Page 9 of Taken to Nobu
Perhaps she has never heard of a Mountain Run or a Hunt as is practiced by the ancient Dra’Kesh, once rooted here on Nobu before migrating to Cxrian. The Dra’Kesh left behind many of their genetic traits to mix with those of the Voraxian populations that remained, resulting in the varied skin tones of my people. And then they left this. But if she is not Dra’Kesh and is not Voraxian, perhaps she does not know of this. Perhaps, to consummate our Xiveri union, she needs something else. Wants something else.
“Xivoora Xiveri.” I sound pained as I speak. Realizations have not in any way dimmed the desire coursing through me, threatening to unbecome the male that I am. It is painful, but for her I would suffer through the vilest of tortures, drown in the deepest of seas.
I push her matted, freezing hair from her face and arch my body over hers to try to bring up her declining body temperature. Our foreheads touch and in the quiet space between our mouths where not even the savage wind can reach, I whisper, “Warrior, what do you need?”
4
Kiki
“Warrior what do you need?”
My thoughts are fucking haywire. Every emotion and nerve ending and sensation and thought and breath in my body is wired to stay alive. To block this out. To fight.Fight! Don’t stop fighting!But I do stop fighting because I’ve lost. Now all that’s left is to wait for him to do to me what the other one did. What he brought me here for.
Then why did he stop?
His huge fingers invaded me against my will and then he tasted my insides. He’d looked wrecked by the taste, like it was some exquisite meal, and me, the full fucking feast. I tried to ignore the heat of his passion. I tried to ignore everything about him, but his scent. I just couldn’t block that out. In a way that can only be described as ancient and primal, it called to me.
The oasis. A lush green plant, that rich fauna, a gentle heat.No. Don’t get sucked in. Fight! Kill!But how do you kill an oasis? Not even the desert can do that.
I moan — sob.Pathetic. Weak.To silence the sounds slipping out of me, I bite the inside of my cheek until I taste blood. Pain is better than fear. Pain is better than capitulation. Anything is better than capitulation. I’m supposed to be fighting.But I’m so exhausted.And the scent. I just want to give up and dive in.
“Xiveri, what do you need? Speak to me.”
“No.” He’s the enemy. He positioned himself between my legs without my permission. He was going to rape me. He’sstillgoing to rape me. Why hasn’t he? I’m so confused. The smell is cloying. I can’t breathe through it. I blink in the sight of his face. He’s staring down at me and his strange purple face is illuminated by fuchsia and pink lights beaming from his forehead — a lamp to the counter of the dark red sky behind him and the white swirling through it. The cold white.But it’s so warm in the cage of his arms.
He frowns and starts to pull back. Hope flares for a second that he’ll leave me be —that he’ll leave me to die—but when he sits back on his heels, he grabs the front of my suit and drags me up.
I try to push him back, but my hand sings from hitting him earlier and I’m slowing down.No. I trained. Endurance. I can do this.But I’ve been in that syrup for who knows how long and I haven’t eaten or drunk any water in a day at least and I’ve fought warriors and battled this beast of a male and somehow none of this matters as much as the scent of his purple, alien skin and the havoc it’s wreaking on my mind and will and body.
“Are you injured?” He says and there is a strain in his tone Ihate.
I try to push him away. “Get away from me.”
“Kiki, desist immediately. Stop fighting. You cannot seriously have expected to come out victorious on this day. It is not the Xanaxana’s way.”Kiki. He called me Kiki. He knows my name.
Tears come to my eyes but I refuse to let them fall.Pathetic. Weak. Small.Oasis. I grab onto his suit, which matches mine except that it’s a hundred times larger. He’s huge. What good is fighting? He’s right. I was always going to lose.No!
His black hair whips in the wind, spraying across my arm as the next gust of cold charges against my skin. It burns. It burns so badly, but it’s nothing compared to the strange pain bubbling up inside of me. It’s the smell.Get away from it!
I try to stand, but my body buckles and I fall into his outstretched arms. “Are you injured?” He says. “Tell me this at least.”
I shake my head, willing him to stop talking because the more he says the more potent the smell gets and the more the pain flowers and blooms, but I don’t speak. I can’t speak. And he doesn’t stop speaking. “I will take you down the mountain to the healer. Do not attempt to fight me on this. Your life is too precious to me. I will not risk it.”
He starts to stand with me cradled in his arms, but the moment he moves, it hits me. A pain so surreal it’s unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. And I have felt the purest torture. No, this is like that, but a thousand times more painful.I’d rather be tortured again by Bo’Raku than feel this sort of pain.
No, I wouldn’t. No, I don’t.
Because it isn’tpainthat rips through me like a hundred knives through cloth. It’s a pain that isn’t painful. It’s a pain that’s demanding something of me and I know exactly what it is but I’d never in a million years do what it wants. It's a pain that says, this monster is mine, bound to me across every lifeline, across every lifetime and there’s nothing I can do to prevent it. Nothing I can do to stop the pain. No thing, but the one thing.
“No…” I moan, grabbing hold of his collar to stop him from standing. I look into his pure black eyes and take in his purple face and I commit it to memory. Here is the male that I will hate most for the rest of eternity, and it is because of what I will say next. The words that barrel out of my throat like a bruise as the barbed wire in my abdomen tightens and a surge of liquid and heat spills from my core and wets my suit, all the way down to the thighs.
“Fuck me,” I say, and I mean it with every fiber of my being.
5
Kinan
“No,” she says, pulling me down to the snow and ice when I attempt to lift her. “Fuck me.”
