Chapter 10
Sorik
She climbed. Watching her curvy ass sway above me was a torment I had not anticipated.
She was good at it. That shouldn't have surprised me — Sloane was good at everything she turned her full attention to, with the focused, unhesitating competence of a person who treated every new problem as already half-solved.
She read the rock face with the same rapid intelligence she gave her scanner data.
Dark eyes tracked holds three moves ahead.
Her body adapted to the cliff's geometry with a practical grace that had nothing to do with formal training and everything to do with a mind that processed spatial information faster than most warriors I'd served beside.
She was extraordinary.
She was also twelve meters above me on a forty-meter cliff face on the most electrically active rock formation in Stormfall Valley.
The pre-surge atmosphere built charge around us by the minute.
Every crystal vein within thirty meters of our climb path held hours of stored storm energy that would discharge into the first conductive surface that disturbed it. That would be me.
The second most conductive surface on this cliff moved twelve meters above me.
Sloane’s jaw was set with determination. Her dark hair lifted at the ends with the static already built in the air. I could see the faint, luminous traces of Skybond marks on the back of her neck, even from here.
My marks.
The thought moved through me like a direct strike — white and immediate and total, lighting every node simultaneously. Possessive. Aware. Something deeper. Something the Skybond had written into my bone marrow overnight.
I knew the exact weight of her in my arms.
I knew the sound she made when she gave up control.
I knew what it felt like to bury my cock deep. Steal her soft cries with a kiss. Fill her with my power and my seed at the same time.
That knowledge lived in my hands. My chest. My cock.
My storm nodes with a permanence that no amount of wishful thinking or ignoring would ever take from me.
If she decided to leave me behind, I would mourn her loss for the rest of my life.
Never bond with another. We were one flesh now.
One frequency. Bonded and complete. Two halves of one whole.
My skin remembered hers with a precision that made the space between us feel like an open wound.
I needed to touch her.
The need was not new. It had been there since the storm, since her ship crashed.
Since the first moment I felt her presence.
it solidified the first time I saw her, was close enough to sense her unique electrical signature move through my nodes.
That moment, my entire nervous system reoriented around her like a compass finding north.
Fucking her, claiming her, had shifted things.
The current running between us was different now.
Before the cave, I’d fought the need to be close to her.
To protect her. To touch her. But I had been able to fight those urges.
Control myself. The initial stages of the new Skybond had been recognition.
The bone-deep certainty of the bond forming. The pull of destiny. Fate. Her.
Now? She was part of me. My need was constant. Hungry. Relentless.
I could not stop looking at her. Could not stop wanting. Watching. Obsessing.
Since the cave I was — I had no word for what I was.
Changed was too small a word. Remade was closer.
The Skybond had done what the elders described, what the bonded warriors of Sol'Virex had tried to prepare me for. My mate’s energy had reorganized something fundamental in my body.
My mind. My entire system. Had taken what I was before and given me a new center of gravity.
Her.
I had read about other worlds. Studied the archives. My people had crossed the dark between stars before my grandfather's grandfather drew breath. Had walked on foreign ground under foreign stars and catalogued what they found there. We had looked at what the universe offered.
We had chosen to come home.
Chosen this ground. Chosen the storm. Realized we were one with our home world and the planetary consciousness that ran through our nodes like breath. Our ancestors traveled the stars. Our people had seen other worlds and found nothing that mattered as much as our home. Our way of life.
I understood that choice differently now.
Her heartbeat was the first thing I'd registered when I woke. The first thing I checked now was her position on the cliff. I could feel her marks from here — the slow warm pulse of them moving through the bond between us like a second heartbeat running alongside mine.
I needed to touch her the way I needed air to breathe. Water to drink.
Not want. Not preference.
Need.
Fundamental. Physiological. No amount of discipline could conquer the fire that burned in me.
For her. Only her. My years of warrior's training held me in check — barely.
I felt the cost of my restraint in my clenched jaw, my trembling hands and the nodes along my spine that pulsed their awareness with every beat of her heart.
She climbed above me.
Unprotected. Exposed.
Every energy surge that moved through this cliff between her boots and the valley floor was a variable I could not control.
Fear for her pressed against the inside of my ribs with a force that had no true name.
It was not a warrior's calculation. It was older than that.
More fundamental. The primal compulsion of a bonded male whose female was too far above him on an electrified cliff face and moving further away with every hold she took.
I managed it. Barely. For her.
I thought about her ship. Wrecked in the valley below.
I thought about her people — their technology, their salvage crews, the beacon she spoke of counting down to a response I had not yet found a way to prevent.
My people had built ships once. Had solved the problems her people still worked toward.
I knew what their technology could do. I also knew, with the calm certainty of a man who had spent eleven years assessing threats to this valley, that knowing what something could do was the first step toward knowing what it could not.
I needed to speak with the other warriors.
I needed to see her ship.
I needed her to trust me. Give me time.
She hadn't agreed to that yet. But she would.
Because the alternative was leaving. Because I had felt her nervous system against mine in the dark.
Because I knew — with the same bone-deep certainty with which I knew this cliff, this valley, the electrical signature of every storm that had ever moved through this rock — that she did not want to leave.
She was afraid. That I understood.
Fear was a reasonable response to a bond this powerful. I had felt it too — in the moment the bond formed and my entire understanding of my own life reorganized itself around am alien female, a human woman who had fallen from the sky.
But I had looked at everything the universe had to offer.
I had made my calculation. Made my choice. She was mine. I would not let her go.
I was waiting for her to make hers.
"The vein at your right hand," I called up. "Two meters ahead. Don't use those holds."
She looked down at me.
Those dark eyes found mine through the charged air. My awareness of her bypassed every other sensory input. I sighed in relief when she moved to her left. She tracked to the crystal vein threading through the rock face to her right. Adjusted her route without debate.
"The deposit layer starts here," I yelled. The wind had increased enough that I needed to raise my voice. "Watch the surface. The crystal matrix runs through the obsidian in veins — the rock around each vein holds static charge. You'll feel the pressure build before your hand makes contact."
She pulled herself up another hold.
Her breath was controlled and even. The morning light moved across the planes of her face — the strong line of her jaw set with concentration, the dark intelligence of her eyes reading the rock three moves ahead, the marks at her collarbones pulsing their warm luminous rhythm in the pre-storm light.
My marks.
On her skin.
I wanted to do this for her, leave her safely in our sleeping cave.
Stubborn, sexy female had refused. We’d argued about it last night until her face turned a dark reddish pink and her heart raced so fast, I’d feared it would burst.
I was Commander of the Storm Guard, accustomed to instant obedience.
My instinct to protect my female, to force her compliance on this issue, was nearly overwhelming, yet I refused to force an alien female to obey me, especially not the one gifted to me by the storm,.
I had sensed in her mind that if I had tried, I would have lost her trust forever.
She was alien, a female from a strange world with stranger ways. I made the decision to adapt.
Then I had fucked her until her limbs trembled and her eyes were so glazed with pleasure she could barely move.
Much better use of my time.
At this moment, with the wind attempting to tear us both off the side of this cliff, I considered the possibility that I had miscalculated. I should have tied her up and left her in the cave, retrieved the crystals she needed on my own.
My hands tightened on the obsidian until the rock edge bit into my palms.
Good.
The pain was useful. The pain was something to hold onto that wasn't her.
"This looks good." She tucked her scanner into a pocket on her suit.
Her hand hovered two inches from a crystal-laden section of the face.
Not touching. Even from here I could feel the energy field radiating from the deposit.
Noted the slight tension in her wrist where she held herself back — the careful precision of someone who had learned, efficiently and not without cost, to respect what this planet could do.