Enthralled by Tiffany Roberts
Chapter 13
“How’s this?”Ella asked, holding up the basket she was making.
Ivy looked up from her own basket to look over Ella’s. The wide, green blades of grass were tightly woven, and Ivy could already tell that it would turn out much better than any of her own early attempts. “That looks great!”
Ella lowered the basket into her lap. Her trembling fingers resumed their work, threading another long, thick blade. “When I was a kid, I used to make friendship bracelets during recess in school. I didn’t have much time to make them at home because there were always so many chores to do on the farm when I wasn’t doing homework. But all my classmates loved them and always asked if I could make them some. I loved making them. This reminds me of that.”
Ivy smiled. She had come up with the idea of teaching the other survivors to weave baskets early this morning before Ketahn had left to visit his sister, and he’d helped her gather the grass and lash it together with a silk rope on their way to the pit. Not only had she hoped to occupy her mind and stop herself from thinking about all the horrible things that could happen to Ketahn during his return to Takarahl, but she’d also wanted to give the other humans a way to pass their time more pleasantly.
Idle hands are the devil’s tools, as her mother had been fond of saying.
Ugh, don’t go there, Ivy.
Most of the others had taken to the task eagerly, grateful for something to do. Hearing Ella’s fond reminiscences made Ivy’s heart swell. She was glad she’d been able to bring the woman a little joy despite the circumstances.
Ivy ran her gaze over Ella, and her smile faded. Ella’s condition hadn’t improved. If anything, she looked worse than she had the day before. The woman’s gray pallor and the dark circles under her eyes were more prominent, and Diego was worried—though he’d been careful not show it around Ella. At least Ella had mustered enough energy to slip out of her cryochamber and move about the room today, but even that had taken a lot out of her.
Fortunately, sitting on the floor weaving baskets was something she could manage without overtaxing herself.
Time, Ivy. Ella just needs time to recover.
But time was something they didn’t have.
Ivy glanced at the door as though it would open that very moment to reveal Ketahn. As much as she liked being around other humans, she missed him and longed for his presence, for the loving caress of his hands, for the gentle scrape of his claws over her skin and through her hair. She’d lived so long without physical touch—without intimate, loving, physical touch—but Ketahn gave it to her in abundance, and she loved every bit of it. She’d come to crave it.
He hadn’t relished the idea of leaving Ivy in this place of death among people he didn’t trust, and he’d been particularly agitated after what had happened with Cole yesterday. When Ketahn had brought her here this morning, his eyes had immediately locked on to Cole; his mandibles had spread wide, his fine hairs had bristled, and he’d held himself taller, wider, somehow becoming even more imposing than normal. Thankfully, Ivy had been the only one close enough to hear his displeased growl.
Her eyes wandered, drifting over the cryochambers lined up along the walls. Most of them were covered now; the others had used blankets from the emergency caches to do so. Unfortunately, that was the most respectful—and practical—way to deal with the dead.
It only helped a little in pretending that there weren’t twelve corpses sharing this space with the survivors.
“So you worked on a farm, Ella?” Ahmya asked, bringing Ivy’s attention back to the conversation.
“Yeah, my family’s farm,” Ella replied. “We had some dairy cows, a few pigs, a whole mess of chickens, and two hundred acres of crops.”
Callie chuckled. “I didn’t realize there were still family farms like that. I thought everything was automated nowadays.”
“A lot of places have gone under or been bought out over the years, yeah, but my family’s had that land for a long, long time. My parents didn’t want to give it up, and there was just enough of a local market for fresh produce to keep us going. My brother is set up to inherit it after they…” Ella dropped her gaze, but not before Ivy caught sight of tears gathering in her eyes. “Well, I guess he would have taken over a long time ago, huh?”
“I know it’s hard to come to terms with,” Ivy said gently, “but we’ll always have the memories of what we left behind.”
For better or worse, right? Even if we’d rather forget…
“I had a small apiary and raised a couple goats,” Lacey said, tilting her head as she worked a strand of grass between the other blades. “I ran a small business selling homemade goatmilk soap, bath bombs and salts, and fresh honey. I’d sometimes get calls about beehives in people’s homes or other random places, and I’d drive out to extract them and bring back home.”
“You girls grew up running around in the county, and here I am, born and raised in New York City,” Callie said with a smirk.
“What’d you do, Callie?” Ivy asked.
“I’d just graduated college with my master’s degree in chemistry when I was approached about joining the Homeworld Initiative.”
“Wow,” Ella said. “They approached you?”
“Yeah. I think they were recruiting experts pretty zealously for this trip, and they offered me a chance to expand the width and breadth of human knowledge by joining the mission and working with all the alien compounds on Xolea. They really knew how to get to a young science nerd’s heart, you know?” She lifted her shabbily made basket up and studied it with displeasure. “Not that I’ll be doing much of that now.” She flicked her gaze to Ivy. “What about you?”
Ivy rubbed her arm as a flare of embarrassment rushed through her. Everyone else’s lives sounded so nice compared to her own. “When I was in high school, my plan was to become a teacher. But…well, I made some poor choices and ended up working as a cashier.”
Ahmya nudged Ivy’s arm, offering her a small, encouraging smile. “Life doesn’t always go according to plan.”
Lacey snickered and waved a hand around her. “You got that right.”
“What’d you do, Ahmya?” Ivy asked.
“I was a florist,” Ahmya said, looking down at the basket in her lap. Hers was nearly halfway done and by far the best of anyone’s. “I thought about going to college for botany but…I kind of suck at math.”
Ella chuckled. “Me too.”
Ahmya smiled. “But it’s okay. I got to spend every day working with beautiful flowers.”
Cole dropped down on the floor next to them and drew up his legs, dangling his hands off his knees. “You’re all over here playing with grass and talking about flowers like we’re on some vacation.”
“Is making a basket too hard for Mr. Construction Worker?” Diego asked without looking up from his clumsy attempt at basket weaving. He’d closed his cryochamber and was sitting atop it, legs hanging off the side. “Good thing I never hired you to build me a deck or anything.”
“Tch. Making baskets is a totally different set of skills,” Cole said with a smirk. His mood had been better today—at least since Ketahn had left.
Callie tossed her basket—which had started to come apart—onto the floor in front of her. “And what kinds of skills do you have?”
“Well, I can build a pretty damn good-looking deck for one thing.”
Ivy smiled. “That could come in handy. There’s definitely plenty of wood out there.”
He grinned at her, flashing his straight white teeth. “I’m very good at handling wood.”
“Really, Cole?” Will shook his head. He hadn’t taken part in the basket weaving lesson and had instead watched quietly from his position sitting against the wall. His fingertips were a bit tender after he and a few of the others had gone into the nearby chambers yesterday to scrounge for extra supplies—an electric panel had shorted while he was accessing it, and he’d suffered some minor burns. “I thought those kinds of lines died off like two hundred years ago.”
“And for good reason,” Callie said.
“Oh, come on.” Cole threw his hands up in mock exasperation. “Just trying to have a little fun.”
Diego pinched his finger and thumb together until there was but an inch of space between them. “Little being the key word, right?”
Callie hissed. “Ooo, that’s a burn.”
“Harsh, man. Harsh,” Cole said. “I bring a very valuable and practical skillset to this…team, or whatever we want to call it. Who do you think is going to build us a shelter out there?”
“The spider guy,” said Lacey.
“Vrix,” Ivy corrected with a quiet snicker.
Lacey arched a brow. “What kind of homes do they live in anyway?”
“Well, Ketahn’s people live underground, but he made his nest high up in the trees. It’s safer to be off the ground.”
“Up in the trees? You’re not going to tell us he lives on a web or something, are you?” Cole asked.
“He…kind of does. His nest is built out of branches, vines, and silk, and it’s suspended by a giant web that’s kind of woven into the nearby branches and anchored to the tree trunks.”
Ahmya’s eyes widened. “And you…you live there too? With him?”
Warmth flooded Ivy’s cheeks. They already knew Ketahn was her mate, and Cole had outright asked—no, he’d demanded—if she was fucking Ketahn, so she could only imagine what they thought of her. For an instant, the heat burning under her skin was that old shame she’d felt under the judgmental stares of her parents, but she swiftly shoved that feeling away.
“Yeah. It took a lot of getting used to,” Ivy said, lowering her basket to her lap. “Honestly, I’m still not used to being up so high, but I trust Ketahn with my life.”
“What’s the plan for when we get out of here?” Will asked.
Ivy shook her head. “I don’t know yet.”
“When are we leaving, anyway?” Cole shoved himself to his feet and walked toward their pile of supplies. He snatched up one of the hydration packets. “I don’t want to be the one to complain, but I don’t think I can get through a week of staring at these walls with nothing to do.” Biting open the packet, he tipped his head back and drank.
“Soon,” Ivy said, wishing she could give a better answer. “Ketahn is going to need help carrying everyone and all these supplies out of here, but he also needs help keeping everyone safe, teaching us, and providing fresh food for us. He has to be careful arranging all that.”
“So there’s going to be more of them? More vrix?” asked Diego.
Cole waved a palm at Ivy. “Hold on a sec now. One of those things is big enough to eat all of us for breakfast in one sitting, and now you’re telling me there’ll be more soon? We have everything we need right here. We can figure it out, can’t we? There’s no reason to invite more of them along.”
“We don’t have the knowledge we need about this planet. About its flora and fauna, about the landscape we’re in,” Callie said.
“We don’t have all the tools we’ll need to survive out there. There’s no way we’d even be able to climb out of this crater,” Ivy added.
Cole gestured to the supplies stacked before him. “We have tools.”
Will ran a hand over his short hair. “Survival knives and chem scanners, mostly. A couple fire starters and flare guns. What we have is a start, but it’s not exactly an all-in-one kit for easy jungle living, man. And we don’t know what else is out there.”
Ivy caught her lower lip between her teeth. She’d never been a leader, had never had any knack for the required skills, and she was surrounded by people who, for the most part, were far more qualified to talk about all this than her, the former cashier.
But she could not lose sight of what was necessary. These people needed to be ready to move as soon as possible, and they needed to do it together, as a unit.
“I know it’s a lot, but I’m asking you to trust Ketahn and his friends,” Ivy said. “They want to help us. And in this situation, we need all the help we can get.”
Will sighed. “I agree. There are only eight of us, and if what Ivy said was true, we’ll be flooded out of here before long. Everything we were meant to use to establish the colony on Xolea is gone. All that equipment, all that food, the starter seeds for crops, the meds, the prefab buildings, it’s all gone.”
“And who better to teach us how to adapt to this world than the natives?” asked Lacey.
“So just like that we’re going back to the stone age?” Cole shook his head. “No, there’s gotta be a way to make use of all this tech we’re sitting on. Come on, Will. There’s something you can do, right?”
With a humorless chuckle, Will turned his palms toward the ceiling. “Give me a few weeks and I can probably clear about half the errors out of the computer system. Might even be able to squeeze a few more days’ worth of power out of the backup reactors by shutting down systems that are needlessly draining power. But that doesn’t really do us any good if we need to get out of here.”
“Which we really do.” Callie gestured toward the door. “We all saw the flood line in the corridor. And these rations will only go so far. It’s either get out of here and rough it in the wilds, or get trapped in here and die.”
“It…could be like those survivalist shows,” Ella said with a smile. “But we’ll have guides who can help us.”
Lacey chuckled. “Too bad we won’t have the producers just off camera to take us back to civilization if we want to tap out.”
“It’s hard work and sometimes dangerous, but it’s not all bad.” Ivy set her basket on the floor and unfolded her legs. “And it’ll be easier with all of us working together.”
Cole crossed his arms over his chest. “You mean working with those spider things. Are we all going to have to bend over and get fucked in exchange for their help?”
Ivy glared at him.
“I’m all for it if it’ll calm you the fuck down, man,” Diego said, shooting a glare of his own at Cole. “I don’t even know why it needs to be said, but what she does with her body”—he nodded toward Ivy—“isn’t any of your business. It’s not anyone’s business but hers.”
Something within Ivy softened toward Diego even as her respect for him solidified. It…was not often that anyone stood up for her.
Cole’s lips peeled back. “It’s just disgusting.”
Angry fire sparked within Ivy’s chest, burning her throat. She swallowed it down. They didn’t need this. They didn’t need the bickering, the fighting, the animosity.
Pushing herself to her feet, she faced Cole. “As Diego said, what I do is none of your business, so I would appreciate it if you stopped making unwanted comments. And no, Ketahn isn’t asking anything of you other than for you to do your part. He doesn’t have to do this at all. He has no obligation to any of you. But despite the risk to his own life, he’s helping you because it’s the right thing to do.”
Ivy approached Cole and stopped directly in front of him. “You are more than welcome to do this on your own if that’s what you want. We’re not going to force you to follow us. That is your choice.”
Cole stared down at her for several seconds, his eyes gleaming—but she couldn’t tell if that gleam was due to shame or anger. He looked away abruptly. “I’ll stay with the group,” he muttered. “Humans need to stick together.”
“The vrix are not our enemies, Cole.”
“Nothing wrong with being on my guard.”
Ivy nodded. “I understand that.” She reached out and touched his arm, wanting to show him there were no hard feelings, that she could forgive. “I just hope you’ll come to see them as people instead of monsters.”
There was a faint hiss as the pressurization system released air, and then the door opened with a swoosh. Having been focused on the conversation, several of the others gasped or started. Everyone’s eyes darted toward the now open door, which Ketahn was already stepping through, his hair and hide dripping with water.
His mandibles were spread, and they widened more when his eyes—which held a sharp, heated glint—fell upon Ivy.
Whose hand was still on Cole’s arm.
Oh, for God’s sake.
As happy as she was to see him…
Worst timing ever.
She swiftly withdrew her hand and stepped away from Cole. A smile touched her lips, but it dropped when Ketahn stalked toward her, leg hairs bristling and posture stiff. He commanded so much of her attention that she was only vaguely aware of a couple of the others shrinking back as he passed them.
Ivy’s brows furrowed. “Ketahn, are you—”
Ketahn turned toward Cole and hissed, curling his fingers to brandish his claws. Cole spat a curse and stumbled backward. His feet bumped into the neatly stacked supplies, knocking rations and medkits onto the floor with a jarring clatter.
“Ketahn, stop!” She placed her hand on one of his forearms, pushing it down. “That’s not helping.”
With a snarl, Ketahn spun to face her. Before she could even meet his gaze, he had all his arms around her. He lifted her off her feet, and his lower hands guided her legs around his waist as his claspers hooked around her hips, locking her against him.
Another turn, and he carried her out of the room. If anyone said anything, Ivy didn’t hear—Ketahn was again her whole world.
His stride was fast, almost violent, and his body was thrumming with tension and restless energy, making the air seem charged—like he was a gathering thunderstorm about to burst. Heat pulsed from his skin, and his spicy scent enveloped her. The red light in the corridor was more fitting than ever in that moment.
Red for blood. Red for fury. Red for passion. Red for unbridled, consuming desire.
Ivy clutched him as he exited the Somnium. A light rain was falling, filtered into heavy, erratic droplets through the tangled plant growth overhead. Ketahn snatched up his spear from where he’d leaned it against the ship’s hull and stalked forward. His pace only sped now that they were outside, his long legs devouring the distance as he crossed the damp, debris strewn ground.
She frowned. Something was wrong. Something had happened while he was in Takarahl.
She clung tighter still when he reached the crater wall, shoved the shaft of his spear between his back and his backpack, and began climbing. His limbs worked furiously, dragging them higher and higher, faster than she’d ever seen him go even though he was only using two arms. The thick strands of silk he’d anchored on jutting roots and deep in the dirt aided him, but most of his speed seemed born of desperation. Bits of dirt and pebbles slid free and tumbled down to land in the standing water below. And regardless of his speed, regardless of this frenzy that had overcome him, his body was as solid and stable as ever.
Ivy remained silent. They’d talk once they were out of the pit and work through what was bothering him. Seeing her touching Cole had undoubtedly added to his agitation, but there was definitely more to it. A lot more.
The rain, no longer blocked by the tangled growth, fell upon them freely, slickening Ivy’s skin and wetting her hair. She smoothed her hands up and down his back as he climbed, doing her best to ease him, to comfort him, but his tension only strengthened. His fingers flexed on her ass, prickling her with his claws. Despite everything, the sensation tingled across her skin and sparked Ivy’s desire, pooling heat into her core. He pressed her sex more firmly against his abdomen.
Ketahn climbed up and over the edge, scaling a boulder and coming down on a patch of jungle floor that was blanketed with moss, fern-like plants, and tufts of thin, soft grass. It was there that he stopped, chest heaving, breath ragged.
Ivy lifted her head and drew back to look at him as he tugged his spear free and tossed it aside.
His eyes locked with hers for but a moment before he spun her around and forced her face down onto the mossy ground. She gasped, stunned, and flattened her hands on the ground. The grass tickled her palms.
Ketahn’s rough palms trailed up her thighs and lifted her skirt, baring her ass to the rainfall. She shivered at the sensation. The cloying scents of damp earth, vegetation, and rain filled her senses.
Ivy turned her head, her vision obstructed by strands of wet hair. Ketahn leaned over her, bracing his upper arms to either side of her shoulders and curling his claws into the ground. His pelvis pressed against her ass, radiating maddening heat, and she felt his slit part as his claspers snaked around her hips again.
Her breath quickened, and her sex clenched in response. “Ketahn.”
He touched his forehead to the back of her head and inhaled deeply. When he exhaled, she felt his warm breath on her neck through her hair.
He growled, “Kir telenas kess, kir’ani nyleea.”
I need you, my mate.