I Flew the Alien Warlord Past the Blockade, and He Already Knew My Name novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Drift Gate Nine

Customs boards, Inez and Havrik hide in the smuggler's hold with an inspector overhead, and once they clear, he kneels on the cargo floor and she finds out how quiet she can be, until Biscuit finds a tracker on the hull.

Drift Gate Nine stopped us at the exact minute I'd hoped it wouldn't.

"Concord customs," said a bored voice on the comm. "Cut engines and prepare to be boarded."

Every hull in the Reach goes through the gate, and every inspector there has one job: find the Dar.

"Havrik," I said.

"I heard."

"The smuggler's hold is behind the third panel in the cargo bay. It's a metre wide."

He looked at the doorway, and then at himself.

"It will be a closer fit than your galley bench."

"Get in the box, Warlord."

He folded himself into the hold.

I slid the panel shut on his white braids and his gold eyes, and I had four minutes before the airlock cycled.

"Biscuit, bleed the engines into the cargo bay."

"The bay will reach forty degrees."

"Good. Do the galley oven too. Everything we own."

"May I ask why?"

"Because the scanner reads heat, and I'd like it to be confused."

The inspector who came aboard was a thin man with a handscanner and a face.

He took in the sweat on my forehead and said, "It's warm in here."

"Reactor's cranky," I said. "Don't touch the wall. I've lost two fingerprints that way."

He started with the cabin and went through my bunk, my boots and the drawer where I keep my mother's one photograph.

He held the photograph up to the light for a long time.

I smiled at him the entire time and wanted to break his arm.

Then he went down to the cargo bay with the scanner beeping.

The scanner pinged at the third panel.

I felt my pulse in my teeth.

"Heat source," the inspector said.

"That's the reactor shield," I said, too fast.

"Behind the panel."

"Behind the panel is a coolant loop, and it's a hundred and forty degrees, and if you open it you'll lose your eyebrows."

He looked at the panel.

He looked at me.

I looked back and thought about my father, who used to say that the best lies are the boring ones.

"Eyebrows," the inspector said at last, and moved the scanner along the wall.

He spent another twenty minutes tapping my crates, and when the airlock finally cycled behind him, my legs went.

I made it to the third panel before I sat down on the deck.

I pushed it open, and the hold breathed out a wave of heat.

Havrik unfolded himself, and he was lit up.

The seams ran gold from his wrists to his collar, down his ribs, and into his waistband.

His shirt was soaked.

His eyes were enormous.

"Forty-one minutes," he said.

"You counted."

"I had nothing else to do but listen to you lie."

"I'm a very good liar."

"You were extraordinary," he said, and the roughness in his voice made my stomach drop.

"He picked up your mother's picture and your voice didn't change."

"How do you know it's my mother?"

"Your hands shook after you put it back."

I stared at him.

He had been behind a metal panel the entire time.

"I can hear a heartbeat through a hull," he said.

He crossed the bay in two steps.

I was still on the floor.

He went down on his knees in front of me, which put his face level with my chin.

"You were magnificent," Havrik said.

No one had said that to me since my father died.

My eyes stung, and I was furious about it.

"Don't," I said. "I'll cry on you."

"Then cry."

"I want you to make me stop thinking."

"Tell me how."

I grabbed his braid in my fist and dragged his face toward mine.

"Your mouth," I said. "On me. Now."

He kissed me first, deep and slow, and then he picked me up.

He lifted me with one arm and set me on a cargo crate.

The crate was exactly the right height.

His hands went to my belt.

"Off," I said.

"Yes."

He peeled my trousers down my legs, and my boots with them, and he was so careful that I wanted to scream.

I was bare from the waist down on a crate in a hot cargo bay.

He knelt between my knees with his hands spread over my thighs.

They covered the whole of them.

"Look at you," he said.

"Don't look."

"I will look. I will look until I have it by heart."

His mouth came down on me.

I cried out, a short broken sound that the bay swallowed.

His tongue was hot, long and wide and so patient that I felt it in the roots of my teeth.

He licked me in one slow stroke, from my entrance up to my clit, and then he did it again.

I grabbed his braids with both hands.

"That," I said. "Again. Don't stop."

He didn't.

He found the rhythm he'd read in my body, and he stayed in it.

When I rocked against his face he groaned into me, and the sound shook through every nerve.

His hands held my hips down on the crate, easily.

"You taste like salt and engine heat," he said against me.

I laughed, and then I moaned, because he had circled my clit with the flat of his tongue.

"Good girl," he said, low. "Let me hear it."

"Havrik."

"Louder."

"Fuck, Havrik, right there."

I came with a shout that rang off the bulkheads, and my thighs clamped around his head.

He kept licking through it, gentle and unhurried, until I was sobbing and half boneless and tugging his hair to make him stop.

He didn't stop.

He slid one long finger inside me, only one, and curled it.

The second orgasm took me so hard I saw stars.

When it was over, I lay back on the crate with my hand over my eyes.

My whole body hummed.

Havrik rested his forehead against my stomach, and his breath was uneven.

His seams were still blazing.

I could feel how hard he was against my shin, and he made no move to do a thing about it.

"I'll fix that," I mumbled.

"Later."

"You're cruel."

"I am patient," he said, and kissed my hip. "It is a Dar failing."

I started to laugh.

Then Biscuit cleared its throat on the bay speaker.

"Captain, I regret to report that the inspector left a gift."

I sat up.

"What kind of gift?"

"A tracking pod on the hull, magnetised to the ventral plate," Biscuit said. "It has been broadcasting our position since the gate."

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