Page 107 of Command

Threxin hissed through his fangs. “You do not understand what I almost did to you, human.”

“But you didn’t. And you look calm now,” she said. “Please. I don’t want to be alone… Not like this.”

It was a lie. All she wanted was to be alone. She wanted to coop up in her cabin and cry and feel sorry for herself. Alina felt broken and used. She had wanted this so much, and it had gone so horribly wrong.

Alina choked back her self-pity and instead reached up to stroke the sloped spikes at the nape of Threxin’s neck gently. She yanked her hand away when the spikes snapped flat against his spine with a loud crack, threatening to pinch—maybe sever—her fingers. He looked up and turned to her, eyes narrowing.

“Do not do that, human,” he snapped.

“Do what?”

“I am not blind,” Threxin hissed in her face, fangs bared. He rose suddenly to his feet, making her draw back. “Stop trying to take care of me. I do not require your care. Nobody on this shoqing ship requires it.”

Alina took a shaky breath, trying to fight back the familiar overwhelmed sensation. “Threxin, you have an implant in your head that’s hurting you. Let me help and?—”

His nostrils flared, fists clenched, and for a moment Alina thought he might snap again. Instead, Threxin jerked his trousers back up over his hips and buckled himself. Then he turned mechanically on his heels and left her cabin.

CHAPTER 45

THREXIN

Threxin paced the blood passages for ticks upon ticks. Ship hours. It may as well have been ship days.

His skull throbbed endlessly. Mercilessly. To the point that he had half a mind to march into the medbay, grab the nearest sharp object, and dig into his skull—digitout. It may as well kill him.

He paced.

Something was wrong, he could feel that much. His limiter used to kick in with a smooth efficiency before he could even feel whatever outburst it was protecting him against. By design, he shouldn’t even get the chance to know the emotion it was walling off.

Threxin thought back to that time as a teen, in theElysiancommand center with that female, tearing at each other as they fucked and bled. Later he’d put it down to the limiter adjusting to the onslaught of puberty, because it had never happened again. Mating was… fine. It was fine. No one got killed, and that was the important part.

Except that night, with his cock buried deep in Alina Argoud, it hadn’t been fine.

Disappearing in that warm, wet, clenching sleeve that sucked him in. Watching her take his girth, so clearly notdesigned for it but doing it anyway. He wanted to force his way inside and rip her open, and he did, and she took it. He felt himself hitting something inside her, knowing he was hurting her and not giving a shoq. Enjoying the way she squirmed beneath him.

His limiter had been fighting hard, building its wall, trying to cage away the real thing inside him that wanted to kill and fuck something at the same time. But it may as well have been a toy, unable to withstand the grotesqueness of what he really was.

Threxin had watched Alina’s eyelashes splayed on her cheeks as she looked down at him tearing her apart, her brow furrowed in pain and yet her cunt unable to do anything but suck him in like a thoughtless animal. The way red had crept up her chest, spreading out over her heavy tits and along her pebbled nipples, made him want to claw into her skin and draw out more of it.

He had been about to sink his fangs into that flesh when she looked up at him and their eyes locked. Threxin had expected to see a look of painful resistance. Or maybe resignation to just having it happen and knowing she could do nothing about it. Instead, he saw eyes black with a desire so desperate it could only be mirrored by his own.

She had wanted this. He was hurting her, and she wanted him, and she wasn’t like an uhyre female—she would never try to stop him or fight back like one of his cohort would. Even with a vaccine, the lack of physical addiction hadn’t kept her wits about her. Alina Argoud was putting her pathetic human life in his hands, trusting he wouldn’t snuff it out even as he was pulling a chunk of hair from her scalp with the grip he’d had on her.

It had hurt, the way he wrenched himself away from her, his spikes catching on flesh as they popped out one by one with an ugly wet sound. They dripped with both of them,and shoq, Threxin had half a mind to go back there and finish the job. Fuck every hole he could find and fit into.

But that look in her eye was more effective than the implant in his brain had been. His heart was drilling through his chest as he remembered where he was, who she was, and tried to banish that aching thing that somehow hurt more than his head did when their eyes met.

Threxin had no name for it, but he knew in that moment he’d sooner kill himself than hurt the female before him.

And then she had the gall to bring him calming liquid and try futilely to comfort him. She pitied him. Threxin had nearly ripped her throat out again right then, this insistence of putting everyone before herself driving him shoqing crazy.

He had to get away from her. That was the only thought he could get clear in his mind through the dagger being stabbed over and over into his malfunctioning brain:I can be nowhere near her.

The realization killed him.

A sound from the passage ahead made Threxin stop in his tracks. He narrowed his eyes, tightening apertures to prevent light leaking through and giving away his position.

“I can smell you,” the voice bounced off the walls.

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