Chapter 17 #5
She closed her eyes and opened her thighs.
She didn’t want to take her gown off. His large body atop hers shielded her from the two-way mirror, but she imagined scientists on the other side, watching. She grew nauseous.
She felt his hands on her thighs. One real, one cold and unyielding. He forced her thighs to part further, so he could settle between them.
She flinched as he touched her. He stilled. The heavy weight of him settled over her, pressing her against the mattress.
"You are shaking."
"Sorry." She squeezed her eyes shut tighter. "I’ll try to stop."
The collar seemed to thrum around her neck in warning. They had to do this.
Kit’s fingers ran over the seam of her, parting her as he touched her. He was surprisingly gentle, yet it was rough to endure his touch. She was closed up, on edge.
He inserted a finger inside her. She breathed a sigh of relief to feel it was real. The fingers of his prosthetic skimmed over her shoulder. It was cold. Methodically, he touched her between her thighs, trying to get her to warm to him. But she couldn’t. She was dry and cold and shaking.
"Stop," he warned when her thighs clamped around his hand, trying to get him away.
She forced herself to still.
He kept touching her, and she couldn’t bear it. Not because it was him. Because she wanted him—she always had. It was because of the circumstances.
Using his prosthetic, Kit grabbed her hand, where it was fisted in the sheets by her hips. He pressed down on the joint below her thumb, making her release her death grip. He squeezed a little too tightly. She wondered if it was because he couldn’t feel her bones groan beneath his strength.
For just one second, when his eyes trapped hers, she felt fear.
His fingers were still between her thighs, resting against her, while she was pinned beneath him.
It was as though he wanted to pop open her flesh like it was the skin of a fruit, find the juice inside.
The corner of his lip curled up, revealing his teeth.
Then whatever war he waged within himself was won—or lost—as he forcibly took her hand, movements jerky, as he stretched her fingers out and laid her palm flat over her eyes.
She saw dull darkness through the cracks of her fingers.
Kit’s lips hovered over hers, his breath hot. "Do not look." His finger traced over her core.
She felt a stirring of something in the darkness, as she let her eyes slip closed, and tried to ignore where she was, pretend a collar with a bomb wasn’t locked around her throat.
He did something between her legs, and she felt a traitorous wetness slip from between her thighs and dampen the rumpled sheets beneath her hips.
Rin made a soft sound.
Kit’s fingers stilled.
Her lips thinned as she pressed her palm more firmly over her eyes.
He resumed.
After a while, she felt his hardness nudge against her entrance, and she swallowed a sob or a moan—a strange amalgamation of both.
Kit held her thighs open, covering her body with his as he slowly pushed into her.
It was almost like torture. He would push into her, then still for so long she couldn’t help but tilt her hips up slightly, chasing after him.
He would then stop her with a hand on her stomach, forcing her down, before he slowly broke her open.
He made a deep, inhumane sound. She was grateful she couldn’t see his face, afraid that there would be violence there.
She’d rather not know if he decided to crush her anyway.
When he was all the way inside her, his hips flush against hers, he stayed there in the silence for a few beats. Then he moved. It was methodical, fulfilling an order and nothing more.
At first, she felt nothing, just the discomfort of him moving inside her.
But slowly, his hand began to move. She felt his warm, real fingers skim up the side of her thigh, then graze the scar on her abdomen before he ventured higher.
When he touched her breasts, she jolted.
He grazed her nipple, making it tighten.
The touch of his hand was vastly different from the feel of his length moving within her or his prosthetic holding her thigh open.
Slowly, she spread her fingers, peeking through the cracks. His eyes were squeezed shut, a look of exquisite pain on his usually cold face. Perspiration dotted his forehead, making his brown hair stick to his temples as he moved within her.
Rin let her hand fall away fully, staring up at him.
She touched his chest—right over his heart. He looked at her.
His eyes shone. A tear clung to the tips of his lashes, then fell from the end, right onto her face. It was wet and real. She felt it slide further down her cheek.
Kit cocked his head. "You cry."
"No, Kit, you are."
He reached up, with his real hand, and touched beneath his eyes, confused as more tears glistened on his fingertips.
She gripped his face. "I’m going to make them pay for what they did to you.
" He leaned into her hand like he was starved of physical touch and comfort.
His lids fluttered shut. "You’re not all gone.
I see you." Her hand dropped to his chest; she felt his heartbeat, firm and true, beneath her small palm.
He was not all metal. "In here, you are still my Kit. "
"You are not just mine." He echoed the words from so long ago—the graveyard.
She clenched around him, suddenly desperate at this glimpse of the man she loved.
"I will not let you die," he vowed.
He moved deeper within her, and when she was forced to the edge against her will, she finally came. Only a slight moan escaped her before his prosthetic covered her mouth. The metal had warmed from their shared body heat. She gasped wetly against it.
With his real hand, he held up her hips until they were nearly off the bed, and she was almost folded in half, as he thrust inside her—methodical, once more.
He was soundless as he came. The only indication he ever felt anything as he released within her was the slightest of furrows between his brows.
Kit held himself away from her, only connected to her where he was seated deep within her and by his hand over her lips. "I did not want them to hear." He pulled his hand away, and she saw that the palm of the dark, sleek prosthetic was foggy with her breath. He stared at it.
She tugged at her gown, ensuring it covered her still splayed thighs.
Kit was utterly nude above her. She was sore, from the procedure and from what Kit had been forced to do to her.
She couldn’t help but wince as he pulled out.
She closed her legs, feeling their shared, treacherous arousal drip out of her.
Kit sat back on his heels, head still bowed. He refused to look at her. He didn’t seem to care about his nudity, or the fact he was bared to the mirror and the watchers on the other side. While Rin kept herself covered, shivering as she wrapped her arms around her middle.
She stared at the low, dark ceiling. "What happens now?"
The answer came in a hiss of grey fog. It filled the room from the corners, heavy and unrelenting. It was so quick that neither of them had the chance to say…
Goodbye.
Before their eyes met, and she lost herself.
Atlas knew it was time.
He had known long before she had ever been born in this life, in this body, sleeping soundly in a white room adrift in space. It was time.
Everything he had done since the moment of her—and their unborn child’s death—in the village of Luxuria on the first planet, Stella, had been leading up to this moment. Ever since that wretched, fate-written day, he had worked toward the moment he could have her again. Forever.
In one’s life, there were always pivotal moments, marked by grand occurrences, shaping the entire trajectory of a life’s course.
For Vesperin Vox, there were many. Much more than the average being.
When she had been born, because they were so linked. Her very birth had been ordained.
When they first met, sparking Atlas to find her on the floor of her childhood bedroom, gifting her his Nova to ensure she did not yet die; gifting her a piece of him, so he could always find her.
When Kiton had died. The start of her journey to discover her Soulbonds. Because otherwise, she never would have gone to Sibeth—she and Cyrus never would have met.
And when she had confessed her love to Lucien, making him want to protect her. Her love for him had drawn him in, tied a string around his Soul, leaving him unable to stand aside any longer.
And now this.
When the Celestial touched Vesperin and imparted upon her a locked-away corner of her mind.
There was a reason Souls did not remember everything in startling detail about their past lives.
It could drive one to insanity. Too much for a mind to contain, memories upon memories—unable to fit within a single mind.
But this had to be done. Now.
Atlas leaned down slowly. Vesperin lay alone in the white room, a thin sheet draped over her waist. She looked tired, even as she slept.
He wished he could crawl into the small bed with her, take her into his arms, and tell her of every torturous moment he had spent waiting. But not yet. It was too soon.
Just as Atlas had done before—with the doctor—he gently pressed his thumb between her brows, and so, one small corner of her mind opened.
He had allowed her to be taken and tortured the first time with electricity, knowing the shocks would awaken parts of her past—enough for her to know the men who proclaimed she was theirs spoke the truth. Atlas was the only one to open her mind fully.
It was done.
She would dream now. Dream of them—and perhaps even dream of Atlas, as well, though they were not Soulbonds.
A Soul he did not have, though he did have Nova. Pieces of which he had imparted upon her, tying them together. So too with that link, she now would be able to remember their only life together.
When it had all begun.