Princess of the Void

Grant wonders if subtlety isn’t the Taiikari style when it comes to kissing, because this is the second time Sykora of the Black Pike’s opening gambit has been to pounce him like a wildcat and shove her tongue down his throat.

Then he remembers what Hyax told him, as she kisses him like she’s trying to live inside his skin. About the experience thing. And he realizes this might be Sykora’s second kiss ever.

Seven, eight.

He catches the back of her neck, holds her lightly, just enough to still her ravenous forward momentum. He eases her microscopically away from him, enough that he can breathe and kiss her back. He gives her lower lip a gentle, encouraging bite. Another one of those high feminine squeaks, so at odds with her day-to-day smoothness. So undignified of you, Majesty. He could get addicted to making her do that. Fourteen, fifteen.

Her tongue is so textured. It’s setting fireworks off in his brain as it caresses the roof of his mouth. He shouldn’t have done this. This woman is dangerous. Nineteen, twenty.

He feels her arm move and grabs her hand, pinning it back above her tail. He holds both her wrists snug in the span of a single hand’s grip.

He breaks away for a moment. “Hands to yourself,” he murmurs.

Her head darts forward and traps him again, and now he’s abandoning prudence, taking the same drowning breaths she is, wherever he can get them between their insatiable kiss. Twenty two. Twenty three.

Their teeth click together. A little huff of laughter out of her nose, a smile curled at the edge of his mouth. Twenty five. Twenty six.

Her tail curves around his back and squeezes tight. She pulls herself forward with it, pressing against him. Her silk uniform. Her firm stomach. Her full, cushioned chest, spreading its downy warmth where it shoves onto his.

She smells like freshly cut jasmine. And something else underneath, something feral. A warm, aphrodisiac musk, primal and feminine. And intoxicating.

He really, really shouldn’t have done this.

Thirty one, thirty two.

Her heartbeat is different from a human’s. Not his lub-dub but a galloping triplet. Her fingers curl upward and squeeze into his palm. She churns her hips deeper into his lap. Warm and soft and pliant and full of need.

She groans, from deep in her little body. She’s shivering. She kisses him like she never wants him to stop. What if he didn’t stop? He doesn’t need to stop. Thirty eight, thirty nine.

God fucking dammit.

He leans backward, and it’s like he’s standing up from a hot tub into an Alberta winter. A gossamer strand of saliva connects their reddened, bereft mouths. “Forty seconds,” he gasps. “Time’s up.”

“Nooo,” she whines. She licks his jaw, kisses his neck. “Taiikari seconds are different. It’s five-to-one.”

“Count to ten, then.”

“Fine.” She sits back. “One.”

They stare at each other.

“Two.”

“Very convincing, Majesty.”

“Three.” She’s cracking up.

“All right.” He shifts. “Get off. Don’t make me compel you.”

“It would be funny to watch you try.”

“You think I can’t? Just because I don’t have laser eyes? Maekyonites have ways.”

“Like what?”

His hands snake up the side of her ribs. “Are you ticklish?”

“No.” Her arms snap tight to her sides, trapping him in place. “No we aren’t. Not at all. I don’t even know what that word—” He’s trying to get his hands further up toward her armpits. A half-stifled giggle escapes her. “I don’t know what that word means—GRANTYDE. No tickling or I’ll summarily execute you.” Her face grows thunderous. “I will count it as treason.”

He releases his hands and holds them up. “No tickling, Majesty.”

Her legs wrap tighter. “You want me, Grantyde. I know you do. I feel it.” She slowly grinds her hips closer to his waist. “You’re starving for me.”

“I am,” he admits.

“Then taste me.”

“I want to. I will. Just tell me I’m free.” His forefinger traces the base of her tail. “And I promise I’ll taste you so hard I’ll fucking choke on you.”

“Grant.” His name, in her purring, scratchy voice, sends pinprincks across his skin. Her horns nudge his jaw as she nuzzles him like a cat. “I am everything you imagine me to be. I’m more. Do you know what they say about Taiikari girls?” She grinds harder. “They say the only thing more bewitching than our eyes are our insides. That damnation lies on our tongues, and salvation between our legs. That we didn’t conquer the firmament because of our ships or our compulsion, but because you can never go back to your own species once you’ve had a Taiikari girl. Never.” Her hips are gyrating now. Her butt flexes. “That our cruelty, our capriciousness, the submission we extract. Every little bit is worth it, for the moment you wrap yourself in our bodies.”

“It would be.” He plants his hands on her waist and stills her. “I know it would. That’s why I can’t. If we go to bed now, I think I’d be done resisting. I’d be willing to let you own me, just to keep making love to you. And I can’t let that happen.”

She huffs. “I don’t understand this. This need for freedom, faced with all that your submission will give you. Do you think I’ll be cruel to you? I won’t be. I—” Her fingers draw little circles on his shoulders. “I’ll take care of you, Grant.”

“I know.”

“Then why?”

He sighs. “I know it seems stupid to you. I mean, I’m driving myself crazy. But…” He tries to untangle his brain enough to extract something useful out of it. “I think it would always be in me if I gave up. The knowledge that you own me. The sorrow that I never had the choice to choose you back. And I think it would grow. And I’d be happy for a long time, but it would stay in there, and it would keep growing. And I don’t want to be happy with you for a long time. I want to be happy with you for the rest of my life.”

“I can pull that sorrow out at the root. I swear I can.” Her tail is stroking his forearm. “I’d give you anything. I would give you your freedom. If there was a way, I would.”

“We found our way out of the last prison.”

“This one is bigger. This one stretches across the firmament. There is no way out from this one.”

Insist upon these impossibilities and make yourself miserable, or…

“I’m not asking you to overthrow the empire,” he says. “I’m willing to pretend in front of everyone, like we did before. I can keep doing that. I had fun doing it, even.”

A blinking, uncertain smile crosses her face. “You did?”

He nods. “I can be useful. That groom’s code—I can break it. Work with me as an equal partner, and we can use it. I don’t need it in writing, I don’t need an announcement, I don’t need any Empire or Empress to acknowledge it. Only you, Sykora.”

And as he says it, he realizes what it is he needs, what his freedom looks like.

“Only you,” he repeats, quieter. “You’re who counts. Just tell me, and I’ll believe it.”

“I didn’t realize,” she says. “How hard I’d have to try. How strange this would be. You’re insubordinate. You’re uncontrollable. You’re unrealistic. The wise move would be to find you some alien enclave, some place to put you, and run like hell. Every instructor I’ve ever had would be screaming at me. Screaming. But I can’t.” She lowers her face onto his chest. “I can’t let you go. I can’t do it. I’m hamstrung. I’m irreversibly weakened. And if I free you…”

She bites her lip.

“If I free you, I doom myself. If you stay, there’s a loaded gun pointed at my heart for all time, just waiting for a rival to discover it and shoot me out of the sky. A free husband-of-the-void. Free and uncompellable. A member of the Imperial family, wed to an alien she can’t control. I’d go from Princess to pariah, Grantyde. And if you go, I’ll shake apart like an unshielded shuttle.”

He shakes his head. “I’m not going.”

“You’d stay?”

“I would,” he says. His hands slide lower and rest on her hips. “You’re right, Sykora. You said there’s nothing for me on Maekyon, and you’re right. This is the only place I belong anymore.”

Her breath shakes.

“I can keep your secrets.” He runs his fingers along her spine. “I kept them from Frelle. We’re already sharing one huge lie about me. What’s another? You don’t have to own me.” He presses his hand to her sternum. “Just trust me. We’ll figure it out, day by day. Not the Maekyonite way, not the Taiikari way. Some new thing.”

He tucks a strand of her hair behind her fanned-out ear.

“You said I was worth trying for,” he says. “You’re worth trying for, too.”

“I’ll… I’ll think about it. I promise I will.” She leans into his touch. “I’m scared. But I will. Will you keep being patient with me?”

“Yes.”

She shuts her eyes. He feels her shiver under his palm.

“Maybe we can start small,” he says. “I want to wear the compulsion stopping goggles all the Taiikari guys wear, when I’m on the Black Pike. Those dark frosted things.”

That gets her eyes open again. “You don’t need them.”

“I know. But your crew doesn’t.” He shakes his head. “I don’t want them to be terrified to be alone in a room with me. I don’t want them to look at me like I’m a lost lamb. Or a victim.”

“The anticompel glass…” She plucks stray carnelian fibers from his uniform. “It’s only for Taiikari citizens. It’s not meant to be worn in private, or by, uh.”

“By property.”

“By Husbands-of-the-void.”

“Then let’s make this the first rule we break.” He scratches the back of her head, through the silk waterfall of her hair. “Only on the Pike. Only in your kingdom. Starting small.”

“You…” She leans forward and rests her forehead against his clavicle. He lays his chin on the top of her head, his jaw framed in her horns. “You are dangerous, Grantyde.”

“I had that exact thought about you,” he says, “when I was kissing you.”

Sykora’s tail unwraps from him and slides to the floor. She slips out of his lap and presses the intercom button in the cabin. She keeps eye contact with Grant. “Chief Engineer Waian.”

A click and a beep. “Majesty. Have you thought about the gyros? You feeling that vibration under your feet? Not good.”

“Still not feeling anything, Wai,” Sykora says. “But I’ll make you a deal. I’ll get you the gyros you need, and you do a minor project for me.”

“How minor?”

“I need you to design a pair of anticomps for my husband.”

“Majesty…” A crackle on the other end. “Are you sure?”

“Are you sure we’re going to shake apart because the gyros are five cycles past their sell-by?”

“I never said we’d shake apart, but there are knock-on effects, Majesty, I told you—”

“One pair of Maekyonite anticomps, Chief Engineer. Two, actually. We’ll want a spare. Thank you.” She hits the button again. She takes a deep breath. Her hands are shaking. “There,” she says.

He’s across the cabin in two steps. He picks her up. She thrashes. “Grantyde put me down—”

He folds her into a tight embrace. She tenses and freezes, and then holds him back. Her thick tail wraps around his waist.

“Thank you, Sykora,” he whispers. “Thank you.” He kisses the tender skin on her neck. He kisses the smooth arc of her jaw. He kisses her trembling mouth—just for a moment. Then he puts her down. Her horns have grown out far enough that there’s the beginning of a little curl at the end of them.

She swallows her excess saliva and straightens her uniform. “You are most welcome.”

“Was that forty-second kiss part two of my gift?”

“That kiss was for me, Maekyonite.” Sykora’s reassembling the pieces of her haughty camouflage. “Part two of your gift is in the hangar bay. Hide your hard-on and let’s go. I’m going to give you your first flight lesson.”

“Your horns are showing.”

“Shut up.”