“Who?”
“I’ll give you a hint. He’s got teal skin and a stick up his ass the size of…”
“The size of what?”
“I set my speech patterns to avoid certain sayings. Sometimes it glitches out and I can’t get a word out. Let’s just say…the size of an oblong asteroid a few hundred meters wide and tens of kilometers long.”
I blinked at him. “Why not just change your…wait, Thuliak ishere? Now?”
Tschenkar nodded, then he waved his hand toward the wall.
Just as the wall began to open up, Tschenkar grabbed me by the arm with both hands. He pulled and lifted me up, and the moment I was standing, he took me by the waist and tugged me in toward him. He clutched me tight against his body.
It felt like a move he’d practiced before, but I realized it was likely just some kind of imprinted instinct the Hivemind gave him. Either way, it managed to pull me in to him in a way that had me naturally bring my hands up to try to slow myself down before my face crashed into the hard muscle of his bicep. I got my hands on his arm, but they slid, and the moment Thuliak’s beautiful, sculpted teal form stepped through the hole in the wall, I was pressed up against Tschenkar, with my arms wrapped around him.
Tschenkar was healing fast. It had been barely an hour since we’d escaped fromWrathand hijacked the shuttle, but his burn injuries looked half as bad as they had when they were fresh. A human would lookworsethis soon after taking such a burn. The skin would be peeling off, there would probably be bleeding. A human would look like more like Thuliak did now. He was covered in blood—even his teal eyes were covered in red veins, many of which had burst and flooded the whites of his eyes with crimson. Each time he inhaled, I could hear it like a metallic wheeze. His nose was bleeding too, and he had cuts and bruises all over his teal skin.
Thuliak met Tschenkar with a hard stare. Where they weren’t bloodied, his eyes were a steel grey, the teal was a storm of lightning cast over his eyes. “Tschenkar.”
“Thuliak,” Tschenkar said, pulling me tighter against him even as I tried to pull away. “Mate, how did you get here even? It looks like you walked. Through space.”
“Let her go,” Thuliak said.
“Do you smell me on her? I was just licking her neck. She didn’t stop me. We were just about to kiss, before you barged in.”
His eyes narrowed, and they moved toward me. “Is this true, Airlock?”
“She prefers ‘Eve,’” Tschenkar said.
“I was going to stop him,” I said, but realized I might have been lying. I didn’t ever want to lie to Thuliak. “I might not have stopped him right away. But…I think I would have, before he got to second home plate.”
“There’s only one home plate,” Tschenkar said, “and you were about to score a homerun directly to it.” He grinned at Thuliak.
Thuliak stepped toward me, and he raised his eyes toward Tschenkar. “Let go of her. Now.”
He let go. The coldness from before came back, and the place where his hand had gripped my waist felt chilled to the bone. But then Thuliak took me, his big strong hands wrapping around me and covering my stomach and waist. He pressed me up against his body. His cock stiffened against my back. It felt good. It felt like coming home. Still though, even with Thuliak’s hands on me, there was still a coldness that couldn’t quite warm up, right where Tschenkar had been touching me.
“So,” Thuliak said, “Airlock, you were seduced by this opportunist?”
I felt defensive, but Thuliak didn’t seem angry with me at all. All of his anger was pointed at Tschenkar. “I don’t think I’d have let him breed me. I know how important the triumvirate is for Khetar, and I know you don’t get along with Tschenkar, so I wouldn’t have forced you into that.”
“I understand,” Thuliak said, “and I place no blame on you, my little human, all the blame is on him.”
Thuliak jabbed a finger toward Tschenkar.
Tschenkar laughed, and even with Thuliak’s arms around me I wished I could always hear that laugh. “You’re calling me an opportunist? It wasyourplan to let the pirates swarm Eden. I was just doing what a good Fifth would do and taking orders from the big bad scion in charge.”
I bit my lip. Somehow I felt like it should be my job to mediate this situation, but trying to get in between these two was as scary as getting in between two boulders ready to crash together. I chickened out at mediating, but maybe just changing the topic would help. “Is Eden okay?”
They both looked ready to kill each other, but at my question, Thuliak’s body relaxed. A good chunk of the tension that had been in him melted away, and Tschenkar narrowed his eyes.
“Shit,” both of them said in unison.
“What?” I asked.
“There’s a lot more pirates than we thought,” Tschenkar said.
“On Eden?”