Chapter 11:
They’d flown hard and without stopping except to refuel. Every time they did, they heard the same grim and hard news. The Federation had embarked on a legacy of utter ruthlessness. Their campaign was cruel and their retribution unchecked.
The Federation had gathered all of its ships and those ships were dropping neutron bombs on every system that had denounced the Federation. Entire systems had winked out of existence.
Lornia stood in the small chamber she’d been assigned with her face turned toward the cleansing chamber and her heart heavy. She’d wanted company for so long, and now that she was constantly surrounded by people, she often felt weary and confused.
They thought she was carrying the weapon with her. She had yet to tell them that she was the weapon. She had yet to decide if she truly wanted to be that weapon, and while the weapon as it had been had had no choice once commanded, she did.
She was still a being with a heart and a mind and a conscience. She still didn’t trust Drake either.
He was so charming and kind when he chose to be, but he was also a man endowed with an ambition that oozed out of him. She started a bit as a knock sounded on the door. She had not yet undressed for the chamber, so she called out for whoever was on the other side of that door to enter, and immediately regretted that as the door slid open to reveal Drake standing there.
His handsome face always sent flutters racing through her belly, and that happened again as he said, “I haven’t seen you today and wondered if you were all right.”
The door still stood open. He had not crossed the door to enter her chamber. Common sense told her to tell him to go away, to leave her be. Her body cried out for her to ask him in.
She cleared her throat, trying to fight back that raw and powerful attraction that lay between them. That he felt it too was no secret to her. That neither of them had done anything about it spoke volumes about how little she trusted him or wanted to know him.
He was the man who would cause her to kill millions—and even if those deaths were necessary, there was another purpose she must serve as well, and that purpose was one she would never tell him because she did not trust him—or any of his kind.
Drake stepped into the room. His head tilted to one side. “Lornia? Are you all right?”
She looked away fast. Dammit, he was too close. Her body was betraying her. That dream came rushing back as it did every time she was in his presence, filling her mind with vivid images of the two of them entwined on the narrow bed that lay just to her right. “Yes, thank you. I’m just…I don’t know how to be near so many people yet, I guess.”
“I understand. If I were you, I would have probably run screaming the first day.”
The words caught her off guard. “You would have? You don’t strike me as someone who would run from anything.”
He didn’t. Drake shrugged, “I sort of feel like running away from this war. To be honest, I didn’t imagine the Federation would start blowing up entire systems and now that I know that they will, and are, it’s…I can’t believe they’d be that ready to destroy so much just to hold onto that power of theirs.”
She drew a little closer even though she knew that was a dangerous thing to do. It was like being a light gatherer, one of those tragic and doomed creatures that always flew too close to the flames, and died as a result. “You seem to want power.”
He didn’t look away. His gaze was forthright and open. “I don’t know that I want power that much. What I want is to be recognized.”
His eye contact broke. She knew then that he had said something he had not meant to say, had never said to anyone. Her hand came out of its own volition and touched his arm. Little shocks ran through her system. “Because?”
He drew a breath in. His hand came up and rested on hers. The heat of his skin warmed hers and sent little shivers running up and down her body. She knew she should move away, right then. But she didn’t. She didn’t because she didn’t want to.
What she wanted was him. She wanted to know if that dream of hers had any basis in reality; if she had seen something that would be or should not be.
He said, “Blade’s my brother. You know that. He’s my half-brother. Our father was a general in the Federation and Blade was on his way to being a high-ranking officer until the Federation did something that turned them against them. That’s his story to tell.
“But he left, and my father arranged it so that it seemed as if he had died. I thought that then I could rise in the ranks of the Federation. Bastards, illegitimate children, are not allowed rank. It’s Fed rule.”
She saw the pain in his eyes, and it hurt her to the core. “I see. Even with him supposedly dead, that did not happen.”
“It could not happen. All my life I have been the bastard. I had to go to the academy as a bastard, which meant I would be an officer due to my birth, but always a lower ranking one no matter how hard I worked or succeeded. I saw those with less aptitude get the promotions that I wanted so badly simply due to their births, and myself passed over because of mine.”
How unfair. His race had some odd notions of what was right. Children were a blessing, no matter their lineage; at least they were in her race. Her race did not often bear children though, and from what she knew of humans, they had the ability to reproduce almost wildly. Perhaps that was the difference.
“You felt lessened by your birth.”
His smile was bitter. “I was lessened by it. There was no feeling that way to it. Blade was a top-level student. I always had his record to live up to. I always had him to live up to. Not in the wider world, that thought he was dead…”
“But in your father’s eyes.”
The words lay between them. Drake nodded. “Blade was one hell of a criminal. The best in the universe. Assassin, thief, rebel. He was larger than life and even as my father hated the things that he did, he admired the man who had done them, and I always seemed to fall short somehow.”
Lornia said, “I understand. I do. I’m sorry.”
She did understand. How painful it must have been to never quite be the son that his father loved the most.
Drake sighed. “I think what I want the most is just to be remembered.”
That was ambition in its purest form, and he had no idea of that fact. She knew it because she had lived long enough to know that. He either had never considered it or his mind could not grasp it and that he had such a huge ambition meant that he was a man who would do anything to be remembered, to have his name written large in history—and such a man was a ruthless man. A man willing to use power to his advantage and in a way that would almost guarantee that harm was done.
He moved. It was a slight shift of his body, a negligible thing that somehow brought his chest into contact with hers for a split second. That small second was the turning point, and she knew it. There were only two options. Move away or move closer.
She knew she should choose the former.
Instead, she did the latter.
Their bodies collided. Drake’s eyes widened, then darkened as the desire that lay between them lashed in like a lightning strike, felling all of her defenses and common sense and leaving only that urgent need still there and alive in her thoughts and body.
Drake’s skin was heated and smooth, silk and satin over lean muscle that flexed and still held the tensile strength of steel. Lornia’s breath caught. That dream she’d had of him came rushing back. Her body strained forward, and their skin met. Her nipples pressed against his chest, and her fingers clutched at his strong shoulders as her legs went weak. It had been so long since she had known this kind of touch and she craved it so much, and there was something so familiar and so right about his body: the shape of it, the weight and size of it.
Of course it was familiar. She had known him in some way she could not explain. That dream had brought him to her, and as her hand dropped to his trousers, she felt the thick and long outline of his member. It was chubby and already stiff and as she ran her fingers along the length of it and his flesh went even more rigid: a fact that made her breath go fast and sharp as his tongue slid into her mouth and met hers.
Her breath hissed in and out of her mouth as his mouth turned demanding and fierce. His hands pulled her closer yet, his hands dropping to her ass and cupping it, tilting her pelvis so that her lower body pressed against his hard rod.
That rod that she wanted inside of her so badly.
His hands divested her of her clothing, and Lornia’s hands worked equally fast to remove his garments. They fell to the bed, and his mouth trailed across her flesh, consuming her nipples and then moving lower. His tongue found her, clit that pulsing ridge of flesh that nestled right at the top of her hood. Her fingers clutched at his hair and her hips arched and her ass shook as she bucked wildly, her cries locking behind her clamped-together lips.
His mouth teased her close to the edge of an orgasm, and she whispered, “No, not yet. Please. I want you inside of me.”
He came up, one hand moving across his mouth. His other hand guided his thick and long staff to her center. Her juices coated that member of his, and then he was inside her. Her inner walls spread and took him in and her moan broke over her lips and then was lost in the corners of his mouth as he kissed her again, that time so passionately that she lost all her breath.
Her body reacted and oils, slick and hot, spilled from her core and coated his dick. It slid inside and then out of her body as her walls began to spasm and more juices spurted from her body.
His low growl rang through the aftershocks that took over her body, and her legs went around his waist as he went first rigid, and then loose, his body curling up and over hers as his dick twitched and pulsed inside her tunnel.
They lay tangled together, not moving or speaking for a long time. Finally, he rolled away from her and reached for her, but she sat up, her hair spilling over her shoulders.
She said, “I know you believe I carried the weapon out of Tralam. I did. But what you may not know is how.”
He said, “We assumed it was something we could not look at, given what you had said to us.”
She began to weep. She could not help it. Everything she felt was too big and too frightening. She was too inexperienced in the nuances now to speak any way but plainly.
“I did not carry it out, and you are looking at the weapon right now. I am the weapon. It is me. I am the weapon that Tralam protected.”