Now would be a good time to start fighting back against the too big, too sexy alien laying atop her like they’d just gone a sweaty round in her quarters and he was gearing up for round two. Or three. She shifted her hips, her legs splaying for a moment in something that might have been invitation before her brain caught up with what the fuck was going on.

What that fuck was? She had no clue, but it was all kinds of wrong and it had her heart beating and her body on fire in a way it had never been before.

An unwanted thrill went through her as she struggled against him, trying to wrench her wrist, and her knife, back under her own control. But this alien held her down like she was nothing. If it weren’t for her training, she might have been scared, but fear had no place in a fight like this. That was for later, for when she was evaluating everything that had gone wrong and right, everything she could do better.

And that evaluation of this encounter was going to be one hell of a doozy because she still had no idea what the hell was going on.

“Patrol,” he hissed in her ear. “Stay still if you want to live.” And, no, an excited spark didn’t race down her spine from his gravelly, strangely flat, voice. He almost sounded like one of the androids she’d worked with back home. They never quite got the emotions right on those bots, making them hollow simulacrums of real people. But this guy was real, she could feel almost all of his reality pressed up against her and if she shifted just enough, he’d be cradled between her thighs.

Well, provided they were biologically compatible. Which she kind of thought they were. Damn tactical gear getting in the way made that impossible to tell.

No, focus. She needed to get a damn grip. A light flashed off in the distance, one of the patrols doing its rounds. If her comms were working she could have known they were coming, could have used that distraction to her advantage. She tried to move her hand, the one not clamped to the ground, but her captor captured that one as well.

“Not going to hit you,” she spat out on a sharp whisper.

His face was flat, unreadable, nothing but darkness swirling in those black eyes of his. What would he look like in daylight? Why did she care?

The light went away, the patrol not finding them. Still, her pirate didn’t give up. But if he was a pirate, why had he hidden her from the patrol? “Who are you?” she asked, and there were so many questions piled into that word that she wasn’t sure what she wanted him to answer first. Detyen wasn’t enough. She wanted, no, needed, everything he could give.

And that meant she’d gone crazy. Maybe she was still unconscious and this was all some weird, blaster-induced fantasy. She was going to wake up in a few minutes and never speak of this again. Not at all. Nope. Mindy would want the details and Jo would laugh at her. But even as the thought flitted against her mind, she knew it was wrong. This guy was way too solid to be some kind of fantasy.

“Raze,” he said, and that must have been his name. “Who are you?” Something flashed in his eyes there, that hint of red that disappeared between one blink and the next, so quickly that she might have been imagining it.

She wasn’t supposed to give her name. What kind of spy would she be if she went off telling her identity to anyone who asked? But she couldn’t have stopped the sound from slipping out if she tried. “Sierra.”

He loosened his grip on her hands, paying little heed to the knife she still gripped. “Not a pirate,” he said quietly, sitting back on his knees.

Sierra crawled backward and hid her own weapon away. “Not a pirate,” she agreed. She shouldn’t take his word for it. The only people on this planet were pirates and slavers, and that made them all consummate liars and thieves. But she couldn’t not believe this guy, and that was the crux of the problem. They stared at each other, at a loss for what to do now that the fight had left them. She wished the light were better, sunlight instead of the moon. Even as bright as it was, the alien before her, Raze, was more shadow than person. “Since we’ve settled that, I’ll be on my way. I assume you won’t tell me about your business.” As long as he was working against the pirates, she didn’t really care what he was doing. Their paths wouldn’t cross again.

“No,” said Raze. At first she thought he was agreeing about the business, but when she went to stand up, he grabbed her arm and pushed her back down. “You’re staying.”

Like hell she was. “I have my own shit to do. Let me go now or my knife comes back out.” She should have never put it away in the first place, but that weird something about this guy made her not want to hurt him.

He ignored the threat. “I saw you earlier today. My men disappeared. Did you see anything?”

Was that what this was about? “There was no need to stun me for that,” she said sharply. Though she would have never given the information to someone who actually was a slaver. “Three men took your guys. Two looked human, one might have been Oscavian. They were walking away and disappeared. Literally disappeared in the blink of an eye. That’s all I saw.”

He studied her for several seconds and it felt like she was under a microscope. Or being stalked by some jungle predator that had gone extinct a hundred years ago. His gaze was unnerving, too level, without a hint of what he was thinking or feeling. She was getting that android sense again, like he didn’t feel, and that wasn’t possible. How could a person not feel? Then again, he wasn’t a person, he was an alien.

“Get up,” he ordered.

She wanted to resist just because she could, but Sierra needed to be standing if they were about to fight. “Is that all?” she asked, unable to stop poking at him.

“You’re coming with me.” He said it like that was a reasonable request.

“Afraid not.” He might be a big sexy alien who could throw her over his shoulder and have his way—or whatever—with her, but that didn’t mean she was going to abandon her job when she was halfway through it.

“My men need to be found.” Was he trying to convince her? Maybe if he didn’t sound like an encyclopedia bot, listing off dry facts, then she might be swayed.

“And I wish you the best of luck. But that’s not my job.” Something compelled her to take a chance, to believe that he wouldn’t do her harm if she walked away, despite all evidence to the contrary. Sierra took a step back and turned on her heel. She wasn’t surprised when Raze caught up. He grabbed her hand to pull her back, but the damnedest thing happened.

A strangled sound caught in the back of his throat and he froze, pulling her in place. She glanced back and saw his eyes flare red, this time definitely not a trick of the light. His knees locked and he fell forward, into her, taking her down with him.

***

Agony. Blinding hope. Darkness.

Raze gasped and curled into himself as Sierra jerked her hand away from him. He couldn’t move, couldn’t defend himself. If she chose at that moment to stab him in the back, he would bleed out before he realized that he was finished. But her shadow came over him, blocking out the light of the moon. Her hands fluttered around, never touching him for more than a second and careful to avoid his bare skin. It was the most exquisite torture he could imagine, to be in reach of her, of that indefinable, impossible thing and to have it taken away before he could realize what it was.

His mind circled around a word, but it was so outlandish that he wouldn’t let himself think it. He couldn’t hope, and in this moment, that was more blessing than curse.

His hand burned where their fingers had met, but he had a driving impulse to reach out again and lace their fingers together and hold on through the pain, to ride it to the other side and see where that left him. Instinct blazed bright, demanding he take that path. But instinct wasn’t the territory of the soulless, it was some vestigial limb that served no purpose.

After several long moments of searing pain, his breathing evened and the sensation faded to a dull ache inside of his chest. He sat up slowly and stared at Sierra, the human woman who’d witnessed his men being taken, the human woman who wounded him with a simple touch, the human woman who almost made him feel. His emotions were so close to the surface that if he reached out a hand, he thought he might be able to grasp onto them and gather them back. Instead, he turned away from that insanity, that instability.

The mission came first.

She studied him closely. “Does… that… happen a lot?” she asked after he had recovered himself. If it weren’t ridiculous for her to care, he might have thought she sounded concerned for his safety.

“No,” Raze responded, his voice back to its normal neutrality where it belonged. “I apologize if I disturbed you.”

She gave a harsh laugh. “I was more concerned about whether I could find a place to hide your corpse, to be honest.” That note of concern he’d detected before seemed even stronger. “And the last patrol came even closer, if I didn’t have a dark blanket in my pack, they might have seen us.”

“Patrol? When?” He couldn’t have been in that strange condition for more than a few minutes.

“You were out for nearly half an hour. I think we’re both lucky that you didn’t scream.” Now she sounded just as neutral as he did, and in someone with a soul, or whatever humans called that essential part of themselves, that was always a front. But why did she care?

“I can’t scream,” he found himself saying.

“Can’t?”

Raze shrugged. “It is physically possible, but I no longer have the motivation.” No fear, no anger. The only reason he had to raise his voice was to be heard in a loud environment.

“Motivation?” Sierra asked on a high note.

These were secrets of his people, things never spoken to outsiders. They couldn’t understand the soulless and why a man would walk that path. But he could not stop himself from trying to explain to her. “I no longer feel emotion. It was a sacrifice made to lengthen my life.”

She gasped and took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. “I…” she tried to speak, but trailed off.

Raze himself didn’t know what else to say. His nerves were raw from the contact and the night grew short. “Come, if we start now we can make it back to the hill by daylight.” He waved his hand at her, but was careful not to touch.

Sierra sputtered a laugh. “You may be emotionless, but you’re also crazy. I’m not leaving here.”

He should have brought the rope with him when he chased her. He could stun her again, but he didn’t reach for his blaster. For some reason, he needed her to come with him willingly. “Please,” he tried the request, though he could not remember the last time he’d said that word.

Sierra sighed. “Your little… freak out gave me time to think. If they were going to take your guys anywhere, wouldn’t it be to the settlement?” She nodded her head towards the town. “I’m doing some recon. I can keep my eyes open, tell you if I see anything.”

“And how would we communicate?” He didn’t want to let her go, but she had a point.

“Set up a signal? Or a rendezvous? I don’t like the idea of anyone being at these guys’ mercy, and I know how to look for things. We can plan to meet up tomorrow night, right here. You can go back and see if there’s any more evidence at the scene of the crime, I’ll find out if they’re being held in the village. Then we go our separate ways, no questions asked.” She leaned back, sitting on her calves, her posture deceptively calm. He almost wanted to insist again that she come with him, just to see what she would do.

But no, he didn’t want anything. He couldn’t.

“I could go with you,” he countered. He doubted there was anything more to see back at the hill, especially if she wasn’t there with him to give him more detail about what she’d witnessed. “If we find the men, I’ll help them escape and we go our separate ways.”

She breathed deep, watching him for several seconds. Finally, her shadow nodded in the moonlight. “If we don’t find them by tomorrow, we’re done,” she insisted.

He wasn’t supposed to lie, that was one of those early lessons from his soulless days. But Raze nodded and said, “Very well,” as if there was anything on this planet that would allow him to let her go.