Challenged (Mates for the Raskarrans #8)

Chapter 20

CHAPTER TWENTY

Angie

I t’s been a long time since I fucked someone in a single bed, but what always felt cheap and kind of pathetic with other guys feels intimate and exciting with Rardek. He’s so big, his legs extend beyond the end of the bed, and there’s very little space for me to crawl up his body. As I straddle his hips, I squeeze one leg into the gap between him and the wall. The other I have to hang off the edge of the bed, pressing into the floor on tip toes for leverage.

His cock feels massive in my hand as I stroke it. Very rare, in my experience, that men have the goods to back up their bragging, but of course Rardek does. He’s never lied to me once, I realise.

If the blindingly good orgasm he gave me downstairs hadn’t convinced me I wanted to do this, that thought would do it. He might be arrogant, smug, all the things I usually hate, but he’s also sincere and honest and thoughtful - things I really like. Plus, he values me. He doesn’t just say it; he proves it by listening to me, desiring my opinion about things, trusting me. Things I love.

Fuck. It feels ridiculous to even think it. But in the whirlwind two days since he swaggered into my dreams, I might have just fallen in love with him.

I brace my weight on his chest, hands pressing into perfectly sculpted pecs as I lower myself onto him. I take it slow, lifting my hips up before pressing back down, over and over, taking him a little deeper every time until he’s fully seated inside me, filling me, stretching me in the most delicious way.

“Nhi Angie,” he breathes, his hands coming to grip my thighs.

I roll my hips, slowly at first, getting used to him. Sparks of pleasure flutter in my belly, intensified by the way he closes his eyes, tips his head back, a low moan escaping him. His fingers dig into my skin a little harder, his tail winding tight round my calf.

I have every intention of setting the pace, controlling this moment. Showing him the way to my pleasure. Not that he needed it downstairs. The guy was like a heat-seeking missile, primed and ready to make me explode. But human men always seem to make hard work of it, and Rardek doesn’t have the advantage of experience. Plus, it’s always harder to reach a second climax. I figure he’ll need a bit of direction.

Then his hands shift, coming to grip my hips. He lifts me up, guiding my movements, before drawing me back down as he thrusts his own hips upwards.

Pleasure explodes inside me as again and again he drives into me, setting the kind of punishing rhythm I didn’t even know I liked. His fingers bite into my hips, the pain a delicious contrast to the pleasure. He’ll bruise me, I think, and for the first time in my life, I’ll love wearing the marks a man has put on my skin.

He surges upwards, claiming my mouth in a fierce kiss, his tongue tangling with mine. We’re both breathing hard, unable to sustain the kiss for more than a moment, and one hand releases my hip, sinking into my hair and tilting my head back to expose my neck. He nips and sucks, tasting my sweat slicked skin. The memory of him tasting another part of me has me moaning, heightening my pleasure.

Watching him lick my juices off his fingers was the most shocking and the hottest thing I’ve ever seen. It makes me wonder what else he might be prepared to do with that tongue.

I lean back, bracing my weight with my arms behind me, arching my chest towards him. He takes the invitation, moving his mouth and tongue to my breasts, laving my nipples before sucking them hard into his mouth. My pussy clenches around him, this new angle working even better for me. I don’t know how it’s possible that I’m so close to coming again, mere moments after my last orgasm.

“Don’t stop,” I moan, even though he won’t understand me. “Don’t stop.”

“Linasha,” he growls against my skin, and that sound alone is nearly enough to set me off.

With his hands back on my hips, he shifts his position, no longer fucking me with abandon, but experimenting with different angles, different pressures. His eyes remain locked on my face the entire time, looking for signs that he’s hitting the right spot. So I’m vocal for him, moaning his name when a stroke feels good, occasionally clenching my inner walls around him because I love the way that extra tightness makes him hiss.

Then our bodies align just right, his cock driving deep as something slightly raised moves over my clit. My legs lock around him, a ragged moan escaping my mouth as he starts pounding into me again, over and over in that exact spot, one hand gripping my hip, the other sliding up to brace my back as my body goes limp with the intensity of the pleasure.

“Nhi Angie,” he breathes, his own climax as close as my own.

Then he kisses me hard once more and I’m shattering, my pleasure driven ever higher by the relentless thrust of his body into mine, until one climax rolls into another, my body breaking apart almost as soon as it’s come back together. My hands are all over him, finding no purchase on his sweat slicked skin, until I sink them into his hair once more and just hold on.

With a few final thrusts, Rardek reaches his own climax, crying out as he spills himself inside me. His hips continue to stutter into mine for a moment as he rides the last waves of his pleasure. Then we are turning, his body guiding mine down as we collapse into the bed.

We lie there together until our breathing slows, our heart rates returning to normal. It takes a while. I’ve never come so hard in my life, and the echoes of that pleasure keep rippling through me for a long time. But eventually the fluttering between my thighs stops, and reality presses back in. I’m disgustingly sweaty. Rardek kicks off some heat, and my body is all pressed up against his. That, combined with our rigorous activities, has me clamouring to get back in the showers.

Rardek comes with me, and I’m hard pressed not to climb up him again as we scrub ourselves, and each other, clean. But duty calls - I know Liv wants him and Maldek heading out to follow Jaskry’s path to the end as soon as possible. We’ve already delayed that too long.

If our mutual shower dampness wasn’t giveaway enough, the blush that fills my cheeks at the first hint of a smirk from one of the other raskarrans does it. There’s a bit of good natured jeering and some back slapping. Somehow, it manages not to be gross.

“Don’t mind them,” Brooks says, handing me a bowl of something that looks like porridge. “It might look like the worst sort of male behaviour, but you’ll soon see that they’re all genuinely delighted for Rardek. For you.”

I go with her to the fire, taking a seat on a log bench. The porridge smells divine, and as I take a mouthful, I realise I haven’t eaten in far too long.

“Still feeling all over the place?” Brooks asks as she refills my bowl. “Or is this appetite from the ah, exercise?”

She shoots me a teasing grin that wouldn’t look out of place on Rardek’s face.

“Skipped a couple of meals yesterday,” I admit.

She gives me a sympathetic look. “With everything else on your mind, food was probably the last thing you were thinking about.”

She introduces me to the other girls, including two who were frozen like me, Petra and Becky. Neither of them appear to be in good shape. Petra is quiet, barely answering yes-no questions. Becky says nothing at all.

“We’re going to start waking the rest of them today,” a redhead called Rachel says. “If you’re feeling up to it, you might be able to help us. You know what they’re going through better than any of us.”

I think of my questions, the answers that might be waiting to be found on Farrow’s hot mess of a computer.

“Empathy has never been my strong suit,” I tell her, ready to make my excuses.

But then I wonder - what’s the point? Does it matter if I don’t understand? Mercenia isn’t coming back here. This is my life now. Making the best of it means bonding with these women. Finding ways to be useful to the tribe.

Do I want answers more than I want to make a start on those things?

No. No, I don’t.

“I’ll do my best,” I say.

It’s a long day. There are sixteen women left to wake and Liv wants to get through at least half of them. Brooks, Rachel and a woman called Grace know how to open the pods, so they do three at a time. While actually waking them doesn’t take all that long, dealing with them afterwards is a delicate process.

The first girl that Brooks wakes just bursts into tears when she looks around and realises she’s not at home in her bed. Brooks tries so many times to get through to her, endlessly patient and kind. The girl just continues to sob hysterically, her eyes red, her skin blotchy.

In the end, I lose patience for it.

“Hey,” I bark, the sharpness of my frustration seeping into my voice. “Cut it out.”

She does, sitting up like a scolded school child. I’d feel bad about it, but at least she’s stopped sobbing.

“What’s your name?” I say, keeping my voice firm, not letting any softness into it, afraid a kind word will just set her off again.

“Bree,” she says with a hiccup. “Bree Colton.”

She’s a pretty thing, even with the blotchiness. Strawberry blonde hair cut to stylishly frame her face. I would be surprised if she was a day over twenty.

“Now Bree, I’m going to tell you a few things,” I say. “And I need you to listen without crying, okay? You think you can do that?”

She nods, blinking the last few tears out of her eyes. Her arms cross in front of her, looking for all the world like a teddy bear or some other comforter is supposed to be clutched inside them.

“Good. That’s good. But just to warn you, some of this isn’t going to be easy to hear.”

Her lip wobbles. “Daddy’s going to kill me, isn’t he?”

And oh, I recognise that look. Saw it in enough of my peers at school. Might have seen it in my own reflection if I hadn’t inherited so much of my mother’s spite.

The father who ruled with an iron fist. My heart breaks for her.

“No,” I say. “That’s one thing I can promise you. Your father is never going to lay a finger on you again.”

It’s an emotional drain, going through everything, especially as I’ve barely come to terms with it myself. Trying to guide a fragile woman to a place of acceptance is fraught and difficult. With Bree, we don’t get anywhere close. I have to just leave her crying with some of the other girls so we can wake the next one.

Summer. A quiet brunette who stares at me and Brooks with distrusting eyes but takes everything we tell her a little too in her stride. I wonder if, like me, she harbours a belief that this must all be a trick, but is smart enough to keep quiet about it.

We’re already deep into the afternoon as we prepare to open the last set of pods. I’m exhausted, and Brooks must be too, because she looks at the next pod in the line and just freezes.

“You okay?” I ask.

She doesn’t move for a long moment, but then shakes herself, shooting me an apologetic look. She tries to follow it with a smile, but she’s gone so pale, it looks creepy rather than reassuring.

“I’m fine, it’s just… It’s Dawes.”

I feel like I’ve heard this name before, but before I can figure out where, Rachel steps up, her expression full of kindness and empathy.

“Don’t worry, Brooks, we’ve got this. Liv only wants eight, right? Why don’t you sit this one out? We’ll wake Dawes, and tomorrow, you can help us with the rest.”

“I can’t, I…”

“Yeah, you can,” I say, taking her by the arm and tugging her towards the exit. “We’ll just be in the office next door, alright? Come fetch us if you need any help.”

I lead Brooks right through into Farrow’s office. When the glass door clicks shut behind us, it dulls most of the noise of the pod room.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Brooks says.

“The very grey colour your face went says otherwise. What’s the story with this Dawes?”

“She was head of one of the science tier teams here.”

My mind spins for a moment, pulling a personnel list out of my memory - one of the many things I found on Farrow’s computer.

“Katherine Dawes? They froze her? Why?”

Brooks shrugs. “Outlived her usefulness, I guess. Just like I did. We were all eager to wake her up at first - demand answers from her. Me included. But we didn’t want her to be the first, in case we messed up the waking process.” She grimaces. “Sorry.”

“What, you think I didn’t figure out that I was your guinea pig?” I say with a snort. “Don’t worry, I won’t hold it against you.”

She manages a sheepish smile. “Anyway, we didn’t wake her up first, and then Liv didn’t want Rachel and Grace learning to wake people up on Dawes, either. Then you said you could probably figure out why Mercenia left.”

“If Dawes was frozen before they left, she might not even know.”

“That thought had occurred to us as well. So we were really glad when you found that memo about the sickness. It meant we didn’t have to rely on her anymore. But we still have to wake her up, and the answers that she can still give me… I find I don’t want to know.”

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what she’s referring to.

“You mean whether she was involved in what happened to you?”

“She wasn’t there,” Brooks says. “It was just Farrow and two of my military tier colleagues. But maybe it was her idea, her suggestion. How am I supposed to live with her, work with her, if she had any part in it?”

I consider it for a moment, even though I’m pretty confident of what I’m about to say. I don’t want Brooks thinking I’m just trying to make her feel better.

“I doubt she was involved. What happened to you - it was fucking awful. Personally, but also scientifically. Science tier are meticulous to a fault. Careful in everything they do. What they did to you wasn’t careful. It wasn’t scientific. You think the master plan was to have raskarrans raping human women to impregnate them? When artificial insemination is so much less risky? It stinks of someone getting impatient, trying to cut corners.”

Farrow, probably. Someone with an eye on the glory and nothing else. Brooks could have died. The raskarran did die. Anyone on science tier would have foreseen those risks and thought them not worth taking.

“She’s still not going to be easy to live with,” I say. “She still oversaw the experiment that led to us both being brought out here to be breeders. But given that we’re both happy with how that turned out, maybe it won’t be so difficult to ignore.”

Brooks’ expression turns almost shy. “You really are happy? It’s not just…”

“Post-coital glow?”

She actually blushes. “Your mate is my mate’s brother, remember? That makes you both my family. I’ve never had a family before. Don’t really know how to be a part of one. But for what it’s worth, it would make me happy, if you were happy. I want you to be happy. Both of you.”

“Well, I never had a family that gave a fuck if I was happy before,” I say, surprised by how rough my voice sounds. Surprised by how much this awkward but earnest overture of friendship, of sisterhood, means to me. “So you’re already an improvement.”

“At least that makes them easier to leave behind, I guess?”

I think of my mother, the proud lines of her face. The bruises she always had on her jaw, around her eyes. I’ve often wondered why she wanted the same fate for me, even though she wasn’t meek and completely downtrodden like the other women in her position. She still had a strength inside her, and she used it against me. Cut me out rather than be proud that I was forging myself a different kind of life.

“I left them behind a long time ago.” I look over at Brooks. “You have a first name? If we’re sisters-in-law, I figure that’s something I should know about you.”

Brooks shrugs. “I didn’t. Chose one for myself a few days ago, but I’m not used to it yet, and I don’t think anyone else is, either. It’s Deborah. I don’t mind being called Brooks, though.”

“Deborah. It suits you.”

A pleased blush creeps into her cheeks, and I decide I’ll do my best to call her by her chosen name from now on.

“Thanks,” she says. Her expression goes gentle. “You sure you’re okay with everything? If there’s anything you need to talk about, any questions you need to ask…”

“I’m good,” I say, and though I say it almost reflexively, I realise it’s true. “Always thought I didn’t want a man in my life. Turns out I just didn’t want a shit one.”

Deborah laughs. “The guys I was used to being around - it was hard to believe a man who wasn’t shit existed.”

“Only had to go to a whole other planet to find one. What do the female raskarrans think about all of this, though? Interlopers coming and snatching up their good men?”

Her expression immediately drops. “Didn’t Liv tell you?”

I’m about to say ‘tell me what’ when something floats up through my memory. A thing Liv said, and I dismissed because I thought it was just part of the fake scenario. But the scenario wasn’t fake and I feel like I should have remembered that little tidbit long before now.

“There are no raskarran women?”

Deborah nods, her expression solemn. “All killed by the sickness. It nearly wiped the raskarrans out. If we hadn’t arrived, it would have done. It just would have taken another sixty years or so.”

“It killed all the women?”

“Awful, isn’t it? Imagine staring down a future where there will never be any children, you’ll just grow older, your family and friends dwindling around you, until eventually, someone is the last survivor. And then that’s it. Your entire people, gone. It’s why a lot of the other tribes have gone bad. Turned from Lina’s path, as the raskarrans would say. Honestly, I don’t know how Maldek and the others in our tribe managed to stay as good as they are, knowing that was the end they would come to.”

It’s bleak, for sure, but that isn’t what my brain is stuck on.

“It really had a one hundred percent mortality rate, just for the women? That’s not… diseases don’t work like that.”

“There are things that human women are more vulnerable to than men. Osteoporosis.”

“Yes, but that’s to do with hormonal changes that women go through. And it’s a physical condition, not viral or bacterial infection, like this sickness must have been.”

“Could hormonal differences still not be responsible? Or other biological differences we have?”

“Maybe if the difference was something like twenty percent. But all of them dead? It…”

It doesn’t make sense. How many times have I said that in the last two days?

Unease burns at the back of my throat.

“Anyway,” Deborah says. “We probably shouldn’t hide down here all day. I’m going to head up to the fire. Help with the cooking. Keeping busy will keep me distracted.”

I know I should go with her, but the disquiet I feel keeps growing and growing. It’s like the itch of this new unanswered question has reignited all the others, all of them now clawing at me, impossible to ignore. I glance at Farrow’s computer. Feel a twitch in my fingers towards the keyboard.

“I’ll join you in a bit, okay?”

I catch a glimpse of disappointment in Deborah’s expression as she leaves the room without me.