their bloodlines pure to not dilute their hold on power.”
“The old guys who want to buy me?” I ask.
He nods.
“You still are going to sell me?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “I have enough savings. Not quite enough to get another ship, but if I do a few jobs, I can scrape something together.”
I hug him, holding him tight.
Maybe I misjudged him. Being a pirate isn’t what defines him. He fell into that because of bad circumstances, but now he has a way out.
“Krakon,” I say. “You called me Cat. Why did you do that?”
Then I see something I never thought I’d see. Krakon blushes.
“The fuck is this?”
A strange voice wakes me.
I jolt awake. There’s a Cygnian woman standing above us. She’s got three rings piercing the lower-left half of her lip. Her hair is long and dark, but it’s tied up in a complicated up-do, like something you’d wear to prom. The fussy prom hair doesn’t quite match with the big scar on her face, but nothing about her quite makes sense to me.
It’s the first Cygnian woman I’ve seen. It’s not that she looks masculine. She doesn’t. It’s just that she’s at least six feet tall, and she’s lithe and muscular. My lizard brain knows she could rip me in two with her bare hands, and yet her facial structure and her curves are intensely feminine.
The storm is gone. It’s peaceful white outside the cave. Even without a fire, the cold is bearable.
“Thraxa,” Krakon says, jolting upright.
He stands up, abandoning me and the fur. It’s actually the first time I’ve seen him naked. We were buried beneath the fur with no light when we made love.
His cock is flaccid, but even soft, it’s bigger than any hard human cock I’ve ever seen, even in porn. He looks perfect. Absolutely stunning. If they could make a statue of him and send it back to my time, it would be enough to ruin human men for millions of women. It’s unreal how perfect he looks.
Thraxa laughs. “You don’t seem very excited to see me, Krakon.”
She points at his cock.
Why is Krakon letting her see that? That’s my cock.
He turns his back to her and grabs his thermal suit off the cave floor. He slides it on.
“This your cargo?” she asks, pointing to me as if I was a big wooden crate. “You probably shouldn’t open it and play with it if you want to sell it, Krakon.”
“There was a storm,” he says. “It was the only way to keep warm. I didn’t…”
My face burns red. More from anger than embarrassment.
Thraxa shrugs. “Well, my cryo chamber is already full, so that one will have to stay awake. We can chain it in the cargo hold.”
“That one?” I hiss. “It? My name is Catherine.”
I stand up, but holding the furs up against my body doesn’t really make me particularly imposing.
“Put your suit back on,” Krakon says. His voice is gruff, and he doesn’t even look at me. “You’ll freeze.”
Thraxa smiles at us. “After you went through so much hell to keep her warm. It must have been horrible to have her smell filling the furs. Her naked body pressed up against you. So traumatic! Wouldn’t want her to freeze after going through all that, would you?”
“Fuck off, Thraxa,” he says.
“I came all this way to save you, and that’s the thanks I get?” She puts her hand on her heart as if he’s hurt her, but she’s clearly just messing with him.
“I’ll pay you,” he says.
“Actually,” Thraxa grins mischievously, “I’m going to probably end up paying you. I didn’t actually go out of my way to save your sorry ass. I was passing right by, and I couldn’t get anyone else from the swarm to go along with me.”
26
Krakon
“So,” I say, “you figured you’d get someone like me, who had no choice but to come with you?”
“Something like that. No one was rushing to your beacon, Krakon. They told you not to do it, and you did it. A lot of ‘we told him so’ on the comms chatter. I’m sure someone would have eventually felt guilty enough to come get you. We thought you were stuck in orbit...not on the surface! To think you lasted this long.”
“You’d have come faster if you’d known?” I ask, but it’s a rhetorical question. “And after you saw how well this all worked out for me, you decide to go on your own impossible job? And to bring me along with you? Shouldn’t we learn