Abysm (13 page)

“While also making the Alliance look bad and the IDCC look like nothing special.” He shook his head. “I don’t trust them—Prevos. I never did. I consented to their use because it was our sole chance for victory.”

“Yet they didn’t betray us.”

“No, but they could have, and we would’ve been powerless to stop them. This is what worries me.”

“I understand, Aristide. I don’t even disagree. But fear never won a war nor created a peace.”

“Didn’t I say that to you once?”

“You did, a long time ago. I took it to heart.”

He sighed in resignation. “All right. I was leaning in the direction of endorsing the bill, if only for a lack of more palatable options. I’ll draw up a speech tonight and see about casting my fate tomorrow.”

“Want company on the dais?”

“The military publicly declaring its support as well? You’ll take that step?”

“We’re the ones who have the experience working with Prevos. Our absence will leave open questions, while our presence will answer them. Send me the details. But if you can, schedule the announcement for early tomorrow. I have a flight mid-day to meet with Admiral Solovy about continued ship production at the Murat facility.”

“In person? Why go to the trouble?”

“Our working relationship, not to mention any personal one, is…strained at present. I hope to alleviate the strain.” She stood. “But first, I’m going to take the rest of the night off.”

“Oh? Hot date?”

Her eyes twinkled a touch before she turned to leave. “Yes.”

11

SIYANE

R
OMANE
IDCC
C
OLONY

T
HE TRANCE
A
LEX HAD DRIFTED INTO
broke when the human entered the hangar bay. No, not
the human
—Caleb. Husband. Lover. Soulmate, assuming she hadn’t lost hers somewhere in the stars.

She’d spent the designated hour pacing in agitation around the cabin, trying to work out what she would say when he returned but mostly chasing endless loops of recrimination in her mind.

Then she’d had a glass of wine and tried to prepare a happy, welcoming demeanor. Failed.

She made it two whole hours before giving up and sinking into the walls of the ship. There was nothing new or wondrous to see—they were parked in a hangar. But it still gave her comfort, an outlet, a place where time didn’t pass a slow, ticking second at a time. A place where it didn’t seem to pass at all.

But now he was here again. She’d never observed him from this perspective. Where in the hyper-dense congregation of neural cells and firing synapses inside his skull was his consciousness? What portion of the atoms comprising him represented
his
soul?

Jolted by the odd, disjointed thoughts, she hurriedly withdrew into her body, blinking past the brief wave of nausea which always accompanied doing so.

She looked around; she was on the couch. She needed to splash water on her face, but there was no time. The airlock hissed.

He threw his jacket on the floor and barely glanced at her on his way to the kitchen.

Her eyes followed his movement. When she got a good look at him, her brow furrowed up in surprise. “You left to clear your head over new unwelcome revelations about your father and…you went and got a haircut?”

He shrugged as if to deny it, but his hair
was
a good four centimeters shorter and well groomed; not quite close-cropped, but decidedly more clean cut than before. “It was overdue.”

She swallowed and moved on, as his haircut was the literal least of her concerns right now. “I thought you might come back drunk.”

“I considered going drinking. But if I started down that path, I might not have made it back here for…a while.” He spun to the cabinet and retrieved the bottle of Irish whiskey. “But seeing as now I am back, it’s a fine time to start.”

He retrieved a glass, threw a few chiller cubes in it, filled it to the rim with the whiskey and turned it up. The contents disappeared in one long swig. He immediately refilled the glass and took a more normal, if still lengthy, sip. Finally his gaze rose from the glass to meet hers. “Okay. Lay it on me. Give me your worst.”

“I’m not…Caleb, I don’t blame you for this. You were a child when it happened. You’re not responsible for your father’s actions.”

He regarded her strangely, then quickly took another sip. “Thank you for that. But surely my government is to blame—and Division, whom I spent eighteen years working for. Surely you want to lay a bit of their sins at my feet, if only for my poor judgment in choice of employer.”

She opened her mouth to respond but struggled to locate the words. He sounded so damn caustic. Harsh, on edge and spoiling for a fight. She couldn’t rightly blame him, but she wasn’t any good at soothing his angst when she
did
have her full wits about her.

Finally she ventured forward in a tentative, quiet tone. “I don’t. I know when you met me, I had let my bitterness over my father’s death fester and grow into a generalized displeasure with entire organizations, entire governments. With entire swaths of the galaxy. But I’ve put it behind me. I haven’t felt that way for a while. I thought you realized.”

He regarded her in stark consternation for several seconds, then rolled his eyes at the ceiling before taking another long sip of his drink.

“What? Are you not glad I don’t blame you? I expected you to be glad. I tried to tell you before you left, but you bolted before I could get out half a sentence. What else do you want from me?”

“What else do I
want
from you? I want…I want you to yell and scream and throw things. I want to see the slightest hint of the fire that made me fall in love with you, even if the fire is directed at me.” He held up his glass and sloshed its contents around. “I’ve got my flame-retardant gear, so I can take it.

“When I met you, when we fought the Metigens, you were
alive
. You were angry and acerbic and disagreeable and daring anyone to prove you wrong about the world, but you were alive. And I would give a proper fortune right now to see just a spark…to see something more than this shell, this faded shadow of who you are.

“You
should
be angry. You should feel betrayed and disgusted and the galaxy should tremble in the face of your wrath. But I wonder—do you feel anything?”

She closed her eyes, hiding from his piercing stare. She had no response, because he wasn’t wrong. His words ought to sting, the events behind them should cut…she searched for the pain and found only emptiness.

In a detached sort of way, she recognized that she
was
angry, at so many things; she recognized the emotion and what it meant. But she experienced it as in a dream, ephemeral and incorporeal in a realm where nothing as fleeting as emotions truly existed.

She tried to find her way out, but the real world had become the dream, the elemental domain the sole place which felt real.

In desperation she leapt up and moved to stand in front of him, close enough to touch but not doing so. “Then make me feel. Make me feel
you
.”

His irises bore into her, dark as indigo obsidian and violently brooding. His brow creased. He tilted the glass up to empty it again, then set it down too hard on the counter.

When he spoke, his voice was taut, sharpened by vitriol. “How am I supposed to respond to that? What is that even supposed to mean?”

She inhaled, but instead of air, her chest filled with a cavernous desolation. Her focus drifted to the floor so he wouldn’t see the hopelessness overtaking her as she eked out a response. “Nothing. It doesn’t mean anything at all. Never mind.”

Then she turned and began walking away, wishing as strongly as he had that there was somewhere, anywhere on the ship where she could be alone. She didn’t—

His hand landed on her upper arm and yanked her around to face him, then yet closer. His mouth crashed into hers with a rough, coarse fierceness. There was no tenderness to his embrace as he shoved her against the edge of the data center table.

The taste of whiskey on his tongue and hunger in his touch was what finally began to break through the fog clouding her mind. Like a drowning swimmer grasping for the dangling rope, she met his kiss with equal fierceness, dragging her fingers through his hair until her nails scraped at his scalp.

He drew back a sliver to growl against her lips. “Did you feel that?”

“Yes.” She pressed into him, renewing the kiss and holding him fast lest he try to escape, having made his point. In truth his touch flitted at the edges of her reality, but she needed this. She needed him to be
real
. She needed him to not let go.

In the smallest act of mercy, he didn’t fight her or pull away; instead his teeth grazed her lower lip insistently. A hand swept down to her hip then inside the waistband of her flimsy shorts. Farther.

Jolts of pleasure rocketed through her. It was the first sensation she’d experienced in this allegedly tangible world to exceed the palpability of the elemental one in days.

“Do you feel that?” His voice was gravelly and harsh. Challenging.

She pulled in air, mind and body swimming, and managed a semblance of a nod.

His other hand clasped the nape of her neck and coaxed her into meeting his troubled gaze. “Say it.”

She blinked. “Yes…I feel that. Please.”

His mouth teased hers. “Please what?”

“Please…more. Don’t…please don’t stop—”

He short-circuited the last word with his lips, and she let go of the esoteric fear in favor of physical, carnal sensations. Her hands found the hem of his shirt and yanked it up, willing to forego his kiss for a blink of time to be rid of the shirt—and hers, as he’d done the same.

His skin burned hot on hers, his pulse racing beneath its surface. She sensed the moment when his motivation shifted from anger to anger-fueled lust, when his motions became desperate as his hands shoved her shorts down and gripped her ass to hold her tight against him.

Right now she didn’t care what fueled it. Right now so many wrong things fueled her lust, too. It was all wrong, but it was the only thing she had tethering her to reality.

She fumbled for the clasp on his pants, wrenched them open and down over his hips—

—instantly he had hoisted her up onto the table. First one knee then the other hemmed her in on either side as he slid her backward.

She managed the beginning of a weak protest. “The table—”

“To hell with the table.” The weight of his body urged her down.

The table is scientific equipment worth tens of thousands of credits and was not made for this. But it doesn’t matter, does it?

Smooth metal met her back in a flash of white-hot ice. She would have bolted up from the shock if it had been possible to do so.

The contrast of the heat of his skin and the cold metal was almost too much for her to bear. Scorching, freezing, which was she? Which was which?

His palms clutched both sides of her face. “Look at me, dammit.”

He was too near for her to bring him into focus. The whole of her vision was dancing, electric sapphire. “Caleb….”

“Do you realize what you mean to me? Do you?” He slid inside her in perfect time with his lips meeting hers anew, denying her the chance to reply. And she remembered what this plane of existence could feel like.

His words were the only gentle thing about him. Yet she pushed him further, nails scratching up his spine and trying to draw him yet closer, deeper, seeking yet more.
Make me want, need, ache to choose this world, my love. Demand I choose it. I beg you.

He lifted her up and onto him as he settled on his heels, which was when she noticed his pants were still mostly on, the waistband sitting haphazardly below his hips. Nothing to be done for it now.

The absence of the cold metal at her back was almost as stark as its arrival had been, and suddenly she was burning up. He was even hotter, scalding her lips as they roved over his damp skin.

She nipped at his earlobe, his neck, the pounding artery beneath the skin which had once been ripped open—

—the memory punched all the air out of her lungs. She froze, tears stinging her eyes. He’d come so close to dying. She’d come so close to losing him when they’d scarcely begun.

One of his hands fisted in her hair as the other held her up roughly. “No. Don’t you
dare
slip away from me now.”

He misunderstood the reason for the abrupt slackness in her body and the halt in her motions. But before she was able to respond, he had all but thrown her down on the table, driving into her with renewed urgency.

The shock from the icy surface forced out what little air she’d regained, and with his mouth covering hers she could hardly find more. It was fine. She didn’t need to breathe.

The sensations coursing through her body grew to overpower the ice and the heat. Had she imagined anything else compared? This
was
better. More important. More alive. More of life. She held on to the passion with everything she had.

His arms wound beneath her, and he lifted her off the table to brace her against him, suspended in the air.

Her head fell back, sweaty, tangled hair sweeping across the table as she surrendered to the deluge of sensations and cried out.

The wave of ecstasy crested but didn’t crash down. Instead his own surging pleasure held it aloft, much as his powerful muscles held her body up. She let her and his rapture wash over her, blending and merging and searing into her.

This time the cold from the table surface didn’t penetrate her skin when he eased her down onto it. She only felt him.

His chest heaved above hers as he regarded her with an expression of heartbreaking rawness, tainted by shadows of pain and sadness.

She’d almost forgotten these visceral human emotions could be so…brutal. Her chest hurt, but not from his weight. From something deeper, yet maddeningly elusive.