11. Ursa
URSA
Gnash’s private quarters do not look like the lair of a monster, which is both professionally inconvenient and personally dangerous. My legs still shiver with aftershocks as he lounges atop me, arms resting on my thighs, and face still inches from my still-spasming pussy.
“This is not what I expected,” I say. “I know I mentioned it before, but this does not scream ‘bloodthirsty warlord.’
His crimson eyes narrow with amusement. “You expected blood on the walls.”
“I expected a room designed to make visitors regret having nervous systems.”
“That is the interrogation chamber.”
I look at him sharply.
His mouth curves.
“Joke, Ursa.”
“You need to mark those better.”
“I have been told my humor lacks comforting softness.”
“By whom?”
“Skahar. Vakka. Three merchants. One captured assassin who complained while bleeding on my floor.”
“That sounds like a statistically meaningful sample.”
His smile deepens enough to show the points of his teeth, and the sight should make me step back. It does not. My pulse is still too fast from the spirited snu-snu.
“But you were saying,” he purrs, “about how you feel sex with a Reaper doesn’t meet your expectations?”
“I don’t know if I would put it that way--”
He disrobes, peeling away his garments to reveal obsidian-skinned perfection.
If you look past the bone spurs and shark-like teeth, you can see that he’s a damn fine specimen of a man…
er, alien. Michelangelo himself couldn’t have envisioned a more perfectly carved example of brawny yet lithe musculature.
Bet he couldn’t have envisioned those red eyes, either, or…
good god, his cock has spurs on it! My apprehension is soon assuaged, however, when I realize these aren’t made of bone but some sort of soft cartilage.
I can tell when he grips the throbbing, veined shaft in his gnarled hand and drags the crown across the top of my thighs.
“Are you frightened?” he asks while giving me bedroom eyes that could turn a nun into a harlot.
“No,” I reply. “Yes. Maybe?”
“There’s nothing to fear,” he rumbles. “I could never hurt my jalshagar.”
“There you go being sweet again,” I say.
“I might spank you,” he says “if you’re not a good girl, however.”
My heart skips a beat.
“Spank me?” I ask with an incredulous laugh.
“Oh yes, I believe in strict discipline,” he rumbles.
“Then I guess I’d better be a good girl,” I reply, stretching out my hand toward his throbbing member. My fingers trace along the underside. He gasps, eyes narrowing, body heaving with pants. I feel his cock twitch as much as I see it.
I extend my tongue and run it along the crown, tasting his sweat, his desire. A bit of moisture beads on the slit, and I lick that off, too, my eyes locked on his own.
I can fit both of my hands on his shaft, a big pulsating vein warm and beating against my palms. I take the entire crown inside my mouth, working lips and tongue to show him that I can make him cry out, too.
His hand tangles in my hair, and he pulls me off of him.
I cry out, spilling a mouthful of his seed as he flips me over onto my belly like I weigh nothing.
The mattress bends under his weight, and clawed fingers grip my hips.
I reach back, trying to touch his cock, to guide him in, but he doesn’t want or need my help…
as evidenced by the way he grabs my wrist and twists my arm into a hammerlock behind me.
I cry out on instinct, not from fear but from surprise.
His grip is like iron. In a moment he traps my other hand and pins it behind my back as well.
Gnash holds both my wrists in his hand easily, fingers encircling all the way around.
I might as well be wearing titanium handcuffs, all things considered.
Not that I want to get away if I could.
My face is on the mattress, looking at the glass/steel viewing ports. The stars are lovely, but I’m distracted by our reflections--especially the size difference between us. It looks like I’m being mounted by a gigantic, paleolithic beast rather than a burgeoning leader.
Then his cock presses against my wide open pussy, and logical thought flies out the window.
I try to push back against him, but his grip holds me prisoner.
I just have to wait as he slowly, surely stretches me with his full length.
I cry out as there’s a sharp pinch when he goes all the way in…
then sigh and moan softly as a cascade of ecstasy throbs from our conjoined bodies.
“Mine,” he growls, then thrusts into me. I let out a sharp cry against the mattress, my own breath hot as it’s reflected back at me. My pussy clenches hold of him, as if not wanting him to go even as he draws out, then thrusts back in.
The spurs on his cock flex and flare inside of me, creating a staccato that adds to the sensation. My free hand twists up in the sheets as I scream out my first climax. Gnash doesn’t slow down, he speeds up, driving his hips into my backside like a demon possessed.
His free hand snakes around my throat, pulling me up until I’m on my knees, his cock still buried inside of me. My voice is strangled and tight as I let loose a scream as pulse after pulse of delirious delight crackles through me.
Gnash’s cock empties inside of me, buzzing like a vibrator as he unleashes his seed. We collapse onto the bed on our sides, him still nestled inside of me. I squirm and writhe about as much as I am able, encased in his warm but possessive embrace.
“Mine,” he purrs into my ear.
“Yours,” I manage to whisper in a voice hoarse from screaming.
We lay like that for some time. After a while I roll over onto his belly, our gazes locked while we just share the silence and the feel of our bodies pressed together. He idly plays with my hair, red eyes warm and oddly sweet.
“So,” I say. “About that interview…”
Gnash laughs, and nods his assent.
“Very well.”
I lift the compad before my thoughts can get any more undisciplined. “Before we start, I need your consent on record.”
“You think I dragged you from a feast to refuse?”
“I think powerful people often confuse access with consent. I prefer clarity.”
His expression shifts, and for a moment the amusement falls away. What remains is quieter, heavier, and far more difficult to dismiss. He inclines his head once.
“Then be clear.”
I activate the recording field. A pale ring of light rises from the compad, catches the edges of his face, and throws faint illumination across the bone spurs along his jaw.
“This is Ursa Ramone for IHC-Now, recording aboard Guyver Station with Gnash, warlord of Guyver Station, fleet commander, and central figure in the ongoing protectorate negotiations. Gnash, do you consent to this interview being recorded, transmitted, edited for length only with full contextual archive preserved, and used as part of my reporting?”
“Yes,” he says. “On one condition.”
My stomach tightens. “Name it.”
“You do not edit my words to make me seem softer.”
I blink. “That is your concern?”
“I have many enemies willing to call me a monster. I do not need a friendly lie turning me into a misunderstood pet.”
The answer lands with enough weight that I forget whatever sharp reply I had ready. “I don’t do friendly lies.”
“No,” he says, studying me with unsettling focus. “I begin to suspect you do not.”
I swallow and pretend my throat has not gone dry. “Then we have an agreement.”
He gestures toward a heavy table near the viewport.
It has been built from old hull plating and polished until the scars in the metal shine.
Two chairs wait beside it, one clearly made for a Reaper and one probably dragged in from some diplomatic storehouse at the last minute.
I sit in the smaller one, set my compad between us, and try not to feel absurdly human in a room shaped by his body, his history, and his command.
Outside the viewport, Guyver Station’s inner docking spine curves below us in a blaze of amber work lights and moving ships.
Cargo haulers crawl through assigned lanes.
Small patrol craft pivot in disciplined arcs.
Farther out, the Badlands shimmer in violent ribbons of purple and blue, a beautiful wound across the black.
Gnash notices where I am looking. “Most outsiders expect chaos.”
“I was one of them,” I admit. “Before I started reading the traffic reports.”
“And now?”
“Now I think chaos is bad branding for what you’ve built. Convenient branding, maybe, but inaccurate.”
He sits across from me, and even the large chair complains softly beneath him. “That is the first question?”
“No. That’s an observation. The first question is why.”
“Why what?”
“Why build this?” I gesture toward the viewport.
“You could have kept raiding. You could have vanished into the Badlands whenever the pressure increased. Instead, you took a station, established tariffs, created ledgers, enforced traffic lanes, sheltered refugees, and invited ambassadors to eat meat under conditions apparently designed to traumatize etiquette officers. Why?”
For several seconds, he does not answer.
The silence is not empty, though. It has machinery in it, distant voices through the walls, the faint hum of the viewport field, and the low rasp of his breathing.
He looks past me toward the station beyond the glass, and his size does not feel like the most dangerous thing about him.
“Because raiding keeps people alive until the next raid,” he says. “It does not give children a place to sleep without counting exits.”
My fingers still over the compad.
He continues, voice low. “Reapers are very good at surviving the next hour. We became excellent at it because the galaxy made anything longer seem like vanity. Ships break. Crews splinter. Captains die. A strong warrior takes command, gathers enough bodies around him to become feared, and then he spends his life proving he deserves that fear. It is a small way to exist.”
“That’s not how most governments describe Reaper culture.”