Chapter 36

CHAPTER 36

ALINA

I t worked. Her test had worked. She'd saved Per Halen's life.

When Threxin had escorted her back to her cabin in silence the night before, Alina wanted the floor panels to swallow her up and free her from her shame. She'd felt like a pathetic failure—an uhyre's whore giving herself away to a monster for nothing. How stupid an idea it was, to try to soften up an uhyre for the benefit of her people.

So when, in her cabin, Threxin had informed her that Orion's father would be kept alive after all, the shock that followed morphed very quickly to elation. So much so that she embarrassingly flung her arms around Threxin's neck like some CRD schoolgirl hanging on a command deck officer. Even Threxin had been startled. He hovered his hands on either side of her before letting them fall to the curve of her waist as she rose up on her toes, pulling him down to press a firm kiss to his cheek.

"Thank you," she sighed against him before withdrawing, suddenly self-conscious about her childish behavior.

Threxin's hands took a while longer to release her waist as she stepped back, brushing her bangs to the side with a nervous flick .

"You are…" he had started, but then his brows drew together and his apertures tightened and he shook his head. "Go to sleep, Alina."

She had looked up at him sheepishly through downturned lashes and nodded, relief and gratitude compelling compliance. When he'd left, she tried to sleep, she really did.

But a world of possibilities was suddenly open to her. She could get through to this alien commander. She could help people.

He showed up at her cabin again the next night, soon after she'd gotten home. He'd been waiting, ducking out of the nearest blood passage and practically shoving her into the room.

"Where have you been?" he demanded.

"I was walking!"

He looked agitated, but not angry. On edge, but not displeased. When his hand came up to hover at the side of her face, she turned her cheek to close the distance, tilting into the comforting heat.

It wasn't like the warmth of human skin. This heat thrummed, as if generated by the vibration of alien otherness born from his very bones. It radiated something masculine but collared, a byproduct of a pent-up essence.

Alina opened her eyes, honing in on his mouth, and a muscle ticked in the back of his jaw. When he leaned forward and kissed her, something molten rushed to her abdomen, an expansive flutter peeling through her. The world widened as she softened to his lips, bringing a hand to cup the side of his muscled neck. She didn't hesitate, knowing now from experience that if there was a risk of exorin he would stop her—even if she begged him not to.

Threxin clasped her waist and led her backward toward the bed. He propped himself back on one arm and pulled her down with him, and Alina was suddenly self-conscious. Where did he want her? Where should she put her legs? What was this going to be?

Threxin seemed to sense her hesitation. He curled a hand beneath her butt and nudged her into his lap. Alina traced her palms along the apertures running at both sides of his neck, following them across the expanse of hard, smooth skin.

The sting of a fang nipping sharply at her lip was quickly replaced with the heat of his mouth as he sucked the puncture. She had only begun to return the favor, tugging at his bottom lip, when he groaned and pulled himself away, lifting his jaw up and just out of reach. Alina followed the underside of it to the point of his chin. His eyes were dark beneath his lowered lids as he watched her. His exposed throat shifted in a swallow and she knew it was his poison he was keeping her away from. Alina traced its movement down the cords of his neck.

They were playing with fire. How many shots would they get before a trace of it got in her mouth? How many chances before he ruined her life?

His hand was at her temple, sliding a lock of hair behind her ear as he watched her from beneath thick lashes, chin tilted out of reach. She chased his touch, every nerve in her skin pulling toward him as though magnetized.

Maybe that was what he was. A magnet for very bad decisions. Even with her sitting up in his lap, his torso towered over her, the arm on which he propped himself chiseled with the bulging muscle of his bicep. Heat pooled downward as she imagined what it would be like to be really taken by him. Really, properly fucked into oblivion by an alien giant— this alien giant.

Threxin clamped his fangs over his bottom lip, eyes narrowing with a certain knowing as she thought these things. And then his hand was on her chest, splayed between her breasts, shoving her back into her bed. In a flash he was looming on top of her, kicking her knees apart with a massive thigh. Her ribcage protested under the pressure of his hand.

His mouth was too close, a black line seeping between his lips. He licked it away as his other hand raked roughly down her shirt, to her synthleather skirt. Alina gasped as the sharp tip of his finger traced a line upward in the tights along her inner thigh, the knifelike talon leaving a tingling trail of apprehension. The hem of her skirt moved up as he continued his way up her flesh. Barely audible snagging told her her tights were done for. This was confirmed by the loud, crackling rip and sharp pull of the fabric against her thigh as he dug in and yanked them to pieces.

"Stop wearing this," he rasped under his breath as his fingers reached the fabric of her underwear.

"Okay," she whispered.

Alina scanned the length of his torso. His heavy weight on top of her was everything, but she wanted more. She needed to be bursting at the seams with him. She realized her nails had been digging into his sides, and damn that shirt, she wanted skin. She picked at the fabric, clutching fistfuls of it. She shoved it up his back, exposed apertures casting a blue glow up to the ceiling above her and down to her face. He stretched himself up, straddling her as he lifted his arms to pull the shirt over his head and cast it aside.

A sound caught in her throat as she watched sharp muscle rippling beneath his broad torso. Rippling striations shifted beneath his chest. An eight-pack of abs laddered down into the hard V trailing beneath his trousers. The glowing slits in his skin were perfectly positioned along the lines and edges of his landscape, accentuating the perfectly symmetrical muscularity of him. Threxin's abdomen rose and fell as he breathed deep, watching her watching him.

"God, you're beautiful," she whispered to herself, staring at the otherworldly canvas before her .

"I do not think you want me beautiful, human," he rasped low in response, eyes raking down to her hiked-up skirt. Her knees moved together instinctively, but he shoved them apart and leaned back slightly atop her as if to see. After a few seconds of burning scrutiny, his eyes flicked up to hers, and though they still glowed that brilliant blue, all she saw was darkness. "I think you want ugly."

Alina cried out as he reached into the rip within her tights and shoved her panties aside, the sudden exposure chilling her overheated core.

"I think you want poison." He bent his head to grab the front of her shirt in his fangs and yank hard. She was jerked into the air for the split second it took the buttons to break, her breasts spilling from the fabric.

He licked up the length of her sternum between them, drawing out a moan as the viscous exorin melted and stained with the heat of his textured tongue. He moved up her throat and then higher, smearing himself beneath the curve of her cheek and she couldn't think anymore—she tilted her face to his mouth in a desperate, nonsensical offering despite the alarm bells going off somewhere in the recesses of her mind. She reached for surrender, aching to let this man take the reins of what was left of her. Was addiction really so bad? Or could it be the way to block out the racing thoughts that plagued her?

"I think you want a monster." Threxin lifted and sat up over her once more, licking his lips with a stained tongue. He flicked a talon against her clit, sending her hips bucking with a jolt. But when his talon came to stroke along her entrance, she froze.

That thing was sharp enough to cut. To hurt. So why did her pussy clench with empty anticipation at the proximity of a dangerous object? There was no reason to trust he wouldn't hurt her other than the fact that he hadn't so far.

But control was an illusion anyway. She had none. Not with Kaia or Orion, or her parents—and definitely not with the uhyre who was twice her size. That realization stilled her mind into gratifying silence.

Threxin drove that home when he plunged the length of his finger inside her, eliciting a guttural yelp that was as much fear as bliss as she instinctively tightened around him. Her second instinct was to plant her feet into the bed and try to scramble back, creating distance between her insides and the sharp point of his finger, but Threxin only hissed as her head hit the wall.

"Be still," he chided, slowly withdrawing from her only to plunge back in. The addition of another finger ignited her insides, sparks skittering up her stomach. When she managed to refocus, there was something like surprise on his face as he worked himself inside her, pulling out, pushing back in slowly. Clinically.

"W-what are you doing?" Alina frowned.

Suddenly self-conscious, she began trying to shift herself away with renewed vigor. But Threxin only took hold of her upper thigh and yanked her back down, continuing to prod at her entrance.

His eyes flicked to hers, then back to his work.

"Are you studying me again?" she hissed, blinking back a surge of unwanted pleasure as he twisted his fingers inside her.

"Of course not," he muttered absently, continuing to stare down at her genitals like she was the alien. Alina curled her hands into fists and folded them across her stomach as she tried to focus on the outrage of it all and not the reactions his touch was wrenching from her body.

When he added a third finger to the digits filling her up, the stretch was sharp as her pussy was forced to accommodate the new girth. The primal instinct to get away from the three very sharp things inside her abated when her body realized the calm precision of his movements. His veined forearm shifted as he worked himself deeper, harder, until Alina could feel the lightest of pressures against her cervix, and even though it should've sent her right back into panic mode it only made her walls pulse around him.

His eyes remained fixed to his work except for the occasional flick to her face when she gasped, or moaned, or shifted her hips to meet him—a dangerous reaction which he expertly adjusted his depth to.

Threxin lifted his free forearm to his mouth, wiping his exorin before it could drip into the dangerous territory of her pussy. Watching him work, Alina thought she spotted more cracks in his stoic visage. His fangs flashed as he sank them into his lip. His bicep bulged with tension. His cock tented beneath his trousers.

It was that obvious need for restraint—the evidence that this was not just clinical experimentation with a foreign body, no matter how much he wanted her to believe that—that started the pressure mounting in her abdomen. Seeing his bicep flex as his movements stuttered, the muscle ticking in his jaw, made her walls contract victoriously. Her pussy clenched at him with an increasingly desperate rhythm. Her skin buzzed, losing contrast with the air around it. It merged with a pool of lusty heat as pleasure built with the stretch and slide of his motions. He noticed. Slack-jawed, his eyes glazed over as he flicked them between her face and her pussy, as though unsure where to look as she edged ever closer.

When he rolled his hand slightly, somehow reaching just the right spot toward the front of her pelvis with the flat pads of his fingers, Alina squeezed her eyes shut and jerked her hips up from the bed. He had to shove a firm palm against her belly to keep her from writhing erratically against him.

"Don't stop," she gasped, throwing her head back into the pillow as an orgasm ignited her diffused body. "Don't stop, don't stop. "

Threxin took the instruction very seriously, continuing to maintain those curving thrusts as she burned.

Alina only came back into herself when she felt Threxin's weight shift as she lay in a pool of her own sweat and come. Her hands acted a split second before her eyes opened, curling blindly around his wrist.

"Don't go." She looked at him, poised to get off the bed.

She knew it was pathetic, but she was sick of him doing this crap and leaving her alone right after. Whether he was kissing her or fingering her in this stupid clinical way that ripped an orgasm out of her as if by force, when it was done she wanted him to be there in a way she'd never felt with prior partners. Some part of her, a part she aggressively shoved into the furthest recesses of her mind, thought maybe it wasn't just a sex thing. That maybe she was actually getting attached to this alien who seemed to be softening his terrifying shell.

It was simply a matter of mutual respect. Trust even, maybe. Threxin had shown her that he wouldn't hurt her—even prevent her from hurting herself when her self-control with his exorin had slipped. In turn, he'd trusted her to take care of him when he was hurt, came to her even. It didn't have to be anything more than that.

But just for now, she wanted him there. Alina tugged at Threxin's heavy hand. "Please."

Threxin frowned as he looked down at her hands curled around his wrist. He was going to say no. He was going to leave and she was going to be mortified about thinking he'd ever want to stay. God, he couldn't even fit in her tiny bed.

And why would he even try? Last time he was there, it'd been after a nearly fatal stabbing. The place must not exactly bring great memories. Alina opened her mouth to tell him to forget it, but before she could speak he extricated his wrist from her hold, climbed over to the side closest to the wall, and squeezed himself in by her side.

Hesitantly hopeful, Alina began to make more room for him. Instead, Threxin threw one heavy arm over her waist, shoved the other beneath her, and pulled her back against him so hard that it punched the air from her lungs.

When the cabin lights faded, they were plunged into what would've been darkness had his apertures not been casting an ephemeral blue glow. There was something comforting about it.

A nightlight, Alina thought with some amusement as she closed her eyes, settling against him. She wondered how long he'd be able to tolerate such a tight squeeze before extracting himself and going back to the luxury of his own cabins.

"Are your feet dangling too much?" she whispered.

"No." His answer vibrated against her back.

"Don't you think your arm will go numb like that?"

"No."

"You know, if you get uncomfortable, you can feel free to push me over. I really don't mind, and?—"

"Shut up, Alina Argoud," he said flatly, giving her body another pointed squeeze.

Okay.