creatures can humble her, then they can humble me. I’m not hanging around to find out how.
The place they’re keeping me in is obviously calculated to function as a prison for a creature like me. They think they don’t need a cage to keep me here. They think I am stuck in this tower of rock because there’s no way down. Maybe that’s true for most people. It’s not going to be true for me.
The more I force myself to look down, and up, the more I make my brain stop freaking out at how high up I am, the more I actually take in. These rocks are craggy and full of outcroppings. They’re obviously naturally eroded by wind and rain, and that means that they’ve effectively been designed with a million different hand and foot holds all the way along them.
What would Captain Sullivan do? I don’t even need to consciously ask myself that question anymore. I’ve asked myself it so many times I already know the answer. She’d get the hell out of here, no matter what the risk and no matter what the cost.
I lower myself to the edge, ease myself over it, and start to climb down.
I tell myself that the hard part is going over the edge. That’s all. Once I’m on the rock face, it won’t matter. Nothing will. All I’ll have to do is climb.
Clinging to the rocks, I am glad for the naturally chalky texture of them. That coats my sweaty palms in a light covering of dust that stops me from slipping. I start to work my way down, knowing this may very well take hours. Holding fast to these little vestiges of solid ground, I think about things that make me brave. I think about revenge. I think about riches. I think about the crew. I think about everything and anything besides the thousands of feet stretching out below me.
The funny thing about starting to fall is that it takes me a moment to notice it is happening. I don’t so much slip as simply become unmoored as the rock beneath my digits and toes crumbles in a clean sheet, taking me with it as it starts its inevitable descent.
In the little seconds it takes to register that I am falling, my mind comes to a very old animal place of acceptance. It’s like it knows there is nothing it can do about this sort of thing. If I had anything to fight, I’d be fighting it. But gravity is the ultimate dom.
I’ve got time to think before I hit the ground.
So this is how it all ends. I always thought I’d be killed by security forces during a heist, or perhaps the ship would be obliterated in a hail of fire. I assumed the end of my life would be much like the beginning: violent, and cruel, and completely out of my control.
FWOMP!
Strong arms wrap around me, purple scales gleaming as bright slitted eyes glower down at me. I have stopped falling. Instead, I am being held against the muscular body of my captor, his massive wings beating against the air, defying gravity.
“You’re going to be punished for this recklessness,” he declares, looking at me with an expression of ferocious determination. I feel a thrilling chill run through me.
Maybe gravity isn’t the ultimate dom.
Maybe this guy is.
* * *
