Dreams of a Dark Warrior

frenzy took hold. “I have come for you.” Love for her pounded in his chest, matching the fever of his need.
    Her eyes went wide, the irises pure silver. “You’ve remembered me!”
    “From the moment I took your lips.”
    “H-how?” She arched beneath him. “How could you return?”
    He didn’t know; as he drove into her body, it didn’t matter. “Nothing keeps me from you.
Nothing!
” He cupped her face, pulling her up to him. “Tell me that you belong to me.”
    “I belong to you.” Her claws sunk into his back as she gasped and writhed. “Ah, gods, I’ve missed you so much!”
    He felt her sex tightening around his shaft, knew she was about to climax.
I will take her over the edge, will make her scream with abandon.
    “Follow me!” she cried.
    “Wherever you lead.”
Plunging into her madly, he did. …
    Declan woke with his back bowed, his hand on his cock, precisely two quick pumps away from spending.
    “Regin!”
he bellowed when his seed erupted. He fucked his fist, imagining it was her tight little quim as lash after lash of scorching semen struck his torso.He yelled until his voice went hoarse, until the pressure finally ebbed. …
    He was left gasping for breath, sprawled on his bed—with no pain, no anxiety, no strain. Only after-shudders from the most powerful ejaculation he’d ever experienced.
    He’d masturbated to a dream about a detrus and had come so hard, his spend had nearly reached his chin.
    I hadn’t
known
I could come so hard.
    How had he lived without this for so long?
    He groaned, wallowing in a kind of sick satisfaction. The guilt would arise soon enough, but for right now, he lay stunned, his limbs boneless.
    Sick.
    What was happening to him? Just like the Treves she spoke of, Declan felt like he was going mad. And, as in the dream, he’d begun having those stray thoughts, as if someone else was inside him.
    In the end, Treves had been
taken over
by Aidan, the berserker’s memories overriding the knight’s, sublimating them.
    The fuck that will be happenin’ to me.
No, this was an entrancement. Regin was a born killer, an unnatural, deathless female. Damn it, he didn’t feel this way about her.
    Go run, go train. Go
kill
something.
But relaxation made his muscles lethargic, not with sleepiness, just … ease.
    Yet soon enough humiliation begun to burn within him. Here he was, nearly comatose with pleasure after stroking off to one of them.
    Where’s your iron will now, Dekko?
With a bitter curse, he forced himself to rise and wipe off his chest.
Stay away from her. Ignore her. Fight this—
    His private line rang. Webb.
    Just in time to make the humiliation and guilt complete. Declan crossed to his console, answered the call.
    “You sound like hell, son. You losing your voice?”
    There was something in Webb’s tone that immediately set him on edge. Paranoia gripped him yet again. “No, sir.”
Just my mind.
    Webb wasted no time. “I’ve received some disturbing reports about you and the Valkyrie.”
    “No doubt from Fegley.” Though Vincente was privy to Declan’s dealings, he didn’t suspect the man for even a moment.
    “Perhaps it was. The fact remains that I’ve heard disconcerting things.”
    “She delivers information to me,” Declan said. “Information
you
ordered me to get.”
    “Then why haven’t any transcripts been uploaded?”
    Because Declan needed to edit them first—so her pleas for him to kiss her never went on record. “They will be,” he bit out, the harshest tone he’d taken with the man since that first night in the hospital.
    A long pause followed. “Look, son, guarding the monstrous ones is relatively easy. It’s far more difficult to guard the innocent-faced ones, the beautiful ones. The ones that sound like us, dress like us, mimic our species in every way. They call to our sympathy. You’rethere because you have no sympathy. You’re devoid of emotions like that.”
    Declan’s mind flashed back to his training—the intermittent sleep and food deprivation, the combat simulation with live rounds and no pulled strikes. He remembered the butt of a rifle slamming into his temple as his commander yelled,
“You’re more of a monster than the creatures out there. …”
    At seventeen, he’d been shown photos of what detrus did to mortals. Hour after hour of grisly images for days. No sleep. In the end, his bloodshot eyes had rolled back in his head, and he’d collapsed.
    To this day, I punish myself with photos.