I Flew the Alien Warlord Past the Blockade, and He Already Knew My Name novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Terms

Inez shakes the cutter through the debris lane, stitches Havrik's shoulder while his gold seams light under her hands, and kisses him first, but a bounty is posted on her own name.

The Concord cutter caught us in Tallow's scrap lane, and I lost it there too.

The scrap lane is eleven kilometres of dead hulls tumbling in a slow ring, and nobody sane flies it above walking pace.

I flew it at the speed of a bad decision.

"Left," Havrik said, once, quietly, from the second seat.

"I said no orders."

"It was a prediction."

I went left, and a torn fuel tank rolled through the space where we had been.

"Fine," I said. "You can predict."

The cutter was a good ship with a clever pilot, and he followed us right up to the Cobb wreck.

There he did the sensible thing and stopped.

I did the stupid thing and went through the hole in its hull.

We came out the other side with the cutter's lights a dim red smear behind us and a panel sparking over Havrik's shoulder.

A bolt had clipped the console on the way out.

He had not made a sound, but a dark stripe of blue ran down his arm and into his lap.

"You're bleeding on my floor," I said.

"I will not do it again."

"Biscuit, take the stick."

"With pleasure, Captain," my ship said. "I have been wanting to fly something large that doesn't insult me."

"I do not insult you," I said.

"You sometimes shout, 'Come on, you cow.'"

I dragged Havrik down to the galley by his good sleeve, and he came.

The galley has a fold-down table and one bench, and he sat on the bench with his knees up around his ears.

I got the medkit and stood between those knees, because it was the only way to reach.

"Coat off."

He took off the coat, and then the shirt under it, and my brain left the room for a moment.

He was blue all the way down, slate over the shoulders and darker at the ribs.

Every inch of him was built like a hull frame.

A burn had opened his left shoulder to the muscle.

I put the sealant gun to the edge and began laying the line, and when my fingers brushed his skin, the gold woke up.

Fine seams of it ran under the blue from his wrist to his collarbone, thin as wire, bright as a filament.

They pulsed, once, where my hand rested.

"What are those?" I said.

"Seams," he said. "They show when I am warm."

"You're always warm."

"When I am warmer."

I laid another stitch, and the light ran up the line of his throat.

He sat very still.

His hands were on the edge of the bench, either side of his thighs, and his knuckles had gone pale.

"Havrik."

"Yes."

"Are you going to look at me?"

He lifted his eyes, and they were gold all the way through, and they weren't looking at my face, they were looking at my mouth.

I'd had the kind of day where a woman does something stupid.

I put the gun down and kissed him.

I had to go up on my toes and put a hand on his chest.

His mouth was hot and careful and absolutely still.

He made a sound low in his chest.

It went through me.

"Hands," I said against his lips. "Stay where they are."

"I know your terms."

"These are new ones."

"Tell me."

"I decide."

His breath came out shaking.

"Yes."

I climbed onto his lap.

His thigh under me was as thick as my waist, hard and hot through my flight trousers.

The first slow grind of my hips drew a noise out of me that I'd never made on my own ship.

He didn't move.

His seams flared all the way down his forearms and lit the underside of the table.

"You'll want to hold on to something," I told him.

"I am holding the bench."

"Good boy."

His jaw clenched, and his eyes went black at the edges.

I got his trousers open with both hands.

He sprang out into my palm, and I swore.

He was blue and heavy and hot, with one fine gold seam up the underside, lit.

My fingers didn't close around him.

I used both hands, and there was still length to spare.

"Fuck," I said, quietly, with real respect.

"I can be careful," he said, through his teeth.

"I didn't ask you to be careful."

I stroked him, slow and firm, root to crown, twisting on the way up.

He shuddered under me and gripped the bench, and the metal creaked in his hands.

All the while I rode his thigh, dragging my clit against the seam of my trousers, hard, in short rolls, the way I liked it.

He watched me do it.

He watched every movement of my hips.

"Look at you," he said, hoarse. "So small, and you take what you want."

"I do."

"Take it."

That did it.

The heat built under my skin, then broke.

I came grinding on his thigh with my forehead on his collarbone and my hands still wrapped around his cock.

I felt the gold light flare beneath my lips.

He lasted three more strokes.

He came with a low, wrecked sound, hot across my wrists and his stomach.

The bench groaned, and one of its screws popped out of the floor.

We stayed like that for a while, breathing, until I could feel my knees again.

"I broke your bench," he said, finally.

"It was cheap."

I wiped my hands on a galley towel with all the dignity I had left.

He sat watching me, his seams fading from gold to a soft dim amber.

"No one has asked me to keep my hands still because she wanted them," he said. "Only because she was afraid of them."

"I'm not afraid of them."

"I see that."

I picked the sealant gun up again, because it was easier than looking at him.

"This isn't on the invoice," I said. "You understand that. The four hundred is for flying."

"I understand."

"Good."

"It would be an insult to put a price on it."

I laid the last stitch into his shoulder, and I didn't say a single clever thing.

Then the cabin speaker clicked.

"Captain," said Biscuit, very carefully, "I hate to interrupt a medical procedure."

"What."

"A two million credit bounty has just been posted on the pilot of Loose Change."

I went cold.

"On who?"

"On you," Biscuit said. "Signed by Governor Mordaunt himself. He wants you alive."

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