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  “No.” The answer came on a quick breath.

  “So why the collar?”

  He felt the fine bones in Bhel’s wrists move as she squirmed against his hold. “For your protection.”

  Jak narrowed his unseeing eyes. “From whom?”

  Silence stretched.

  “From whom?”

  “From yourself,” she finally whispered, and before he could demand an explanation, her firm, long, warm thighs pressed against his hips, her velvet-damp pussy lips nestled against his cock and her mouth took possession of his.

  The kiss was fierce. Almost desperate. Her tongue invaded his mouth, flicking at his teeth, exploring the wetness beyond his lips. She rolled her hips backward and forward, working her pussy up and down the length of his shaft, teasing its growing length until hungry blood left it engorged and stiff. He moaned, the sound low and base. He should be throwing her off him, demanding answers she so obviously didn’t want to give, but when her sex caressed his cock… when it slicked his burning flesh with the cream of her desire… he could think of nothing but how tight she was, how wonderfully they fit each other’s bodies, how quickly and deeply he’d fallen in love with her…

  He closed his sightless eyes and released her wrists, burying his hands in the thick, cool tumble of her hair. He yanked their bodies closer together, thrusting his tongue deeper past her lips, grinding his cock harder to her sex. She whimpered, her breasts crushing against his chest, her soft flat belly pressing to his.

  She nipped at his bottom lip and his cock twitched in dark interest at the sharp ribbon of pain that shot through him. He groaned and raked his hands down her back, the satin-smooth feel of her flesh under his palms almost as arousing as the feel of her pussy on his throbbing length. He grabbed her ass and yanked her wetness closer to his cock, assaulting her tongue with his. Sons of Urik! She was keeping him prisoner on the most distant planet in the outer Boundaries, she’d used him to deliver Zeric and Jaienna into Hrung Crortek’s hands, and she’d deceived everyone he held dear. He should be wringing her neck now!

  The damp lips of her sex nudged the swollen head of his cock and he groaned again. He should be wringing her neck, but the gods damn him, his heart—his captured romantic heart—demanded he do something else entirely different. “May Urik damn us both, Bhel,” he ground out between gritted teeth.

  “As long as I’m with you, being loved by you,” she murmured, rolling her hips to brush her smooth mons across his rampant cock, “I am never damned.”

  The words sent fire into Jak’s balls, into his gut, chest and soul. “If you are deceiving me, Bhel…” The threat felt raw in his throat.

  Her palms pressed to his chest, cool and hot all at once, making his nipples pinch into rock-hard nubs. “Feel me, Jak.” Her pussy stroked his cock, painting it in her juices. “Does it feel like I’m deceiving you?”

  His unseeing eyes locked on her. “It feels like you’re seducing me.” He swallowed, pleasure throbbing through his body as powerfully as the pain throbbing in his head. “Again.”

  The palms on his chest pushed—gently—and he let his back lower slowly to the surface beneath him, straightening into a prone position. Fingertips danced over his flesh, circled his nipples and feathered up to his lips. “Not seducing, Jak,” she whispered, and he felt her hips shift against his groin, her pussy-lips enveloping the head of his cock in an almost hesitant caress. “Apologizing. Begging you for forgiveness.”

  Gods, Jak. If she’s still playing you…

  He closed his useless eyes and ran his hands up the curves of her rib cage, letting them explore a body he knew so well, wondering what lay in the heart, the soul, inside. His fingertips brushed the underside of her breasts and, before he could stop himself, he cupped each heavy swell.

  “Yes, Jak.” Bhel’s husky voice kissed his senses. She arched her back, pressing her pussy harder to his cock and her breasts deeper into his fondling grasp.

  He found her nipples and rolled the puckered tips between his knuckles, his mouth dry as the memory of their texture on his tongue filled his head. Cool fingers found his own tiny nipples, emulating the same pressure he caressed hers with in erotic pinches that made his head swim and his muscles tense. He removed one hand from her breast and slid it around her back, pulling her down to him. He needed to relive the memory. He needed it now.

  She came to him. The warmth from her lowering body like a mist on his skin. He opened his lips, seeking her nipple, picturing its puckered pink perfection in his mind.

  The softness of her breast brushed his cheek, his nose, her nipple seemingly tracing the scars on his cheek from his sexual initiation. He twisted his head, blindly hunting the peak with his mouth.

  She pulled away slightly, her nipple stroking the line of his profile from lips to forehead. “Forgive me, Jak,” she whispered.

  He bit back a groan, opening his eyes to stare into the gray fog, squeezing the breast he still cupped, dragging his other hand down her spine to grasp at her ass. “Bhel…”

  She moved again, her weight repositioning over his hips. He felt her pussy slide up and down his cock, felt its creamy wetness slick his balls. “Forgive me, Jak.”

  He swallowed, his throat clicking, his nostrils flaring. He tried to hold her still but she rode the length of his shaft with such liquid strokes, fucking him with without penetration, and he realized he wasn’t trying to keep her still after all, but directed and encouraged the movement of her hips with the hand gripping her ass.

  Sons of Urik!

  The hands on his chest, the fingers teasing and pinching his nipples slid lower down his torso and were suddenly gone. The loss of contact made him moan. He couldn’t see her! Surely she wouldn’t deprive him of her touch?

  Fingers suddenly buried in his hair and her mouth crushed his, her tongue plunging past his lips, assaulting his. The savageness of the kiss sent him reeling. He sank his nails into her hip, her breast, driving his tongue to hers in equal force. Her nipples rubbed his chest, her pussy ground against his cock. He felt a tingle begin at the base of his spine as his orgasm began to build.

  And you still have yet to bury your length in her sex!

  He needed to amend that.

  As if she heard the very thought, Bhelais broke off the kiss, ending it as abruptly as she began it. He blinked, his lips pulsing with hot, bruised blood.

  “Tears of Druentia, Jak. Why did I not find you until it was too late?”

  The urgency in Bhel’s voice made him smile and his cock twitch. She was just as close to losing control as he was. “It’s never too late, Bhel,” he answered, lifting his hips to press his hungry erection to her sex. “I told you that on Ry’l.”

  Her tongue suddenly touched his left nipple and he sucked in a surprised and pleasured hiss.

  She flicked the tip of her tongue at the nub of tight flesh. “Tell me again, Jak.”

  “It’s not too late, Bhel.”

  Her tongue danced over his chest, circling the other nipple. “To save me?”

  Jak arched beneath her, a whimper slipping past his lips as her teeth closed down on his nipple. “Yes,” he ground out.

  She rolled her hips backward and forward, each stroke bringing his cock closer to glorious impalement. “I saved you to save me, Jak.”

  “Then let me save you, Bhel.”

  With a silent grunt and a sudden flip, he threw her onto her back and pinned her to the surface, capturing her wrists and ramming them to the hard surface beneath her, driving his knees between hers to shove her legs apart, the musky scent of her sex filling his nostrils immediately. He stared sightless down at her through the thick gray fog, seeing her in divine clarity all the same. “Let me save us.”

  “Druentia wept!” Bhel cried. “Yes!”

  He dropped his hips and rammed his cock into her tight pussy. Wet, constricting muscles surrounded him, sucked at him greedily. He thrust into her until his balls smashed against her ass. Withdrew and rammed home again. Each pene
tration scored his flesh with an inferno he couldn’t understand, as if an invisible master was whipping him.

  He punched into her, feeling her nails rake over his back, feeling his balls swell and rise.

  His life had been about righting wrongs, fighting for those who could not do so themselves, protecting the weak and scouring the Boundaries of Bliss. The woman below him, the woman he fit so perfectly was a Bliss-using sex-slave who’d sold her own sister’s life for the drug, a woman who’d brought about the death of his partner for her own gain, but he loved her. All the rest he would deal with later. At that very moment, nothing but bringing Bhelais to scalding, exquisite release with him matter. Nothing but showing her she’d been right. He could save her.

  If she truly wanted him to.

  He captured her neck with his lips, plunging his cock in and out of her clenching, sodden pussy as he drank the sweat slicking her skin. He scored a line up to her jaw, her ear, dragging his hands down her arms to curl them under her shoulders and hold her close to him, his heart to hers. “Tell me the real reason you couldn’t kill me, Bhel, and I’ll save you forever.” He nipped at her ear lobe, almost coming there and then as Bhelais’ sex constricted around his shaft in a gripping vice. “Tell me, Bhel, and forgiveness is but a stroke away.”

  Her muscles tensed, her hands stilled on his back. And then she turned her head until her lips pressed his cheek and whispered, “Because I love you, Jak.”

  Molten pleasure erupted in his sac. Lines of it shot up his spine, into his belly, down his thighs. His balls shrank to swollen rocks of heat and his cock pulsated as wad after wad of cum burst from its engorged tip.

  “Gods!” Bhel cried out, bucking underneath him. Her nails dug into his hips, her ankles locked behind his ass. She thrust up into him, meeting each one of his wild, brutal stabs in equal need, her sucking, clenching, gripping sex milking his cock of his seed. “Oh, gods, Jak! Yes!”

  He stared at her with sightless desire. Saw nothing but grayness and everything perfectly. They were both damned, but perhaps in each other’s arms, damnation would be forced to wait.

  His heart hammered, in unison with the wads of thick cum spurting from his cock, in harmony with the squeezing muscles of Bhel’s climax.

  And then, rhythm deserting him, he threw back his head and cried out himself, physical agony blending with physical rapture, emotional pain twisting through emotional ecstasy as the last of his load pumped into Bhelais’ pussy.

  Drained, depleted and numb, Jak rolled to the side, his head a white ball of agony, his body weak and trembling. He sucked in a ragged breath, pulling Bhel against his side, needing her heat and smooth, sweat-slicked firmness. “No one will ever hurt you or make you do anything against your wishes again, Bhel.” Eyelids fluttering closed, he felt sleep reach for him with an undeniable embrace. “I will always be your savior, your protector. From Bliss, from Crortek, from every nightmare you ever had.”

  Her cheek snuggled against his chest, fine strands of her golden-blonde hair tickling his jaw and chin. “I know, Jak,” she whispered, placing her palm on his heart.

  He sank into sleep, its still blackness taking him away.

  Just as Bhelais murmured on a soft breath, “If only I could let you.”

  * * * *

  The bars of his cage hummed around him, radiating their painful energy, making his skin prickle and the beast snarl in fury. He watched the people moving around him, their curious stares like razors, their titters and giggles turning his blood hot. Crortek was trying a new tactic—public display. He’d had Zeric’s cage moved to the center dais of his “entertaining” room, letting his guests watch Zeric’s every move in the hopes of wearing him down, exhausting him to the point where his psychological control crumbled and the Illashionist’s power of deception took over.

  Crortek needed Zeric to ejaculate.

  Zeric bared his teeth in a silent snarl, a cold sense of satisfaction twisting through him as the gawking couple standing closest to the cage cringed.

  Not ejaculate as a human, but as the beast. The werewolf.

  The crime lord had tried every test possible to extract the mysterious DNA strand from Zeric’s system that transformed him into a werewolf. None successful. This, by Zeric’s reckoning, was Crortek’s last opportunity.

  “I would pay a pretty chit to have you fuck me.”

  The proclamation, delivered in a low and thin Aglaian hiss, slid Zeric’s flat gaze down to the bottom right corner of his cage. An Aglaian master-merchant, dressed in clinging diaphanous robes and more bejewelled gold than her thin body seemed capable of supporting, leered up at him, her long fingers lazily tracing small circles around the erect nipple of her left breast. Her lips curled in a smug smile when Zeric’s eyes met hers and she ran her tongue over the pointed tips of her fangs. “A cock like that would more than fill a female’s fantasies, it would create new ones.”

  Zeric gave the woman a flat stare. The beast within growling with disgust, he turned away.

  And saw Jaienna.

  In the far corner of the room, watching him, her copper-fire red hair ablaze in the dim lighting, her exquisite body covered with nothing but a shiny black strip of leather that wrapped around her torso and hips to disappear between her smooth thighs, leading his eye on a wonderful path of memory, a path his lips and tongue had traveled more than once, a path that led to sweet, tight, slick heaven. A delicious path that led—

  The room shimmered. Jaienna rippled, as though a wall of water fell between them both and suddenly the Illashionist stood in the far corner, her sunken gray eyes fixed on him.

  Zeric reeled backward, the beast in his blood roaring in fury. Enraged. Incensed.

  Free.

  His body changed. Immediately and forcefully.

  Flesh became fur, teeth became fangs, and nails became claws. He threw back his head, a deafening howl tearing from his throat as the beast let its rage release.

  Screams of terror rent the air. People scattered, glasses and Bliss bombs thrown to the floor, trampled beneath stamping feet. Zeric tasted their fear, revelled in it. Feasted on it. He threw his arms wide, expanding his chest, letting his thick animalistic blood rip through his veins and his humanity shudder and writhe in its wake.

  Yes!

  He bared his fangs, glaring at the fleeing horde, claws sinking into his padded palms, muscles thrumming with the desire—no, the need—to kill. He would make them pay. Pay and pay again. In blood and pain and death. He scanned the room, no longer human.

  Then his burning stare fell on Crortek.

  The Ornithion leant against the far bar, a Xolotlan Sniff held loosely in his taloned grip. The lipless mouth curled into a slow, smug smile, the pale pupil-free eyes shining with triumph. He raised his glass in a mocking toast, that white pearlescent stare fixed on Zeric. “Soon,” he said, the word lost in the cacophony of screams and cries but understandable all the same. His smile stretched wider. “Very soon.”

  Chapter 3

  Jaienna sat beside Tornada in the confines of his Skimmer, staring blankly out at the blackness of space. Deep within her core, low in the pit of her stomach, an insistent, demanding hunger fluttered.

  Since Bhel had injected her with a Bliss hit she’d been aroused. It never left her. After the initial hit she’d been almost driven mad by the need to fuck, to climax again and again and again. Tornada had found her in the height of the aphrodisiac’s potency and the memory of his hands on her body was still strong in her mind. Despite the passing of days since Bhel’s deception, despite lying in her bunk every night, thinking black thoughts of death and destruction while her fingers brought her to bitter, powerful orgasm after orgasm, the hunger—the craving for sexual fulfillment—hadn’t left her. It had faded, yes. Become a fluttering itch she could, with great effort, push to the back of her mind for a period of time, but it had never disappeared completely.

  She wanted to be fucked. At this point, she wanted it more than to see her duplicitous sister�
��s face. She wanted to feel hands both strong and arrogant on her body, squeezing, fondling, mauling. She wanted to feel fingers, both long and confident, delve into her folds, stroking the Bliss hunger even as they tried to sate it.

  A silent moan slipped from her lips and she closed her arms around her chest, the friction against her nipples making her pussy contract.

  Druentia wept, she was confused.

  She hadn’t meant to plant the suggestion she had in Tornada’s mind. The second the slaver demanded she perform on her ex-lover, she’d been flooded with all sorts of suggestions to plant in his mind: shoot yourself, reveal who you really are to the Archeron, go jump from the nearest space-loc…

  What stopped her? What made her suggest he tell her everything in his heart? The memory of the life she’d had with him? The memory of their happiness, their contentment before she’d learned of his fiancée? Or the admission he’d murmured in her ear back on Ry’l as his fingers buried in her sex, grinding against her swollen, Bliss-pumped clit: Just the simple truth. A marriage between two of the oldest Jjor noble families—arranged before I was even born. A duty I’d prepared to deny. A family title I’d planned to rescind. For you.

  He loved her. Always had. And she’d almost killed him because of her own stupid, cynical, suspicious heart.

  Fuck.

  She shifted in her seat, the warm licks of lust spreading through her groin up into her spine. She loved Zeric. Loved him like no other, yet Zeric was not here—captured and most likely killed by Crortek. She loved him and always would, but the man sitting beside her, the man who had risked so much to help her extract her revenge of the Ornithion crime lord and all those who worked for him, had been her first love. The first person to ever make her feel like she was worth something more than a cunt to fuck.

  She closed her eyes, her nipples pinching into twin tips of aching hunger. What did she do now?

  Fuck him.

  She clenched her teeth, the Bliss-fuelled suggestion making her pussy constrict. She couldn’t. She didn’t want to.