Chapter 343: The Tyrant’s Hands
The ten-centimeter-thick military alloy blast-proof door gave a metal-grind of overload. The giant rivets at both ends of the hinge burst one after another under the gravity tear. Flung metal fragments ricocheted off the lead-lined walls on both sides, denting them with large pits. The heavy steel plate tore loose and slammed onto the isolation cabin’s floor tiles.
The huge physical impact kicked up a roomful of dust, denting the pressure tiles with deep turtle-crack patterns, stone and slag flying in all directions. Before the door fully collapsed, the ancient Mother-Goddess’s muscle memory reacted ahead of thought. Bearing the womb-shredding plummet in her lower belly, she lifted her tactical boot and toed the vomit bag full of stomach acid and bile into the waste-disposal trough in the far corner, then knocked the metal lid shut with her heel.
Her barely-moving right hand grabbed the high-concentration nutrient injection from the table. With no strength to unscrew the cap, she bit the glass seal open with her teeth. Chloe tilted her sweat-covered face up and poured the thick liquid, carrying a strong fishy-sweet smell, down her parched, hoarse throat. The potent drug burned all the way down the esophagus, lighting a barbed fire in her stomach.
Only through this extreme chemical stimulation did she barely force down the terrible spasm in her womb that wanted to suck her spinal marrow dry. Victor stepped over the thoroughly wrecked alloy door and strode into the cabin. His heavy tactical boots crushed the glass shards on the floor. The man’s huge, broad frame blocked the pallid emergency light from the corridor entirely.
This beast that had just torn itself from the critical-repair pod wore only a wide black silk robe. The belt hung loose, revealing the broad chest beneath, wrapped in high-pressure medical bandage. The unhealed perforating wound could not bear such violent movement. Pale-red blood water kept seeping from his left chest’s heart-vein position, blooming large red stains on the sterile gauze.
His eyes, flooded with pure-black gravity micro-particles, churned with un-faded berserk killing-intent and panic. The nest-guarding instinct, fully triggered in the top predator, pressed down hard on Chloe’s bloodless cheek. The thick, dominant, even slightly blood-scented pine-cold scent-information brutally filled the narrow space. His territory scent wrapped her whole, airtight.
The pureblood Tyrant’s rough large hand, callused from gunplay and carrying alarming heat, shot out and locked firmly onto Chloe’s fragile neck. His thumb-pad pressed directly on the spot where her carotid pulsed, with force enough to snap that section of neck bone on the spot. In utter loss of control he used the most primitive, barbaric way to forcibly probe the faint life-signs in his mate’s body that could cut off at any moment.
Chloe was forced to tilt her head up, meeting the man’s bloodshot black eyes. Mild oxygen-deprivation from the compressed windpipe quickly paled her cracked lips, but she did not struggle free. Through the skin she could clearly feel the high-frequency tremor in Victor’s fingertips. This was the stress response of a top Alpha’s nervous system in complete dysfunction when facing the threat of losing his fated mate.
A series of chaotic, sharp stings came through the mate tether. This madman, who could not even keep his own heart-vein, was pouring remnant life-force into the tether at any cost, trying by self-destruction to drag her back from death’s edge.
“What the fuck are you doing.”
Victor’s hoarse voice carried a feral oppressive weight. Chloe swallowed the thick iron-rust rising in her throat. The ancient Mother-Goddess’s reason ran at high speed in her mind, dismantling every subtle response step to the extreme. She knew all too well how paranoid this man’s review logic was right now. Any struggle that covered the truth would step on that nerve of his about to snap.
The ancient Mother-Goddess did not pry open the iron wrist locked on her throat. Chloe dropped her tense guard posture and let her weak husk lean forward. Her cold, bloodless cheek actively pressed into the man’s burning, rough palm.
“Hurts.”
The dry, broken single syllable left her mouth, carrying unhidden exhaustion and faintness. That weak word instantly dismantled all the pureblood Tyrant’s berserk defenses. Victor’s five fingers on her neck-jaw ripped their force away, panic leaking from those bloodshot black eyes. Chloe lowered her lids, hiding the clear calculation in her dark-gold vertical pupils.
She turned slightly, exposing bit by bit to the man’s view the left arm bound at her waist, its array patterns completely peeled.
“Divinity array patterns overdrafted. The marrow is biting back.”
She let her breathing go very light. Every word struck squarely on Victor’s deepest soft spot and guilt. The brutal campaign of hard-resisting high-dimensional rays and igniting the ancient array patterns in North America was the price she paid to pull her mate back from death’s line. Right now she perfectly packaged the organ-failure phenomenon caused by the fetus’s forced life-plunder as an after-effect of array-pattern backlash.
The half-true, half-false intel, along the undefended channel in the mate tether, slammed straight into Victor’s already-chaotic mental landscape. The weakness built on objective fact completely sealed off the Tyrant’s ability to link the truth toward the fetus’s mutation. Victor’s broad chest heaved. He looked down at the ghastly wound on Chloe’s left arm, laid bare to the bone and showing gray-white dead skin.
The pure-black gravity micro-particles roaming the cabin and trying to pierce her defenses all retreated into the man’s bones at this moment. Berserk review-logic was replaced by surging heartache. He wished he could transfer all that array-backlash pain onto his own riddled carcass.
“Shut up.”
Victor brutally cut off what she had not finished, his voice carrying the heavy breathing of a wounded beast. The man’s broad, powerful arms avoided her left-arm wound and caught her lower back and the bend of her knees. Chloe was lifted steadily, cradled against him. She buried her face in the collar of his ointment-scented robe.
In the angle the man could not see, Chloe released the right hand she had been pinching hard against her inner thigh to stop the pain. The nails had left deep dents in the bulletproof cloth, and only after being lifted off the floor did she barely recover her normal breathing rhythm. Victor carried her out, turning from the wrecked isolation cabin.
His tactical boots ground the glass shards on the floor into sharp screeches. The armed guards and ship medics hurrying in from both sides of the corridor immediately lowered their heads, not daring to breathe loudly.
“Cut all outbound comms channels on this ship.”
Victor’s cold, hard order echoed in the empty metal passage, carrying the lord’s pressure.
“The whole ship enters first-level silence. The Queen needs absolute rest.
Anyone who dares bring a battle report to this door, I will personally snap his neck.” The executor Leon, dragging his freshly replaced temporary mechanical leg, stood in the nearby shadows and bowed his head deep to receive the order. The pureblood Tyrant carved out, by the most domineering means, an absolutely safe sterile territory for his mate amid the storm.
The cruise ship split giant waves on the raging Atlantic. The thick bulletproof portholds shut out the storm’s violence entirely. In the master bedroom cabin a dim night-light glowed, and the high-spec air-filtration system hummed low and even. By three in the morning Victor had fallen into a rare deep sleep, his new heart’s overload forcing it.
Even asleep, one thick arm lay domineering across Chloe’s waist, locking her before his burning chest, his nerve-ends on guard even in dreams against her scent slipping away. Chloe opened her dark-gold vertical pupils in the dark, her eyes clear with not a trace of sleep. She waited patiently until Victor’s heavy breathing was steady and regular before she began to move slowly.
Her uninjured right hand lifted the arm he had laid across her waist inch by inch, the motion so light it caused not a single deformation in the high-grade mattress. Leaving that burning embrace, the cold air rushing in made Chloe’s thin back break out in cold sweat. She rolled out of bed and stepped barefoot onto the cold soft wool carpet, not even throwing on a coat.
The plummeting pain in her womb grew worse. The fetus carrying the pureblood Tyrant’s aura had become an unfillable black hole, its greedy conduit sunk straight into her spinal depths, sucking the remaining blood-making cells without restraint. Chloe clamped her back molars, bearing the black spots at her vision’s edge from low blood sugar and blood loss.
By the corridor’s dim emergency light, relying on her memory of the mothership’s structure, she avoided the patrolling near-guard all the way. The cool-toned medical-room door was pushed open. She locked it behind her, sealing herself in the space thick with the sting of disinfectant. The fully-automatic centrifuge on the console was on standby, its indicator blinking cold blue.
Chloe pulled a brand-new blood-collection tube from the sterile cabinet. Severe dehydration and overdraft had shrunk the veins on her hand backs. She used no tourniquet. The sharp needle pierced her right-hand skin, and she twisted the tip a few inches under the flesh before barely piercing the vessel wall. Her extremely low blood pressure made the dark-red blood crawl slowly up the transparent tube wall.
The dark-gold sheen mixed in the blood looked abnormally dim and thin compared to her prime. After pulling the needle she pressed the puncture with a cotton swab and slid the collection tube into the centrifuge’s slot. The metal lid closed. The instrument gave a high-frequency mechanical whir. Chloe braced one hand on the cold metal tabletop.
Her bloodless face reflected in the stainless-steel glass panel, showing the withered look of a final life-force burning down. The progress bar crept forward on the screen. The ancient Mother-Goddess’s instinct had given its ominous answer back on the North American wilds, but she needed the most precise physical data to back the guess.
The embryo’s gene sequence fused the ancient Wolf God mother-body and the pureblood Tyrant’s origin, plus potential high-dimensional mutation elements. If she did not pin down its energy-drain limit, she could not last until the day she got the key and resolved the Great Lakes Star Gate. The indicator shifted blue to green. The centrifuge’s brake gave a crisp sound.
A detailed blood-spectrum analysis report unfolded on the holographic projection screen. Chloe lifted her bloodshot eyes, her dark-gold gaze crossing the long, complex routine data to land on the core assessment line at the very bottom. The cold-blue holographic light struck her bloodless face. When she made out the scarlet number at the screen’s very bottom, representing the fetus’s energy-drain threshold, a real chill reflected in the Costa Queen’s eye-depths, and her faint breath stalled entirely in her throat.
--- Shit, Victor said, almost tender, and pressed his palm flat over the wound as if he could will the goddamn world to hold.
