Chapter 45
FORTY-FIVE
CYAN
The ship’s warning lights flashed as Cyan abandoned the controls, crossing the cockpit in two swift strides. The autopilot could hold their course steady, for a while. He’d meant to stay at the helm, maintain control, keep them safe. But…
His hands fumbled with the clasps of his armor, pieces clattering to the floor as proximity sensors blared ignored warnings.
He dragged Elaina from her seat and shoved her against the control panel, scattering their plotted course data. Her fingers scrabbled for purchase on his shoulders as warning lights strobed across her flushed skin.
“The coordinates,” she gasped between kisses. “We’ll lose our?—”
“Backups are engaged,” he dismissed, then silenced her with his mouth.
The ship lurched, artificial gravity fluctuating as they strayed from their flight path. More alarms joined the cacophony. The rational part of him knew they’d need those coordinates if something went wrong with the autopilot, knew drifting in a wormhole meant death. But rational thought dissolved when she arched against him, her body’s pull more compelling than any navigational data.
The rest was a brutal struggle to consume each other as the world collapsed around them. Time thinned, then snapped back. Gravity fluctuated around them and they were floating and falling, untethered from anything except the heat of their hands on each other’s skin.
The lines between them dissolved until Cyan didn’t know where he ended and she began. His fingers found her mouth and she sucked them in, scraping her nails down his neck as he ground against her. She bit along his jaw, the pain sharp enough to blur his vision and tear a growl from his throat.
Another shudder shook the ship, and Cyan shifted, pulling her to the pilot’s seat and bending her over it.
“Spread your legs,” he ordered, a command her body was designed to follow.
He gripped her thighs, spreading her wide, and kneeled before her dripping heat. Her arms braced on the back of the seat, and when he pressed the flat of his tongue against her she crumpled as though melting before him. Each stroke of his tongue rocked her hips into his mouth as he took his fill, his hand working at his own shaft as he destroyed her.
When he reached up, his fingers finding her lips, she turned, catching his eyes over her shoulder, then slipping lower.
“Let me taste you,” she whispered, turning to sink to her knees before him.
His hands found their way into her hair, tugging her face up. “Eyes up here.”
“Yes.”
She dug her nails into his thighs as she took him into her mouth, demanding. Her moan vibrated through his shaft and he gripped her hair tighter, guiding her rhythm with an unrelenting force. The glow of the wormhole around them blurred and twisted, but all he could focus on was her.
“This is mine,” he said, thrusting deeper, feeling the edge of where he could go and pushing past it. “Yes?”
She nodded, the fire inside her building.
“Tell me,” Cyan spoke down at her, keeping himself in her mouth.
She mumbled as best she could, her words not quite comprehensible but their meaning very clear.
The pressure in his gut built as his body tensed, the muscles of his thighs trembling beneath her palms.
He pulled her closer, forcing her to take him fully, nudging past the point of resistance in her throat. Her eyes watered up at him with a desire that tore him apart. He bucked against her as he spilled into her mouth. Her throat worked around him as she swallowed him, catching every drop even as it seeped from the corner of her mouth.
Cyan held her together as they fell into the void, the ship trembling around them, reality dissolving into a brilliant haze. And in that moment there was nothing else—only them, suspended in the nothingness, the only real thing left in the world.
He took her everywhere. Each time was not enough. Each time, their movements grew more frantic, a desperate violence in each new coupling. It grew quick—the fucking, the sitting, the coming. Shoving fingers in each other’s mouths and digging teeth in each other’s flesh. The wormhole swirled into a dizzying array around them, mirroring their self-destruction.
Cyan groaned as the tension inside him snapped, another release so intense it left him breathless .
Suddenly the swirling colors surrounding them began to fade, the frenetic twisting easing as if the universe had decided to catch its breath. Cyan could feel it—time reasserting itself, the weight of existence settling back into place, pulling them from the storm. He rolled off Elaina, both of them panting, bodies spent yet still buzzing.
He felt it coming in now—the ache of overuse in his joints and muscles. How long had they been doing this?
Cyan pushed himself up, then lifted Elaina. She was limp as he strapped her into her seat, securing the harness around her. Once he was sure she was secure, he took the pilot’s seat, trying to get his head on straight.
The viewport revealed the colors starting to part, giving way to the darkness of space beyond.
There, in the distance, the faint glow of Gaia emerged, a shimmering blue-green orb against a black canvas.
“Is that it?” Elaina whispered, her voice small.
“Yes.” Cyan nodded, a tightness forming in his chest. This had been home. The last time he saw it was a visit before the sword pulled him to Earendel. Over a century in what to him felt like mere weeks.
He thought of the family he had left behind, lost to time and distance. Gaia was a reminder of everything that once was—people who were now only ghosts. He thought of the forests and fields he had longed to return to, and did, only now they would be empty of everyone he once knew. He felt the weight of that loss now, a hollow ache that ran deep, even as Gaia’s familiar sight brought a pang of nostalgia.
But right now, as they drifted out of the wormhole and into the grasp of reality once more, Cyan focused on the warmth of Elaina’s presence beside him.
“We made it,” Cyan murmured, his eyes locked on the distant planet. The ship continued forward, the thrusters engaging in a low hum as he set a descent course. Cyan exhaled slowly, the tension in his muscles gradually loosening.
The ship moved steadily toward the planet, and a strange sense of calm settled over him. The chaos behind him still echoed in his mind. But something told him that ahead lay the place he was supposed to be.
He looked over at Elaina. She was exhausted, eyes half-closed with sweaty strands of hair stuck to her face. They would rest, soon.
The sword had taken him from Gaia and brought him back to it, only this time he was not alone.