Marauder Kain: Scifi Alien Invasion Romance (Mating Wars Book 5) (8 page)

It presses into a few more spots, and then it settles in one location just above my forehead. It steadily increases the pressure, until it feels like the worst migraine I’ve ever had– thankfully the shield has blocked out all light.

There’s no fighting. When I try to move, I feel my muscles attempt to flex, but there’s not even enough give for that. I don’t move a single micrometer despite exerting my full strength.

The pressure on my skull reaches a breaking point, and then I feel it turn from a blunt oppression into a sharpness. A tendril. It jams through my skull– a horrendous feeling, surgery with no anesthetic– and I feel it...melting into my brain.

It’s a cold pulsing flaring through my nerves. I know it’s just in my brain, but I can feel it everywhere.

I start to see flashes of light, but it’s nothing that I
see
, it’s just the tendril entering my visual cortex.

It worms its way all through my brain, but I’m still conscious the entire time– one thought from Raius and I’ll die instantly, and I won’t even know it happens. Kara will be left totally alone.

When the lights from within my brain die down, I see Raius again. The teal film is gone, but the lights in the hallway are all too bright. He’s just a blurry purple shape. My eyes soon adapt, and I realize I’m standing up still.

Everything snaps into clear focus, and all the pain melts away. I feel...perfectly normal.

“What the fuck did you do?” I hiss at him.

I raise my hand to grab him, but a teal tendril blasts out of my chest and grabs him for me. I can feel it around his neck, almost as if it were my own hand. I look down and see that I’m covered in the teal armor...the biosuit.

I let go of my anger, and the tendril drops Raius, then pulls and melts back into my body.

“See,” Raius says, coughing. “Adus wants me to teach
you
to use the biosuit.”

“
T
his really is hell
,” I mutter into my gruel.

Felicia frowns at me.

“The food is what sterilizes us, you know?” I say. “As long as we’re eating this, we’re sterile.”

“Did you want to have a kid here?” Felicia says.

“That’s not the point! It’s inhumane!”

“They aren’t human, Kara.”

“And that fucking asshole. Kain. He was supposed to be better than them, but one little setback and he goes full-on berserk monster.”

“One little thing,” Felicia says. “Senka was going to rape you–”

I feel tears fill my eyes, and I shove the tray of gruel away.

“He was protecting you, Kara,” Felicia says. “What happened to your optimism?”

Felicia and I are sitting alone. The men from our mining team ate earlier than us– they put us on staggered shifts– and everyone has already heard that the brutal murderer brother of the High Commander
claimed
me. No one wants to risk so much as looking at me.

“When Senka’s body hit the floor,” I say, “I lost
a lot
of my optimism. Kain acted like it wasn’t even there, like he could just have a regular conversation with a fucking corpse on the ground.”

My legs feel like rubber, and my back is flaring with pain.

“And this fucking gravity,” I hiss. I reach for the dial on my exosuit, but Felicia grabs my wrist.

“Kara,” she whispers. “Come on. We need to get rid of these things. This all has
at least
made you realize the urgency of getting off this hellhole. So you don’t like Kain...whatever. He’s just a tool for us to get off here. You don’t have to marry him.”

I wipe my tears away and look up at my sister. Is that what’s
really
upsetting me? I saw some semblance of a future after this nightmare, and– I realize now– it had Kain. Now, even if we escape, I struggle to see him there...and that emptiness hurts.

“I thought he was better than that,” I mutter, putting my hand on Felicia’s.

“We don’t know yet what things are like here,” Felicia says.

“I think we have a pretty good idea, though,” I say, shaking my head.

“So how would you describe it?” she asks.

“Cold, dark, brutal...merciless.”

Felicia nods. “And so to survive this place– to pretend you belong here– how would you have to act?”

“God,” I say, shoving Felicia off me. “You’re just trying to defend him. Why don’t
you
marry him? You can have a nice big wedding, and when one of the bridesmaid’s boyfriend’s smiles at you, Kain can rip his head off.”

“I think you just need some rest,” Felicia says.

“Yeah,” she says, “so we can fill up three more wagons with big stupid fucking rocks.”

* * *

I
do feel
a bit better after I sleep, though I wake up in the middle of the night from aching pains. All of my muscles have that feeling you get two days after going to the gym on New Year’s Day. But this time, I don’t get to wait a year before I work out again– or even a weekend. There
are no weekends
. Every day is rock hauling day. Every single day until I escape or die.

But I do feel better. About Kain at least. What was he supposed to do? Slap Senka on the wrist? Tattle on him? This is Darkstar, not kindergarten. If he had done anything less than what he did...what was to stop Senka from just coming right back a day– a week– a month later, and doing what he wanted to do to me? With the position Kain was in, was there any other real solution or way to save me?

Is it fair of me to blame Kain for how awful Darkstar is? He’s the one who abandoned it, who turned against it. It would be easy for him to be just as bad as Senka...but he’s not.

There’s a knock at the door, and I jolt upright, which sends my muscles into spasms, and I fall right back down.

“Fuck,” I mutter. “I need to remember the gravity….”

Another knock.

“Come in!” I shout.

As if I have any real choice. Anyone who is outside of the cell can open the door as they please. Knocking is only ever a formality.

The door slides open, and Kain’s muscular frame fills the doorway. He’s covered in a skin-tight teal armor. It’s skin-tight everywhere except for his cock. A way-too-big crotch plate is there instead...or maybe it really does need to be that big.

“You…,” I say, looking him up and down. “You got a biosuit.”

He nods.

“So we can–”

He holds one finger up to his lips, and I stop speaking. He shuts the door behind him, but still stands stiff as he looks down at me.

I slowly sit up this time, and I brace my back against the wall while sitting on the bed.

“Is the exosuit not working?” he asks.

“It is,” I say, “but the miners showed me how to adjust it. I have it set to barely help...so I can get rid of the exosuit sooner.”

Kain nods. “I see. I was hoping to hack into the killswitch for those...but if you can lose them entirely it would be easier. It must hurt.”

He sits down on the bed beside me.

“Did I say you could sit on the bed?” I say.

He goes to stand back up, but I grab his wrist. “No, stay.”

He sits down, but doesn’t loosen up.

“Where does it hurt?” he asks.

“My back, mostly.”

“Moving in higher gravity puts a lot of strain on the core. The back and stomach mostly. Those muscles have to work extra hard to keep everything from toppling. And if the muscles aren’t strong enough, the spinal nerves can get pinched.”

He’s close to me. Right beside me. On my bed.

“I can’t keep relying on the suit,” I say. “We need to be able to act on any escape window...it’s one more variable we have to eliminate.”

“I agree,” Kain says.

“I just hope I can stand up tomorrow. Back to the grind.”

“I can get you out of it,” Kain says.

“Felicia, too?” I ask, eyes widening.

He shakes his head.

“Then I’m working, too,” I say. “Even if I can barely walk.”

“Felicia would understand,” Kain says.

“Maybe, but I need to spend more time with these three miners. I think they could really help us. They’ve been here longer, and Darkstar has made them strong.”

“Fine,” Kain says. “But at least let me do something for your back pain.”

I narrow my eyes at him. “What can you do?”

“Darkstar training requires that we can kill a human with absolutely minimal pressure. We have to know how every muscle and bone fits together, so we can break and tear them apart. Dying to a human in battle would shame debt your entire family–”

“So you’re going to break and tear my back apart?” I ask, laughing.

“No,” Kain says. “They don’t actually teach us this part, but if you know how to break and tear, then you know how to fix, too.”

“So you’re going to make my back feel better...with your hands.”

“If that’s okay,” Kain says.

I nod.

“Lay down,” he says, and I see a fire light up behind those green eyes.

I obey without hesitation, and I lie face down on the bed, propping my chin onto my forearms.

I’m wearing my grey slave jumpsuit, but even through the thick fabric, I feel the warmth pour into me as Kain’s hands press down on my back.

“Mmmm,” I say. “It’s working already.”

“I haven’t applied any pressure,” he says.

And then he does.

His palm drives down just on the edge of my spine, and I feel an intense crack, followed by a flood of warm relief.

My eyes widen, and Kain’s hands work their way down my spine.

Once he’s cracked most of the pain and knots out, he begins to knead along the smaller muscles of my back.

“The fabric is getting in the way,” Kain says. “It keeps bunching up, and I need to press directly on the skin to feel out the muscles–”

“Uh huh,” I say, starting to pull at the shoulders.

He undoes the shoulders and pulls the fabric down to the small of my back. I’m still wearing a bra, and I’m still lying face down on the bed. He can only see my bare back.

Then his hands press onto my skin, and I nearly moan at the first touch. I stifle the sound, not wanting to give him the wrong idea.

He kneads along the muscles of my back with his palms and fingers, and whenever he reaches near the side of my waist, I feel near ecstatic pleasure pulsing across my body. I have to tighten my muscles and bite my lip to stop it from taking me over.

“I don’t understand,” Kain’s voice says from above. “It should be working…but you’re still so tense.”

“It’s working,” I say abruptly, my voice tight and strained.

“My back feels much better now...,” I say.

He pauses, his hands resting gently on my lower back.

“But?” he asks.

“But…,” I say, suddenly wanting him to touch my butt. “But I’m still sore.”

“Where?” he asks.

“My legs,” I say. “They were doing a lot of work too...and now that my back is relieved, I can really feel the tension in my legs.”

He grabs the jumpsuit and tears it off entirely.

I gasp in surprise, but I lay flat in wait. In expectation.

“Where on your legs?” he asks, and I can hear something in his voice. Anticipation.

“Everywhere,” I say. “I worked every muscle to exhaustion.”

“
Every
muscle?” he asks.

“Yes. Every. Single. One. Top...to bottom.”

I feel his hands wrap around my ankles, and he drives his thumbs down along my Achilles heel. I had no idea I was sore there– and maybe I really wasn’t– but damn, it feels good. He squeezes and slowly works his way up my calf, using more and more of his hand to fully service the fuller flesh of my calf.

I can hear him breathing heavier behind me, and my own heart is beating hard– my body feels like it’s on fire.

He works slowly and slowly up my leg, until he’s touching me just behind the knee. When his fingers graze the back of my thigh– the lowest part– I moan audibly.

“You must be really sore here,” he says.

“Very, very sore,” I say.

He squeezes my lower thigh. He’s not really massaging me now as much as running his hands along my body, but I’m having fun keeping up the pretext.

When he gets midway up my thighs, I realize quite suddenly how wet I am, and how close his hands are to my pussy.

I pretend to adjust my hands, and in doing so I part my legs...ever so slightly. Imperceptibly.

I feel his hands pause on my thighs– is he looking between my legs? Can he
see
how wet I am?

He moves further up, grabbing the full meat of my thighs in his hard, warm hands.

“All of your legs?” he asks, his voice a reverent whisper.

“All of them,” I say, even quieter than him.

His hands slide up onto my ass cheeks, and my legs spread even wider apart, and I tense my whole body in eager anticipation.

He squeezes my thick ass, and I hear him letting out a blissful growl from behind me.

As he massages my ass, I start to push higher up, working my hips up into the air.

“You’re wet…,” he says huskily.

“Yeah,” I say. “Are you going to claim me? For real? Or is that just something you–”

His fingers press against my soaked panties, and I scream out from the intense pleasure. What was burning longing is now being satisfied...at least partially. He’ll need to go further than touching me outside my panties to truly–

He finds my clit through the wet fabric, and I gasp. He runs his fingers along it in circles, and I shift myself up onto my knees, sticking my ass up even higher in the air.

He grabs my panties and pulls, sending my legs back down flat.

I feel the cool air on my wet pussy, and then Kain flips me over.

He looks down at me with serious eyes, and his lips part slightly as he drinks my body in while gazing hungrily at me up and down.

“Nothing I say is just words,” Kain says. “I claimed you.”

“But I haven’t agreed yet.”

He reaches down between my legs again and pushes his palm against my wet mound and swollen clit. I moan and throw my head back, a slave to the sensation.

“This sounds to me like agreement,” Kain says. “Or would you like me to stop?”

“No,” I whine. “Please don’t.”

“Don’t touch you?” he asks, pulling his hand away.

“Don’t stop,” I say.

He grabs my ass again and squeezes, and I sigh in relief that he’s touching me again. As long as he’s touching me, then everything is okay.

He leans forward, the sharp planes of his face moving toward me. I grab hold of him, my hands touching the hard armor on his back. He presses his lips against mine, and I open my mouth widely for him, waiting for his tongue to enter me.

I feel it slide in, and I press back against it, meeting his warm wetness with my own. I close my eyes, and for that moment I am not a slave on Darkstar. I won’t have to break and haul rocks tomorrow under crushing gravity. I am just a woman kissing a beautiful, gorgeous man...and nothing exists outside of that.

He massages my tongue with his, and he reaches up and tears my bra off with one hand as we continue kissing. He cups my breast and squeezes. I moan and lean back, falling out of his dizzying kiss.