The big shifter’s lips twitched. “I assume that refers to balls. Mashing takes them out for weeks. Better just to fuckin’ remove them. Castration heals faster.”
I made a mental note not to trade disciplinary lore with Slade.
“You can get even by stealing his bunk,” Slade noted. “Around here, you fight for prime space. He’s just moved up to semi-private. Think he can move back down.”
We passed rooms filled with double-tiered bunks and paused at one with only six inside it. By the gear scattered over the mattresses, they were all taken.
Slade grabbed a pack off one. “That’s yours.”
I glanced around. It was a bottom bed in the middle of the room. Instead of tossing my pack on it, I strode to the upper bunk in the far corner.
Slade leaned on the doorframe as I tossed the gear off it, and onto the mid-tier empty one.
“Cricker’s good with a knife,” he noted.
“So am I.” I hung my cloak on the bedpost and pulled myself onto the cot.
Slade barked a laugh and waved at me. “Your funeral.”
“Nope,” I said. “His.”
I was wet, exhausted, horny as hell, and had an annoying bird fixing me with a stare that accused me of being an idiot.
Okay, maybe the last was my overactive imagination.
“Showers are down the hall.” Slade smirked. “Do what you fuckin’ have to—just be ready to roll by morning.”
I gritted my teeth and nodded to him. He turned and left.
It was all I could do not to jack off immediately. I’d never been in so much discomfort. But my grandmother’s teaching was deeply ingrained—control wasn’t just something you trotted out when convenient. It was a lifestyle choice.
As Nemi flitted around the room, I ran my fingers through my hair. My eyes caught on a dark spot on my sleeve.
My grandmother’s blood.
As a lust killer, it didn’t do half bad because it cleared my head, enabling me to heft my pack and cart it down the hall to the showers.
I envisioned separate stalls in a brightly lit space, but of course, the reality was a row of nozzles along a stone wall. At this time of night, however, they were unoccupied. Fortunately.
The moment I stripped, and that hot spray hit my boner, I lost it. Exhaustion and the events of the last twenty-four combined with that damned juice’s ability to produce an animal driven entirely by need. My fingers worked with a desperation I’d not experienced before.
But it wasn’t blind lust. The woman I’d seen on the street rolled into my mind with a seductive sway of those hips, and the glimpse of her luminous eyes from within her hood ignited my imagination—and something else that I wasn’t willing to acknowledge. Instead, I envisioned those lips wrapped around me. Lightning shot from my spine to mycojones, and I came apart within seconds.
And then, again.
The third time, I tried, with desperation, to rein it all in. And failed.
The fourth, I almost had it.
The fifth left me leaning against the stone, shaking with exhaustion. Nemi chirped from her perch on the faucet. I avoided her stare, turned off the water, and staggered back to the cot.
I got my rocks off for a sixth time, and I was now lying on the damp blanket, staring at the ceiling and gasping for breath.
Chico Tezwas stillerecto. That was some juice.
I rolled beneath the blanket. With a sense of futility, I went at it for a seventh time. On the fading waves of that, I arranged myself with my back to the stone wall, and no fewer than three knives close at hand.
A tiny sentinel settled herself on the bedpost near my head. The moonlight coming through the single window caught the gleam of her alert eye.
