Page 28 of Big Bad Red Protector

Hard. Deep. Primal. Each brutal thrust slams into me, the wet slap of skin on skin loud in the observation tower. My tits bounce with every punishing stroke. I claw at his back and shoulders, moaning shamelessly as he pounds my dripping pussy, ridges rubbing perfectly against that spot inside me that makes me see stars.

He flips me over, bends me across the seat, and drives back into me from behind even deeper. One big hand grips my hip, the other reaches around to rub my swollen clit. I come again, screaming as my cunt spasms and squeezes around his thick cock, juices running down my thighs.

Kheltor doesn’t stop. He fucks me through it, hips snapping relentlessly, using my body with raw need. When he finallycomes, he buries himself as deep as my body will take him and roars. Heavy, thick ropes of cum flood my pussy, pulse after pulse until it spills around him with every movement. He keeps moving, pushing his seed deeper, claiming me completely.

What happensin the observation tower above Orpheus Station is ours. The Bridge glows outside the seal-glass and the warships move in slow distant arcs and the station alarms run their muffled pattern through the walls, and none of it reaches us here. He is careful and then he is not careful, and I am not passive, and the urgency of knowing this moment is borrowed from a crisis that has not finished with us yet makes everything more honest than it would be otherwise.

He keeps his promises in the specific way Kheltor keeps everything—completely, without qualification, without asking for acknowledgment. I notice. I notice the difference between being protected and being chosen.

Afterward, lying against his side with the Bridge light painting the ceiling in slow shifting patterns, he says: "When this is finished."

"When this is finished," I agree.

"There are things I want," he says, with the deliberate imprecision of someone whose vocabulary for this subject is still developing. "That I did not want before. Or did not permit myself to want." His hand moves once against my hair. "I want the time to learn what they are."

"I want that too," I say.

The seal-glass carries the warship lights in long arcs, and the Bridge pulses once, and neither of us speaks for a while.

Zevra's transmission cuts through the comm with the particular pitch of someone who is frightened and refusing to sound it.

"He moved it up." Her voice is stripped of its usual layering. "Drekar. The activation sequence—it's been manually overridden. The pre-initialization cycle we saw in the weapon site is running at four times the original rate." A pause that carries more weight than anything she has said directly. "The timeline isn't seventy-two hours anymore."

Kheltor is already sitting up.

"How long?" I ask.

"Eighteen," Zevra says. "Maybe less, depending on how much power he routes through the secondary grid."

Eighteen hours until the Bridge activation. Eighteen hours until the warships waiting outside have a reason to stop waiting.

I am already on my feet when Kheltor reaches for his armor.

The observation tower releases us back into the crisis without negotiation, as crises do, and I carry what we found here—the future we named, the time we chose—into the eighteen hours ahead like something I intend to protect.

CHAPTER 20

KHELTOR

Eighteen hours is not enough time to be careful.

We move through the lower sectors fast enough to accept certain risks in exchange for others, and I spend the distance calculating which ones are recoverable. Zevra has the activation sequence data running on her surface, tracking the power draw from the secondary grid through the signal hardware. The draw is increasing. Whatever Drekar's people are doing inside the weapon site, they are not waiting for optimal conditions. They are moving because they believe they have already won.

That belief is an asset. Overconfident people leave evidence behind.

Nina is two steps ahead of me, reading the corridor junction markers as if she has memorized Orrik's maintenance map. She found the discrepancy in Sareth's records from a single mismatched prefix. She will find what we need here.

"Zevra," I say into the comm. "The signal relay for the extremist command node. Where does it terminate?"

A pause. "Level nine. Diplomatic administrative block. The one evacuated three days ago when Drekar's people requested it for 'security consolidation.'" Her markings must be cyclingjudgment colors, even through the audio. "They evacuated a wing of the station to run their command operation out of it."

"Access?"

"Orrik is already in the maintenance overlay. Give him four minutes."

It takes three.

The command node is three rooms—two outer administrative spaces, stripped of personnel and repurposed for equipment and communication, and one inner room where the walls are covered in a display array showing every element of the conspiracy assembled in one place.