Page 18 of Big Bad Red Protector

"Harder," she gasps. "Fuck me like you mean it, Kheltor."

I growl and give her what she wants. I slam into her, pounding her cunt with raw power. The platform creaks under us. Her tits bounce with every brutal thrust. She comes again, harder this time, screaming as her pussy gushes around my cock, juices dripping down my balls and soaking the sheets.

I flip her onto her stomach, pull her hips up, and drive back into her from behind. Deeper now. Meaner. The slap of my hips against her ass is loud and rhythmic. I reach around and rub her clit while I fuck her, forcing another orgasm out of her until she’s shaking and sobbing with pleasure.

When I finally let myself go, I bury myself as deep as her body will take me and come with a guttural groan. Thick, hot pulses of cum flood her womb, rope after heavy rope until it overflows and leaks out around my cock. I keep thrusting through it, pushing my seed deeper, marking her completely.

Afterward she is draped across my chest in a configuration that suggests she has solved a geometry problem to hersatisfaction. The room is warmer than it was. Outside the reinforced walls, muffled by distance and bulkhead, the station carries on its complicated and dangerous life without us.

She traces the long scar on my forearm without speaking.

"Tell me something true," she says finally.

I consider it.

"Veth corridor. The war's seventh year." The words come flat because that is how I learned to carry them. "Six months of extended engagement. I had thirty-one officers who did not come back. I know their names in order." I pause. "I still run the sequence every morning. I have not missed a day in eleven years."

She does not say she is sorry. She says nothing, which is correct.

"Vakutan doctrine holds that attachment creates exposure," I continue. "You protect what you love. The protection reveals the vulnerability. The enemy finds it." The ceiling is uniform in the low light. "I built my command around this principle. The thirty-one names did not disprove it. They confirmed it. I decided I would not give anyone else the coordinates of something I could not afford to lose."

"And then I showed up," she says.

"And then you showed up."Something moves in my chest that has no tactical designation. "Filing complaints on your first day. Citing protocol seven. Finding seal discrepancies my officers missed." I look at the top of her head, the dark curls against my skin. "You are the most inconvenient thing that has ever happened to my command structure."

She tilts her face up to look at me, and there is something in her expression that I do not examine too closely because I suspect if I name it I will not be able to put it back.

"Good," she says.

I understand, lying in that cold and borrowed room with the conspiracy still moving through the station beyond these walls and her warmth against my side, that I have crossed a line tonight that has no corresponding return route.

I find, with a quiet that surprises me, that I am not trying to find one.

CHAPTER 13

NINA

Kheltor is already at the terminal when I wake up.

He doesn't comment on the hour or on the fact that I slept at all. He hands me a sealed ration pack without looking away from the display, and the mundane practicality of it—this enormous, battle-scarred Vakutan commander handing me breakfast in an abandoned safehouse at oh-six-hundred—is somehow more disorienting than the night itself.

I eat standing up. He lets me.

We don't discuss what happened. Not because it needs hiding—the awareness between us has changed texture in a way that is obvious to anyone paying attention, and Kheltor pays attention to everything—but because there is nothing to negotiate. We both know what we chose. The station outside is still a conspiracy and a crisis and a political catastrophe in progress, and we are both, at our cores, people who work the problem in front of them.

The problem in front of us is large and getting larger.

Orrik meets us at the secondary access junction with three data chips, a maintenance overlay of the station's lower-sector ventilation routing, and a sleepless, cheerful look that suggests he considers exhaustion a fair price for interesting information.

"You look terrible," he tells me cheerfully. "Both of you, actually. Very coordinated."

"The chips," Kheltor says.

Orrik hands them over.

Zevra is already inside the secured analysis room, settled into the cool, narrow focus I've started to recognize as her working mode. She has Calyra's warning cross-referenced against the partial recordings from the abandoned sector meeting and the archive fragments from the restricted Bridge partition, laid out across the display in a structure that makes connections I had not yet seen.

"You found something," I say.