He’d known that. He’d even injected triple doses of metcer cells, hoping to quell his need, but it was hardly working.
“Sh—she—” The intern’s nose was trembling so much it looked like a female pleasure device on the Taiq'ud’s face.
Ajos growled and reached for the small male, his anger getting the best of him.
If the little weakling didn’t tell him where they’d taken his mate, he was going to—
“Calm down, brother.” Someone touched his arm and the contact only made his rage grow. Ajos turned his head slowly to glare at the offender and Xul removed his hand from his arm. “She is with my Athena and Aker at the laboratory. They are running some tests on her.”
Ajos dropped the Taiq’ud in his grasp and stalked from the med bay. No one stood in his way, but he could feel all their eyes on his back, and he didn’t qrakking care.
He was seeing red.
He’d told them to take care of her.
He’d trusted them to.
Yet, they were moving her about when she was clearly ill.
When his arms found their way around Aker’s throat, the medic better have a good reason why he couldn’t have run the tests in the med bay.
If they made her relapse…
The walk to the laboratory took ages and as he approached the building, Ajos stopped dead in his tracks, his fists clenching and unclenching.
Rage filled him, steam was probably releasing through his pores.
“Oh, hello, Commander.” Iceon’s ears perked when he saw him.
Ajos growled and Iceon’s ears immediately lost their perkiness and fell flat on his head. “Commander?”
Ajos stalked forward and before Iceon could do anything, Ajos felt the male’s throat between his fists.
Power surged into his arms as he lifted Iceon off his feet.
“Commander?” Iceon gripped his arm but did not fight back. Maybe out of respect or maybe because of his rank, because he knew the male could defend himself.
“What. The Qef. Were you doing. In the lab?”
Iceon blinked. “That’s a bit personal,…Commander.”
Ajos growled again. The male obviously didn’t know how close he was to snapping his neck.
He knew Iceon was attracted to Keh-reh-nah. He’d seen the way the male had been looking at her when they went to the sky tower.
“You should be at the sky tower.”
“Yes, but I had…business to take care of here. I would have gone already too if the human females didn’t come in. I found it hard to leave when—”
He didn’t want to hear the rest.
Ajos threw the male and he crashed against the laboratory’s door. The door split in two, falling in on itself as Iceon’s large body skirted across the floor to bump into the long legs of a pale female.
Ajos’ breath came hard from his body as he looked up slowly, his eyes following those legs.
He knew those legs. Remembered them wrapped around him.
Keh-reh-nah stared back at him, her mouth open, her eyes wide.
He was vaguely aware that there were others in the room.
In the blurry background of their surroundings, something the bright color of purple fell from her hand and into one of Aker’s many large receptacles laid out on the table.
“Ajos?” His name came from her lips and for a moment, he was sane again.
Ajos blinked, his throat moving as the world around them slowly came back into focus.
His nefre pulsed and shivered with the agitation of unspent emotions.
He wanted to kill something while, at the same time, he wanted to take her into his arms and be gentle with her.
“What the fuck?” He assumed the other human there, Xul’s mate, Athena, said that.
He wasn’t quite sure. He didn’t really care.
He heard Iceon groan and let out a series of expletives himself.
And then, there was another exclamation.
“Raxu!” Aker pushed past the two females, his nose working like a piston as he leaned down to look at the vial by Keh-reh-nah.
The contents of the vial were bubbling dangerously as they ate up Keh-reh-nah’s flower.
Some guilt flooded into him. She liked that flower, and his lack of control had caused her to drop it.
“Ajos?” she said his name again and his throat moved once more, unable to form words just yet.
“Iceon, are you all right?” The other human asked the Ochair as he rose to his feet.
He could feel the Ochair’s wary gaze on him and knew what the male was probably thinking.
Again, he didn’t care.
He could only think about the one person in his sights right now.
Keh-reh-nah.
She looked okay, as if the past few days hadn’t happened.
For two days, he’d stayed with her as she shivered against him. He’d held her tight, never leaving her alone for more than a few moments.
He doubted she remembered any of that, but that wasn’t the point.
The point was that each moment he’d spent with her had made his decision to leave her side even the more difficult.
“Are you okay?” he finally asked, his eyes on Keh-reh-nah.
He watched her mouth close as her brows furrowed a little. She, too, had a wary look on her face and he hated to see it there.
“I’m fine.” She forced a smile. “Aker gave me something. Some kind of serum. Didn’t you, Aker?”
She glanced at the Taiq’ud but Aker wasn’t paying attention to any of them.
Instead, he rushed across the room, throwing instruments this way and that before he grabbed something, opened a drawer that hissed as cold air was released from it, and retrieved a thin disc with what looked like goo on top of it.
“What’s that?” Keh-reh-nah asked.
“Stay away from it. It is highly contagious. It is a sample of Tasqal tissue.”
“Eww, why the hell do you have that?” Athena heaved, holding her stomach as her face scrunched up at the sight of the disc’s contents.
“I’ve been testing different things on it,” Aker said as he placed the disc on the table and rushed toward the still-bubbling receptacle near Keh-reh-nah. “I’m not a good fighter, so I contribute in the only way I know how: medicine and research.” He paused as he took a sample of the bubbling fluid and
