Fragile Bond (22 page)

Marc’s fingers found the glands on his neck, petting with ruthless precision. Hamm felt his body going limp in response and looped his arms around Marc.

“What are you planning to do?” He blurted the question with all the finesse of an adolescent making a first overture at dominance. He’d been biting it back for too long, though, and the mining teams had almost finished gorging on white carbon. The furrs had spent a few weeks showing their new human trade partners how to extract what they wanted without raping Soma. After that, it had gone too swiftly for Hamm’s tastes.

The fingertips stroking his skin stuttered to stillness, but only for a moment.

“What do you mean?” Marc was playing dumb. This close, he could smell it on him. A mix of reluctance and dread, maybe even a tinge of fear that had nothing at all to do with the way Marc traced Hamm’s unsheathed claws with his free hand.

He tightened his arm around Marc’s waist, resting his hand on the man’s flank. Muscle tensed and shifted beneath his touch, and Hamm realized he’d started purring again involuntarily.

Soma help him, he couldn’t think straight long enough to even have a conversation.

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.” Each syllable a softly spoken murmur, Marc’s face buried in his mane, breath tickling at Hamm’s ear.

He twitched it, which only encouraged Marc to huff another exhale on his ear.

“I’ve been discussing my options with them since they officially slapped me with diplomatic duties.”

“What options?”

Marc tensed as though to laugh, but he smelled of pain and all that came out was a sigh. He shifted his head and rubbed his face in Hamm’s hair, burying his nose deep, chest expanding on a long, slow inhale. “Staying . . . and staying.”

“You have a level head and a sharp tongue when it’s needed. We could use you.”

“We?”

Hamm growled and slid his palm down the length of Marc’s thigh, then back up, half-sheathed claws skittering and snagging at the cloth of his trousers. He tried to remember how humans behaved and communicated, but civility was a strain despite how familiar he’d grown with the smell and feel of Marc.

Marc’s hand in his mane tightened, tugged a fistful of hair. Rough, demanding, and Hamm lifted his head from the man’s shoulder to meet his gaze. Fierce, intense. But he didn’t smell anger.

“I said I would stay.”

“I remember.” Every word. Marc’s lips and nose tracing his face. He hadn’t forgotten.

Marc’s features softened, eyelids sliding down a fraction. He leaned in until his lips brushed against Hamm’s with each syllable. “I’ve no intention of breaking my word.”

Hamm chuffed and tightened his grip on Marc’s waist.

“Unless you decide you want to explore space or something?”

Just the thought made him ill. Bile burned the back of his throat. He roared, his body tensing against Marc as he forced the sound out. It expressed his dread at the very prospect, the ache that crippled him at the possibility that his mate might leave him. He didn’t doubt Marc’s word, but reassurance . . . he found he needed it more and more.

“Okay, okay.” Marc twisted to face him and grabbed him by the ears. He pulled his head down until Hamm rested his forehead against Marc’s chest. “I won’t mention that anymore.” His small human hands stroked down over his head and neck, following the trail of his mane as it tapered down his spine, again and again. Hamm closed his eyes and relaxed in small increments, kneading gently at Marc’s hips. His purr began as an uncertain stutter, but Marc continued petting him.

Continued, until Hamm went limp and boneless, resting his head in Marc’s lap. His purr had become a rolling wave of sound, the ebb and flow in cadence with his breathing. He rubbed his head against Marc’s thighs and tightened his arms around the man’s waist. He could relax here with him in a way he couldn’t anywhere else.

Nobody came here as often as they did.

This corner of the valley had taken on an ambiance of peace and silence all its own. There were moments when it felt as though the saturation of reverence and remembrance surrounding the memorial had somehow transformed it.

Marc tangled his hands through the hair around Hamm’s ears. A deliberate tactic; he knew the effect it would have. The man often teased him about there being a string between his ears and his groin.

“What are you doing?” He murmured the question with his lips pressed against the inside of Marc’s thigh. That unique blend of ’nip and musk beneath the thin cloth of his trousers teased at Hamm’s senses. He pulled Marc’s hand from his ear and laved his tongue over the inside of the man’s wrist where his skin was thin and warm with scent.

“I like it when you purr. It means you’re happy, and it eases something in me.” Marc kept his voice low and even. It was as close to a purr as he ever managed. It did things to Hamm, knowing that Marc tried to communicate with him in ways he’d understand, on levels that didn’t use words.

“Eases?” Hamm lifted his head enough to run the bridge of his nose along Marc’s thigh. His mouth bumped against the man’s cock, hot and heavy under the thin cloth. Resisting the urge to lave the length of him through his clothes took effort and Marc’s intervention; the man twisted his wrist in Hamm’s grip, drawing his attention back to that bared flesh. Hamm surrendered to it, pulling the taste and scent of him from his skin with another pass of his tongue.

“Yes, eases.” Marc sounded as though he were strangling on something, and cleared his throat. “Like when you sing.”

Hamm ran his tongue up the inside of Marc’s arm to the crook of his elbow, rubbing his nose, then his face, against the warm, sensitive skin. “You want me to sing to their trees again?”

“Before we leave. Not yet.” Marc massaged the cartilage of Hamm’s ear between his fingertips. Long strokes of pressure from skull to tip that tugged at his skin, and he relaxed back into the man’s lap with a sigh. The breeze wove its fingers through his mane, and Hamm closed his eyes again and purred.

The sensation of peace and tranquility they found here together, thick as a winter monsoon soaking his pelt, eased them both. Hamm might have to drag Marc here most of the time, but once he managed to actually get him here, the moment caught and held them.

He blinked his eyes open and shifted his head beneath Marc’s hands. The names were slotted together, human and furr, in the order they’d fallen on that last day of bloodshed. The day his world had tilted on its axis forever, the sun rising on a different horizon.

He had no regrets. He would change nothing. There were times, many of them, when the differences between them felt insurmountable. But coming back here and remembering together never failed to strip away all the inconsequential, the trivial.

Hamm didn’t know what they did with their dead, on a spaceship that had no soil to hold them. He tried not to think about it too hard.

The young trees were healthy, thick trunks and dense canopies jutting toward the sky. If four of them were more reddish, more robust, than any other tree in the valley, nobody said anything of it.

They did rather look tinged with blood, as though smeared with a fresh kill.

He often wondered if it had something to do with the alien minerals feeding them from Soma’s embrace. Marc’s wounds were still tender. He’d fought like a wild thing to have his squad kept here. With him.

Helping the man tend his own wounds had been a way for Hamm to do the same for himself as well, without feeling self-conscious about it. Without seeing himself as weak somehow for needing to mourn those furrs etched forever in the stone.

Marc made a sound like a growl, and Hamm realized he’d stopped purring. “Come on. Sing to them, then.” His tone conveyed the tension thrumming through his lean frame, and Hamm felt it ache in his chest like a wound.

Hamm rolled to his feet and stood, easing Marc up from the ground with him by the wrist. He led him around the back of the stone monolith, into the lengthening shadow it cast. Pulled Marc back against his chest, looping his arm around the man’s body to lock him in place. The growl was already building inside him as he dropped to a crouch and anchored his back against the cold stone. It vibrated through him, his limbs trembling. Marc tucked his head back under Hamm’s jaw, pushing into his throat.

A gasp escaped the man when Hamm let loose and roared. It was a deep, low-register sound, heavy with emotion. It rolled through the young trees like an almost visible thing, then echoed back off the ridgeline. Hamm breathed deep and roared again, his arm tightening around Marc. Letting the human feel the sound, the tension in his body as he forced it out with every fiber of his being.

Sharing an expression of emotion the human wasn’t capable of.

Not that Marc didn’t try.

Hamm kept roaring, leaving only a heartbeat of silence between the end of one and the beginning of the next. Marc’s voice would never be as deep or resonant, but he lent his emotion to it well enough. His body coiled with tension and he yelled as though expelling pain and grief from his chest, not just air.

The sound crawled over Hamm like thorns scraping flesh. His roar dropped deeper, all pain and rage and grief, honor and love. For the furrs he’d lost. For the humans he’d felled. And for the one he didn’t.

Hamm curled a hand around Marc’s throat, as much a touch of support and encouragement as to feel the thrum of blood, life and energy surging through him. The skin of his jaw was cool and wet with moisture, the hard jut of bone beneath thin flesh. Throat sliding against his callused palm, pulse a rapid thrum that finally, finally slowed. Heartbeat calming as Marc’s voice became softer.

They fell silent and still between one heartbeat and the next, as though through unspoken mutual consent. And they sat there, Marc’s fingers clenched on Hamm’s thigh, blunt nails gouging crescents of blood into his flesh. The air vibrated among the trees, rustling the branches and swaying blood-smeared leaves against the darkening sky, tangling through Hamm’s mane like a live thing born of their raw emotions.

It was possible. Anything was possible. He’d discovered that the day he flushed from stone a human who smelled of ’nip.

Marc twisted his head around to tuck his face against Hamm’s neck, and Hamm purred in comfort, tightening his grip on the man.

He didn’t know if Marc needed words just then. It was hard to know when words were needed, and which ones. So he just purred, and stroked his hand against the curve of his mate’s neck, and tried not to think of scraping his fangs along that beautiful arch of skin, of chasing the faint scratches he left with his tongue to ease the sting. Tried not to remember the way Marc would writhe and groan when he did it.

Tried, and failed.

“We should go.” The words came out more rumbled than spoken, his voice still a thick, harsh rasp from roaring. He’d kept it up much longer than he usually did when they came out here together. Probably because this was the first time Marc had joined him like that.

Marc remained limp against his chest, unmoving, no tension left. Only the rise and fall of his chest pushing at Hamm’s arm, and the faint pulse beating a tattoo against his palm, gave indication of life.

“Marc?” He slid his hand up over the man’s face, felt the wetness of tears, and understood. “Okay. We’ll stay until you’re ready.”

“No. Take me home. Please.”

Hamm growled his assent. “Home, then.”

He slid his arm under Marc’s legs and stood, lifting his mate with ease.

I’d like to extend a ton of gratitude to Amara’s beta talent and artistic shinyporn inspirations. The ever-professional staff at Riptide have my thanks for seeing this one through to its maturation. Also, a big H/T to all the #soldierporn followers.