Chapter 13
Claimed
Lorri
I have been standing on the dock in a dress for an hour and fourteen minutes.
A DRESS. On a dock. On Junction One. Where people wear cargo boots and coveralls and the fashion consensus is functional and stain-resistant, and I am standing here in a deep green dress from the Finder’s Market because the color reminds me of someone and the neckline is doing something the vendor described as “evening appropriate” and that I would describe as “structurally ambitious” and the underwear underneath it is a DECISION.
Black. Lace. More credits than I have ever spent on something I intend to have destroyed.
I have read the manual. Nine days. Every page. Every footnote. The pair-bonding section. The venom. The hum-sense. Page forty-seven. I memorized it.
Nine days of sitting with permanent and does not break for the rest of his life.
Nine days of the old voice — the colony voice, the small voice, the one that says you are not the kind of person things like this happen to — running its usual loop.
What if he changed his mind about the route?
What if the instinct recalibrated? What if he docks and his pupils don’t slit, and the tongue doesn’t flick, and the whole thing was just a lockdown and a Vrennak and the kind of proximity that tricks the body into thinking it’s found something permanent when really it just found something nearby?
The voice ran for about four days. Loud. Persuasive. Deeply committed to the idea that I am not the kind of woman a male waits forty-one years for.
On day five I told it to shut up. Not politely.
I told it to shut up the way I told the Vrennak to sit down — in the voice that comes from somewhere underneath the apologizing, from the part of me that held a predator’s gaze and did not flinch.
The voice shut up. It has not come back.
It is sulking somewhere in the back of my brain, making a list of things to worry about later, and I am going to let it make that list because the list is how it copes, and I am done fighting the parts of me that cope.
I am ready.
The dock officer’s comm pings. “Bay Fourteen. Cleared for berthing.”
My heart lunges.
I walk. Fast. The dress moves against my thighs. I go to the OOPS cargo office where he files his routing paperwork. He always comes here first.
I wait by the door.
His footsteps. The weight I know. The stride I know.
He rounds the corner.
He sees me.
He stops.
The datapad lowers. His eyes go from my face to the dress to the neckline to my bare legs and back up.
Slowly. Then his gaze drops to the fabric at my hips and holds — the dress is thin, the dock light is behind me, and the outline of what is underneath is visible through the green.
Lace edges. Dark. The shape of something that is doing a job, and the job is visible and his pupils lock on it and his ridges flush dark. Both arms. Instant.
“Hi,” I say.
“Lorri.” Nine days in his mouth.
“I read the manual.”
The datapad hits the desk. Fourteen years of filing first. The paperwork does not exist.
“And?”
“Page forty-seven. I memorized it. The bite, the venom, the bond. Permanent. Does not break.” I hold his eyes. “Inside of my thigh. High up. Only for you.”
Something cracks on his face. Wide. The face of a male who was told this would never happen, and the woman in front of him has memorized the page.
“Good girl,” he says. Soft.
His claws extend. Fully.
I bolt.
No head start. I run, and his footsteps are behind me — two strides — and a hatch slams between us.
“Captain!” HORATIO. Maximum innocence. “Welcome home! I appear to be experiencing a minor hatch malfunction. Most irregular. New firmware.”
Jazil’s curse is Skiveth and untranslatable.
I am running through the dock corridor in a green dress and boots and LAUGHING. HORATIO is buying me time. We have had a plan for four days — the schematics, the ventilation adjustments, the maintenance junction between the cabin and the head.
Bay 14. The ramp. Through the hold. Past the galley — two settings. Into the crew section. Maintenance access panel. Port side.
The duct is warm and dark and smells like him.
The same position as a thousand colony hiding spots — knees up, spine flat, breathing shallow.
The same shape I folded myself into when the drill officers swept the corridors and the access tunnels and the cargo tarps, and I was the girl who was so good at disappearing that disappearing became the only thing she was good at.
HORATIO has dispersed my scent across multiple zones. He can taste me, but he can’t pinpoint me.
I press my back against the duct wall. Hidden. The old shape. The new reason.
This time I want to be caught.
Footsteps on the ramp. Courting speed.
“HORATIO.” From the hold.
“Captain. I do apologize for the hatch malfunction.”
“You sent her the schematics.”
“She is very resourceful. I am merely supportive.”
His footsteps move through the hold. The soft flick of his tongue. Tasting. HORATIO’s dispersal working.
“Lorri.” The hunting voice. “I saw you in that dress on the dock.”
Past the galley. Slow.
“Every male on that concourse saw you in that dress. That neckline. The way the fabric sits on your hips. Those collarbones are mine. That throat is mine. The skin below that neckline is mine, and they saw it, and the dress is going to have to go, little human.”
My body flushes in the duct.
“The dress is coming off. One claw. And I am going to buy you a new one. Green. Because green is my color on you.” His footsteps slow.
“And the thing underneath — I could see it through the fabric, Lorri. On the dock. In the light. The outline of what you’re wearing under that dress.
I have been thinking about it since the cargo office, and I am going to find it, and I am going to remove it with my teeth. ”
He is in the crew corridor. Close.
“When I have you — and I will have you — I am not going to be patient. I have been patient for nine days. Nine nights of tasting you on my sheets and my pillow and the copilot’s seat.
I am done being patient.” His voice drops.
“I am going to put my mouth on every inch of you. I am going to start at the throat and work down, and I am not going to stop until you are shaking and begging and saying my name, and then I am going to put my teeth on the inside of your thigh and claim you. And after that, I am going to find out what it feels like to be inside my mate with the venom live and the bond locked, and I am going to take my time because I have been waiting my whole life for it.”
Two feet from the panel. I clamp both hands over my mouth.
“There you are. The ventilation junction. HORATIO. You beautiful, treacherous ship.”
“Captain. I am on standby.”
The panel opens. Blue eyes. Feral smile.
“Caught you.”
“Took you long enough.”
He pulls me out. One arm under my back, one under my knees.
He does not take me to the cabin.
He puts me against the bulkhead.
His mouth finds mine, and the kiss is nine days of starvation. Both tips of his tongue tasting, claiming. I grip his hair and pull, and the growl vibrates through my teeth.
He pulls back. One claw hooks the dress strap. Looks at me. I nod. He cut both straps. The dress pools at my waist. Air hits my skin.
The lace. Black against me. His eyes go completely still. The pupil-lock. He traces the lace edge with one claw-tip — from my hip to the center and back — the precision insane. The claw that could gut a Vrennak, tracing lace on his mate’s skin.
His mouth finds my throat. The freckle. Both tips and my pulse jumping.
His hands sliding up my ribs, thumbs finding the lace edge of the bra.
He pulls it down and his mouth follows — collarbone, sternum, lower.
He takes his time the way a starving male takes time with the first meal.
Not fast, not slow. Thorough. Every inch of skin between the collarbone and the lace gets his tongue, his teeth, the fang-drag that leaves goosebumps.
The bra. He unclips it one-handed — I did not know claws could manage a clasp, and I am going to be thinking about that for weeks — and his mouth finds my breast. Both tips on the nipple.
I arch off the bulkhead and his hands press me back.
Holding me still while he works one side, then the other.
The growl vibrating through my breast into my ribs.
I am making sounds the corridor has never heard.
Lower. Mouth on my stomach. Tongue tracing the muscles that tense under his lips. Teeth grazing the soft curve below my navel. Hands sliding down my thighs, taking the dress. It hits the floor. The lace is the last thing.
He looks up from his knees. My lace and his eyes and the question.
“With your teeth,” I say. “You promised.”
The feral grin. His mouth at my hip. Teeth closing on the lace. One side bitten through. He moves to the other hip. Bites through. The lace falls.
I am naked against the bulkhead of his ship, and his face is level with my stomach, and his hands are on my thighs, and he has been starving for nine days.
He puts my leg over his shoulder. Opens me. Both tips make contact, and the sound I make is the sound of a woman who read clinical language about Skiveth oral anatomy, and the clinical language did NOT prepare her.
He does not rush. Both tips working independently — finding the places that make me gasp and the places that make me scream and the places that make me grip his hair and pull him closer. He maps me the way he logs the nebula. Every pass different, every angle reveals something new.
“Please, Jazil, please —”
He brings me to the edge and holds me there. Builds and builds and does not let me crest.
“Not yet.” Against my thigh. “I want to taste you when the bond is live.”
I am going to DIE. I am going to die naked against a bulkhead while a Skiveth male edges me for SCIENTIFIC REASONS.
He works me back to the edge. Holds me. Again. The third time my legs are shaking so hard only his hands keep me vertical.