Chapter 10

Rurik and I wait in our room’s antechamber, side-by-side. I’m so nervous that I’m sweating, fully aware of my bits on display. Only, nobody has looked at me sexually except for … the prince. And oh, the way he looks at me. I could die in his gaze. His stare is a touch. His arm in mine is a promise. His gaze is a tantalizing threat.

“I can’t wait any longer,” I whisper, and this time, Rurik doesn’t try to hide the way his gaze rakes my mostly naked form. His attention lingers on the swells of my breasts, the dark spots of my nipples, the small patch of hair between my thighs. He returns his attention to my eyes, sucking me into them, dropping me into endless night. “But I’m also terrified of this whole ritual. Wedding. Whatever.”

“Do not be,” he breathes, and I feel myself relaxing at his words. Now that I’m not fighting the insta-love happy chemicals, they’re rather soothing. I feel like I’ve downed an entire bottle of my favorite pinot noir—oh God, those Willamette Valley vintages, ugh—and my muscles unclench, my breathing slows, my racing pulse relaxes to a steady trot. “This first time will be challenging, but I will take care of you.” He turns his face fully over to mine. “The second time, I will show you that there is a heaven beyond the stars.”

Err.

Um.

I turn away from him and stare at the door, waiting for … my wedding? I’m getting married? It hits me all of a sudden, how much I miss my mom and her words of encouragement accompanied by her incredible cooking, my dad and his lame jokes and his obsession with hand-washing his car, my baby brother Nate and his dedication to all things fantasy, my older sister, Jenna, and her lack of personality beyond law or marrying well, my middle sister, Kari, and her weird Etsy store that sells knitted dicks, and my other sister, Maribel, that I rarely see because she lives in France but sends me really nice soaps for Christmas.

They should be here.

I miss them.

I grab Rurik’s hand and squeeze hard. He doesn’t seem to mind. Actually, he squeezes me right back.

The doors open.

I can’t breathe.

Avril is waiting off to one side, dressed in another stiff cloak, full makeup, a beautiful red dress. Zero waits beside her, wearing a similar outfit. They’ve both changed, and Connor is with them again, also dressed prettily for the occasion, but in black slacks and a red jacket. I figure at this point that he’s also my handmaiden or … handman … handdude … handyman? Anyway, I think I own his ass—quite literally. Officer Hyt is not going to be pleased that another one of the illegally abducted humans has found a mate.

“Any luck, Connor?” I whisper as we stand there in silence, waiting for some sort of cue.

“He hates me,” Connor whispers back, eyes filling with tears as he drags his jacket sleeve over his face, forgetting about his glasses and knocking them messily askew. “I don’t even like guys, and I got paired up with one, and he doesn’t want me?”

Now I’m pretty sure that he’s talking to himself. I decide to let it be. We can chitchat later.

The blood lace—it’s easy to see why Rurik’s is called blood lace, but it’s a huge stretch to call his father’s ugly pattern anything less than meaty gore—on the walls and ceilings dims. Moths flutter down the hallway, hundreds of them. Thousands.

“What the hell?” I start, but Rurik leans down to whisper to me.

“These are drones, to film the occasion so that the whole of the Noctuida may participate in watching us be mated.”

The moths flitter around our doorway in a cloud. One lands on my shoulder, and I resist the urge to brush it off. It’s cute—a little fuzzy vestal tiger moth—but knowing that it’s filming me right now? That thousands or millions or more creatures might be watching?

I feel a bit dizzy.

Rurik waits for the blood lace in the room to brighten back up, and then we exit our open doorway together. He takes us down a long, wide hallway with our small entourage trailing behind, moths fluttering prettily around us.

It’s dead silent for several minutes there.

Dead fucking silent.

We approach another set of doors, and they slide open to reveal—

My mind empties.

There’s an entire jungle on this ship, a hothouse of plants and streams and decorative benches with wing-notches cut from the backrests. There are windows on either side of the large, domed room, the left one showing off a beautiful (if terrifying) vista of the World Station and the planet it’s attached to.

Also, the room is full of Vestalis and their mates. There are easily thousands of Vestalis males with an assortment of companions that range from Falopex to Mollusca (eww, slugs) to galactic millipedes. There are those shrouded bony-handed creatures with the beaks, a woman with dragonfly wings and insect eyes, a girl with a striped lemur tail, someone that looks vaguely like a swan with an uncomfortably long neck.

I stop walking. Rurik stops walking.

It’s silent in here, too, but for the soothing trickle of a manufactured stream, a dripping of condensation from car-sized leaves overhead, and the gentle whisper of moth-drone wings.

Another panic attack rests in my chest, crouched there and waiting to leap out at the most inopportune moment. I’ve already embarrassed Rurik enough. I’ve fucking got this. He turns to me as if to comfort me, but I lift my chin and take a step forward without his help.

I catch a brief smile on his lips before we’re moving again, walking a meandering stone path through the greenery, past brightly colored flowers with waxy petals, past small waterfalls that make me miss Abraxas, but mostly past the prying eyes of way too many people.

“These are the gentry,” he murmurs, low and throaty. I feel like Rurik is holding back somehow, but I can’t explain why I think that. Not on his words, but … something. There’s a gentle, tender strain in his face, like a guy with an erection in his pants that he doesn’t want anyone to know about.

Oh. Maybe not like a guy with an erection, but … maybe he is a guy with an erection.

“The gentry,” I repeat, wishing I really could shoot Avril into the nearest dying star. “Like, the nobles?”

“Mated Vestalis are elevated in status over their unmated counterparts,” Rurik continues in low tones, and I just assume it must be okay for him to talk about this stuff even while being filmed and in public. He knows what he’s doing better than I do.

“I see.”

I’m trembling now.

But not just because there are too many eyes on me.

Because I want him.

And I feel like if I can’t have him here, now, today, this very second, that I’m going to die. How I ever resisted him in the first place is beyond me. My blood pulses, pushes at my skin. Itches. Hurts. I rub at my own arms, and Rurik notices, exhaling violently.

He takes my hand again and we run.

We run right off the curving path and through the dirt. Splash through another stream. Duck under a thick cluster of woody vines. Dart past a giant tulip with teeth. Oh my. The crowd splits easily for us, and we stumble out another set of doors on the other side … into a neighborhood.

I come to a halt, forcing Rurik to stop along with me. The moth drones swarm around us, as beautiful as they are invasive.

The hallway here is as big as a street back home, houses lining the glass walls on either side. Houses. They’re all made of white metal, but they have windows and front porches, and there are trees. Yards. Gardens. The ceiling above us is made entirely of glass, too, starlight filtering prettily over the red, white, and black of the alien crowd.

I stare down the length of the hall to see that the entire space is packed shoulder to shoulder. Men and boys—all Vestalis, obviously—fill it. But the thoroughfare down the middle? It’s empty.

It’s disconcerting. And alien. And strange.

But I don’t care.

Rurik is mine, and I’m his. He cares little about his own people right now. I don’t think he cares about them at all. Everything he’s doing is for me. Becoming king. Taking the throne. The throne.

He’s caressing my knuckles and looking back at me, waiting for me to follow him.

I think about him sitting down in that horrible throne room and finding himself alone in the dark with a bunch of flickering screens. Feeling and seeing everything but never experiencing life himself.

No wonder his parents want to force the throne onto him.

My lips purse. I vow to myself that I will not allow that to happen to him. I don’t care what I have to do. If I have to blow up this entire ship to keep him from that fate, I’ll do it.

Zero, Avril, and Connor have just now caught up to us. The former by Rurik’s choice (he can control how fast she runs), and the other two because they’re out of shape. All three are panting. I don’t blame them. I’m out of shape, too. Only … there’s something I’m running toward that I really, really want.

To bond with my mate.

“Your Majesties, wait, please,” Avril gasps out, but I just grin.

“No, I don’t think we will.” I smile at them, and then I turn and run faster. Rurik easily keeps up with my pace, the cloud of moth drones sweeping along at our heels.

The street feels like it’ll never end, branching out in four-way intersections every so often. The view from every angle is of space, space, and more space. So they’re like streets, but they are nothing like streets. Whatever. I don’t care right now. I can let the heavy weight of astrophobia hit me later. My skin feels like a cocoon ready to burst—pun intended—and all I want to do is fuck Rurik.

I truly and honestly consider grabbing him and dragging him into a flower-filled alien spaceship yard. I’d let him throw me against the glass wall at the rear of one of the properties. He could fuck me with my ass cheeks on the stars, and it wouldn’t even bother me.

That’s where I’m at.

We leave the neighborhood through another set of doors and there’s a much narrower hallway, like the one that connects our rooms to the throne room. There are people on either side, all of them in uniform, all of them with mates. They seem important.

Rurik ignores them.

How big is this fucking ship? It must be huge, to be able to blow planets up. I don’t even care.

Another set of doors. A hallway. Doors. Hallway. Another greenhouse. Doors. Hallway.

Platform.

We’re in a room with four doors leading off of it. All of them are closed. In the center of the small space, there’s a platform, like the ones at the bookstore. Rurik steps onto it and then tugs me into his arms. We bump together chest to chest, and then his hands are all over me.

He kisses me as we rise up a glass elevator shaft, stars on all sides of us. The moth drones disappear briefly before reappearing on the exterior of the tunnel, chasing us up. I don’t even consider how they got outside the ship so quickly. They’re far less important to me than the taste of Rurik’s lips, so I ignore them.

“I do not care that you are going to ruin me,” he breathes, taking my face between his hands. I reach up and pry his fingers away, yanking his gloves off. I need bare skin, not fabric. I run both of my palms over the fur at the base of his throat, his pale, graceful neck surrounded by white and red.

“I’m going to save you,” I assure him, and he groans, like I’ve just fisted his cock or something. I haven’t even touched it. Yet. Yet.

When I reach for his belt, he takes over, jerking it off and dropping it to the floor with the clack of metal on metal. I move my own hands to my dress before I remember what it is and what it’s made of.

“I don’t want everyone to see me naked,” I whisper, and Rurik gives me the most beautiful frown before curling the edge of his lip up in a sneer. His anger isn’t directed at me. It’s on my behalf, and I find the heat of it intoxicating. He wraps his white wings around me, filling the glass space and blocking me from view.

“Yes, my princess.” Rurik takes my hands in his own and kisses my knuckles as we continue to rise, higher and higher. The platform is slow, intentionally so, and I know the moths are filming just outside of it, but I feel good now. When he releases me and begins to free himself from his clothing, I feel better and better and better.

I’m trembling so hard, wanting so hard. Wanting him so hard.

Rurik utilizes the convenient slits in his jacket to slide it off without disturbing his wings. He leaves them where they are, keeping us covered, and then kicks his boots and slacks off together. When he stands up, he is entirely naked. When he taps a finger to my dress, it drifts to the floor and then reverts back to what it is: blood.

We are fairly much standing in a puddle of it. Doesn’t last. It’s absorbed—by Rurik, I can tell—and then it’s gone. It’s dry. The dress is gone. He just … he did that.

“What are you?” I ask, but I don’t just mean him. I mean the Vestalis in general. They’re so weird.

“Your mate,” he replies easily, and then he smiles at me and it does exactly what his biology meant it to do. It makes me feel better. He feels human. I feel safe.

And then I look down and I realize how delusional that all is.

He is not a human, and he has the dick to prove it. Those red spirals on his cock unfurl, and then curve into the shape of claspers at his hips. Bloodred. Black thorns at either end. He steps forward and he grabs me with them, tugging my body into his. I’d thought the thorns were going to hurt. They don’t. But they certainly dig into my skin. They make me bleed.

“It will be quick at first, but it will solve the problem of our audience.” He leans down and licks the side of my neck, turning my knees to liquid again. Doesn’t matter. If I fell, he could hold me up with the effort of his claspers alone. I can feel the strength in them.

The platform comes to a stop as Rurik teases me with his teeth, running the sharp points against my skin without biting down. I want him to. Oh God. So bad. I lift my arms up, trying to pull his head toward me, but he walks me backward into the room. It’s not as awkward as I might’ve thought. Just four steps and I hit the end of the bed. Rurik catches me with an arm around my waist and lowers me down, crawling forward as he does so that we find ourselves at the center of a perfectly round bed. White linens. Red pillows.

The room we’re in has the shape of a glass bell jar. All the walls and ceiling are seamless glass. It looks like we’re floating on a platform in the middle of space. My breath catches as I look up past Rurik’s face. The sea of moth drones settles on the exterior glass in a wave, their legs creating a gentle whooshing sound.

This sex is … kind of a big deal. And I wish it weren’t. I wish we were alone in a private space together, that nobody would know if or when we had sex unless we chose to tell them.

“I don’t want them to watch,” I breathe, knowing that I’m asking for a lot here.

Rurik stares down at me, his face on fire.

“Yes, my princess.”

He drives his hips into me, and I scream. I wish that I didn’t. But I do. The sound echoes all around us as I stare up at our joined bodies on the glass ceiling, watching as bloodred markings stain themselves into the reflection of Rurik’s pristine white wings. It looks like lace. I can feel it in my back, too, a hot color marking itself like a tattoo.

Matching patterns.

Rurik bites me hard, and I gasp, hips bucking up and into his. That’s as much as his claspers allow me to move, locking down on my pelvis and grabbing me. We’re pressed as tightly together as we can get, and he’s right: he hurts, but only a little. Just a bit of a stretch, but I know that if I breathe through it, it’ll be good. I run my hands over his smooth shoulders and back, to that fur at the tops of his wings. And then I remember something interesting.

Those red markings that I saw when he was in the shower that day, the ones at the base of his spine, I find them with my fingers.

They’re swelling against my hand, but I almost don’t realize it at first because Rurik pulls back and licks the wound on my neck hard. Blood lace flows off the bed in a wave, over the walls, climbing higher until all of the interior surfaces in the glass room are covered. A red lace cocoon to protect us.

If I can’t see the stars, then I don’t think anyone else can see in. Above us, a beautiful lace canopy hangs, giving the impression that we’re inside of a large tent.

The room goes still, both of us turning to look at each other.

There’s no hiding then. Everything is open and bare.

Rurik sits up, but his claspers keep me right where they want me. He uses two hands under my ass to help pull me along with them. As I stare up at him, four red tendrils bloom around his body, like I’m watching a plant grow in fast-forward. There are two tendrils on either side of him, four in total, like red tails. Fine hairs line them, giving the impression of feathers.

There’s Rurik with this fan of red between him and his wings, like a male peacock. He ruffles them now, those beautiful wings, and I can smell it again. His pheromones. Honey, dripping and hot, sliding over skin, being licked off. The sweet-and-spicy burn of cardamom on the tongue during a kiss. They hit me so hard that I orgasm. That easily. I’m knocked completely off-base by the suddenness of it.

As I pant on my back, sweating and halfway to uncontrollable tears, I know for a fact that Rurik truly gave me a choice in the matter. If he’d wanted to force me from the beginning, all he would need to do is unfold those tails and waft these pheromones at me. That’s it.

I’m helpless to deny him anything now.

He drops back down over me, a palm on either side of us, and he’s panting, too. His dark eyes are closed, bloody lips parted gently.

“This next part you will not like,” he sounds sorry about it, too. I believe him. He cracks those gorgeous eyes again and watches me. “It will hurt, my princess. And there will be some things I will do that are out of my control.” His face softens. “They are biological functions that even we do not fully understand.”

These space-dwelling planet-destroyers don’t understand something? I can hardly believe it.

And then the pain hits.

Oh my fucking God.

It hurts so badly that my back bows, and I unconsciously try to squirm away. Those claspers lock down even harder and slam our pelvises back together. Rurik drops his face to the side of my neck, kissing me instead of biting me.

I wrap my arms around him and try to breathe through it. The tears are a different story now, from pleasure to pain. But as I blink through them, the sharpness of it begins to fade. There’s an ache against my lower back, like a really awful menstrual cramp.

I exhale.

I know what he’s doing.

The eggs. His DNA. Just like Officer Hyt told me.

Shit.

Knowing what’s happening is doing two things to me simultaneously. One half of me is disturbed and upset and worried—despite Abraxas’ assurance—that Rurik will take control of whatever baby my dragon mate and I might’ve had between us. The rest of me is … impressed. The ultimate act.

One fuck. All his babies. How very … male of him.

That’s a biological godsend to a species.

I exhale and use a hand in his hair to drag his face to mine.

“I am sorry,” he tells me again. He means it, too. He means it, but he likes it. A sensual twist to the edge of his mouth, his half-lidded eyes, the way he drops his lips to my hair and kisses my head. He holds me right there while it happens. Ten minutes, maybe. Or fifteen.

By then, I’m aching for other reasons. My hips wiggle in Rurik’s claspers, and he lets out a sharp, surprised sound.

“You are not in pain?” he asks, like he expected this part of the process to last much, much longer. He never did specify, and I forgot to ask. I hate Avril.

“Not anymore,” I admit, and then he drops his mouth down to mine. He’s so much taller that he has to bow his back, wings shifting over us like fabric on either side. I throw my own head back so that I can strain upwards for that kiss.

And then our lips part and he’s looking down at me while he starts to fuck. His claspers do the work of keeping me tight to him, his cock slipping in and out of my swollen pussy. It’s slick with nectar, dripping down my ass and onto the perfect white blankets beneath us.

They’re already stained.

I put my palms against his flat chest, and it doesn’t even matter that he’s different, that he has no nipples, that he wears fur at his neck or has wings on his back or … My hand reaches out and grabs onto one of the four red tails behind him. I fist it and give a jerk to the fine hairs that decorate it.

He drops lower and drives harder into me once, twice, three times. He finishes hard with an allover shudder, hips pumping every so often until it feels like whatever he needed to do to take my eggs, it’s done.

Any child I ever have will be his child.

Unless Abraxas— But it’s too fucked-up for me to think about him right now, so I don’t.

“What is this?” I whisper, stroking Rurik’s tail-things as he turns to look me in the face. His body is more or less collapsed on top of me now, but I like the weight of it. I like the way his wings drape over us, adding to the illusion that this is a private, cozy moment.

In reality, I’ve just fucked a man to kinghood.

Glowing pussy, check. Kingmaking pussy, check.

I have the most badass genitals, don’t I?

“Coremata,” Rurik whispers, and he gives another shudder, leaning down to press his lips to my temple. “Those are my coremata, princess.”

I think on that for a minute, and then it hits me.

The moth guy I dated … I mean, not this moth guy, but the human man who raised moths. He showed me something amazing. Some male moths have body parts called coremata that they use to spread sex pheromones, so that they can attract females. On Earth. This happens on Earth.

It’s hard for a moth in the seemingly endless night, to know if there’s another like him out there. So he does his best to find someone, unfurling these appendages and dusting leaves and flowers with a scent trail that promises a mate if only a female will follow it. If she likes his scent, she does, and they find each other. Even with the world as big as it is, as lonely as it can feel sometimes, they discover a partner.

And Rurik and I, it’s as if we’ve traveled through time and space for the same reason.

He puts a hand under my ass and jerks me back to him again.

“This will go on for many hours,” he tells me softly, and I swallow back both nervousness and excitement. “I will be fucking you for hours. Once my body is emptied entirely, we will be able to separate. But not until then.” He kisses the side of my face, along my jaw, my neck. Tongues the wound he left there with his teeth.

Blood lace unfurls into my body, taking over every single part of me.

Harder. Faster. More.

I have no idea at first if those are his thoughts or mine, but then I realize that they belong to us both.

He fucks harder, driving me into the mattress, my nipples rubbing against his muscular body. I reach out and grab another of his coremata, and the pheromones surge through me like a drug. I let them. I let them bring me to orgasm again, climaxing on Rurik’s cock as he grips the bed with those few sharp-nailed fingers he has.

“Yes, my princess,” he breathes, admirably managing to hold back his own climax while mine flutters and squeezes and milks him. “Again.”

He doesn’t give me a lot of space to recover, pounding wildly into me, the room silent but for his frantic breathing and mine, and the slick rub of our pelvises. That’s it. Nothing else. He exhales against my hair, stirring it. There’s a tenderness in the touch of his hands that isn’t present in the movement of his hips. One side of him is romantic and gentle while the other side is needy and base.

He rocks into my heat as I drag my nails down his back, making him bleed. He loves that, pumping harder, deeper. Coming again as his claspers desperately gather me to him.

“Stay with me,” he murmurs, and somehow, he’s already going again, and he’s rough, and he’s trying to kiss me while his body fucks. I can see which half of him he’s in control of right now. The softness of his lips, the gentleness of his breaths. But not his cock. He drives fierce and ragged with it, and that ache in my lower back returns. Rough, so rough. Good, so good. Both things at once.

Whatever is going on inside of me right now, whatever is going on between us, it’s as strange as Abraxas’ markings inside of me. Am I glowing right now? Does Rurik care? Doubtful. Because I don’t. I don’t care about anything except finding his gaze and looking into his eyes, finally feeling the completeness of our bond.

Until just now, we had nothing.

This is the start of it.

“Slow, slow, slow,” I tell him, swallowing hard.

“Yes, my princess.” He manages to slow down, but then his thrusts are twice as powerful. Deeper somehow. Burying him all the way to the hilt. Now that my body is getting more used to him, I can feel his testes inside of me, those two firm round shapes on either side of his shaft. It’s the strangest sensation, like he’s expanding to fill every part of me.

The fur at the base of his cock teases my folds, my ass, rubs silkily over my skin. And the ridge on his underside? It rakes and stokes like a fire poker in hot embers. It’s almost too much, so I writhe against it as it mercilessly plows across my already swollen insides.

“Rurik …” I don’t think I have the energy or the headspace to say anything else, and he knows it.

He fucks me greedily into the mattress, again and again. His climax. Mine. His. His. Ours. His. Mine.

I’m panting and shoving at his shoulders now, but he doesn’t snatch me with his claspers this time. He lets me fight him and then waits until I’ve calmed down and relaxed, his fingers stroking my arm.

“Are you alright, my princess?” he asks me, and I nod. Can’t talk right now. Tongue is swollen from kissing. Blood lace inside my neck, lingering and teasing the frazzled outline of my soul. Pussy shimmering with heat and pleasure, sated but desperate, ready to be done but somehow finding it impossible to stop. Me, covered in sweat with peaked nipples.

I push Rurik’s hand onto my breast, and we both groan. He kneads the flesh hard, possessively, like he owns me. Which is fine. I own him and he owns me. This is the contract that we’ve just entered into together.

There’s a sound, a strange whooshing, and Rurik goes very still, tucking his wings more tightly against his sides.

“Your Majesty,” a male Vestalis murmurs, depositing a tray beside our bed. He leaves it right on the floor, bows, and then turns away.

Rurik and I both look down to see a pair of wet washcloths, a bottle of what I think is lotion, some food and drink, a drying cloth.

Huh.

With a murmured scoff, Rurik glances over his shoulder and waits for the servant to leave.

“What was that?” I whisper, my body still wrapped around his. When I move like I’m trying to separate us, his claspers yank me back of their own accord, and I feel this strange sensation, like there’s a grappling hook slung from the end of his cock, snagging my ovaries. I have no idea what’s going on, but that’s what it feels like.

I force myself to relax as he turns to me again.

“My parents … a servant.” He groans and drops his face against my hair, holding me close and stroking me with his fingers as his lips murmur kisses on my hot, tender skin. “They will try to come again.”

“How long do we have to stay here before we can go back to our room?”

That’s what I really want. I want the joy of seeing him smile under starlight in our private room, me on top, his hands on my hips. His claspers can lock my thighs as I ride him into oblivion. Oh, and his mouth on my pussy. Biting my smooth inner thigh with vampire teeth. Letting me play with and tease his coremata. Roll around in his pheromones. Learn every inch of him.

I exhale.

“Eight … or nine … Earth hours.” He seems reluctant to admit that. I close my eyes against the revelation.

“Eight or nine hours?”

I really think about that.

We’re going to be stuck together for an entire night.

I imagine the moth drones whisper-walking across the glass on the outside of the window.

But, even with all of this forced pomp and circumstance from his parents and his people, he granted my wishes not once but twice. For them all not to see me naked. Not to see me fuck. Nobody is watching us just now.

Rurik reaches down for one of the washcloths, draping its coolness over my sweaty forehead. He dabs my skin off, swiping it over my breasts, my belly, anything he can reach. It stays ice-cold the whole time, and pleasantly damp. I only realize as he sets it back on the tray that it’s a thick cluster of moss and not a washcloth at all.

“Water?” he asks, lifting the glass and then looking from it to me. He’s propped up by one hand, the water held in the other. I do my best to sit up on my elbows and he tilts it to my lips, flooding my tongue with moisture. Our eyes stay locked the entire time, and so do our hips. When I adjust myself again, his claspers greedily snatch my pelvis. Rurik grits his teeth and drops the water glass onto the floor, uncaring that it shatters.

He’s moving against me again, inside of me, thumbing my nipple with gentle strokes of his smooth fingertip. It’s enough to drag me into another cycle of fucking, breathing, fucking again. We rest. We rut.

I’m on my back with my arms spread now, panting hard and trying to remember what it is that I’m doing here. Right. Mating this guy so he can become king. So that he can control the Noctuida. So I can see Abraxas again. And Jane. So I can send a message to my parents. So that his parents don’t blow up my entire planet as retribution.

All of that stuff is hard to remember with our bodies joined the way we are.

Another servant comes in to drop more food off, and to clean up the glass that’s all over the narrow strip of floor beside the bed. Beyond that, there’s nothing but lace and stars and tiny blots of red and white moth against the glass. I hear their legs clicking across it even if I can’t see them at the moment. Tap, tap, tap.

“Get out,” Rurik snarls, and the sound of his voice has an immense effect on both me and the servant. He’s terrified; I’m turned-on. I try to soothe my mate by petting him with my fingers, lifting up to kiss him on the chin.

“It’s okay, Rurik. Really. I’m starving.”

He glares at the servant until the male finally leaves, and then he looks back down at me. If I’m going to eat, he’s going to have to feed me, and he knows it.

At first, it’s okay. Because the ardor between us hangs in the air, heavy and wet and humid. As primal as anything I ever experienced with Abraxas. It makes me miss him and miss Rurik both, at the same time. I don’t understand it at all.

And then he starts to feed me, pieces of fresh fruit that I can’t identify. He places cool sweetness on my tongue, watches as I swallow, kisses the taste off me, cleans my lips with a hot sweep of his own tongue. This goes on for some time before I’m full, and he relaxes.

Then we’re just lying there.

It hits me suddenly that I have no idea who this guy is.

None.

I don’t know his favorite color, and I’m afraid to ask because what if it’s an alien color that I can’t see? Like what if he sees things in a completely different spectrum? I can’t ask what his favorite movie is because even if he told me, I wouldn’t know it. I can’t make really bad pop culture references because he won’t understand me.

“Your heart is thundering, my princess,” he tells me, head turned away, a red pillow tucked up by my own head that he just so happens to be using. He doesn’t look directly at me which makes this a bit easier. Maybe. Or it’s the most awkward moment I have ever experienced in all of my life.

I’m glad we did this, don’t get me wrong. I just … I’d like to get up and shower. Or have an ice-cold Coke while I sit in a chair with my knees pulled up, so that I can call Jane and tell her about the experience between sips. I want to kiss Rurik goodnight, leave for home with a smile on my face, and flop into bed to dream about seeing him tomorrow.

All that normal first-time shit.

Instead, our pelvises are pretty much glued together. He’s locked onto my ovaries. His claspers won’t let me shift more than a few inches.

“Tell me something about yourself.” I’m not trying to be hokey here. I’m serious. When I said that I couldn’t wait to get to know him, I meant it. As awkward as this is, as strange as it is, that hasn’t changed.

Silence falls between us as I look up at his coremata. I can’t resist brushing one with my fingers, gasping at the rush of need that slingshots through me. Clutching onto Rurik as he mates me again.

My next climax turns me into mush, and I just lie there, clinging to him, waiting to see if he’ll belatedly answer my question or if he’s going to fuck me again first.

“When I was a child, I always dreamed of finding my mate last, after all of my brothers.” He takes a few moments to breathe, and I can feel him clenching his jaw, grinding his teeth. I know he can’t help the amount of times that he, um, goes tonight, but he’s sorry for it anyway. “We wouldn’t have to be king and queen. I wouldn’t even have to play the part of a duke. We could just be …” There’s another long silence here where his entire body relaxes, like he’s forced it to against its will. Sexy. He’s in control now. For a minute anyway. “We could just be free.”

I don’t know what to say to that, so I move onto a different subject. As I talk, I stroke my fingers up and down his back. I study the coremata. I stare at the canopied ceiling. There are dim lights in here, pale ones set into the circle of floor that sweeps around the bed. It casts the oddest shadows of me and Rurik onto the lacy walls.

“Can you come to Earth to meet my family?” I might be crazy to ask a question like that. But I’m serious. I am dead fucking serious.

“A permitted individual may visit Earth up to twice a year.” That’s how he answers me. I don’t like that. It’s evasive. “Eve, I am … I am sorry, my princess.”

His hips begin to move again, and I grab hard to the coremata, drugging myself with pheromones.

It’s hours and hours and hours of this.

Hours of feeding me, washing me, rubbing lotion into my aching skin, mating me, breeding me, claiming me.

And yet somehow, when he finally slips out of me with a sigh and rolls onto his back beside me, when his claspers aren’t making me bleed, and his mouth isn’t latched onto my throat, I miss him instantly.

I press a hand over my stomach.

Now that he’s moved, everything is sore down there.

“Come, my princess,” he whispers, forcing himself to his feet. He accepts a pair of robes from another servant and helps me into one, puts a pair of slippers onto me, looks up from his kneeling position beside the bed. Gazes lock. Hearts pound. He snatches my chin and shoves his mouth against mine, pausing only to breathe soft words against my lips. “Let us go back to our rooms.”

Rurik takes my hand and gets me up off the bed and moving, leading us onto the platform, holding me tightly as it drifts back down to the floor we came in on. He guides me off and the moth drones rejoin us, trailing us on a long, slow walk back to our suites.

Either all of the people have gone to bed, or they’re not allowed to be out anymore. Maybe this moment is just for us?

So, hand in hand, we take our time. Outside the ship’s window, I can see a distant sun come into view, and it’s almost like a sunrise.

“What’s next?” I ask him after a while, but he doesn’t answer. He keeps our bare hands together and looks down at me with an expression that promises he’ll tell me when he can.

Avri, Zero, and Connor wait at the beginning of the last hallway, silent as they take up their positions behind us.

“Stay in the servants’ quarters until we call for you.” Rurik pulls me into our foyer, and the door slides shut behind us.

He looks at me again, and then he’s yanking the tie from my robe, dropping his onto the floor.

He lifts me against the wall, drives into me, and makes love to me in private for the first time.

It’s all the sweeter with nobody watching.