Page 97 of Command

Had all the uhyre been implanted with these things? What else did they suppress? Andhow? Suddenly those moments where he flinched back or stopped in his tracks or went far away somehow made sense. The implant in his brain was keeping him on a chain.

“It is the only thing that keeps us alive.” Threxin leaned forward and grabbed the edge of her chair. She gripped the seat for balance as he wheeled her toward him, positioning her between his splayed legs. Threxin looked down at her, tapping two talons beneath her chin. “Keepsyoualive.”

His eyes tracked her throat as she swallowed, and the hunger there infected her, making the heat between her legs blaze.

“Threxin,” she began, knowing she needed to get this out of the way before she lost her damn mind. “The Uploads…”

“…Rations first. Then Uploads.”

Her eyes flew up to his. “Really? You’re going to do it?”

“I will arrange for Uploads to resume. To a holding database,” he finally said.

“You will?”God, why didn’t he say so earlier?“Wait… a database?”

“You have a holding database, to hold the binary data of Uploaded humans temporarily while on expeditions. Your dying humans can be stored there. I will haveColossaltransfer them to your wider network directly before our jump.”

Alina pursed her lips, thinking. This could work. It was a compromise, but something the residents ofColossalwere already used to from expeditions. They wouldn’tlikeit—they probably wouldn’t trust him to go through with the final transfer. But it may be the best they could get, and Alina knew Threxin wouldn’t back out. Unless…

“But if I discover two-way communication is possible before we jump,” he said pointedly, “I will destroy them. Do you recognize?”

“I recognize,” Alina nodded vigorously, her whole body trembling with the ache to launch itself into his arms with gratitude.

A small smirk lifted the corner of his mouth as he observed her failing restraint.

“Come here,” he rasped low. “Show me how you recognize.”

She lay in her bed hours later with Threxin kneeling on the floor beside her. He dipped the towel in his hand into his bowl of warm water, then brought it to her skin.

“This looks familiar,” Alina muttered with a lazy smirk.

He’d finger fucked her to oblivion and back, and her head was still in a haze.

Alina sighed as Threxin wiped every last trace of exorin that had gotten onto her skin over the course of their not-quite lovemaking.

He’d made her come countless times—ripped orgasm after orgasm out of her until she was begging for him to stop, her overly sensitized body unsure what to do with itself. But he hadn’t come even once, and when Alina had tried to do what she could with her hands, he’d batted her away only to shove another finger in her pussy.

Alina turned her head to look at him, reaching up to trace a fingertip along the burning blue aperture running down his obliques. He closed his eyes and sank a fang into his lower lip, his body tilting forward into her touch.

Biting her lip, she rose on her elbow and pressed her lips to that blue slit in his hard, unfamiliarly smooth skin. The sound from his chest made her open her eyes and look to his face with her mouth pressed against him. His hand snaked around her to hold her to him, leaving her hands free to come to the apertures on his chest and abs, stroking up gently in slow, gentle arcs.

Threxin shuddered underneath her as she traced his glowing lines, her breath washing over the aperture still beneath her lips. She kept watching his face as she chanced pressing her tongue to the aperture and giving it a tentative upward stroke.

“Shoq,” Threxin choked out, his talons prickling at her back.

The aperture tasted like nothing, but it radiated some kind of heady current that shot straight to her head, then her gut. Alina had to pull back and lean her forehead to his skin, taking quick, shallow breaths. Her hands paused their stroking as she caught her bearings, and after a few seconds she leaned forward again, this time pressing her tongue to theaperture running from his shoulder and diagonally down his flat, broad pec. Her breath hitched as the aperture widened under the tip of her tongue, the current hitting her all at once this time. She pressed her tongue tighter against him, flattening it to his skin for more surface area.

“Alina…” he choked out, but she only brought a finger to his mouth, pressing it to his lip. She moaned as a fang nipped affectionately at her fingertip.

At the base of his sternum, two apertures wound on either side of his jagged eight-pack of abs. Saliva pooled in her mouth as she drank them in hungrily, deciding which to follow first. She took the left, tightening her grip on his side with her hand as she adjusted on her knees to lick down the glowing opening. The way it shifted and pulsed under her tongue was odd and felt weirdly primal—it was such an alien part of him, what she was doing wasn’t comparable to anything in her world, but it was incredibly intimate nonetheless even if she didn’t quite have a comparison for it.

She shifted on her knees to bend lower as she followed the pulsing aperture toward his hip. Already her pulse was up again, her eyes flicking to his belt, trousers slung low on his hips. The aperture beneath her tongue tapered to a point right at the edge of the flat plane beneath his stomach, where his bulging abs ended and the taper of his hips began.

Threxin must have sensed her hesitation, maybe in the way her fingers flexed against his sides, because he clasped his hands to her face and pulled her back up before she could try anything stupid. He held her sitting upright on her knees before him, staring at the line of black seeping through his lips.

“How can this ever be enough for you?” Alina whispered.

How could he possibly be satisfied with these restrained shreds?Shewasn’t.

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