They’d been told the shower never ran dry, but they tested it, and when they found their way back to his bunk, they reveled in their scoured cleansing.
“This is as close to innocence as I get,” he told her.
She kissed her way down his body, lingering a moment on the ragged edges of his unfinished tattoo. In the bath, he’d shown her what a love slave might do, if she’d been inclined to have one. Now she completed her path and took his thickening flesh in her mouth just as he’d suckled her little nub, softly at first, teasing like a meteor skipping across the atmosphere, then plunging in and setting his world aflame.
He gripped her hair, the short white spikes sticking up between his fingers, and let his head fall back. She reached up to pinch his nipples and he bucked his hips against her taut tongue.
When he was one laving stroke from finishing, he flipped her to her back and plunged between her thighs.
She was ready, so ready, her body slick from their earlier joining, a hot link that would burn between them forever, he knew.
She cried out his name as she came and the sound of her gasping sent him over his own edge. They fell together, entangled.
As their bodies cooled, he pulled the sheet around her.
But her breath didn’t slow and he knew her eyes were still open; he could catch a little gleam of gold when he glanced down.
He tightened his grip on her. “What is it?”
“Sometimes I’m afraid this will all be taken from me, that I’ll be made to forget again. And I’ll be alone.”
“Never. The Asphodel is your place now. Between you and the tuner, you’ll have the shipkiller’s archives decoded, and we’ll figure out who Moirai is. This is the closest the captain and Benedetta have ever been to answers. Because of you.”
“And you,” she said. “The underwriters can’t come for you after what the captain threatened to reveal about them.” She shook her head. “Do you really think they destroyed Hermitaj?”
“They never admitted anything, but it fits. Hermitaj had become very powerful, with a technology—you and the other commandoes—that could’ve fallen into the wrong hands. Just like the twins. I could almost consider them allies, since they incidentally set you free, but they never even tried to decommission you, just cut you off.” He set his jaw. “I’ll never forgive them for that.”
She touched his cheek. “As I’ll never forgive them for using what happened to your family against you.” She trailed her fingers to the side of his neck, resting against his pulse. “I wonder if I’ll ever remember my family, at least enough to find them.”
“The memories are still coming back, yes?”
“Slowly,” she said. “Maybe someday I’ll know who I was.”
“We have time. All the time in the worlds.” And his next kiss took her to the stars.