by Claire Kent
Riana stood up, feeling more grounded now that she’d become used to the motion of the transport. “Are they going to chase us?”
“They’ll make at least a cursory pursuit, but I don’t think they’ll call for any help. That would mean admitting they let prisoners escape. They’ll probably just count us among the dead from the riot. You know what the Coalition is like—let things slide unless it directly impacts them. We need to dump this transport and find a safer spacecraft as soon as we can, though, just in case they decide to be thorough.”
“Genus 5 is less than an hour away,” Hall said. “I’ll take us there. The capital is a big city. Anything goes there. We can get lost there easily enough.”
Cain nodded in agreement.
“Sounds good.” She was about to take her seat again when she thought of something else. “So we have an hour?”
“Just about. Why? Did you want to take a nap?”
“No. Too jittery for that yet. But there’s probably a shower in the head. If you don’t need me to help…”
Cain smiled, an uncharacteristically soft look on his face. “We’ve got it covered up here. Go take a shower.”
Riana did.
The shower was old-fashioned, a little rusty, and wasn’t particularly clean. But it had been two months since Riana had been able to take one.
With the exception of having sex with Cain, nothing had ever felt better in her life.
* * *
When they landed on Genus 5, they left the transport in a public docking station, and Hall did his persuasion thing and got enough money to buy them a meal and a change of clothes. They went to a rather sleazy bar that evening, and they used the remaining money to join a card game. By the end of the night, they’d won a rickety spacecraft—this one safely anonymous—and enough money for fuel and adequate provisions.
Riana wasn’t surprised by their success at gambling.
No one could bluff better than Cain, and Hall could make people do whatever he wanted them to do.
She’d felt awkward and uncertain ever since they landed. Hall was planning to take off on his own, once he got to some planet where a friend of his lived. He would start up his life again, doing any sort of freelance work that made him money. But she wasn’t sure what Cain’s plans were once they were safely away. He would have had every right to dump her on the first convenient occasion, instead of hauling her around, but she certainly didn’t suggest it.
That evening, they got rooms in a hole-in-the-wall lodging house that didn’t ask for identification, and since they’d only gotten two rooms, she assumed she was sleeping with Cain.
They both took showers before bed, and Riana spent a long time combing the tangles out of her hair. But they didn’t talk much. Cain seemed closed-off and brooding, and everything felt so strange, unnatural.
Cain didn’t even smell like himself. He smelled like soap. It seemed foreign and unreal.
“Is your shoulder okay?” she asked. He’d been bleeding there earlier.
“Yeah. Shallow wound. Nothing serious.”
“Do you want me to bandage it up?”
“I already took care of it.” He was wearing a t-shirt with sleeves. She’d never seen him wearing sleeves before.
“Okay,” she said, swallowing hard. She wanted to say something else—something about how odd she felt, how different things were, how she felt like he was slipping through her fingers. But he wasn’t in a talkative mood, and she was terrified of hearing the truth, so she didn’t end up saying anything but, “Good night.”
Maybe he would roll over on top of her the way he often did. Maybe in sex things would feel more natural.
But he didn’t make any advances at all. He just said, “Good night,” back to her and turned off the light.
It felt like he was a stranger beside her, and she realized with the bleak weight of impending knowledge that what had been so good inside the prison might not last now that they were out. What she desperately wanted, needed from him might not be a possibility.
Freedom might mean she had lost him.
It wasn’t pitch black in the room, the way it had always been in the Hold at night, but she still felt lonely and scared for a long time before she finally went to sleep.
***
She smelled Cain as she woke up.
It was just a faint whiff—not the way she’d always been surrounded by the scent of him on waking—but it was distinct, unmistakable, deeply known.
It was Cain, and she’d know him anywhere.
She rolled toward the smell of him as she gradually woke up, until she could feel his body beneath her hands. She breathed deeply, comforted by the familiar scent of him.
“What are you doing?” he asked, his voice gruff, fully awake.
“Smelling you,” she mumbled, obviously not quite in her right mind yet.
“Sorry. I can take another shower.”
“No.” She reached out for him groggily, sighing with pleasure as he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her against him. “I like it.”
He chuckled and slid his hands down her back until he was cupping her bottom. “I’m not sure what to think about that.”
“It’s strange—being out,” she admitted, nuzzling his chest and breathing him in.
He exhaled deeply. “I know.”
She moved against him and felt that he was hard, his erection trapped between their bodies. A tension unclenched in her chest at the recognition. He still wanted her. At least that hadn’t changed.
She rubbed herself against him slowly, until he moaned, low in his throat. Then he grabbed her face and pulled her into a deep kiss.
They kissed for a long time, moving their bodies against each other. It felt so different—with clean skin, clean hair—but the hard tension in his body, the urgency in his touch hadn’t changed.
With one hand, he stroked her hair as they kissed, and with the other he caressed one of her thighs. It wasn’t long until she was deeply aroused, whimpering slightly as desire pulsed all through her.
“Cain, please,” she gasped, pulling her mouth away at last. “I need you. Now.”
He release a muffled groan and rolled them over, so she was on her back and he was positioned between her thighs. They fumbled with their clothes, and he used his hand to align himself at her entrance, and then he was sinking inside.
Her pussy clung to his hard length, and she arched up in pleasure at the penetration. “Cain.”
He pushed a few times against her—just small, involuntary thrusts. And he said one breathless word with each push. “Yes. Baby. Riana.”
She arched up again, loving the sound of his voice, the feel of his need. She wrapped her legs around him and held onto him with her thighs and her arms. She kept breathing out his name as she rocked beneath him, matching his rhythm by instinct as much as practice. She couldn’t seem to stop.
Then he was kissing her again, even as their motion became more urgent, and it felt like they were truly joined, truly together, truly one. Her chest was aching with it as the pleasure released inside her, and she arched her neck, breaking the kiss and crying out softly as her body shook through the climax.
“Fuck, yeah,” he muttered, pushing against her contractions. “Baby, I love when you come.”
He was sweating now, and he smelled more like Cain than ever. And she’d come down enough to watch and feel as he froze, the release breaking on his face, before it was washed over him with palpable pleasure.
She held on as he came inside her, and she gathered him to her when he started to relax.
He lay on top of her for a minute, his weight heavy and hot and loved.
“That was so good,” she breathed after a minute, needing to say something, desperately wanting to hear from him some sort of reflection of her own feelings.
“Yeah,” he muttered, nuzzling her neck.
She waited, but he didn’t say anything else.
Maybe it was just sex to him. Maybe it was just a phy
sical release. Maybe he wanted to go back to his real life and cut any ties from the memory of the nightmare year he’d spent in the prison.
Who could blame him, after all? Relationships formed in crisis weren’t supposed to last.
She wasn’t going to make him feel guilty. He’d more than lived up to his side of their deal. He hadn’t just kept her safe and taken care of her while they were in the Hold. He’d managed to get them both out. She wasn’t going to make him feel bad if he didn’t want to have her around for the rest of his life.
The idea of living the rest of her life without him upset her so much that she suddenly had to get some space. She squirmed slightly until he rolled off her, and then she tucked herself into a ball under the covers, telling herself to hold it together.
Cain had a good heart, no matter how he tried to hide it. Even a year in the prison hadn’t managed to beat it out of him. If he knew how sad she was at the thought of losing him, he would feel guilty about it.
It felt like he might be looking at her, but she couldn’t take the risk of checking.
Finally, he said, “I guess I’ll take a shower.”
“Okay. I’ll take one after you.” She thought she managed to sound mostly natural.
She shuddered and shook after Cain got up and went to the bathroom until she’d controlled the emotion.
There was a knock on the door a few minutes after she heard the shower come on. She sat up with a jerk, surprised and momentarily terrified.
They’d seen a couple of guards from the prison yesterday evening at the public docking station. Evidently, they’d made a search for them after all.
Maybe they’d found them.
“It’s me,” Hall’s voice came through the door.
Relieved, Riana threw her clothes on and went to open the door.
Hall was fully dressed and grinning—breathtakingly handsome despite his still swollen eye. She pitied the girl who Hall made a real move on. The poor thing wouldn’t have a chance.
“I found a ride,” he said, glancing behind her and evidently realizing that Cain was in the bathroom. “I think we’ll be safer going our ways now.”
“Oh, okay.” Riana agreed he was probably right, but she was kind of sorry to see Hall go. She felt strangely close to this mysterious, charismatic, incredibly attractive man. “Who’s your ride?”
“Someone going the same direction as me.” He lifted his eyebrows. “She was happy to give me a lift.”
“I bet she was.”
“So I’m taking off. Take care of yourself,” Hall said, leaning down to kiss her cheek. “Thanks for picking me out of the herd and giving me an escape route.”
He’d said he was going to kill himself if he’d stayed much longer in the Hold. She was absolutely sure it was true.
In a fleeting thought, she decided the world would have been lesser if he had.
“Thank you,” she said with a smile. “We couldn’t have gotten out without your help. You’re going to be okay?”
“Of course. I know how to take care of myself.”
“Don’t get in trouble again.”
“I’m always in trouble.” He gave her his characteristic grin. “I’d tell you to take care of yourself too, but I think someone already has the job covered.”
“I…don’t know about that,” Riana said, a little primly, since she wasn’t at all sure his assumption about her and Cain was true, and it really wasn’t Hall’s business anyway.
He chuckled and lowered his face to murmur, “You might not know, but I do. I read his feelings, remember? And I’ve never felt anything like it before—the way he feels for you.”
She stared at him breathlessly, a thrill rippling through her at the words. “Really?”
He nodded. “If I felt that deeply for a woman, I’d be absolutely terrified.” He glanced over her shoulder at the closed door of the bathroom. “Tell him goodbye from me. And thank you. And that he has nothing to feel guilty about.”
“What?” Riana asked, trying to sort out exactly what he was saying.
“Just tell him,” Hall said. Then he kissed her cheek again and turned to leave. But he added as he walked down the hall, “You can trust me.”
She stared after him for a minute, and she was still staring when the bathroom door opened.
“What’s going on?” Cain asked, low and hoarse.
Riana closed the door. “Hall. He got a ride to that planet he was heading for, so he came by say goodbye.”
“Oh. You didn’t want to go with him?”
She sucked in a sharp breath, turning to stare at Cain. “Why would I?”
He gave a half-shrug as he pulled on the pair of pants he’d bought the day before.
She was confused and emotional and flooded with far too many unanswered questions.
Where was Cain planning to go now, anyway? When were they going to discuss future plans?
Would he want to go back to his old life and forget about her completely?
All of the questions made her stomach knot as she watched Cain pull on a shirt.
She was breathing deeply and telling herself not to panic when he asked, “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“You look kind of shaky. Are you feeling sick again?” he asked, his face softening slightly in concern. “After being cooped up under the ocean for so long, it could just be the change in press—“
“I’m fine,” she interrupted. “I’m not sick.”
He lowered his brow, as if confused by her tone.
Trying to hide her nerves, she asked, “Do you think we’re safe to be out in public? Since we saw them here…I mean, since they came after us after all?”
“It was probably more of a gesture toward pursuit than the real thing. They don’t seem to have called in reinforcements. We aren’t enemies of the state, and they won’t want the publicity of admitting that anyone managed to escape from one of their prison planets. Occasionally, convicts have made escapes before, but the news is always hushed up. It will be easy enough to cover up—with the explosion and rioting that followed. They’ll just announce that we died in the chaos. The other prisoners will probably believe it, and no one else will even know to care.”
It made sense. And, knowing how the Coalition functioned primarily to cover its own ass, Riana realized that was exactly what would happen in this.
“So what are you going to do now?” Riana’s voice cracked slightly as she asked, but her emotions and confusion were rising up again.
Hall had said Cain cared about her. Surely he wouldn’t have lied about that.
“I’m going home.”
“Oh.”
She had no idea where his home was. Where he lived. What he did. Who his family was.
He might have a wife and kids.
He might be anything.
“Where would you like me to take you?” He’d turned slightly, like he was about to head back into the bathroom.
Riana swallowed hard and tried to think. “I’m not sure. Since I’m a convict and they know my name, I can hardly go back to the University. Even if they aren’t going to try to track me down, I can’t really just appear back on Earth and demand my old job back.”
“No, but it’s not difficult to take on a new identity these days. I would have to myself but I refused to give them my name, so they never officially knew who I was.”
Once technology had advanced to an extent that fingerprint identification was obsolete, the Coalition had turned to other methods of keeping track of people. But the Coalition was too vast to keep records on everyone, so only those born in Coalition hospitals or those on staff with the Coalition had their genetic identity on record. Those born on underdeveloped planets like Cain must have been could easily avoid getting tagged in such a way. It didn’t make a difference in the criminal system, since they imprisoned people whether they had a real name or not, but she could understand now why Cain had been stubborn about this. He would have lost his chance to go hom
e again otherwise.
After a reflective pause, Cain continued, “You can probably forge identification and credentials without too much trouble and get a new job—maybe even doing archeology. I’m sure you have friends or family who could help you.”
Growing dread was a sickening weight in her gut as she tried to imagine starting her life over now. Alone.
Without Cain.
But Hall had said Cain had feelings for her.
“I don’t have any family left,” she murmured, staring down at her hands.
“Friends? Boyfriend?”
“I’ve always kept to myself, but I’ll figure it out. There’s no way I can thank you for everything—”
Cain put up an impatient hand. “None of that.”
“But—”
His lips twisted with some sort of suppressed emotion. “I haven’t been selfless. The way I’ve used you—”
Riana almost choked. “What? What do you mean?”
Cain turned to stare at her again. “I took advantage of you. We both know that. You were helpless. And I used that to fuck you the way I wanted—”
“No!” she exclaimed, horrified by the very idea, by the fact that Cain believed that about what had happened between them. She suddenly understood what Hall had meant when he’d said to tell Cain not to feel guilty. “No. I went into it willingly. It was an even trade. A consensual agreement. And, after the first time, it didn’t…it didn’t…”
Cain leaned forward, his eyes scanning her face intensely. “It didn’t what?”
She gave up even trying to retain the last remnants of her pride. He might as well know the whole truth. “After the first time, it didn’t feel like a trade. I mean, I didn’t think of it as something I had to do. I wanted to. And I thought…I guess I thought you understood that.”
Cain was silent for a long time.
Outside the prison, he appeared more human. He was still powerful, stoic, intimidating, but he didn’t seem quite so primal in his bearing and demeanor. He was just a man, after all. A strong, masculine, eminently capable one. But a man.
A man who looked confused and a little uncertain right now.
Finally, he said, “I knew you enjoyed it physically, but you can’t tell me you would have taken up with me had you not been forced into it by circumstances.”