Total pages in book: 19
Estimated words: 16945 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 85(@200wpm)___ 68(@250wpm)___ 56(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 16945 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 85(@200wpm)___ 68(@250wpm)___ 56(@300wpm)
Is that so? I pause in my stroking of her back. I love to touch her—am obsessed with it. Knowing how good she tastes and how I make her come every time I take a sip? It’s made me completely and utterly possessive of her. “What are the criteria, exactly?”
Dana leans back, relaxing in my arms, and her warm scent washes over me. Her skin presses against mine, her bare thighs and arms soft and supple against my harder muscles. “Well. I realize we can’t afford to be too choosy, seeing as how I’m not a person and you’re a test-tube baby, but I thought I’d start with the basics.”
“The basics,” I repeat. “What are those basics?”
She flicks a finger out, pointing it at the ceiling of the captain’s quarters, where we’re currently stationed. It has the nicest bed, and Dana insisted we take over those rooms because of that. “One—we need a place where the government is either crooked or nonexistent, because we’re going to have to bribe our way in.”
Smart. She’s been going around the ship, searching private quarters and looking for credits and valuables stashed away in hidden compartments. I thought perhaps she just liked the idea of stealing from the people who have held her captive. Now I know the truth of it, and I’m annoyed that she’s been doing all the planning and I’ve, well . . . I’ve been distracted with the touch and taste of her. The scent of her. The way she comes when I pet her between her thighs. At least one of us is practical. I’m content to follow her lead. “Good call. What else?”
“Day cycles,” Dana says, turning to look at me over her shoulder. “More precisely, planets that have settlements where the nights are longer than the days.”
“Not space stations?”
“No. I hate recycled air. Once you have the real thing, you won’t want to go back. Trust me.” She wrinkles her small human nose at the thought.
“Are we being too choosy?” I point out.
“No,” Dana says, voice firm. She turns back to the monitor and her fingers tap over the screens. “There are a thousand solar systems in this galaxy alone. There are forty-one nearby that are settled, and of those close enough for a pod to make it to, there’re one hundred and seventy viable planets. From those, we can surely find someplace to get lost. And I think I’ve found the perfect spot.”
“Oh?”
“Yup.” She gives me a smug look and tosses her hair. “There’s a farm planet three systems over. Cassa system, second planet from the sun. It has a slow rotation and a continent close to the pole, which means that winters are long, and the nights are twenty hours out of the twenty-nine in the full day. There’s only a local government at the northernmost settlement, and I’d bet a handful of credits they can be bribed.”
I’m impressed. She’s thought of everything. I wrap my arms around her slender form, tucking her against me. “So how do we get there, and when?”
Her eyes are bright as she regards me. “When the pod is fully charged and operational, we can override it. The station here is still in emergency mode.” She twirls a finger, indicating our surroundings. “So when the base ship is in emergency mode, pods can be manually rerouted to a viable planet without too much issue. The theory is that any escape is better than no escape. Used to be that the Homeworlders would rig a ship to the captain’s biological imprint, but if the captain went down, so did the whole ship. Fascinating, huh?”
“Mmm. So when do we go to this Cassa world? Tomorrow?”
“If the pod is fully charged by then, yes. I’m already downloading the maps to the Cassa system. I’m also downloading ones to three hundred and twenty other systems, so by the time they figure out where we’ve gone, we’ll be off the radar. It’ll take four months for the pod to get there, but we can go into stasis through all of it and wake up to fresh air.” The look on her face turns to one of bliss, as if she’s already breathing in cool breezes.
My heart sinks. There’s one massive flaw in this plan. “I can’t go into stasis, Dana. A body in stasis is kept fed through a nutrient feed, and that doesn’t work for me. I need blood, and regularly.”
“Oh.”
“You can leave me behind.” I grit the words out reluctantly, but I mean them. If only one of us can escape, it should be her. Once they figure out my blood issues, they’ll sell me to some gladiator school somewhere. But Dana is miserable as an overlooked, half-starved pet. She deserves freedom and I want her to have it. It’s obvious that while this station is not human friendly, it’s really not made for vampires.