Chapter 6 Talia #3
I feel the bond between us pulsing like a live wire, carrying sensation both ways, so that when he groans I feel the vibration of it in my own chest, and when I clench around him he swears under his breath in a language I don't recognize.
Through the view port behind the bed, the station rotates and the galaxy wheels past in silence, and somewhere out there my old life is still happening.
Still existing in a universe where I never stood in a black market auction and caught the eye of a syndicate lord.
That woman is eating breakfast with her father.
Going to work. Sleeping in sheets she bought herself in a room she chose.
That woman is dead. I killed her when I stepped forward.
I'm killing her again now, with every thrust, with every sound I make, with every second I don't ask him to stop.
I am the murderer and the corpse and the thing that grew from the grave, and the thing that grew has her legs wrapped around a man who owns her and is saying yes like she means it.
Because she means it.
His pace changes. Faster. The measured rhythm fracturing, his hips snapping against mine hard enough that the sound is obscene, wet and sharp in the quiet of the room, and I can feel it through the bond.
The enormous effort it costs him to hold himself together.
The way that effort is crumbling, piece by piece, not because he's losing control but because he's choosing to release it.
For me. Because of me. Because my body under his is the one thing in this station, in this empire he's built from blood and silence, that makes the leash slip.
I am doing this to him.
I am the thing that breaks the unbreakable man's control, and the power of that realization is almost as devastating as the orgasm building at the base of my spine.
His breath is ragged near my ear. His fingers dig into my hip hard enough to grind against bone and I don't flinch.
I arch into it. I want the bruise. I want to press it tomorrow and remember what it felt like to be the earthquake under a man who never trembles.
"Come for me." His voice is wrecked. Stripped of every layer of composure and command, and underneath all of it he sounds almost desperate, almost young, almost human. "I want to feel it."
I shatter.
Not like before. Not the sharp, violent decompression of the first orgasm he tore from me against the view port.
This one starts deeper. A pressure low in my center, building slow and massive like a gravitational collapse, and when it breaks it doesn't break outward.
It breaks inward. Pulls everything into itself.
My fingers go numb. My toes curl so hard the tendons in my feet ache.
The room dissolves at the edges, white and formless, and I hear myself saying his name.
Not the title. Not the surname the station whispers like a curse.
His actual name, the one that tastes different in my mouth than any word I've ever spoken, and his marks flare so bright that even behind my closed lids the world turns cyan.
"Fuck Zane."
He follows me.
The sound he makes is not the controlled groan of a man who parcels out his responses in measured doses.
It's raw. Torn loose from somewhere he keeps locked, somewhere no one gets to hear, and the cost of it is written in the way his whole body shudders against mine.
I feel him pulse inside me, hot and deep, and the bond does something cruel and beautiful.
It carries his release back to me like an echo in a sealed chamber, his pleasure layered over the aftershocks still rolling through my own body, sensation folding over sensation until I can't sort his from mine.
For one terrible, perfect, annihilating moment, I don't know where I end and he begins.
His forehead drops against my collarbone.
His breath comes in ragged pulls against my skin, each exhale damp and hot, and his heart is hammering so hard I can feel it through his chest where it presses against mine.
Two heartbeats. Out of sync. Then not. Then out again.
Like two clocks trying to agree on the same time and failing, and succeeding, and failing.
His hand is still on my hip. Still grinding into bone. I will be purple tomorrow. I hope I am.
Afterward, he carries me to the shower.
I could walk. My legs work, probably. But he lifts me without asking and takes me into the bathroom, which is all dark stone and recessed lighting and a shower wide enough for four people, and he turns on the water and holds me under it while the heat sinks into muscles I didn't know were clenched.
He washes me himself.
Methodical. Thorough. His hands soaped and careful, moving over every part of me with the clinical attention of someone performing a necessary task.
He washes my hair and his fingers in my scalp are firm enough to be real and gentle enough to make my throat ache.
He washes between my legs where I'm swollen and tender and his touch there is so careful that I have to close my eyes and press my forehead to the cool stone wall because if I look at his face while he does this, I will cry, and I have not cried since I arrived and I will not start now.
He doesn't speak. Neither do I.
The tenderness isn't in the words. It's in the staying.
In the warm water and the steady hands and the fact that when he finishes, he wraps me in a towel and carries me back to bed and the sheets have been changed, clean and cool and smelling of nothing, and he lays me down and pulls the covers over me and then lies beside me.
Not touching.
The space between us on the mattress is maybe six inches and it feels like the void outside the view port, vast and cold and full of things neither of us is ready to name.
I stare at the ceiling. His marks have dimmed to a low, steady glow, like embers banking for the night, and in the faint light I can see the shadows his body casts on the dark walls.
"This doesn't change anything," I say.
Silence. Long enough that I think he might not answer.
"It changes everything." His voice is quiet and certain and infuriating. "You just don't know it yet."
I want to argue. I want to roll over and put my back to him and prove that I am still the woman who was dragged onto this station in restraints, still defiant, still unbroken.
But my body is liquid and warm and the place where our bond connects us is humming with a low, steady contentment that isn't mine and isn't his but belongs to the thing between us.
I know before I open my eyes that he's gone. The bond tells me, a sense of distance that wasn't there when I fell asleep, like a string pulled taut between two points that have moved further apart. The sheets beside me are cool. He's been gone for a while.
I open my eyes.
The view port shows a different slice of sky than last night, the station having rotated through its cycle while I slept. The stars are unfamiliar from this angle. Everything is unfamiliar from this angle.
There's a tray on the bedside table. Fruit I don't recognize, something golden and soft-skinned. Coffee in a sealed thermal cup that's still hot, which means someone brought it recently.
A note. Paper, not digital, which is an affectation or a security measure and with him could be either.
His handwriting is precise and slanted and entirely without flourish.
Dexter arrives today. Stay in your quarters until I send for you. Don't make me regret trusting you.
Trust.
The word sits in my chest like a swallowed stone.
He could have written obey. He could have written anything that reminded me of my position, my status, the transaction that put me here.
Instead he wrote trust, and the choice of that word over any other is either manipulation or honesty, and I am beginning to understand that with Zane Torrence those two things might be the same.
I eat the fruit. It's sweet and bright and nothing like the reconstituted produce on Meridian. The coffee is strong enough to make my sinuses burn, and I drink it standing at the view port, naked, looking at stars that don't belong to me.
Last night replays in fragments. His mouth between my legs.
The moment he stopped. The moment I told him not to.
His voice, wrecked and desperate, saying come for me like a prayer to something he doesn't believe in.
The clinical tenderness of being washed by hands that have killed.
The six inches of mattress between us that felt like the answer to a question I was afraid to ask.
I should feel used. I catalogue the reasons: I am his property, this was always inevitable, the power imbalance could fill a cargo bay, and the coercion is built into every wall of this station. I should feel violated. Regretful. Dirty in a way the shower couldn't reach.
I pull his shirt on. The one he dropped on the floor last night, still carrying his warmth, sandalwood and metal and underneath it the specific scent that is just him.
The fabric falls to my thighs and I catch my reflection in the view port glass, superimposed over the stars, and the woman looking back at me is someone I'm still learning to recognize.
I feel powerful.
That's the most dangerous thing that's happened since I arrived.
More dangerous than the debt.
More dangerous than the bond or the marks or the man who bears them.
Because a woman who feels used can be rescued.
A woman who feels victimized can be saved.
But a woman who feels powerful in her captor's shirt, in his quarters, in the aftermath of a choice she made with open eyes?
That woman can't be saved. She doesn't want to be.
I press my palm flat against the view port glass.
The cold bites into my skin and somewhere deep in my neck, beneath the flesh, my mark pulses with a slow, steady rhythm.
Not my heartbeat. His. Translated through the bond across three corridors and however many steel walls, his heart beating in my skin like it has always been there, like it always will be.
In the mirror across the room, I can see it glowing. A faint, warm light that rises and falls, rises and falls, in perfect time with someone I cannot see and cannot escape and am no longer certain I want to.
I pick up the note. Read it again. Fold it carefully and press it between the pages of one of his books, the one with the most cracked spine.
Then I go back to my quarters to wait.