Anhara
Yes.
The word hung between us. Simple. Final. Everything.
Kallum’s eyes went dark. That predator stillness I’d learned to recognize, the one that meant he was holding himself back by threads. His hand was still on my face, fingers trembling.
“Not here,” he said. His voice was rough. “Not in the medical bay.”
“Then take me somewhere else.”
He stood slowly, testing his body. The wound in his side was closed, pink and healing. He was still weak, but he was standing. Reaching for my hand.
The corridor was quiet. Late cycle. Most of the crew asleep or pretending to be. Our footsteps and nothing else.
He held my hand the whole way. Not leading me. Walking beside me. And his hand was shaking.
I looked down at it. The fingers that had killed a dozen men on the ridge, that had held a rifle steady through six hours of bleeding, that had cracked open the Sovereign’s vault. Shaking.
Because this mattered more than any of that.
We reached his door. He pressed his palm to the scanner but didn’t push it open. Looked at me. One breath. Two. The last moment before everything became permanent.
I reached past him and opened it myself.
His quarters were simple. Sparse. Functional. Bed. Desk. Storage. A viewport showing the stars.
The door sealed behind us with a soft hiss.
“Anhara.” My name on his lips, rough with want.
“Stop talking.”
I kissed him. Not soft. Not gentle. I kissed him like I’d been wanting to since I watched him almost die. Since I held his hand through hyperspace and prayed to gods I didn’t believe in. His hands fisted in my hair, tilting my head back, his mouth demanding everything I had to give.
He walked me backward toward the bed. My knees hit the edge. I fell, and he followed, his body covering mine. The weight of him was perfect. Solid. Real. Alive.
“I’ve wanted this,” he said against my throat.
His tongue dragged across my pulse point, and I gasped.
That feeling from the farmhouse, from our first time together, flooded back.
His saliva doing something to my nerve endings.
Making everything sharper. More intense.
“Since that first night in your kitchen. Since you looked at me like I was worth seeing.”
“You are.” My voice came out breathy. Wrong. I couldn’t think when he was licking my neck like that. “Kallum...”
“I know what you need.”
He stripped my shirt over my head. His mouth found my collarbone, tongue tracing the ridge of bone, and I arched into him. Every place his lips touched buzzed with sensation. The euphoric agent in his saliva was flooding my system, turning my skin into a live wire.
My breast band followed. He cupped my breasts in his hands, thumbs brushing my nipples, and I moaned. When he sucked one peak into his mouth, I nearly came off the bed.
“Sensitive,” he murmured against my skin. “Good.”
He worked his way down my body. Stomach. Hip bone. The edge of my pants, which he peeled off with deliberate slowness. My underwear followed. I was bare beneath him, and he knelt between my legs, looking at me with those dark eyes.
“Beautiful,” he said.
“Kallum, please...”
“Please what?”
“Touch me. I need...”
He lowered his head.
The first stroke of his tongue made me cry out. The euphoric saliva combined with the direct stimulation was overwhelming. He licked me slowly, learning what made me gasp, what made me shake. When he found my clit and circled it with his tongue, my fingers twisted in the sheets.
“Oh god, oh...” I couldn’t form words. Could only feel.
He slid one finger inside me, careful of his claws, and I clenched around him immediately. He added a second, curling them to find that spot that made stars explode behind my eyes.
“That’s it,” he murmured against my clit. “Let go.”
The orgasm hit me like a wave. I screamed his name, my body convulsing, my thighs clamping around his head. He worked me through it, tongue and fingers relentless, drawing it out until I was sobbing.
He didn’t stop.
“Kallum, I can’t... it’s too...”
“You can.” He sucked my clit into his mouth and pressed his fingers deep, and I shattered again. “Again.”
By the time he finally pulled back, I’d lost count. Three? Four? I was boneless, trembling, my entire body humming with sensation. He crawled up my body, kissing a path from my navel to my throat.
“I need to taste you,” I managed.
“Later.” He shed his clothes, and I watched through heavy-lidded eyes.
Lean muscle. Gray skin marked with scars.
Those black sigils tracing patterns across his chest and arms, dark against gray.
And his cock, already hard, that impossible Vinduthi anatomy I remembered from the farmhouse.
Thick. Broad triangular head. Soft flanges along the shaft that had driven me insane.
“I want you inside me.”
“Are you sure you’re ready?”
I reached for him. Wrapped my hand around his length and stroked, feeling the flanges flex under my palm. He groaned, his whole body shuddering.
“I’m ready.”
He positioned himself at my entrance. The broad head pressed against me, and even soaked and wanting, the stretch was intense. He pushed in slowly, inch by devastating inch, each ridge catching and dragging against my walls.
“So tight,” he breathed. “So perfect.”
I couldn’t answer. Could only feel him filling me, stretching me, claiming me even without the bite. When he bottomed out, when I’d taken all of him, we both stopped breathing.
“Move,” I demanded. “Please, Kallum, move.”
He did. Long, deep strokes that had me seeing stars. Each withdrawal dragged those flanges against places that made me clench around him. Each thrust seated him impossibly deep.
“Yes,” I gasped, nails raking down his back. “Yes, like that, don’t stop...”
He shifted angles, hooked my leg over his hip, and suddenly he was hitting something new. Something that made me scream. I came again, harder than before, my body clenching around him in waves.
“That’s it,” he growled. “Give me everything.”
Before I could recover, he shifted, hands gripping my hips, and pulled me up over him, settling me on top. The new angle drove him even deeper.
“Ride me,” he said. “Take what you need.”
I braced my hands on his chest and moved. Slow at first, finding the rhythm, feeling those flanges drag against my walls from a new direction. His hands gripped my hips, guiding but not controlling. Letting me set the pace.
“God, you feel...” I couldn’t finish. Each time I sank down, he hit that spot deep inside that made my vision blur.
“I know.” His thumb found my clit, circling as I moved. “I can see it on your face. Every time I go deep.”
I rode him harder. Faster. Chasing the building pressure in my core. His eyes never left mine, dark and hungry, watching me fall apart above him.
The orgasm crashed through me, sudden and devastating. I cried out, my rhythm stuttering, my whole body clenching around him. He fucked up into me, prolonging it, drawing sounds from my throat I didn’t recognize.
Before the aftershocks faded, he pulled out and flipped me.
“Turn over.”
I did. Hands and knees, trembling, barely able to hold myself up. He entered me again from behind, and the angle was different. Deeper. Fuller. Those flanges hitting new places, creating new patterns of sensation.
One hand tangled in my hair, pulling my head back. The other slipped between my legs, finding my clit. The dual stimulation was too much. I was going to die. I was going to come apart and never reassemble.
“Kallum, please...”
“Please what?”
“I need...” I couldn’t form words. Could only feel. His cock driving into me, his fingers on my clit, his breath hot against my ear. “I need you to...”
“To claim you?” His fangs grazed my shoulder. Sharp. Promising. “To make you mine forever?”
“Yes. God, yes.”
He drove into me harder. Faster. The orgasm building in my core was different from the others. Deeper. Like it started in my bones and radiated outward. Every nerve was firing. Every cell was singing.
“I love you,” he said against my skin. “I love you, and I’m going to make you mine, and nothing in this universe will ever take you from me.”
“Do it.” I was sobbing. Shaking. So close. “Please, Kallum, do it now.”
His fangs sank into the juncture of my neck and shoulder.
Pain, bright and sharp. Then his saliva flooded the wound, and everything changed. The orgasm that had been building exploded into something beyond physical. I could feel him. Not his body but his essence, pouring into me through the bite. His love. His possession. His absolute, complete claim.
The bond snapped into place.
I was dimly aware of screaming. Of my body convulsing around him. Of Kallum roaring my name as he found his own release. But it was all distant, unimportant compared to the feeling of being claimed. Being changed. Being his.
Darkness crept in from the edges of my vision. My limbs felt heavy, disconnected. The last thing I heard was Kallum’s voice, rough with emotion: “Mine. Finally, completely mine.”
Then nothing.
I dreamed of shadows.
Black lines spreading across my skin like roots seeking water. They burned where they touched, but it wasn’t pain. It was change. I could feel them threading through me, rewriting something fundamental, replacing human code with something older. Something his.
My blood ran hot, then cold, then hot again. I heard my own heartbeat slowing, the rhythm shifting, two beats where there had been one. The double pulse of a Vinduthi heart taking root in my chest.
Colors bloomed behind my closed eyes. Ultraviolet. Infrared. Beautiful, unreal spectrums. My ears filled with sounds I’d never heard before. The hum of the ship’s engines. Footsteps three corridors away. Kallum’s breathing beside me, steady and close.
I dreamed of Kallum. His voice in the darkness, telling me I was safe. His hands on my face, gentle even though I couldn’t see him. His presence, constant and steady, an anchor in the storm of transformation.
I dreamed of home.
Not the farm. Not the fields I’d walked for all those years. Something different. Someone different.
When I woke, the first thing I saw was his face.