Chapter 6
Danitalin
It was impossible to describe what it felt like to be touched by someone and not be overwhelmed by their feelings.
After the harrowing last couple of days, I was so raw, so sensitive that this abrupt quietness came as a shock.
I knew there were a lot of things going wrong all around me, and even my body was a mess, screaming in pain.
And yet… I felt an odd sense of peace unfurl inside my chest.
This brute of a Rummicaron—huge, scarred, and armed to his many freaking teeth—had hauled me out of the research facility like I was some prize booty.
Then we were in the jungle, and the calm he anchored me to seemed to spread until it engulfed me.
Vaguely, I knew I could hear shooting going on, things exploding, people screaming.
There was the thundering thud and thump of something huge…
None of it made much of an impression; they were blurs of noise that barely existed at all inside the bubble of quietness I’d suddenly found myself in.
Why had I never considered how peaceful it could be for an empath to be surrounded by beings who didn’t feel?
They should teach that to us in university, the ultimate restful vacation: visit one of the six dozen Rummicaron worlds and recharge those frayed empathy pathways with a dose of silence.
Was it truly silent, though? I had always wondered that, because I simply couldn’t imagine existing without feeling.
He was breathing in a slow and steady rhythm, his boots nearly silent as he walked across the soft jungle dirt.
Plants unfurled their thick leaves like fingers and stroked across his sleek black armor.
I admired how his muscles were thick and heavy, packed to a solid frame that would have been terrifying if he weren’t holding me to his shoulder so very gently.
It was the weight of his palm, which covered nearly all of my back with solid warmth.
It was comforting, protective—the way he gripped me—and he’d angled me carefully so I wasn’t resting on my dislocated shoulder.
Shifting my attention to my shoulder was a bad idea, a very bad one.
The adrenaline from the chaos, Jeltom’s shooting, and D’aron’s terrible killing intent was wearing off.
With it came the pain, harsh, crippling.
It was one of the worst things I’d ever felt.
Tears sprang to my eyes, and a whimper slipped from my throat, one I tried to swallow.
I might think that big hand felt protective, but I could not trust my empathic senses to read the truth of that.
What was it he’d said when he barged into the lab?
“Are you Danitalin Hiraza? We’re here to rescue you?
” I wasn’t sure if he’d used the word rescue or retrieve now, and that made all the difference.
Retrieve could be very bad, it could mean he was just next in line after D’aron to get hold of me for my ability to make this cure.
Even if I was starting to doubt myself—doubt that I could do it—that didn’t matter as long as they believed it.
I fought back another whimper, and this time, I failed; the pain was excruciating.
The Rummicaron jerked to a halt at the sound, freezing in place but not doing anything else for several seconds.
Was he waiting for me to do it again? I bit my lip hard and swallowed the next wave of pain, but tears stung my eyes and began dripping along my cheeks.
As I was upside down, they ran past my temples and into my hairline.
In the distance—very vaguely—I could still hear the sounds of guns and lasers, but it was so muted I knew he’d put a lot of distance between us and the fight. The only other sounds were those of his steady breathing and the jungle, as it held its breath and waited for calm to return.
The hand on my back shifted, and for a short moment, I was drawn away from the pain and focused only on the shift of those big fingers along my spine.
He lowered me slowly, gliding my body along his wide chest within the circle of his arms. I was unsteady on my feet, and though I didn’t want to, the pain that jarred through my body into my shoulder made me whimper again.
His face was so foreign from mine, and I realized how much I relied on the things I felt to know what people were thinking.
I could not read him; he was a gray face with a sharp jaw and too wide of a mouth.
His eyes were small and dark, and his nose was wide and blunt.
He was darker gray at the top of his bare skull and paler at his throat, but that pale bit didn’t make him look soft.
I wasn’t prepared for the slightly rough texture of his thumb as he wiped it along the corner of my eye, straight into my hairline, as he followed the path of my tears.
Something in his face shifted—grew harsher—but I couldn’t tell what that meant.
Was it a frown? Was he upset? Or was he just confused? I had no clue.
“You cry?” he said. His voice was deep and heavy, rumbling through my chest and making me aware of how closely pressed together he’d kept us.
Was that to hold me steady, protect me, or cage me?
I should have paid more attention to the stroke of that thumb, but I’d gotten focused on his face as I wondered what he was thinking.
The warmth of his palm, sliding down to cup my dislocated shoulder, was fast—too fast to fully register.
Then a wrench came, sharp and sudden. I shouted, completely unprepared for the abrupt twist of my dislocated joint.
It popped back into place with a sickening noise, and the pain went from sharp and immediate to dull and throbbing.
My scream petered out into a hiss, and I flicked my eyes from where they’d jerked to my shoulder back to his face.
I felt something then—so light, so vague—that I thought it might be an echo of the things I’d been overloaded with the past few days.
I couldn’t even decipher it enough to give the feeling a name.
“You’re a screamer, are you?” he said mildly, and a dangerous heat flared into my cheeks, catching me completely by surprise.
I knew he wasn’t talking about that, but somehow my mind flashed to orgasms and silk sheets, and…
him. Naked, gray, beastly large compared to me, and so blessedly quiet that I could feel me.
His gaze went from the wetness at my eyes to my cheeks, as if he sensed their sudden warmth, and then to my mouth.
His head tilted slightly to the side, definitely inquisitive, I hoped.
“But you don’t say much else, do you?” His hand slid from my abused shoulder back up the column of my throat, and this time his thumb lightly touched the cut on my busted lip.
Oh, right, he hadn’t been thinking about kissing me; he was just looking at my other injury.
“I say what needs saying,” I told him. That made something that perhaps resembled a smile tilt the corner of his mouth up.
Rummicaron didn’t smile, as a rule, so I wasn’t quite sure if I was seeing that right.
He didn’t feel like amusement, but if there was something deep beneath the self-control, my senses were too burned out to pick it up right now.
“Fair enough,” he agreed. “You smell of blood. Let me clean that up.” He lowered his head, and for an insane moment, I truly believed he was going to lick my lip with his tongue.
His mouth did open, and I saw the flicker of sharp teeth, but he was only bending down to get a pouch on his belt.
He withdrew a small wound-cleansing pad from it and used it to dab at the cut on my lip.
He made a hmming noise, deep in the back of his throat, that was so Aderian—and so alien at the same time—because it was deeper, lower.
“I’ll take care of this bruising with my tissue regenerator later, but your scream might have called attention to our position. We should move.”
I was still untangling the information in that sentence when he swept me back into his arms. My feet left the ground, but this time I was sideways—legs dangling over one arm, torso cradled by the other.
He was already moving by the time I’d processed this new change.
It was certainly much more comfortable, upright, and intimate.
Against my heels, I could feel the brush of the massive laser cannon he had hanging from a strap on his back.
Chin on his shoulder, I could also see the sharp fin rising from between his shoulder blades.
He didn’t talk much either, quietly walking through the jungle and setting us along a meandering, twisting path.
I had a good sense of direction, and I’d been in this jungle countless times since we’d gotten here.
He was circling back toward the compound, or perhaps to a site very near to it.
“Where are you taking me?” I found myself asking.
He had not been threatening so far, so I was going to have to trust that his actions spoke for him.
“To the shuttles, and hopefully off this damn world. Why would a bunch of scientists even come here? You’ve got no business sitting on a powder keg like Radin.
” There was such grumpy disapproval in his tone that I was certain he had to be feeling it too, but still, nothing.
I couldn’t recall if Rummicaron mimicked the sound of emotions in their dialogue or not.
I knew I shouldn’t answer with the truth.
If he didn’t know it, it could put a brand-new target on my back.
If he did know, he’d call me out on it, I hoped.
“I go where they order me to go for the research,” I said.
It was a blatant lie, and I knew I was terrible at lying, but he seemed to take my words at face value, nodding along.