Page 40 of Hijack!
For so long I was afraid to take risks. But in the end, I didn’t let that stop me.
If this wasn’t the end-end, he wouldn’t let his fears stop him either.
He steadied her as they climbed up and over the temporary scaffolding into the center of the torus. Suvan and Griiek had repurposed materials intended for phase two of the Love Boat cruises—something labeled “disco ball of the cosmos”. The refractory crystal structure would supposedly confine their anomaly once the nullifying energy was pulsing through the torus, but at the moment, the hexagonal facets only captured tiny slivers of the two of them, echoing into infinity.
Felicity turned a slow circle, gazing around. “It’s like being trapped inside a fun house mirror.”
He flattened his ears. “This would be fun on Earth?”
“Well, I guess a fun house is actually meant to be a little unnerving, a way to change your perception of reality.”
“That sounds like the place to catch a ghost.”
She pivoted to face him, her hands clenching in front of her. “What if I’m wrong about this? What if emotion has nothing to do with triggering the distortion? What if we waste our power for nothing?”
Capturing her anxious hands, he drew her closer. “What if we find out?”
She tilted her face up to him, her blue eyes wide and bright in the shimmer of standby lights. Her exhalation was a little shaky but when she smiled at him, he believed it. “Bite or no bite?”
He flexed his grip on her. “I would happily feel your teeth, azeeli.”
“My translator doesn’t know that word.”
“The little blossom in the atmo-hall bower. I think you would call it sunflower.”
“We have sunflowers on Earth, but they don’t have teeth.”
“You aren’t on Earth anymore.”
When she leaned into him, the weight and friction of her seemed out of proportion with her physicality, pulling him even closer, bending all his awareness to her, as if the laws that governed the universe didn’t apply to this moment. He didn’t even try to resist, just lowered his mouth over hers, opening to her.
Her teeth on his lower lip were sharp. Her tongue so soft. The taste of her sweeter than any nectar and heady as the freshest planetary air. The sensations spun him round though his boots stayed planted in the center of their last-chance experimental trap.
Maybe he was the one caught.
She skimmed her hands up his chest, raking her fingers through his mane where it tufted out of his uniform. Finding the ventral seal, she widened the opening and splayed her fingers over the shorter fur across his pectorals. Her ragged breath this time wasn’t worry, he sensed.
It was desire.
His heart slammed against her palm, trying to reach her through every strand of hair, every nerve. It wasn’t just thedevotion hunger or even the risk to their lives; this was something new, just between them.
“Harder,” he whispered against her mouth.
Her growl was so fierce he would’ve laughed—except she did bite him, exactly hard enough, and he forgot he was supposed to be saving their ship.
Maybe she wasn’t Kufzasin with the incisors and pheromones to inscribe the devotion, and yet she marked him anyway, deeper than skin, fiercer than hunger. A scar he welcomed for eternity.
He dragged her up against him, no space left, just their panting breaths mingling, bodies yearning to meld even closer.
His wrist datpad beeped, and the conduits powering the capacitorus began to glow with the first beams of power siphoned from the engines.
“It’s coming,” he warned her.
“Not quite yet. I… Oh, the anomaly. Yes, okay.” She clung to him. “Should we…keep kissing?”
Aye, forever.
But they didn’t have that kind of time. The shadowy fingers of the harmonic distortion reached across the torus, darkening patches of the crystals and erasing the reflections of their embrace.
