Chapter 11
Naomi was torturing me. I was almost certain she didn’t realize the level of my discomfort, though every once in a while there was a flash of sly awareness in her eyes. A brief glimpse of curiosity that only heightened my current suffering.
She was perched directly over my cock, her warm weight nestled against my aching length. Every movement, every gesture, every inhale caused the most seductive friction.
My words were coming easier now, my voice not as rough, but her constant touching was destroying any progress I made as my thoughts constantly redirected to her hands on my skin instead of her questions.
Questions I didn’t enjoy answering, even if I had resolved to hide nothing from this female. I wanted her, I wanted a mate. As ruined and damaged a male as I was, I could at least give her honesty and all the loyalty I had to offer.
“Carn?” Naomi’s voice cut through my rapidly devolving thoughts and I sucked in a deep breath, forcing myself to keep focused on our stilted conversation.
When my eyes met hers again, she smiled and repeated herself.
“Are the sytos more advanced than turochs then?”
I glanced around at the smooth walls of my barren cell. I didn’t like to think of sytos as superior in anything. They were cold, manipulative, selfish creatures that used and discarded their own people as easily as other species. But in this at least they were stronger.
“Oska is a small planet,” I said, diving into memories I hadn’t touched in years. “There are no cities, or ships that reach the stars. We hunted on the plains, rode eksines to cover land and slept around fires when the winds were not too strong.”
I wondered what humans would think of my home. I had no idea what the human planet looked like, or how primitive the people were.
“It was a better place than this,” I finally said. If I were to wake up cradled in the sharp grasses of my planet, there was not a single thing I would miss from my imprisonment here.
Naomi’s eyes were distant, as if picturing Oska in her mind.
“I’m sure it is,” she murmured. “Earth is a little closer to this.” She waved a hand at our surroundings. “But there are plenty of wild spaces. Or there were.” She frowned.
“For all I know the planet is in flames right now.”
I didn’t know, either. Everything I knew about the sytos was contained in this cell, the labs and the arena.
“If you were free, would you go home?” she asked, peeking up at me through pale brown lashes.
I flinched at the question. The male that had been born on those planes had been destroyed many times over.
I missed everything from the smell of the air to the way the sand stung my skin when the winds kicked up.
But the thought of seeing my mother band after everything I’d done made my skin crawl.
“No,” I said, my ears flicking back as I wrestled with the surge of emotion. “There is no place for me there. I would not fit anymore.”
Naomi leaned forward until the crown of her small head was nestled under my chin and sighed. The damp heat of her breath skated over my chest and I squeezed her to me.
“I really hope there’s a home for me to go back to. Even if I never make it off this fucked up tin can, I want to imagine my house is still standing, and the couch I just bought is still sitting in front of my TV and there’s a gallon of rocky road in the freezer.”
Most of her words didn’t make sense to me, but the wistful longing in her voice was familiar enough. She missed home and she wasn’t sure she’d ever see it again.
“If there is a way to return you to your rocky road, I swear I will.”
She snorted against my collarbone and her arms twining around my neck.
“Thanks big guy. That means a lot.”