Page 52 of Shattered Silence

Really, there was something about a man who was so powerful, yet so restrained, even when he was struggling with his own internal demons.

Enki held up a single finger, shaking his head.

“You mean there’s only room for one in here?”

He nodded, then made a sign with his hand. Wait.

Wait? Layla pressed her hand against the window, wishing she could talk to him, see his face, touch him. How was he even surviving out there in the cold, airless vacuum, anyway? Was his armor oxygenated, or did he just not need to breathe?

She stared at him, wanting so badly to unravel the mystery that was Enki, even as the thought of him caused a certain warmth to enter her chest. Her breath misted against the window as she watched him floating amongst the stars, a phantom in alien armor who had saved her from his very own kind.

He was vicious and ruthless, just like them.

But he’d saved her, so he was nothing at all like them.

The feeling of warmth spread through the lower half of her body, sending a pleasant ripple across her skin, awakening a sensation she hadn’t experienced for a long time.

Need.

Why now, why here, of all places? Perhaps it was because Layla had found a pocket of calm in the storm. As traumatic memories flooded her mind in the cold, dark, claustrophobic pod, she had no choice but to latch onto the good, and the only good thing to come out of all of this was Enki.

So she thought only of him…

And waited.

Chapter Nineteen

Drifting amongst the stars, waiting for the rescue ship to arrive, Enki finally found his silence.

There were no voices out here, and the Tharian seemed to have given up on trying to take over his body—for now.

With his claws embedded firmly into the outer walls, he clung to the escape pod, watching her through the small window. He wanted to open his comm and speak to her through the pod’s internal communicator, but it wasn’t synced to him, and he didn’t want to risk fumbling about and having his signal detected by the techs on the Ristval V.

They had only just narrowly escaped getting blown to particle dust by the ship’s powerful lasers. He had known the Rysor would immediately become a target, hence why he’d gotten Layla into the pod as soon as the flyer’s velocity had stabilized. Then they’d ejected, and a moment later, the Rysor had been obliterated.

Everything had been done with the narrowest of margins, with the most precise of calculations—the retrieval, the escape, the time taken to get Layla into the pod and eject—but Enki hadn’t been worried about failure.

He did this sort of shit all the time.

Layla didn’t.

But she was smart enough to trust him, and now he was watching her sublime face through the window as she mouthed something at him.

This time, he couldn’t understand the sounds her lips and tongue formed. Perhaps she was speaking in Earth-language, or perhaps he just wasn’t that good at lip-reading.

So he just shook his head slightly and watched her, a sense of contentment coming over him as he observed the slight flush in her cheeks, the dark cascade of her hair as it framed her face, the flutter of her eyelids, the appealing curve of her lips as they parted, revealing her pink tongue…

And those deep, searching brown eyes, so bright in the darkness.

She was life itself; pure, vibrant, vulnerable… everything that he was not.

A prize, as Nythian had called her.

In this rare moment of silence, a powerful feeling came over Enki. It began in his barely beating heart, which had slowed in response to the lack of oxygen in his lungs. It spread through his body, his limbs, his chest, right up to the throbbing bases of his sawn-off horns.

It made him dig his claws deeper into the thick metal walls of the escape-pod, his body filled with tension and desire.

Mine.

---