But although the where might be similar, there was still the matter of how, and more specifically, of how hard. Jotan sexplay got a little rough and human flesh tore easy. Kane ran his hand lightly down the rippling field of that flesh, his eyes resting on her sleeping face, hunting for clues in every slight shift of her features for what she might be feeling as he touched her. She mumbled again and shifted, her hips pushing back at Kane’s stiffening cock. He bumped back agreeably, and she slipped one leg through both of his.

Perhaps it meant something that she twined with him in her sleep. Perhaps not. Uraktus had taken many female slaves, and documented mating with the same meticulousness with which he had documented everything else about them. Once again, it was a study Kane had predominantly ignored at the time. He remembered only one female’s mating clearly, and that only because Urak had taken her right there on the bridge.

It seemed to Kane that she’d done something to deserve it, had tried to cover up when Urak wanted to look at her or something. That was about all he remembered, apart from Tari’i rolling her eyes as the human first was pierced, and the shamed and shrill wails of the human, so alike to Raven’s of the night before. And of course, his father, fucking harder every time he had to order her to hush her noise, right up until the brittle snap and Urak’s disgusted, “Oh hell.”

This had happened before Urak perfected his human regenerators and antibodies. The broken pelvis led to hidden bleeding and that to sepsis. She’d died, but it wasn’t a total loss. Urak had eventually built three good serums from the notes he’d taken during the experience-serums still used by slavers today-and to Kane’s knowledge, Urak had never broken another human’s hip during sex. Not by accident, anyway.

That was the only female Kane recalled clearly, but there had been others. Kane could think of many nights, from boyhood on up, lying in his bed and listening with a drowsing ear as his father fucked in the next room. Listening as the human cries had changed over time from purely pain to purely pleasure and all the many-hued landscapes in-between. So it could be done.

Raven woke. He knew it by the way her breathing changed and then by the way she scooted forward on the bed, away from his rigid shaft. But her hand came back a moment later to rest on his thigh. Her waking instincts had recoiled her from him, but she couldn’t resist trying to please him.

Kane could feel himself wanting to smile. He hid it by leaning in and biting at her shoulder. A little too hard; he drew blood and paused to lick it away. When he raised his head again, she rolled onto her back and moved her hand from his thigh to his cock. She stroked him, fixing him with her grim little eyes, determined to feel nothing, to prove to herself that the previous night had never happened. The way her little claws had dug at his back…

Kane bent and sucked at the bloody bite on her shoulder, letting her hand harden him. She had begged him just to finish with her, begged him. He had the distinct feeling his fierce little Raven didn’t do a lot of that.

Kane sat up suddenly, kneeling with his thighs wide apart and the blankets thrown back. She moved silently to take him in that amazing ‘blowjob’ that humans could do. He closed his mind to it with effort, letting her coat him with slick saliva as elaborately as she pleased. Then he pulled her off him and pushed her back into the bedding.

She resisted briefly, her body tightening and her face turning on itself. Oh yes, she remembered.

He pulled her thighs around his hips and sank into her. It was easier every time. She was cinched tight and tilted deep, forced still and receptive to the quick, hard thrusts he sent against her as he felt out the confines of her body. He was tempted to let go, to lie atop her and take his privilege, to feel the strange delight of her human breasts on his chest and see her hair fanned out violet beneath him. But no. No, he’d done something to her last night, and he wanted to see if he could do it again.

Kane leaned back, keeping her hips tight to him, and both slowed and lengthened his strokes, nudging upwards along her full pubic bone. He could feel the unpleasant scratch of her low hair at his belly, but he could also feel her sudden tension. There was a place on Jotan females, one that could be found just where the upper slope of their selves softened, one that could be counted on for furious pleasure. Kane hunted for it in Raven now, his eyes closed, painstakingly seeking her one slow sliver at a time.

“Unngh!” Raven’s hand flew out and slapped at his chest, her face contorting with misery.

Found. Kane lay back further, only one hand holding her now while the other braced his weight. He drove at her with greater confidence and she came up off the bed a little more with every thrust.

‘Don’t feel,’ Kane thought, his throat working with the effort. ‘Don’t feel. You can hear—gods, hear that sucking, you’ve made her pissing wet!—but don’t feel. It’s over if you feel.’

She was making a sound, not the eye-water sobbing he’d expected, but an urgent, moaning, mating sound. It dug into Kane’s brain and fired through his body. Her slapping hand became a scratching one; the sensitive skin of his chest and belly seared at her touch and it was all he could do not to fall on her in frenzy.

“Move,” he grunted. “Move, damn you, you know you want to!”

She threw back her head and howled, a cry that began at her toes and ground out of her throat as thick and raw as smoke. But then she did move. Her legs rose and wrapped his waist, her hips grinding at his. She pushed at him weakly just once more and then she was clinging to him, her face turned as far from him as she could, as though her mind were straining to physically separate from her body. She was mating with him, great gods, a vessel no longer but a willing partner.

Kane dropped his other arm to better balance his weight, and Raven came up from the pillows to straddle him. She gripped his shoulders with her blunt claws and rode him hard and fast, tears of betrayal leaking from her tightly-shut eyes. She was cumming, contracting on him to damned near the point of pain, and it was just as he’d remembered—that incomparable shivery seal, milking at him like he was a breeder male in a So-Quaal stable. He thrust harder, trying to prolong the excruciating sensation of her working at him, but then came with a violent shudder of his own and collapsed onto the bed.

She fell with him, her hands slapping at his chest to keep her braced separate from him. Her head was bent and shoulders bowed. Her ragged breath still held traces of that half-keening cry, and there were tears still spilling one by one from her eyes.

Kane put his hand on her hip and rubbed, watching her face buckle. “Don’t tell me you didn’t like it,” he growled, smiling. “I know you did.”

She said nothing, did nothing.

He gave her hip a little pull, forcing her to rock at him, miming the mating she had just played out with such reluctant passion. He, still joined to her, could feel her cunt clenching greedily. “You want me hard again,” he told her. “You’re primed. You’re hungry to fuck. Admit it. When was the last time you had a fuck like that?”

She answered him, surprisingly, although her voice was listless. “I can honestly say I’ve never had a fuck like that.” She still didn’t look at him.

“Flatterer.” He patted her hip again and then lifted her off him and dropped her on the bed. “I’m liking you more the longer I know you,” he said, sitting up. “Let’s get moving.”

His clothes and hers were hung up in the privy still, stiff but dried. Kane washed up and dressed rapidly, blocking the privy door in case his human took it into her purple-haired head to run. It was a precaution of habit; he no longer expected her to try.