Page 36 of Guardian's Soul

Feeling stupid being half naked but not wanting to put on a clean pair of pants before I took a shower, I decided to use one in one of the other rooms. A little distance from one another might clear our heads.

Wouldn't you know it? The second I took four steps down the corridor, the damn marks began to burn. Frygg.

"Thrax!" Hannah yelled loud enough to come through the walls.

"I'm coming," I replied, knowing she couldn't hear me. I hung my head in defeat and reenteredourquarters.

"Thank you!" she yelled from the cleansing unit.

Giving up on modesty or anything else, I grabbed one of the bottles filled with spirit and took a long, deep swig. Frygg.

Hannah exited the cleansing unit. "All yours."

"Thank you." I replaced the bottle and stepped inside, careful, just like her, not to have our skin touch. At this point, I was too afraid of what would happen next.

By the stars, I needed answers.Tomorrow, I told myself.Tomorrow, you will have Possedion under your control.And I swore I would make him sing like searing meat on a roasting stick.

HANNAH

"Doyou really think this is a good idea?" I asked, clinging to Thrax's chest as if my life depended on it, which incidentally, right then, it was about to.

He didn't answer. Instead, he took the plunge. Jumping right out of the damn spaceship as it was flying over the canopy of deep orange trees. I couldn't help myself. I screamed.

I screamed louder with every foot we kept falling. Faster and faster, it seemed. We weren't on Earth, but this planet appeared to have the same gravitational pull because the damn trees that had looked like they were thousands of miles underneath us were getting closer.

Suddenly, I felt a jerk as if someone had grabbed Thrax by the collar and stopped us from falling midway down. That moment only lasted a fraction of a second, and then we were falling again, just not as fast as before.

It had sounded like a bad idea when Thrax explained to me that we would have to jump out of the spaceship in midflight, and now that we had jumped, it sounded like an even worse idea.

We need any advantage of a surprise we can get, Thrax hadexplained. And I got that. I really did. But jumping out of a freaking spaceship was so not my idea of a good time.

Neither one of us had spoken about the incredible sex we had in the break room. Thrax had taken his usual spot on the couch to sleep, and I tossed and turned on the bed. Still very aware of the ache in my pussy, where I could still feel his cock filling me.

Even now, while we werefalling out of a freaking spaceship, I felt it. While I was screaming my lungs out in fear, my pussy was having a pout attack because I had refused to initiate a second round last night or this morning. I probably wouldn't have said no had he made any advances, but since he didn't, I sure as hell wasn't about to.

"Hannah!" Thrax shouted at me.

I knew why. He wanted me to stop screaming, but I couldn't. Actually, it felt kind of freeing. I had felt like screaming ever since the Cryons abducted me, and now I could finally voice all my frustrations. I had heard that screaming could be therapeutic and boy was it ever. All my anger vented through my lungs, and for a moment, I considered never stopping.

"Hannah, for the love of the stars!" Thrax shouted again.

We were still falling, but with every few feet we were closing in on the tree line, it felt as if we were slowing down. Impossible. But yet, that's what was happening.

I should have asked more questions about the jumpsuit, I berated myself. Thrax had tried to explain how it worked. Something with antigravity, blahblahblah. Physics had never been anything that interested me, so I had tuned him out. At that point, I had figured that I trusted him. If he said jumpingout of a freaking spaceshipwas safe, I believed him. Until we did.

Thrax's arms were around me, just like mine were around him. For good measure, he had tied us together, although that was overkill on his part. I felt like a jungle vine, that's how I was pretzeled around him.

"Hannah!" he shouted again, forcing my chin up with his hand. That was the sole reason I looked up because… that hand was supposed to be around me. We had justjumped out of a freaking spaceshipand were falling toward an alien planet.

His head moved down, and his lips claimed mine, suffocating my scream and scrambling my brain. I still felt the sensation of falling, but suddenly, it didn't matter anymore. Nothing mattered except this man.

Something brushed by my skin and scratched me, but even that didn't turn my attention from him and his kiss. His tongue, dancing inside my mouth, pushing and pulling on mine. That was all that mattered. I wasn't completely oblivious to the fact that we were still going down or that we must have been going through the tree canopies because it made sense that this was what was scratching me, but again, nothing mattered.

We were still slowing. A hard jerk and impact against my feet that would have caused me to stumble to the ground had Thrax not been holding me. He dislodged our lips and grinned at me.

I wasn't sure if I wanted to slap or kiss him again. But his hands working on releasing the ties he had used to keep us together brought me back to the present and our mission. And that cleared my mind of any dirty thoughts that may or may not have entered it.

That and looking around inside this alien forest. The trees were skinny and hundreds of feet tall, with a thick, orange canopy on top, through which little sunlight flooded. The ground was made up of orange dirt where dark green moss grew here and there, as well as yellow-orange ferns. Orange was probably not the right word for it. It was more a mix of red and yellows and all the colors in between, kind of like a late fall forest in Maine, at least color-wise.

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