Page 71 of Seer Prophet

The woman Loki looked at now didn’t strike him as old in any way, nor as particularly humorous in her light or physicality. Even for a human, she was quite young. Which was neither here nor there to Loki really, but he found it interesting, in terms of how her daughter viewed her. He wondered if it had something to do with her having given birth.

She still wore the remnants of the dark eye make-up she had on when they found her.

Noticing that got him remembering what else she’d been wearing?and not wearing?when they broke into that room. A mere flicker of the memory brought a denser pulse of guilt, and a hotter wave of pain that wanted to take over his light.

The latter caused his tongue to thicken before he glanced at her again.

Gods. She probably wouldn’t thank him for his being turned on by her enslavement, whether she negotiated the terms of that enslavement or not.

Avoiding her wide, dark eyes, whose stare didn’t exactly help his concentration, Loki looked back towards the Chinook and to Preela.

“Approach?” He adjusted the rifle strap on his shoulder. He cleared his throat, his voice toneless. “What do you recommend?”

He’d already told Preela and Rex where they were going.

He felt the female human’s light, curious in his, and his pain worsened. It got bad enough that he saw Preela flinch, right before she glanced at Rex, then at Jax, who stood on Loki’s other side.

Jax shrugged, a faint smile touching his lips.

Even so, he gave Loki a wary look.

Rex grinned openly, leering in interest at the small, dark-haired, muscular woman standing between Holo and Illeg just outside their tighter circle.

“Got a hard-on for our cargo, eh, Captain?” Rex spoke Prexci, the seer tongue, presumably so the human wouldn’t understand. “You can sit in the back. None of us will bother you if you want to ass-fuck her all the way to the next drop.”

Loki ignored him, looking at Preela.

“What do you think?” he repeated politely. “In terms of approach?”

He felt the human woman behind him tense. He blew a warm pulse of light at her in reassurance. He did it without thought, without questioning whether it was appropriate that the others see it, but once he had, he felt the woman’s light wrap even more deeply into his.

He felt flickers of that uncertainty in her again. Fear of the unknown, fear of not knowing them, of not knowing if she could trust them. He felt her remind herself they had treated her gently so far, that no one had hurt her?so far. She tried to reassure herself she wasn’t crazy to risk going with them, if it might bring her to her daughter.

She couldn’t have understood Rex, but Loki had to restrain himself from stepping between the two of them anyway. He fought another urge to speak to her, or at least use his light to reassure her that no harm would come to her.

He decided he wouldn’t leave Rex alone with her, either.

He avoided saying her name still, or even thinking it.

He knew her name, though. It was Gina.

Gina Vasquez.

His pain worsened. He forced his mind off the woman he could now feel tangibly behind him. She wanted to touch him; he could feel that, too. He wanted Holo away from her, almost as much as Rex, and briefly, he had to fight his own light until he controlled it.

The others were all looking at him now.

A few wore wary expressions, even woven into their amusement.

Illeg muttered something darkly to Holo, but Loki only caught a few words.

“…the fuck happened?” Holo muttered back. “Did I miss something?”

“…Fixated… need to watch him with her…”

“Gods,” Ontari muttered. “When? When we found her?”

“No one knows?” Jax began, even as Illeg talked over him.

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