Page 37 of Decadence

This won’t do.

Ikriss slipped his hand into the pocket of her garment, his long, callused fingers curling around her cold, trembling, delicate ones. “This is unnecessary,” he whispered as he teased the tiny blade out of her hand. It slipped into the bottom of her pocket, leaving her fingers free for the taking. He ran the tips of his fingers along hers, surprised to find that the pads of her fingers were actually hard and callused like his.

She was no stranger to hard work.

A fine tremor started in the lower part of her body, rippling up her spine and into her neck, and finally, her head.

Her jaw trembled.

Her lower lip trembled.

She took a deep breath and then let out a slow, shuddering sigh. The tension melted from her body, and for one sublime moment, she surrendered to him, closing her eyes and slumping forward ever so slightly. “I don’t know why I should fucking trust you.”

It was an admission, of sorts. There was fight in her words, but her body told him a different story.

“I could say something trite like ‘you have no choice,’ but then you would have even less reason to trust me.” Detecting a hint of an opening, Ikriss leaned in and inhaled her sweet musk. He was good at sensing when he had the upper hand. He was a hunter, after all. “When it comes to you, my intentions are nothing but honorable.” He tightened his grip on her hand and she didn’t fight it. Ikriss stared down into grey-green eyes that reminded him of the strange, sun-kissed, vegetation-dappled lands he’d seen from the skies when he’d first flown down to Earth.

“Intentions…” Pale golden eyelashes fluttered. The sight of her rapid, delicate pulse beating in her neck stirred something deep and primal within him.

All of a sudden, he wanted to devour her sweet little essence.

Well, perhaps his intentions weren’t so honorable after all, but she didn’t need to know that.

Not yet.

The time wasn’t right.

Not yet.

Sienna took a deep breath and shook herself, as if trying to snap out of a trance. Abruptly, she disengaged her fingers from Ikriss’s and stepped back.

“Fucking hell,” she muttered in perfectly crude English, and Ikriss only understood what she was saying because he’d allowed Zharek to do a neural rearrangement experiment—a patch—on his brain before he left Silence, giving him the ability to speak English.

He was one of the first to get this newly developed patch, and he surely wouldn’t be the last. Although the idea of having his brain rearranged filled him with disgust on some deep, primal level, he hadn’t hesitated much when Zharek had proposed the procedure, because he had faith in the medic’s abilities, and he’d already undergone hundreds of such procedures in the past.

The Empire had trained him well, and as a former Intelligence Officer and then Commander…

Well, one didn’t get to reach such positions without going through a lot of pain.

The trade-off was that he was now able to speak his mate’s native tongue.

What was a little pain when this was the end result?

That was one advantage he had over the First Division, at least. Their freakish bodies wouldn’t tolerate any more modifications. The virulent black nanites in their bloodstreams would neutralize any such kind of intervention.

Ikriss inclined his head, secretly amused. “I didn’t pick you for the crude type.”

“Crude? How did you…?” An indignant puff of air escaped between Sienna’s lips, and he found it utterly charming. She shook her head. “Never mind. We chefs take a course in offensive profanity as part of our training.”

Ikriss frowned. Cursed humans and their strange customs. “What in the Nine Hells for?”

Now it was Sienna’s turn to smile. Oh? So she was toying with him now? “I’m joking. Chef training can be brutal. Most restaurant kitchens are hot, frantic, crazy places, even with all the cuisine-tech they use nowadays. We learn to put up with a lot of abuse, especially of the verbal kind.”

“Ah.” That explains a few things. Suddenly, Ikriss understood how Sienna had been able to withstand such torture and degradation at the hands of the Ephrenians… then snap back into some semblance of normality so very quickly.

She was so determined to regain her place in the Universe, and he could only admire such resilience, even if he didn’t quite understand it.

It was as the General had explained to him.

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