Free The Seek by Ros Baxter

nuzzle her neck as she danced. Kyn watched Mirren lean back in to him, imagining how good his height and bulk would feel to neurones that were firing off on Connect and keen to French kiss the world. He was an impressive physical specimen, even with his injury. Shirtless and clad only in the black pants and boots of the Avenger station uniform, his white chest rippled muscle and old injury.
    Kyn did not know him, so he must have been retired over ten years ago. She placed him around forty. Too old for Mirren. As a general rule, the only Avengers over thirty who were still alive were injured ex-Avengers. She thought about Jedro. Or management. Or Magisters. She watched the man grind into Mirren’s back and buttocks, and she noticed again the staccato edge to his movement that made her sure he was not on Connect. He was on something, but not Connect. Too old, and too experienced, and too hardened. And tonight, too jumpy. The last thing anyone needed was a man like that, full of whatever he’d taken, taking a shine to you. Let alone a seventeen-year-old girl who’d just lost her family and then taken a beating on her first day of training.
    Kyn sighed and settled back in a nook in the wall, drawing herself behind a coolie to watch. The ex-Avenger’s hands were running over Mirren’s buttocks as if he was checking the firmness of a Tyverian Moonfruit. They started to knead and squeeze, then his hands slipped around to the front of Mirren again, working their way up the inside of her short dress. Mirren leaned back into him as he did it, savouring the feeling of those big hands on her. Kyn could only imagine how sore the girl’s gluts would be tonight, after the number of times she had fallen on the ice-mat today. Were those hands offering some comfort to the parts of her that were sore and sad?
    As the music changed pace, the man picked her up and held her above the crowd, looking up at her with blazing eyes. He was one of the only people in the place not wearing a mask, and it was easy to see the intent written all over his face. Mirren arched her back in the lift, seeming to enjoy the elevation and the feeling of flying. She held out her arms and circled the room with them. When the ex-Avenger brought her down, he didn’t let her feet touch the floor, but wrapped her legs around his hips and strode off the dance floor with her. Again, the writhing beast parted for him, and Kyn was reminded of some god striding off the floor with his prize.
    Except Mirren was more than that, and Kyn didn’t know quite what to do about it.
    She watched the two disappear to the corridor where the playrooms lay, and it was clear that Mirren wasn’t objecting to the guard’s plan. Her arms were wrapped around his shoulders, her face buried in his neck. Her legs were still locked around his waist.
    Kyn tried to sort through what she was feeling and thinking. Mirren was a young woman who was perfectly old enough to make decisions about what she wanted to do with her body. She’d just volunteered to join the Avengers — the only volunteer other than herself that Kyn had even known. She’d lost her parents, and she was only seventeen, but on the other hand she could fight better than almost any raw recruit Kyn had encountered, and there was a self-possession and calm to this young girl that told Kyn she knew what she wanted and was not at all interested in anyone telling her that she couldn’t have it.
    It was not Kyn’s place to blast into the middle of whatever these two had going on, and she couldn’t even work out why she wanted to. She started trying to unpick it all. He was old, and damaged, sure, but it wasn’t that. They were all damaged, inside or out. It was the danger of this for Mirren — the danger of her being discovered here, given who and what she was. There was no way she could understand how badly that would play out in the messed-up boys’ club that was Avenger HQ, when they discovered she was the new recruit, and a