Page 14 of Legend

Jess slid her hands lower as she dropped to her knees. I barely had time to think before she’d curled one hand around the base of my cock and closed her lips around the crown. I tangled my hands in her hair as she sucked my length deeper into her mouth and made my eyes roll back into my head.

Grekme, she had gotten so good that I couldn’t imagine giving her any instruction. Not when she took my cock down her throat like she’d been doing it for years. Not anymore. Well, there was one thing I wanted to tell her.

“Don’t get too comfortable on your knees, Jess, because soon it will be my turn, and I’m going to have you on your back and screaming my name.”

She laughed, the sound reverberating through my cock. Then she dragged her mouth up the length of me and pulled away for a beat. She gave me a hard shove, and I fell backward onto my bed. “You first, Drexian.”

Vyk

I detectedvoices before I even reached the doors to the staff dining room, and I hesitated before walking through them. What was I doing? I’d agreed to join the card game so I could form closer bonds with my colleagues and dispel any lingering mistrust they might harbor against me. But now, I’d turned the card game into a face-off between me and Fiona. She wanted to prove herself to me, and I wanted to do what I always did when it came to Drexian cards. I wanted to win.

Memories of past card games—of smoky backrooms that smelled of stale liquor and sweat, of surly aliens glaring at me across the worn tables, of scooping up credits as my opponents cursed me—made my fingers buzz with anticipation. It might not be fair to accept Fiona’s challenge without telling her of my prowess at the card table, but this was not about playing fair. I’d gone from wanting to use the game to show her that I was not the evil commander she believed me to be, to wanting to prove that I respected her enough to play my best.

You want more than that.

I forced the taunting voice from my mind as I entered the dining room. Two of the long tables had been shoved together to make one large square, and I recognized most of the instructors sitting on benches around it.

Kann and Volten sat next to each other on one side, as Kann shuffled a deck of cards. He rapped the glossy cards on the wooden surface before cutting them and placing two equal stacks next to each other.

Across from the two friends sat Fiona and Ariana. My heart squeezed when I saw that the captain wore her wavy, blonde hair loose, so that it fell forward as she leaned her elbows on the table.

She glanced up when I entered, her eyes flaring in challenge. “I thought you might have decided to back out.”

I let out a gravelly laugh. “Never.”

“Back out of the game?” Kann’s brow wrinkled. “Why would the commander back out of a friendly card game?”

“Because it’s not a friendly game.” Fiona leaned back, her gaze never leaving me. “Commander Vyk has accepted my challenge to a one-on-one match.”

Volten and Kann both flicked their gazes between the captain and me, as if waiting for one of us to reveal the joke.

“She is telling the truth,” I said, as I strode forward and took a seat perpendicular to all four players. “The captain issued a challenge, and I accepted.”

Kann opened his mouth, as if to reveal that I was the last person Fiona should play against, but then he met my severe expression and clamped his lips shut.

“First, we will play as a group,” Fiona said, tearing her sharp gaze from me and smiling at everyone. “The last thing I want to do is spoil the fun for everyone.”

A pair of Drexian instructors entered, one an Iron and one a Blade, and they greeted everyone before they took seats across from me. Then Volten produced a bottle of Noovian whiskey from under the table and plunked it down next to the cards.

Ariana eyed the bottle and then him. “I hope you don’t expect us to pass it around like we’re outside a 7-11 at midnight.”

“Not sure if that means anything to anyone but me,“ Fiona told her with a grin, as the rest of us exchanged bewildered glances.

“There are glasses.” Kann stood, threw one leg over the bench, and walked to the back of the dining room where the tables usually held platters of food and pitchers of drinks. He stacked several glasses inside each other, making a tower that he could carry back with two hands. Once at the table, he unstacked them one by one and set them around the bottle.

Ariana beamed at him, her expression filled with affection. “Now that’s more like it.”

For a moment, I wondered why she wasn’t sitting next to her mate, but I suspected her choice of seat had a lot to do with supporting her friend when she played me. The pair of female human instructors had appeared to be fast friends from the moment they’d arrived at the academy, and a part of me envied their easy friendship.

My arrival at the academy had not brought me any new friends, even though there were other Drexians who shared my Inferno Force past, others who had also gone through the academy like me, even others who had been Irons. My reputation as a brutal Inferno Force commander had precluded any connections. It had only provoked fear and wariness, which I’d proved to be warranted through my involvement in the scandal of the trials.

But I had never been easily accepted into groups. Not at the academy when I’d been a poor boy from a no-name clan, not in the Irons when I’d had no lineage of proud Irons to boast of, not even in Inferno Force when I’d quickly gotten a reputation for being fiercer than any other warrior. I had been reserved when others had been loud, serious when others had been pulling pranks, and determined to win when others played for fun.

Kann unscrewed the top from the bottle and poured a measure of the whiskey into seven glasses. “Should we start the game with a toast?”

We all picked a glass and lifted it into the air, then clinked them together in the center.

“To playing fair and having fun,” Volten said.

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