24. Saren
SAREN
My crew mutinies, in their way, on the morning I would have given her up.
They do it kindly, and the kindness is the worse part.
Caelis will not meet my eye. Korrah lays the night's repair manifest on the chart table and says, flatly, that the crew has voted to make for the ruins, with their captain or without him, and that they would prefer with.
Even the ones who called Theryn early stand with it.
They have spent weeks watching a human teach them to want a future, and now they want it more than they want my permission.
Vasha says it plainest. "You spent eleven years keeping us alive for nothing in particular," she says. "She gave the nothing a shape. We're not handing the shape back to a hunter to buy six more months of drifting. Lead us there, or get out of the way and let her."
I lead them there. And when the watch ends and the course is locked and the ruins are a hard certainty ahead of us, I go to find the woman who did this to my crew, and to me, and I find her already in my quarters, waiting, like she knew.
"You decided," she says.
"They decided. I only stopped arguing." I shut the hatch.
The lock engages — the one lock on this ship I hold the key to, and I think of her dream, a door that locks from the inside, and I cross the room and tell her so.
"Your door," I say. "For tonight it's this one.
No one decides anything about you while you're behind it but you. "
Whatever's been holding her upright through the betrayal and the file and the long fall toward the ruins lets go all at once, and she comes into my arms hard, and the kiss is nothing like the careful first one in the observatory.
This one has the betrayal in it, and the dead, and the terror of how close the pod came, and underneath all of it the furious refusal to lose what little the galaxy has let either of us keep.
"Say the thing you wouldn't," she says against my mouth. "On the ship. With the murals. You stopped."
"I love you." It costs nothing now and it costs everything — both at once, the way the true things do.
"Not the bond. The bond is only the door it walked through.
I love the woman who reads wrecks like prayers and grieves a brother she couldn't save and walked toward me when she had every reason to run.
You. Althea. Mine, if you'll have a monster who finally learned the word. "
"Took you long enough."She's already pulling at my harness, fingers fighting the salvaged clasps, and I let her win, because there is nothing left in me that wants to be anywhere but bared to her.
The harness hits the deck. Then her jacket, the patched one she came aboard in, pushed off her shoulders and dropped after it; then the worn shirt beneath, peeled up and away, until there is only her — scarred and small and fearless in the low light — and the sight of her undoes something in me every single time.
I take my time stripping the rest from her, slower than the want clawing through me wants, dragging the last of it down her legs and dropping it aside, learning her by hand as I go — the jut of a hip, the soft inside of a knee, the old salvage-scars she has stopped flinching from when my mouth finds them.
She is not patient. She is never patient.
She reaches for the fastenings I haven't gotten to yet and finishes the work herself, and then there is nothing between us at all, and we both go still for a breath at the heat of skin meeting skin.
"Don't you dare go slow," she warns, even as she arches into the hand I drag up her ribs.
"I'll go however I want," I tell her, and I prove it.
I lower my mouth to her throat, then lower, closing my lips around one tight peak until she gasps and her hands fist in my hair and pull.
I give the other the same slow, thorough attention, until she's writhing under me and cursing my name like it's my fault.
I work my way down, open-mouthed, over the flat of her stomach, the sharp jut of her hips, the inside of one thigh and then the other, until she is shaking and wet and dragging at my shoulders.
When I finally settle my mouth on her she cries out, hips bucking up, and I pin them with one forearm and take my time — broad strokes of my tongue and then tight focus where she needs it most, two thick fingers sliding into her to feel her clench.
"Saren — " She is already close, thighs trembling against my shoulders. "I'm going to — if you don't stop I'm going to come on your mouth — "
"Then do it," I tell her against her, and she does, shattering with my name torn out of her, and I drink every last tremor until she goes boneless and gasping and swearing at me with no heat left in any of it.
Only then do I rise over her, and she pulls me down to her, and I lay her back into the bedding and she guides me home, and when I come into her she arches up to take me with a sound that goes straight through the marrow of me.
"God, Thea," I groan, feeling her tight heat envelop me. "You feel—"
"Don't talk." Her nails dig into my back, sharp and demanding. "Just move."
I do. I move in her with long, deep strokes, watching her face contort with pleasure.
The bond throws its light through both of us at once, and I stop being careful in the way I have never once stopped, because she demands it, because she will not be loved like something that breaks.
I drive into her harder, faster, and she meets me thrust for thrust, her hips rising to take me deeper.
But more is not enough for her tonight, and I should have known it wouldn't be.
She plants both scarred hands flat on my chest and shoves, and because there is nothing left in me that wants to deny her anything, I let her roll me onto my back.
She comes up over me, knees bracketing my hips, taking me even deeper at the new angle, and for a moment she only sits there with me buried inside her and looks down — at the gray skin and the old scars and the bone, the whole monstrous truth of me the galaxy raised her to run from — like she has won something no one else ever wanted to claim.
Then she begins to move, and I forget how to think.
She rides me slow and merciless, setting her own brutal pace, palms braced on my chest and her head tipped back so the long line of her throat catches the low light.
I grip her hips hard enough to leave marks and let her use me, because I have spent my whole life being the one who holds the line, the one who carries, the one who never once gets to simply lie back and be taken — and she gives me that as though it costs her nothing, watching my face the entire time to learn what each roll of her hips does to me.
My thumbs find the old salvage-scars along her hipbones and stroke them while she works herself on me, and the sounds she drags out of my chest are nothing I have ever made for anyone alive.
"You like this," she says, breathless and smug, rolling her hips in a way that makes my vision white at the edges.
"The terrifying Reaper captain, flat on his back, letting a human have her way with him.
" I answer by snapping my hips up into her hard enough to break the smugness into a moan, and she laughs, ragged and delighted, and does it again just to feel me lose the thread of my own control.
When that control finally begins to fray I sit up under her without slipping free, wrapping one arm around the small of her back and dragging her flush against my chest. The change drives me deeper still and tears a cry out of her.
"There," she gasps against my mouth, "right there, don't you dare stop—" and I don't; I hold her seated in my lap with her arms locked around my neck and her marked chest pressed to mine, rocking up into her while she grinds down, the two of us folded as close as two bodies can be made to fit.
Her breath breaks warm against my throat.
Her nails score lines down my back I will wear like fresh carvings tomorrow and be glad of every one.
It is too much and not enough, both at once, and I want her against something solid.
I get my hands under her and rise off the bunk with her still wrapped around me — she gasps, clutching tighter, legs locking at the small of my back — and carry her the two steps to the cold bulkhead and press her spine to it.
The chill of the metal makes her arch, and the new brace lets me drive up into her hard and deep, pinning her between the unyielding hull and the unyielding rest of me.
She loves it; I can feel exactly how much in the way she clenches around me, in the broken litany of my name and curses and please that spills out of her with every thrust. I brace one forearm above her head and take her there until the bulkhead rattles in its welds and neither of us cares who hears.
Before she can crest I carry her back, because I want to watch her face when she breaks.
I lay her down into the bedding without ever slipping free, coming over her with her legs riding high around my waist, and I take the rhythm back into my own hands — deep, slow, relentless — until she is clawing at my shoulders and demanding the pace I am deliberately keeping just out of her reach.
"More," she gasps. "Saren, please, more—"
I pull out of her, ignoring her cry of protest, and flip her onto her stomach. She's on her hands and knees before I've even finished the motion, looking back at me with wild eyes.
"Like this," I say, and it's not a request. "I need to be deeper."
Then I'm inside her again, and she cries out at the new angle, the new depth.
I can see myself sliding in and out of her, wet and glistening, and the sight nearly undoes me.
I fuck her from behind with a rhythm that's all hunger, one hand gripping her hip, the other reaching around to find her clit.
She's so responsive like this, all her careful control stripped away, and when I angle myself to hit that perfect spot inside her she sobs my name.
"Please, Saren, I'm so close—"
"Then come," I growl into her ear. "Come on my cock. Show me."
She does. She shatters around me, her whole body clenching, and the feeling of her coming undone drives me over the edge too. I bury myself as deep as I can and pour into her with a groan that shakes the room.
After, I don't pull out. I stay inside her, feeling her pulse around me, and I pull her against my chest. We're both slick with sweat, both shaking, and I press a kiss to her shoulder.
"That was—" she starts, breathless.
"Not enough," I finish. "I don't think there will ever be enough. I want to keep you like this. Always."
"The lock's on," she reminds me, and there's warmth in her voice. "No one's going anywhere."