Chapter 12 Territorial Defense #3
“You were going to fight them.” She steps closer. Her voice drops to something raw. “Physically fight them. Three armed collectors—one of them eight feet of armored chitin with four arms—and you were going to tear into them with your bare claws.”
“Yes.”
The word hangs between us. No qualification. No apology.
“If they had touched you,” I say, and my voice drops into harmonics I can’t control, “if they had tried to enforce that detention clause, if that Vaxillan had put one chitin-plated limb on you—yes. I would have fought all three. With witnesses present and consequences guaranteed.”
“That’s insane.”
“Probably.”
“You could have been arrested. Charged. Lost the station, lost custody of Tavia—”
“I know what I could have lost.” I step closer. The distance between us shrinks to nothing. “And I calculated the variables. Every single one. The way I calculate every system on this station. And the math was clear.”
“What math?”
“That losing you would be worse than losing anything else.”
Her composure breaks. Not slowly—all at once, like atmospheric shielding failing in a Cat-5 storm. She crashes into me, hands fisting in my shirt, face pressed against my chest, and she’s shaking and laughing and possibly crying and the sounds she makes are wrecked and raw and mine.
I catch her. Pull her tight against me, and the contact after hours of forced distance detonates every claiming instinct I’ve been holding back since that ship appeared on sensors.
My markings flare. Not danger-bright. Claiming-bright. Deep gold patterns that pulse in rhythms older than language, broadcasting possession and protection and mine, mine, mine to every cell in my body.
“Cetus.” She pulls back enough to look at my face. Her eyes are wet and blazing. “Don’t you ever risk everything for me like that again.”
“That’s not a promise I can make.”
“Cetus—”
I kiss her.
Not careful. Not gentle. Not the measured approach of a scientist managing variables.
This is the adrenaline dump finding its target, days of pent-up need converting into something primal and uncontrolled.
My hands grip her waist and haul her against me, and she gasps into my mouth—that sound, the one I’ve been imagining since the night I scored grooves in my shower tiles—and the reality of it obliterates whatever restraint I had left.
She kisses me back with matching desperation.
Her fingers rake through my hair, across the markings on my neck, and when her nails drag over the bioluminescent patterns the sensation rockets through me—white-hot, blinding, every nerve ending lit up at once.
The markings are wired directly into pleasure centers that exist for exactly this: a partner’s touch, cascading responses, rational thought gone.
I growl. The sound reverberates through harmonics that make the deck plates hum beneath our feet.
Her back hits the wall. I don’t remember moving her there, but my body is operating on protocols older than conscious thought.
One hand braces beside her head, claws sinking into the station plating with a shriek of metal.
The other slides down her hip, her thigh, fingers hooking behind her knee and pulling her leg up against my waist—and the position presses us together in a way that makes us both groan.
“Cetus—God—your hands—”
My claws. Extended again. Pricking the fabric of her pants, tiny points of controlled danger against the soft flesh of her thigh. I should retract them. Should be careful. Should—
She wraps her fingers around my wrist and holds my hand where it is.
“Don’t,” she breathes against my mouth. “Don’t you dare pull back right now.”
Something snaps. Not a restraint I chose to release—a limit I didn’t know existed, shattering under the combined weight of her permission and my need.
I pin her against the wall with my full weight and she moans—God, that sound, the one I’ve been fantasizing about for days—and my hips roll forward on instinct, grinding against her, and the friction sends white-hot feedback through my entire system because the ridges are responding to her.
Swelling. Engorging. Each node along the underside of my cock thickening with blood, becoming more pronounced, more textured. Stimulation no human male can replicate. They press against my pants in a rigid line that catches against the heat between her thighs, and Dove’s eyes go wide.
“Oh.” Her breath stutters. “That’s—I can feel—”
“Yes.” My forehead drops to hers. The word comes out guttural, barely language. “They respond to you. To proximity. To pressure. To the sound you just made.”
She rolls her hips. Experimentally. Grinding against the ridge-line through two layers of fabric, and my vision whites out. Each node catches against her center—friction and pressure and feedback cascading through my nervous system in waves that make my claws score deeper into the wall.
“Dove.” Her name is a warning. “If you do that again—”
She does it again. Deliberately. Harder. Her hands gripping my shoulders for leverage, her head tipping back against the wall, lips parted, eyes dark and half-lidded and watching my face come apart.
“Maybe I don’t want you to stop,” she whispers.
My mouth finds her throat. Her pulse hammers against my lips, wild and fast, and I drag my teeth across the spot—the specialized canines that ache when I look at her.
The bite mark from days ago has faded to a shadow.
The urge to replace it, to press down and claim and mark, roars through me hard enough to make my jaw tremble.
“Mine.” The word comes out in harmonics so low the air vibrates. So low the monitors on the far wall flicker. “Say it.”
“Yours.” No hesitation. No calculation. “I’m yours. I’ve been yours since I carried your cargo in a storm and didn’t charge extra—”
I take her mouth, swallowing the rest, and lift her fully off the deck.
She wraps both legs around my waist, ankles locking at the small of my back, and the new angle presses her core flush against my cock.
The ridges swell further—engorging to their full, pronounced state, each node a quarter-inch of textured sensation that she can feel through every layer between us.
She breaks the kiss with a gasp. “They’re—oh God, they’re still—”
“Getting harder. Yes. They won’t stop until—” I can’t finish. Can’t explain what happens when the ridges lock during climax, what they do, what it means. Not with words. I want to show her.
My hand slides up her ribs under her shirt—bare skin under my palm, hot and yielding, my claws prickling lightly against her waist. She shivers.
My thumb traces the underside of her breast. She arches into me, pressing harder, and the friction of her body against the engorged ridges drags a sound out of my chest that is not a growl and not a moan and not anything I’ve ever made before.
Her fingers find the collar of my shirt and yank.
A button pings off the wall. Her palm lands flat on my bare chest—directly on the bioluminescent patterns—and my entire marking system detonates.
Gold light blazes so bright it casts sharp shadows down the corridor.
The pleasure is blinding, annihilating, her touch on the markings creating feedback loops that spiral through my nervous system and converge between my legs where the ridges pulse in time with my heartbeat.
“Mine,” I groan against her throat. “Say it again. Say you’re mine and I’ll give you everything—every ridge, every—”
“SPECIALIST STORM, COURIER FOXTON, THIS IS JUNCTION ONE. DO YOU COPY?”
Mother Morrison’s voice fills the operations center like a hull breach alarm.
We freeze.
Dove’s legs locked around my waist. My hand under her shirt.
My claws embedded in the wall at two separate points.
Gold light blazing from every marking on my body, pulsing in claiming frequencies that are probably registering on sensors three sectors away.
The ridge-line pressed against her center, swollen and aching and absolutely not something I can conceal.
“Please respond. I know you’re there—Pickles is transmitting biometric data that suggests you’re both very much alive and very much occupied.”
“Cetus,” Dove whispers. Her chest heaves against mine.
“I heard her.”
“We should—”
“I know.”
Neither of us moves. Five full seconds of shared agony—the knowledge that we have to stop, that we’re this close, that our bodies are screaming to finish what we started.
Dove unwraps her legs and slides down my body.
Every inch of the descent is exquisite torture—her center dragging along the ridge-line, each node catching and releasing against her as she lowers, and the sound she makes is quiet and involuntary and I will remember it in precise detail for the rest of my natural life.
I step back. Adjust my shirt over a situation that no amount of willpower is going to resolve. The ridges are fully engorged, visibly distending my pants, and they won’t retract for at least twenty minutes. Lividian biology does not accept “interrupted” as a valid command.
I hit the comm panel. My voice comes out wrecked. “Junction One, this is Station KS-7B. Go ahead, Mother.”
“Well, you sound like you’ve been running atmospheric diagnostics in full gravity.
” Mother Morrison’s voice carries twenty-three years of managing everyone else’s crises.
“I’ll keep this brief since I’m clearly interrupting something my medical officer keeps sending me alarming charts about. Three items.”
“She’s here,” I say, before she can ask.
“Of course she is. Item one: Inspector Luzrak has completed his analysis of the evidence package compiled by your station AI. Six hundred twelve exhibits of systematic fraud. He’s described it as, and I quote, ‘the most thorough prosecution brief I’ve seen from a non-legal entity, and several that I have. ’”
“Pickles will be insufferable,” Dove murmurs, tugging her shirt straight with unsteady hands.