Page 32 of Delivered and Devoured
“Try me.”
Something shifts behind his face, something old and low and patient. It’s something that is not the almost-smile and is not the charming courier and is not the careful male asking,may I.Something that saysI told you some answers change things.
“Sixty seconds,” he says. “Starting when you leave this room.”
I stand. The lucky top is stained. My hip aches. The gauze is peeling. I am a disaster. I have been a disaster all day.
The top is lucky. The top has always been lucky.
I head for the hatchway. At the door, I turn back. He is sitting at the table with his hands flat on the surface and his ridges black and his pupils narrow and every line of him held in the stillness that I am understanding is not calm. It is the opposite of calm. It is the stillness of something waiting to be let go.
“One more thing,” I say.
He waits.
“I beat the evacuation drill officers. Every single time.” I hold his eyes. “Nobody has ever found me when I don’t want to be found.”
Something shifts in his face. Something wilder. Older. Something that belongs on a male whose instincts have just been handed an invitation and a challenge in the same breath.
“Lorri.” My name. The lowest register. The one that goes through me like a hand down my spine. “When I find you — and I will find you — I am going to put my hands on you.”
The galley stops. My lungs stop. The entire atmospheric recycling system on this ship stops.
“I am going to put my hands on your waist,” he says, “and I am going to pull you into me, and I am going to put my mouth on the place where your neck meets your shoulder. And you are going to let me. And then we are going to see what happens next.”
His voice is steady; his ridges are black. His pupils are slits. He is sitting at the table making promises with the calm of a male filing a cargo manifest, and the calm makes my knees go liquid and my skin prickle from my scalp to the soles of my feet. Not if. Not maybe.When.When I find you. When I put my hands on you. When you let me.
When.
The air between us is thick with me. With wanting. With a signal I could not hide if I tried, and I am not trying.
“Run, little human.” Low. Rough. A promise wrapped in a command. “I’m already counting.”
I run.
I run and my legs are shaking and my heart is hammering, and the ship is warm and dark and I am running through a corridor I barely know in a stained lucky top with a Skiveth male counting down behind me who has just told me exactly what he is going to do when he catches me and every nerve in my body is lit and I am terrified and I am alive and I am —
Laughing.
I am laughing. I am running and laughing, and the sound comes out bright and breathless and slightly unhinged, and it echoes in the dark corridor, and I have never in my life felt less sorry for taking up space.
The corridor narrows at the turn.
I have fifty-two seconds. I have been hiding since I was nine years old. I am very, very good at this.
But for the first time in my life, I am not hiding because I’m afraid of being discovered.
I am hiding because I want to befound.
9
The Hunt
Jazil
Sheruns,andtheship fills with the scent of her, and I lose my mind.
Not immediately. Not all at once. There are thirty seconds of composure. Thirty seconds where I sit at the galley table with my hands flat and my claws retracted and I count. One. Two. Three. Each number is a choice. I am choosing to sit here. I am choosing to give her more time than the sixty seconds I promised because if I go now — if I follow the trail she has left on the air — what I do when I find her will not be slow.
