“Give me time. I do not have your words.” Tagen leaned back over his glass, slid his thumb down the side of it to chase condensation into rivulets of cold water. “I have come to believe that one of the guards provided E’Var both with the means of escape aboard the ship and with the needed materials to harvest and manufacture Vahst. In exchange for what, I do not know, but what he got for his effort was death. E’Var has demonstrated great loyalty to his…his…family,” he concluded, but very slowly, knowing this was not the right word. “But he does not trust to the silence of mere accomplices.”

Both were silent. The dishes were washed, dried, stacked. Daria was scrubbing at the sink and countertops.

At last, in a small voice, she asked, “How many people is he going to kill for this drug?”

“I have no way of knowing. But as you say, if it is to be profitable, it must be many, and E’Var means not only to make the cost of the trip, but enough to keep himself comfortably beyond the reach of Jota.”

“How many?” she asked again, and her eyes beneath the veil of her hair were young and frightened.

*

“Two hundred,” Kane said. “Perhaps as many as four. Or it could be as few as fifty. It depends on certain things, and I haven’t decided how I want to go about it.” He watched Raven absorb this, rolling the ampoule of Vahst between his fingers.

“Christ, that’s a lot of people,” she said in a thin, faint voice. She was rubbing at her clit-ring, long after the lotion must have been absorbed, and he watched her hand. She seemed to have forgotten what she was doing. “So many people. How could you possibly get away with it?”

“You’d be surprised.”

“I guess I would, because…four hundred people!” She shuddered.

“There’s a lot of humans on this planet,” Kane shrugged. “And they all mill around together and sometimes wander off and vanish or bump up and kill each other. We take a few here, a few there. No one notices.”

Raven’s hand had stopped its movements, but remained cupping her sex. She was staring at the wall beyond Kane’s head, her face locked in an expression of shock so profound it was almost grief. “No one?” she echoed, her voice scarcely audible.

“Mm.” Kane’s interest in the conversation was dissolving. He stood up and approached the bed, still watching her hand, and hooked one claw in the waist of his pants. He’d been patient, she was healed, and it was time to enjoy the work he’d had done on her.

“Hey, no!” she said weakly. “It’s too early! You’ll tear ‘em all out.”

He paused with one hand on her shoulder and the other raised to cuff her for her protestations, and considered that.

Her cunt was beautiful. Shaven smooth and gleaming with steel. He wanted to feel those rings rippling against the side of his shaft as he plunged in and out of her. She looked plenty healed up to him, but then, she might know better. And if the piercings ripped free, they might never go back in.

Of course, she could be replaced. There was no shortage of humans on this miserable planet, as he had just observed.

But there was no guarantee a replacement would prove any hardier than his Raven, who was, besides a convenient fuck, obedient and clever as well as decent company. Plus, he liked her hair, and he still hadn’t seen any other humans in that color.

And there were options, weren’t there? If the human video feeds had taught him nothing else, they had taught them that.

“Give me that,” he ordered, lowering the hand poised to strike and pointing at the lotion sitting beside her on the bed. “And get on your face…on your belly.”

Her face did a curious thing, like a buckling or crumpling, but she rallied to stoicism and slid forward onto her knees and then rolled to brace her hips against the foot of the bed, gathering in folds of blankets to muffle her mouth and presenting her hocks to him. She held up the little hotel bottle and her hand was fairly steady.

Kane tapped out the remainder of its contents into his palm, dabbed one finger into the white cream and rubbed this down Raven’s crevasse to the dimpled bud of her cloacae. The rest he lathered onto his cock, stroking and squeezing until it warmed slightly on his skin. He worked both, his cock and her wrinkled orifice, content for now just to do this.

“What is this?” he asked suddenly. “Tell me the name of it.”

“What?” she stammered, raising her head slightly, as one awakening, befuddled, from a dream of pain.

Kane pulled back his hand and cracked his palm across her flanks with his full strength, reasoning that she seemed thicker there and he wasn’t likely to break anything.

Raven shrieked into her arms, scratching at the bedding before shuddering and sobbing back into place.

“That,” he said coolly. “What is that?”

“My ass,” she wept.

“And this?” He punched his finger into her. Tight. Tighter than her cunt. He squeezed himself hard.

“Asshole,” she sobbed. “A-anus.”

He knelt carefully behind her, rubbing at his glans and sliding his arm beneath her belly to raise her just right, and fit them together. “Have you ever done this?” he asked mildly.

“No.”

Memories of Urak’s male human swam up from the black and Kane paused again, uncertain. “Will it kill you, do you know?”

“I don’t think so. You j-just have to go s-slow and stop if you see b-b-blood.” Her voice broke on the last word and she sank her human teeth into her own clenched fist, shivering.

“Slow,” he echoed. He flexed his arm, bringing her back instead of thrusting forward. He could feel in exquisite detail the tight muscle of her cloacae—of her anus—admitting him, feel the hot passage clamping and fighting him. His shaft sank into her; he withdrew a little ways and pulled her back again, imbedding himself a little deeper this time, shivering with the effort of restraint against the surging heat of pleasure. He eased back, stroked one hand down the jumping muscles of her belly, and then tightened his grip on her and shoved until his hard stomach pushed at her ass.

His head was thrown back, his throat working in silence, his fangs bared. He was scarcely aware of her, and yet intensely conscious of her all at the same time. His arm was an iron bar gripping her tight against him while his free hand moved lightly across her flanks, almost caressing, sometimes reaching up to comb out the tangles of her hair. He could feel his cock swelling, throbbing, almost jerking in the first throes just from the feel of her so tight and shaking with her tears.

Without warning, he yanked back and out (casting one swift glance downwards; no blood) just to punch into her again. She shrieked and tried to scramble away, her hips humping at the bed in her efforts to escape him.

Kane reared back and began to ride her, both hands on her hips now, letting her flee a little ways just for the pleasure of yanking her back, sliding her up and down his pumping cock, falling into the rhythm of thrust and draw. Sometimes he caressed her, drawing the backs of his hands down from the nape of her neck, down the bare shadow of her spine. Sometimes he struck her, beating out cracks like gunplay on her flanks when her struggles waned. He fucked her, hard and fast and steady. He savored the fucking, thinking with the rational part of his mind that this was better than anything he’d ever had, even with that fine female, Tari’i Sunorrok. And just why that should be, he didn’t know, since Raven surely didn’t have her heart in it at the moment.

No, it wasn’t the way she was moving, and it wasn’t just the grip and the pull of her. It was all of her, all his Raven, and the knowledge that she was his. He bent swiftly and savaged Raven’s shoulder in a bite, feeling a sudden swell of affection for her, then reared back and split the night with her screams again.