Page 44 of Hunted By the Wraiths
He laughed, the sound vibrating through me. “Your math is terrible.”
“Your face is terrible.”
“Mature.”
“You love it.”
“I do.” He grew serious, his hand tracing the scar on my jaw. “I need to tell you something.”
His voice rumbled through his chest into mine. “During the worst of it, when they were... experimenting. Trying to break the bonding instinct. I’d think about you. Not the big moments. The small ones. The way you organize everything into lists. How you count exits even in your sleep. That face you make when someone’s being inefficient.”
“Romantic,” I managed, my voice thick.
“It was.” He pulled back to look at me. “It was everything. You were everything. The only real thing in all that time.”
He held my gaze, his own full of a raw sincerity that stole my breath. “I love you,” he said. “I’ve loved you for ten years. I loved you when they were taking me apart piece by piece. I loved you when I thought you were dead. I’ll love you until?—”
I kissed him quiet. When I pulled back, I made sure he could see my face.
“I love you too,” I said. “You absolute disaster of a lizard.”
“Romantic.”
“You want romance? Fine.” I cleared my throat. “Thoryn, you magnificent bastard, you came back from the dead for me. You survived torture and experimentation. You fought through conditioning that was literally killing you to touch me. You’re mine. I’m yours. The Consortium can go fuck themselves. Better?”
“Perfect,” he said, and meant it.
We should have moved. Should have cleaned up, checked his wounds, maintained watch. Instead we stayed wrapped around each other, listening to The Haven’s chaos. Somewhere a deal was going bad, voices raised in three different languages. The air recycler wheezed. A ship’s engine fired, rattling our walls.
“We need to contact your crew,” I finally said.
“Mm.” He was tracing patterns on my hip, and I could tell he had no intention of moving.
“The Consortium is still hunting us.”
“I know.”
“We’re sitting targets.”
“Five more minutes.” He kissed my shoulder. “We’ve been dead for years. We can have five minutes.”
He was right. We’d earned five minutes. We’d earned a lifetime of five-minute increments stolen between disasters.
I reached over him for the encrypted comm unit I’d bought from a paranoid Xelarian. Military grade, supposedly untraceable. The connection took thirty seconds to establish, bouncing through enough relays to hopefully keep us alive another day.
“Raptor, this is Maris Elen.” I kept my voice steady, professional, even though Thoryn was now kissing my neck and making it very difficult to concentrate. “Thoryn and I are secure. Transmitting coordinates for extraction.”
A pause. Then Serak’s voice, controlled but with definite relief: “Confirmed. Estimated arrival eighteen hours. Can you hold?”
I looked at Thoryn, saw my own determination reflected in his eyes. “We’ll hold.”
“Good. Raptor out.”
I set down the comm unit. Eighteen hours. We just had to survive eighteen more hours.
“Think they’ll make it?” Thoryn asked.
“They better.” I curled back into his side. “Otherwise, I’m stealing a ship and flying us out myself.”
