Page 20 of Fighting Gravity
I stepped toward the bed, clutching my dagger tightly. It would take nothing more than a cut to make her bleed out and it would be done.
But the human—Quinn—opened her eyes. They were slits at first, but when she noticed me, they shot wide. She sat up, scurrying back until she was against the wall.
“Jesus fuck!” she exclaimed, quickly taking notice of the blade in my hand.
“Give me a reason to spare your life,” I demanded.
“What?”
“Tell me something useful in the next ten seconds while I think of the best way to kill you. Tell me what the valerians need from you.”
“I told you all I know.”
I moved forward, my hand reaching around the back of her head to clutch at the thin strands of her hair. She fought me, growling out her frustration as I yanked her forward, pressing the sharp edge of my knife beneath her chin.
“You are not telling me everything.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say. I wasn’t exactly high on the chain of command. They don’t tell their plans to anyone. That’s not how humans work. We keep a lot of secrets from each other. I was just a pilot. A grunt. A nothing. They’ve probably already declared me dead without even a thought to look for me.”
“You know the valerians are using humans for genetic research. Why?”
“I don’t know shit about that. I moved stuff around sometimes. I didn’t know what it was.”
“Then give me something else. Human weaknesses. Human traditions. Tactics. Reasons. Anything that would influence the way you fight. The way you negotiate. The way you think. Anything!”
“Get this fucking knife off my neck,” she snarled.
I narrowed my eyes and pressed it against her even harder. She winced as a small tear of red blood trickled down her neck. My nostrils flared at the scent of it. I was beginning to know her smell.
“You think you scare me?” she said, her eyes piercing right through me, rebellious and unblinking. “You’re just another scumbag in a different shade.”
I yanked the knife away, moving it to the back of her neck to pull her in closer. She was on her knees on the bed in front of me, craning her neck to look up.
And, somehow, the sight unraveled me. The way she was in a position of submission, my knife at the back of her neck, flooded my chest with heat. I wondered if she could have brought a disease on board that had slipped past Veron’s scans. I was feeling too feverish for it to be anything else.
“Stop that fucking noise,” she muttered.
I realized my Thel was thrumming at a frequency I wasn’t used to. One I didn’t even summon. The heat in my chest rippled down my arms as I bit back the subtle vibrations. When Quinn let out a heated breath of air from her supple lips, I found myself hesitating.
I didn’t like it.
I tugged at her hair, pulling her head back further until she ground her teeth in discomfort.
“Keep asking me questions, asshole,” she challenged. “I’ll have the same answer every time. You’re shit out of luck. You stole a nobody off that ship. So send me back or kill me already because I’m not telling you shit.”
My nose twitched at that response. So small and so weak and she spoke with such vigor. She spoke like a gek warrior. Like someone trained to take pain and abuse and yet she said she wasn’t military. My cock tingled at her defiance. All I wanted to do was break her.
“Well?” she said. “What’s it gonna be? I’m getting bored.”
I nudged the blade against her a little harder until she winced again. I just needed to press a little harder. Nick an artery. Sever her spine. It would be so fast and so easy.
But I couldn’t.
Rationally, we needed to know as much as we could about humans and she was our best bet.Understanding humans was one way I could get closer to answers. Closer to figuring out what the valerians wanted and how we could deprive them of it. If I could dismantle their alliance, both sides would grow weaker.
As soon as I loosened my grip on Quinn’s hair, an alarm began blaring through the ship, high-pitched and irritating. I slid my knife back into my belt and raised my coms.
“Crex?”
