Chapter 6 #2
The bay with the big war-robots. She stopped at the threshold, her skin prickling.
The ball had rolled in under the shadow of the big robots, and they hadn’t gotten any smaller since her last visit.
They crouched in their rows, all dark metal and don’t-touch, and she was about to call the bot back and write the ball off as a casualty when she noticed it wasn’t going for the ball at all.
It was creeping toward one of the big machines.
One she hadn’t noticed the first time she was here, because it was folded down small, its massive limbs tucked in tight against its body and its lights dark.
Every other machine in the bay stood ready.
But it was like this one had shut itself down… or had been shut down.
The little robot stopped a few inches from it and made a low, humming thrum, so heavy with loneliness she felt it in her back teeth.
‘Daae and his drakeen did not retreat.’
Kellat’s words at the ceremony came back to her. She’d assumed a drakeen was some kind of animal, a war-horse or whatever. Her eyes widened as she looked up at the folded machine. Was this a drakeen?
Shit, she’d been standing in a room full of them the whole time.
They’d shipped the warrior home to his clan today. Nobody had shipped his machine anywhere. It was just here, in the dark, holding itself. She looked at the little robot again and suddenly saw the similarities.
Was it… Her hand covered her mouth as she crept closer, seeing the opened hatch at the top of the bigger machine. Shit, her little robot was part of the bigger one? Its brain, maybe?
“Was he yours?” she whispered as she reached it. “The warrior they sent home today. Was he your person?”
The little bot pressed its head against the giant’s leg and made a lost clicking sound, and her eyes burned at the back with tears.
Crouching down beside the pair, she didn’t say anything else.
There wasn’t anything to say. She didn’t know anything about alien technology, but the silence where somebody used to be? Yeah. She was fluent in that.
She stayed there a long time, one hand resting lightly on the little bot’s back, keeping them both company.
Then the door hissed open behind her, and she nearly jumped out of her skin.
The little robot bolted behind her ankles as she stood and turned to find Nivaak, the smiling alien warrior she’d been talking to at the wake, behind her.
His smile had gone loose at the edges now, and he was swaying just a fraction as he came toward her. The smell hit her before he was even close, and her nose wrinkled. Sharp and fermented, the alien equivalent of a guy who’d been doing shots at a funeral, because that seemed to be universal.
“Hey,” he said, too loud, the word booming around the metal arches. “Found you.”
Great. Her stomach dipped, but she kept her voice light, the reflex worn smooth by years of talking drunk men back into their corners. “Nivaak. Hey. Everything okay?”
“Fine. Just… fine.” He stepped closer. And then closer than that, until his chest was nearly brushing her shoulder and she was looking up at a very large, very drunk alien with liquor-fumes rolling off him. “You looked… really something tonight. In that dress.”
“Thanks.” She eased back a step. All casual-like… no sudden movements. “It’s late. I should probably get back to my room.”
“Wait.” His hand landed on her waist, more a lean than a grab like he needed her to hold him up. “I just… I can’t stop thinking about it. You. About you.”
She winced. “I’m sorry, I really need to go—“
He lunged, and his mouth crashed into hers. It was wrong, all of it wrong. It wasn’t even a kiss. It was a collision of lips. For one horrible second she froze, shock locking every joint she owned. Then her hands found his chest, and she shoved. Hard.
“No!” She scrubbed the back of her hand across her mouth, her heart slamming. “Nivaak, no! Stop!”
“What?” He blinked at her, glassy and confused.
The only warning they got was a rush of displaced air. Then a snarling wall of muscle and leather slammed into the space between them, so big it blotted out the light. She didn’t need to see his face to know exactly who it was.
Kellat.
He yanked Nivaak away from her, then planted himself in front of her, shoulders blocking out the entire bay.
“What the draanth are you doing?” His voice had dropped low and dangerous.
“I was just—“
“Get. Out.”
It didn’t stay quiet. Of course it didn’t.
Two more crew came running in, drawn by the shouting, and then the bay was a wall of noise…
Nivaak trying to splutter explanations, all the huge angry aliens shouting over each other, at least one of them suggesting that the only answer was to send Nivaak out of the airlock.
“He didn’t hurt me!” She stepped around Kellat, waving her arms at the lot of them. “He’s just drunk! It was a stupid mistake, okay? Leave him alone!”
But nobody was listening. She was a tiny human trying to out-shout a room full of warriors the size of barns. So she turned, planting herself in front of Kellat and glaring up at him.
“Leave him alone!”
Kellat looked down at her, his eyes dark and stormy, then he closed his hand around her wrist and all but dragged her off down the corridor away from the argument.
“Hey!” She had to half-jog to keep up with him. “You’re all being ridiculous! He was hammered, Kellat, it wasn’t… Where are we going?”
He didn’t answer her, just carried on walking down a corridor she didn’t recognize, his jaw set. Then they reached a door, and it hissed open. He hauled her through it, and it slid shut behind them, cutting the noise of the ship off dead.
Her eyes widened as she looked around. His quarters. They were in his quarters.
She spun around, and everything went up at once—the hurt from the med bay, the whiplash of the whole night, the icky feeling of Nivaak’s mouth still on hers—the whole mess boiling over in one go.
“What is your problem?” Her voice cracked like a whip. “You treat me like fragile glass one minute and a nuisance the next! You lock me in rooms, you drag me around, you almost kiss me, and then you run away… so which is it? Do you even like me, or am I just a fucking medical project?”
Kellat stood by the door, his chest heaving and his gaze locked on her like she was the only thing in the galaxy.
“You are not a project.” It came out as a growled rasp.
“Then stop acting like I am!” She stepped toward him. “You almost kissed me! You actually almost did it, and then you walked out and left me standing there like an idiot, and now you’re—“
He moved, and she didn’t even see it coming.
One second he was across the room, and her back was against the door.
His palm slammed into the door behind her, his body caging hers, and her words died in her throat.
Heat rolled off him in waves, his scent wrapping around her…
leather and something warm and male, and her knees went loose as her breath hitched.
He didn’t say anything. He just looked at her, violet-blue eyes moving over her face. There was nothing clinical left in them, nothing careful. There was just raw hunger and heat.
His fingers slid into the hair at the nape of her neck.
He didn’t hesitate.
His mouth came down on hers, hard and certain, and oh…
It was everything she’d been trying not to imagine since she woke up staring at his perfect face.
Making a small, broken sound against his lips, she surged up into him, arms winding around his neck, her fingers digging into the leather over his shoulders.
He groaned, deep and guttural, and hauled her closer, his arm locking around her waist until her toes barely brushed the floor.
His thigh slid between hers, pressing her back into the wall, and she arched into him because there was nowhere else she wanted to be.
The whimper broke free as he took her mouth like he’d been starving for it.
His hand tightened in her hair, tipping her head to open her up to him. She went, gladly, drowning in the heat and the taste of him and the sheer solid reality of his body against hers.
Pulling back an inch, he dropped his forehead to rest against hers, and they stood there breathing each other’s air.
“Mine,” he growled, the word vibrating against her lips.
She didn’t have an answer for that. Not one made of words, anyway.
So she fisted her hands in his jacket and pulled him back down to kiss him again.