The Trap Snaps Shut #2
Boiling blood sprayed over my wrists. The saboteur collapsed gurgling.
The shield phalanx collapsed on the right flank.
The Warlord exploited the millisecond of weakness.
With a deafening, animal roar, he plunged into the gap in the energy field.
His hands clawed into the edges of two attackers’ shield generators.
His biceps tensed until the thick veins under his violet skin stood out like steel cables.
With raw, hydraulic force, he tore the shields from their anchors and shattered the mutants’ arms along with them.
The barrier collapsed in on itself. The meat grinder started up again.
He rammed his elbow into the next enemy’s face. The skull cracked loud enough to hear over the sirens. His thick tail struck like a battering ram, swept the legs out from under the fourth saboteur, and shattered his knee joints on impact. The fifth mutineer desperately raised his blade.
I was already in position. My blaster was up, my eye directly over the sight. I pulled the trigger. The hot plasma bolt cut through the air and burned a perfect hole through the attacker’s forehead. He fell backward, dead.
The last mutineer dropped his weapon. Naked panic filled his eyes. He turned and ran toward the blown door, desperate for the dark corridors beyond.
He didn’t chase after him. He just stood there.
The muscular tip of his tail shot across the obsidian floor, fast as a viper’s strike.
The scales wrapped around the fleeing man’s ankle.
A hard jerk yanked the mutineer off his feet.
His face crashed onto the stone. He dragged him back relentlessly by that powerful tail, raised his heavy boot, and stomped exactly once on the spine between the shoulder blades.
The loud crack severed the spine and ended the fight in the command center for good.
The primary alarm sirens continued to wail. The red strobe light flickered over a battlefield of torn armor, black pools of blood, and molten metal.
I lowered the blaster. My breath came in shallow, rapid bursts. The adrenaline burned like acid in my veins. My hands didn’t tremble from fear but from the brutal kinetic recoil of the weapons and the pure, animal rush of survival.
The Warlord stood amid the corpses. The blood of his enemies traced glossy trails across his bare violet chest and forearms. He turned his head. His amber eyes fixed on me through the rising smoke from the plasma burners.
He stepped over the shattered saboteur and came toward me. Each step was heavy, purposeful, radiating an all-consuming dominance.
I didn’t give an inch. I stood upright, the bloody survival knife in my left hand, the blaster in my right. The strategist and the killer in absolute symbiosis.
When he reached me, he didn’t tear the weapons from my hands. He didn’t grab me by the neck in reprimand.
His tail slid across the bloody stone, hot and massive, coiling around my waist. The thick coil of muscle contracted. One hard, possessive jerk yanked me forward. I crashed straight into his scorching, blood-smeared belly.
The heat of his body hit me—searing and damp.
The smell of a slaughterhouse, burned ozone, and his dark arousal wrapped around me completely.
I felt the hard bulge of his cock immediately through the fabric of my combat pants.
The carnage hadn’t dampened his predatory instincts—it had brought them to a boil.
His massive hands rose. He pressed his bloody palms flat against my cheeks, pitch-black claws tangling deep in my wet hair. He forced my head back, his face drawing closer until our noses nearly touched.
“A strategist,” he rumbled. His voice was so deep and rough it vibrated in my own throat. “I thought I was pulling a brilliant mind from the wreckage of that ship. I didn’t know I was bringing a butcher into my quarters.”
“The variables required physical force,” I replied. My breath hit his lips. I didn’t pull away from his grip.
“Liar,” he growled softly, fangs flashing.
The tail around my waist pressed my hips even tighter against his.
The friction was merciless—a raw, sexual promise amid the pile of bodies.
“You didn’t kill in self-defense. You enjoyed it.
You have their blood on your hands, and your pulse beats like a predator’s. ”
I stared into his eyes. The gold in his pupils burned. I swallowed hard. Pride wouldn’t let me look away. My body denied nothing. He was right.
“I defended our fortress, Boss,” I whispered darkly.
A deep, rough laugh tore from his chest. He leaned in and crushed his lips against mine. It wasn’t a gentle kiss. It was a wild, possessive collision. Teeth clashed. I tasted his blood, the copper tang of combat, and the raw, undiluted dominance he radiated.
I flung my arms up, ignoring the metal of the weapons in my hands, and wrapped them around his broad neck. I pressed my weight against him, seeking the heat, the violence, the absolute confirmation of this lethal alliance. I wasn’t a brat he had to tame anymore. I was his damn queen.
When he broke the kiss, his thumb stroked across my cheek, smearing an enemy’s blood into macabre war paint on my skin.
“The command center is clear,” he said, his gaze instantly razor-sharp again—the strategist in him seizing back control. “But Kael’s remaining troops still hold the lower corridors.”
I stepped half a pace back from his grip. The tail around my waist slid away slowly, almost reluctantly, but didn’t release me completely—the tip still stroked restlessly over my thigh.
“I’ll take the primary terminal and hack the security doors on the lower rings,” I said. I raised the blaster and loaded the energy cell with a hard click. “We lock them in the mine shafts. No air, no light. We smoke them out level by level.”
Raze bared his fangs in a brutal, proud smile. He bent down, grabbed the heavy war hammer, and hit the switch for the energy core. The deep hum drowned out the last gurgling of a dying enemy on the floor.
“We,” he rumbled, planting himself broad and unshakeable at my side. “Together.”