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  Or get much, much closer.

  Instead he was forced to just stand and endure the conflicted ache in his muscles while she leisurely wiped herself down. Each swipe had the fastidiousness of the genetically modified kitters sent along with every terraforming operation to deal with the inevitable vermin.

  She finished her impromptu bath and wadded the towel between her hands before slanting a look at him. “I don’t have all my memories, but I know it’s been a long time since anyone noticed if I lived or not. Why do you care so much?”

  As wrong as it was—he worked alone; he always had—he wanted her to understand him. “For the same reason you do your job, in a way: because that’s the way I was raised.”

  “I wasn’t raised. I was programmed.”

  He lifted one shoulder. “You told me we never escape the paths we are set upon. My parents were followers of Tranquility and lived on one of the collective worlds organized around those teachings. When I was just a little younger than the twins, two of my parents were killed during the Alignment Wars by an extremist organization.” Despite his best efforts, his lips twisted in old fury. “The extremists insisted Tranquility worlds couldn’t be unaffiliated, and they coerced governing councils on pain of death. My second father who was on the council refused to give in. Until my mother and first father were taken hostage.”

  More debilitating than the fury was the guilt, and corrosive memories choked off his words. The look on his father’s face when he realized how the extremists had gotten through the house security had flayed a chunk of his soul. Even before his first father had hounded him out of their defiled home, driving him into the underwriters’ impersonally objective employ, he’d known there was nothing he could ever do to redeem himself.

  He shook his head, though the memories clung like cold-burning plasma that had eaten away any hope of who he might have been and left only the brittle, bitter bones of a walking dead man. “If the sheerways are controlled by a sole force, every world would be held hostage. I won’t—I can’t let that happen again, anywhere, to anyone.”

  Slowly, she pushed herself upright, dislodging his hands, which he realized numbly had tightened in his anguish. She swung her bare legs to hang down from the table, and he stared at the blanched marks on her dark skin. He wanted to howl in disgust at himself, then and now. He swiped the back of one hand across his mouth to smother the ugly sound.

  “I am an abomination to you,” she murmured.

  He snapped his head up, a flush of shock incinerating the lingering chill in his body. “What? No!”

  “Tranquility believes in unenhanced humanism and the principle of free will. Of which I exist in clear violation.”

  “My parents were Tranquilists, not me.” Their peaceful way of life had been lost to him. Worse than lost. He’d been the tool of its annihilation when he’d recklessly confused lust with idealism and gave a beautiful terrorist the key to everything that mattered.

  Shaxi braced her hands on the edge of the table, her mouth twisted, though whether in pain from her wounds or something else, he wasn’t sure. “You agreed that we are set in our programming. And if that is how they raised you, you can’t change.”

  He stared past her, unable to meet her black eyes. He hadn’t been brought up to be an assassin either, but one brutal night of blood had washed away all the loving years before.

  The irony of becoming what he hated was not lost on him.

  “My way wasn’t Tranquility, not after what happened,” he told her. “I exist to preserve freedom along the sheerways, whatever the cost.”

  “Even if the cost is working with a being like me.”

  He had done—would do—far, far worse. He would even make her part of his own hell to ensure the greater good. But he couldn’t afford to let her know that part.

  He locked gazes with her, letting her see in his eyes what truth was his to tell. “You think I’d judge you? There is nothing bad you’ve done that I haven’t. And I remember it all.”

  She stared at him for a long moment, her eyes flat black. She drew a shallow breath, and to his shock, she reached out to lay her palm against his cheek.

  The light touch jolted through him, stronger than the electrical charge he knew she could generate internally. But instead of blowing him backward, the sensation locked his knees, as if he might never step away.

  With gentle pressure, she turned his face first one way, then the other as she looked at him. “You have scars,” she murmured. “But they go deeper than what my eyes can see.” Her thumb gently grazed his bottom lip. “Or maybe you are hiding them from yourself.”

  “No.” Under the sharp tang of antiseptic and the earthier musk of blood, he breathed a fresher scent: her skin. “I know what I am.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “A man contemplating the troubles of the universe. And at the moment, I think you might be one of them.”

  Her lips curved with a feminine pleasure even more intense than when he’d handed her the pixberry dessert. “I have never been anyone’s trouble before,” she said. “I’ve always been the solution.”

  From the beginning, he’d intended for that to be the case. If he was going to make her part of his plan, he needed her trust and willingness. He needed her to be open to his influence and primed for his command.

  If he couldn’t access her coding directly, as deeply embedded as those directive systems might be, there were other ways to a woman’s core.

  Slowly, knowing that for all the years he’d fought for freedom, taking this liberty might be his last, he leaned forward and kissed her.

  Chapter 9

  He—Shaxi frantically cycled through her behavioral response identifier—he kissed her.

  His hand had come up in a mirrored gesture of hers to cup her cheek, and when she tilted her head into the touch, not sure what to make of the shared intimacy, his mouth drifted down to hers.

  It was like the first tentative landing of a terraforming survey ship on a dead world: whether the change brought the first gush of free-flowing water or ignited the surface in a fatal burst of failed atmosphere, nothing would ever be the same again.

  She wasn’t receiving oxygen! Normally she could last half a firefight without needing to aerate, but he’d stolen the very breath from her body in a mere heartbeat. Her knees—they weren’t even bearing her weight—felt wobbly, and she shifted her hand off his jaw to steady herself.

  Which she did by wrapping her fingers behind his neck and pulling him closer.

  The friction of his mouth was terrifying—hot and slick as heart’s blood spurting from a mortal wound. But even more shocking was the rasp of his thighs nudging between her parted knees. The abrasion triggered shivers all through her skin and deeper inside her, past the cyber-embeds to her very center. When she gasped, anything to get more air, to cool the rising heat, his tongue dipped past her parted lips and touched hers.

  This time, the gush and the ignition were one.

  His mouth was insistent, his tongue a tease, first soft and darting, then slow and lingering. With both hands, she clutched at his shoulders. His bare skin almost scorched her palms, as if the fractal pattern was aflame, and her pulse rocketed, thudding in her ears as it hadn’t done even when the ship was under attack. She had thought she’d learned about wanting when the twins were working their crystalline charms in the cantina, but this… This was beyond.

  No wonder Hermitaj had neutralized these impulses. All the worlds they’d marauded through would’ve been left unscathed if she and her fellow soldiers had known about this.

  Moving on instinct coupled with the combat training that had been her only experience with touch, she locked her heels behind his backside and pulled him closer yet, right into the vee of her legs. He grunted as the fronts of his thighs slammed into the edge of the table.

  She should be more careful. He didn’t have her self-healing plysteel implants. The position brought a part of him flush with the soft mound of her basewear,
and now she wasn’t flushed, or blushing, she was on fire.

  And wet. So, so wet.

  Her mind whirled at the conflicting sensations. In the UTC-year since the demise of Hermitaj, she’d had fleeting moments like this, but mostly just frustrating. It’d been an easy data search to figure out her libido had been suppressed, but while the words were simple, the concept was baffling. Watching a few vids of the sort Hermitaj had not allowed only added to her frustration. And she’d had more pressing concerns at the time, like staying alive.

  She had never felt so alive as now.

  The beating of her pulse through her veins, the stretch of her skin, the trading of breaths, the rush through every nerve was a symphony of sensation even her enhanced neural network couldn’t process. Her vision had narrowed and was sparked with nonexistent stars, and her head swam in the scent of him, some peculiarly rousing mix of drone fuel, pixberries, and lusty male. Her fingers kneaded restlessly at his shoulders, as if she could link the unfinished lines of the tattoo into their final form.

  She wanted him.

  It was the failure of her coding, she knew that, but it didn’t matter. When she’d stood, exposed, out in that broken thruster, the desolate terrain of Khamaseen screaming past far below her feet, she’d taken a moment to wonder whether her lack of programming really only left her one choice: to end herself as Hermitaj had ended.

  It would’ve been so easy to just step off into gravity’s embrace and the whirling sand, not to wait for the shriving. There was no reason, no artificially induced resolution holding her back. Just an unenforceable “promise” she’d made to some people she barely knew. But…

  This embrace was much better than gravity’s. It had all the most thrilling parts of freefall, but she wasn’t alone.

  “Shaxi…”

  Her name—spoken into her mouth, like he was giving her back to herself—had never been said with such wanting.

  “Eril,” she whispered back.

  “I knew you’d be trouble,” he murmured. “I think you could make me forget my own code.”

  She laughed soundlessly and tightened her grip on him.

  He kissed her again and she felt the lick of heat all the way down to her core.

  Raising his head, he put a bit of distance between them. His gray eyes were brightened to silver and his cheeks were flushed. “What happened to your advice that I stay out of your way?”

  “That was the responsible, rule-following cyborg speaking. I’m a ruthless mercenary now, out only for my own good.” And she wanted him but good.

  She slipped her hands to the front fastener of the vest under his chin, but he caught her hands in his. She gave a light tug, but he resisted. He was stronger than he looked, she thought resentfully.

  “This wouldn’t be good for you,” he said. When she scowled at him, he freed one of his hands to sleek her rumpled hair back over her ear. “You can’t know—”

  “Actually, I have all the data.”

  He shook his head. “There’s more to it than leverage and traction.”

  “I will provide the lubrication. Stay away from the sealant.”

  The gray in his eyes vacillated between impermeable stone and molten silver. “Well, I guess you have it all planned out.”

  She bit her lip, testing the swollen flesh between her teeth. “I only need one more thing.” When he tilted his head, she huffed out a breath. “You.”

  “Shaxi…”

  “You said that already.” She’d thought she wouldn’t tire of hearing her name again after so long being a designation, but said with that pitying sigh, she didn’t like the sound of it. She let her legs fall open—not the way her body wanted her to—and he stepped back.

  He speared his fingers through his hair, disordering the brown waves so the auburn strands glinted under the harsh lights. “Of all the wrong things I’ve done, I think this might be the worst.”

  She stiffened at the pain that sliced through her, as if she gutted herself on the torn thruster metal all over again.

  “I can’t use you like this,” he continued.

  “I was using you too,” she pointed out. “Or trying to.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  She focused on the agitated heave of his breath, the tension in his muscles. And lower down, where he’d pressed into her mound. She might not understand all the niceties of sex, but she knew he wasn’t stepping back voluntarily. So what had control of him, if not his wanting for her?

  She didn’t know, so she asked. “Why don’t you want me?”

  He jerked back, as if her question had been a slap. “I do. But just as there is more to it than leverage and lube, there is also more than wanting.”

  She scanned her data and found the word neatly labeled right between leverage and lube. “Love.”

  This time he recoiled as if she’d shoved an armed plasma grenade into his belly. “No!”

  She rescanned her data to see if she’d gotten the definition wrong. But she hadn’t. There was no reason for him to react with such horror. Except that the word came from her.

  In her years with Hermitaj, in the times when her mind was her own, she’d understood perfectly she wasn’t wanted for herself. To the mercenary corporation, she’d been an investment and a commodity. What had gutted her every time she remembered—the pain twisting until she was desperate to forget again—was knowing she’d been nothing more than that to her mother as well.

  She was done with not being wanted.

  “Shaxi—”

  “I request that you purge the knowledge of my name from your memory.”

  He frowned. “That’s not how the worlds work outside of Hermitaj.”

  “How unfortunate.” She pushed herself off the exam table. He took a hasty step back, so she took a step toward him just for the satisfaction of watching him retreat again.

  He narrowed his eyes, clearly aware she was toying with him. “My intent was not to hurt you.”

  “You didn’t.” She knew her tone was too adamant, so she qualified her answer as she grabbed her boots. “The sealant was all I needed.” Deliberately blanking her tone, she added, “The scan I started based on the unidentified signal is complete with no additional signals detected. So we are done with our work.”

  She headed for the med bay door.

  “Wait.”

  When she glanced over her shoulder, one eyebrow raised, he lifted the leggings she’d left on the table. “Are you just going to walk out there like that?”

  “It was ruined anyway.” She spoke his words back at him with a scornful twist and left.

  As she headed for her quarters, the last few minutes replayed in her head, far more derisive than anything she could have said. If she had access to Hermitaj’s mind wipe tech, she’d willingly stick her head in that vise and take the vicious jolt a hundred times over to stop the welling humiliation.

  Barring that, she needed a distraction.

  She stopped by her quarters briefly to don her Hermitaj gear. Though the sonic cleaning had removed all traces of dirt, it couldn’t repair a UTC-year’s worth of wear. But the familiar fit soothed her, and she zipped the combat jacket as high as it would go under her chin before she left her bunk and continued down the corridor. She laid her palm over the suite’s lock and the door chimed quietly then slid open to let her in.

  The lights in the twins’ sitting room were muted to a comforting glow, taking the edge off the bright colors. Benedetta was curled in one deep nest of cushions, Alolis cuddled against her side. Torash was on her own pillow, but only an arm’s length away.

  Now that Shaxi knew what to look for—the silvery glimmer of their skin even in the low light, the jewel-toned eyes, the flowing yet stylized gestures like water shimmering between its liquid and frozen states—she was surprised she hadn’t known all three women were l’auraly. But then, she supposed believing the mythical l’auraly actually existed would’ve been like hearing a sheership engine and thinking it was a dragon.


  Which now made her wonder about dragons.

  She stepped just far enough inside the door to let it close. “I wanted to confirm you are all intact.”

  Benedetta and Torash nodded while Alolis shrugged.

  “I seem to have made myself a very good deal when I bought your services,” Benedetta said. “Winning bar fights, codebreaking, sheership wing-walking. Is there anything you can’t do?”

  Seduce a man?

  The words were on the tip of Shaxi’s tongue. The tongue where she could still taste Eril’s arousal. If anyone could provide her with advice on that score, presumably these three, crafted to excel at every physical and emotional element of sex, would have more to say than all her archives and data searches.

  But she was learning not to ask questions when she didn’t really want answers.

  “You have paid for my services, up to and including my life, until the Asphodel leaves Khamaseen,” she reminded the other woman. “Whatever you ask for, I will do my best to provide.”

  Torash pulled a smaller cushion to her chest. “That sounds like more commitment than any job deserves. That’s almost as bad as—” She cut herself off at a glare from her older sister. “It sounds like slavery.”

  “Tory,” Alolis said reprovingly. “Hermitaj mercenaries essentially were slaves. They were all initiated young and never had a choice, just like… Well, just like slaves, even if they weren’t wearing chains.”

  Alolis plucked at her own clothing. Instead of their usual silky gowns, all three l’auraly were clad in fitted jumpsuits. Three packs were stacked beside the door. In case of more trouble, Shaxi assumed. That too was a good bet.

  She glanced back at Alolis. “You did some homework.”

  “I was curious why anyone would come here who didn’t have to.” The blonde angled herself slightly farther from Benedetta, a small but telling act of resentment.