Sue-Eye nodded, but it was a slow nod, and Raven couldn’t tell what she was thinking. “What’s he doing with the people he kills?”

“Making drugs.”

“Is he going to kill me?”

“I don’t know.” Raven moved her shoulders in a helpless shrug. “He says he’s going to keep me, but I don’t know that, either. Maybe. What do you want from me?”

“Ever fucked a girl before?”

The abrupt shift of questioning took Raven slightly off-guard. She offered the blonde biker a lop-sided smile. “Last night.”

“I think he got turned on by it,” Sue-Eye said seriously. “We should do some of that.”

Raven only shrugged. She knew Kane well enough by now to know Sue-Eye was right, but that didn’t mean she wanted to do anything about it.

Sue-Eye spread her hands slightly, but the accusation in her eyes robbed the gesture of any real empathy. “I want to live through this. Pretend you like it, okay? You don’t have to do me unless he says so, you just writhe around a lot and make him horny.”

“He’s not going to give a damn if it’s hot,” Raven told her. “I’m not kidding. You’ll just piss him off if you play games.”

“Fair enough. But he’ll like it at night when it’s cooler, and that’s when he’ll be wondering whether or not to keep me or kill me. So you go along with it, because if you rat me out, honey, I’ll rat you right back.”

Raven stared at her, feeling a chill shiver down through her stomach to the soles of her feet. Sue-Eye continued to stare for a little while longer, then nodded once, turned, and marched out to join Kane. Raven washed her face slowly, studying the trapped-animal look her own eyes presented her with, and tried to think. Did she have a friend now or an enemy? She didn’t know, but she didn’t like the way the little circle of her and Kane now suddenly had to expand to admit this new stranger. Life was like a bone Kane held over them, and now it felt horribly like a bone this Sue-Eye didn’t want to share.

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Chapter Eighteen

Another day, pulling him by force from sleep with the itching and aching of his tsesac before the sun was even high. Tagen struggled upright against the sodden skin of his sheets and clapped a hand to his brow. When he drew it down over his face, sweat came off him in streams.

He had already lost one struggle to Heat this morning, but he was not ready to succumb to it again. He would battle with it. Escape to a cold shower, hide in the shade downstairs, try to ignore the urgent demands of his body until he surrendered in fury and in secret.

Battle, yes, but there could be no victory. He would be defeated sooner or later, and he would have to hide, muffling himself with pillows while he struggle to empty himself of burning seed before Daria—

Tagen’s frustration exploded him in a snarl and he threw an arm over his eyes to mask them. Why wait? Why torture himself for hours yet to avoid raising her alarms? He terrified her already. No amount of respectful distance was ever going to woo her to him.

Damn her. Damn her! She could not disguise her body’s cravings, but at least for her, they were only cravings. She had crept behind his door and stolen sight of him as he dressed, but she did not come to him. She sat beside him in a halo of mating musk, looking, lingering, but would not touch him. And of course, she had run from his first cautious overture and shut herself in the utility room.

So that left him here, alone in his borrowed bed with the thought of her burning behind his closed eyes. Dark fantasies and frustration, and those alone until either Heat was done or E’Var found. He would not make a slave of her just to have flesh. To force a female was high among the most contemptible crimes Tagen could imagine, but it was more than morality that restrained him. Somewhere inside her, and not very deeply buried, Daria Cleavon believed he would attack her. Heat-ravaged though he was, he would not prove her right.

But it was her he had thought of when Heat first took him this morning. It was her musk he had remembered and her body he had imagined. It was her name that had burst incandescent in his mind as his true-cum emptied and Heat was relieved for a few more precious hours. It was her who had followed him into dreams, to mate with him again and again.

And it was her step in the hall right outside that he heard now, rousing him from his fitful doze. She went into the bathroom and rattled around, loudly sterilizing every surface until the acidic scent of disinfectant came through the cracks in Tagen’s door. He listened, knowing he would have to go into that room soon enough. He was getting a headache already.

She finished shortly and went back downstairs, but not without hesitating. The day was wearing on and he had not emerged from his room. Soon, she would come knocking, offering him food and drink he could not taste, infuriating him with her nearness, her desire, and her fear. He had to get up before she trapped him here, with pools of his seed still warm on his bedding.

Tagen rose, gathered fresh clothing from his sparse stores, and went to the newly-aseptic privy to clean himself and his sheets. He could not bear to fully dress afterwards; the human’s pants alone covered him, and if his bare chest bothered Daria, so be it. Let her be bothered for a change.

He hung his sheet out the window to dry and headed for the stairs. Daria came up them as he went down, carrying the device she called a ‘vacuum’. She looked at him and her cheeks colored. Then she ducked her head and passed him, leaving a trail of musk behind her to aggravate Tagen’s Heat-heightened senses.

He paused on the lowest step to look after her, indulging in a pleasant fantasy of pursuit. In her darkened room, with all the cool ocean colors around him, he would catch her. Now. Before Heat had a chance to sink down into his senses again, while he could still be gentle enough to ease her to passion in the slow way that humans required. He would sway her, and she would have him.

But she did not so much as glance behind her as she climbed. She disappeared into her room and soon the roar of the vacuum sounded. Grendel came spilling out a second later, all his fur on end.

Tagen commiserated with the cat’s pique. He picked the animal up and carried it into the kitchen to feed it. He knew Daria must have offered it a meal already, but damn it, Tagen needed to have something in this house fawn over him. Tagen assembled a line ration out of bread and meat, and shared it out with Grendel as he sat in the shade in the corner. The cat ate, and then leapt up on Tagen’s lap, clawing at his chest and butting its head into Tagen’s jaw, purring. If only bologna had the same effect on humans.

Tagen rubbed at the cat’s nose, neck, and tail, and then set it down on the tiles and stood up. He had little time before Heat returned. He had to use it wisely.

Tagen knew he should be watching the media feeds, but he lingered in the kitchen. Daria’s computer beckoned. Beside it, the loose fan of pages she’d made for him. She’d marked several listings.

Tagen traced his claw over her messy alien letters, wishing he could read them. She was working so hard. If E’Var was anywhere on this world, she would find him. He believed that. She had a keen intellect and an ability to deduce that Tagen genuinely admired. Hers was not a military mind, but it was a ready one, and it complemented his perfectly.

If he knew how to voice this, would it matter? One of the programs he had seen on the tee-vee had a female who had refused a mate because he wanted her body and not her mind. Tagen did want Daria’s body, he wouldn’t even try to think otherwise, but it had been his high regard of her mind that had allowed him to see her as desirable and not merely human. Perhaps—