Total pages in book: 123
Estimated words: 119846 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 599(@200wpm)___ 479(@250wpm)___ 399(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 119846 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 599(@200wpm)___ 479(@250wpm)___ 399(@300wpm)
They were still too tight in the crotch, rubbing every time he crouched. The fabric didn’t stretch enough for a Kindred his size. He adjusted himself with a muttered curse.
Another fucking thing to fix.
His mind flickered back, unbidden, to the night before. Noelle spread out like a goddess in heat, her soft body trembling beneath his mouth. The taste of her still lingered on his tongue—salt and sweetness and something more, something that made everything they’d done together so much more meaningful.
He and Bright hadn’t just pleasured her—they’d healed her. Made her whole.
I want to do it again.
The thought came unbidden, fierce and raw.
Gods, I want to taste her again. I want to be inside her. I want to make her come so hard she forgets her own name!
But most of all, he wanted to share her with Bright.
Burn scrubbed a hand over his face.
Stop it. Get your fucking head on straight—you don’t have time for fantasies.
They weren’t out of danger yet—not by a long shot. And they wouldn’t be until they got the fuck away from here.
He looked back at the shuttle.
They were so close. If they could just find the key, they had a chance. A real chance to leave this hellhole, take Noelle with them, and get to safety.
He just had to be patient.
Burn exhaled again, slow and controlled, then turned and stalked back toward the main house.
They would find that key. It wasn’t here, but it had to be somewhere. They wouldn’t stop looking until they found it.
51
BRIGHT
The office was even bigger than Bright remembered.
The ceiling soared high above his head, easily forty feet at the apex, with hanging alien light fixtures shaped like glowing fungus pods. They cast a greenish-yellow illumination that gave the whole space a sickly hue, like a bruise left too long to heal. One entire wall was covered with heavy bookcases built for a creature twice his height—packed with warped, oversized ledgers and strange bone-colored data cylinders.
The desk at the center of the room was massive, its glistening, opalescent surface marbled with veins of gold and black. Four long tusks—possibly decorative, possibly functional—protruded from the corners and the chair behind it was big enough to seat a Trollox… or maybe two.
Bright stepped in and let the door swing closed behind him.
Focus, he told himself. Don’t think about last night.
Which, of course, made him think about last night.
About how soft Noelle had felt under his hands and mouth…how her curves molded so perfectly to his touch. How she’d gasped when he kissed her and how she’d cried out when Burn licked her just the way she liked it. How she’d opened for them, trusting and unashamed, giving them everything…
Gods, he thought, rubbing a hand down his face. I’ve never wanted anything more than I want her.
And it wasn’t just the tasting—though that had been mind-melting. It was the way she looked at him and Burn, like she saw straight to the heart of them both. The way she touched so gently but with complete confidence. The way she called both their names in the dark…
Bright took a deep breath and blew it out slowly.
You can’t help her if you’re thinking with your cock. You need to find that key!
Time to work—or at least make it look like he was working.
He crossed to the desk and examined the ledgers. As Cookie had warned, they were laid out neatly—three of them, all open and lined up in a row like little coffins. The entries were hand-written in blocky alien script, which he could read easily enough, but the numbers… the numbers made his head hurt.
“What in the Seven Hells is going on here?” he muttered, flipping a few pages. “Is Thune embezzling from himself? Where is all this money coming from?”
The credits moved in wild, illogical patterns—massive deposits followed by equally massive withdrawals, without any indication of where the funds were coming from or going to or why. No invoice records…no client names…no transaction IDs.
It was chaos.
This’ll take days to unravel, he thought, thumbing through another ledger with mounting frustration. If I had a full console and some software, maybe. But this? Fuck.
He needed a break.
He pushed back from the desk and started opening drawers. Most were stuffed with more account books—some dating back a decade or more. One was filled with what looked like bottles of industrial strength lube, all of them half-empty and sticky. Another contained a bundle of what he suspected were preserved animal testicles, tied together with a red ribbon.
“Lovely,” he muttered, letting that one fall closed.
It wasn’t until he stood and moved behind the desk that he spotted the cabinet inset into the wall—a shallow recess with no handle—just a small raised sensor. He pressed it and the panel clicked open silently.
Inside was a private viewing system. A sleek, dark-gray screen with a row of old-fashioned physical slots beneath it. A stack of thin entertainment disks—none labeled—sat beside it like an ominous little monolith.