Jinx jerked back from the nightmare vision, clutched the bench beneath her—denied the visceral urge to run. No. She was not going to lose it. She wasn't her father. No mental demons—literal or metaphorical—were going to sink their claws into her, drag her over the goddamn edge. She was just having a bad night. Nothing new for her. Nothing she hadn't survived before.

Reaching along the kitchen counter she perched on, she snagged Kaplan's beer off him. Insanity wasn't in her immediate future; alcohol was. A brain-killing, shuttle load of—

Kaplan hooked the beer out of her hand before she could take her first sip toward oblivion. Pointedly holding her stare, he leaned across her to dump the remains of the drink into the recyce. "Give up the death wish on my watch, Jinx."

"Kaplan, my brain's already fragged. To hell with any possible drug interac—"

He moved—planted his fists either side of her, sending her pulse scrambling. "You haven't stepped over the edge yet." He set his gaze level with hers, any prior cool detachment now hot vapour. "Your brain activity is, for the most part, hyperactive but steady. Even when you have these 'glitches', you know what is and isn't real. So, stow the self-pity and keep your head in the game."

"Kaplan—" She flinched as he brushed the hair from her face, the unexpected gesture done with hard eyes. Her stomach dipped then locked. Had the moron not heard a thing she'd said? Had he not seen her head spin in a full circle right in front of him not five minutes ago?

She batted his hand away—only to have him capture her wrist.

He caught her edgy glare next. "Watching you self-destruct isn't an option, Jinx."

"Then shove me out an airlock as promised. In the long run, you'd be doing us both a favour." A clean end, with no one dragged to hell with her. The best future she could hope for.

Kaplan tightened his grip as she tried to pull away. "I'm not looking for any favours. You're not the only one who wasn't made for a long and easy life, Jinx. A lot of people on this ship weren't."

She opened her mouth to argue, but the reality of his situation hit, slapping back the words. Everything she'd just learned replayed. His kind, the Rha Si, had been created to combat the Xykeree, to go to war, and signs were it was coming.

She clenched her hand in his hold, abruptly understanding. "You're personally going after the roaches who took your friend, aren't you?" And he didn't expect a happy ending—for him or his friend. "When?"

"As soon as we have a lead."

Days, weeks, maybe even only hours. Her breath faltered. By the time Kaplan returned—if he returned—she'd be lost to insanity or meds. Even now, as she held his stare, more mental phantoms rose with the buzz he put in her skull.

But they weren't the terror, rage, or blazing agony of her last glitch. They weren't unnerving visions of med equipment and demons. They were something quieter, bleaker.

For a moment, it felt like only a thin wall held insanity back, a sea of whispers.

She wrenched her arm free and gripped the bench under her. The acute need to ditch and run rose again with that unnatural sense of panic. She blocked it out. The impulse, the sense she could escape what was coming for her, was as irrational as the nightmare urge to dive into hell and burn. Both compulsions came from the screaming void.

"Jinx?" A light touch on her arm.

She flicked her lashes up to glower. "I'd tell you to back off and save your concern for someone who could give a shit, but newsflash, I don't have the time to waste."

And nor did he if he was about to face off against a horde of roaches.

Her heart jolted a beat. What was coming... What they each had to do... Things were going to suck from here on in.

And trying to sidestep the coming train wreck was pointless.

"Screw it." She fisted a hand in Kaplan's shirt and yanked his mouth to hers. She couldn't mess things up more than they already were.

Kaplan responded to the kiss—but only for the barest instant. His lips turned unyielding—unamused—against hers. He wrapped a restraining hand around the fingers she'd clenched in his shirt, making her curse him, then herself. Homicidal aliens. Lost friends. Brain damage. Kaplan wasn't the type to forget any of that for a second.

Before he could pull away, re-establish the appropriate level of order and decorum, she bit his lower lip and shoved him back.

Or tried to.

Her pulse skipped as her palms met a wall of tank-bred muscle. Then it sprinted as Kaplan hooked a hand under her hair and brought them back eye to eye. Mouth a grim line, he shook his head. "You just aren't going to stop gunning for trouble, are you?"

"That'd be like asking gravity to quit its shit."

He eyed her a long moment, further amping her heartbeat, then forcibly exhaled. "That's what I was afraid of."

Before she could ask what he meant, he reclaimed her mouth.

Caught off-guard, she stilled—waited a beat for him to pull away and get back to the day's ugly business. Waited another as irritation took on a reckless edge then bloomed into straight up lust. Lips locked on his, she fisted her hands against his chest, resisted the urge to ditch all common sense and climb up over him. Unlike her, Kaplan didn't take extended breaks from reality. Any second now, they'd be back discussing dead friends and the shitty future. Any ... second...

Her pulse jumped as Kaplan slid both hands into her hair and took the kiss up a gear—no more testing the water; a headlong dive. She gripped his shirt as the blood left her head and the whine in her skull bloomed into a thick, disorienting haze. The last lingering echoes of madness drowned as a different kind of darkness pulled her under. No thought. No screams.

Just the fast beat of her heart and the hiss of her breath as Kaplan's mouth broke away—then came back hotter, harder. The restlessness that had been nipping at her for days—weeks—bit down.

She jerked Kaplan between her knees, streaked her hands under his shirt. He met her impatience with his own, hauling her to the edge of the bench.

Any remaining ideas about keeping her head, letting him go, got dropped into the void. She fought to get closer, legs locking around him. He clenched his hands on her thighs—then released them to rush upward, hip to spine, shoulder to hair, shortening her breath. Then he killed it dead, skimming knuckles down her throat to the ragged beat of her heart, the curve of her breast.

Everything blurred, quickened—became a mindless race. Fervent mouths. Groping hands—pulling at clothing. A few yanks and her jacket was gone. A jerk and her singlet whipped over her head.

She barely caught a breath before Kaplan's lips were on hers again. As his hands burned up her spine to the clip of her bra, nerves woke with a few brain cells. Damn—she'd expected him to jam on the breaks, not the accelerator. Throwing caution to the void wasn't his style. Kaplan had rules, discipline—

A tug on elastic. The sweep of hands down her arms, sliding straps away. Then the bite of cool air as her bra hit the deck. More nerves leapt. She was missing something. This wasn't Kaplan. He—

—streaked his hands up her bare torso then lower, across distressed denim seams.

Her thoughts derailed. His motivations became the last thing she cared about. Ripping her mouth from his, she pulled at his shirt. "Off now, or it's seen its last goddamn parade, battle—whatever."

He discarded it before she could make good her threat. Her stomach contracted at his ready capitulation, then again at the skin and muscle it revealed. No mods. All human. Forget freak alien genetics.

She sunk her teeth into a well-defined pectoral.

Kaplan wrenched her head back for a torrid kiss then hauled her off the bench and wrestled them both across the cabin. She landed on his bed with a winded curse, heart hammering, lungs desperate for oxygen. She fought to kick off her boots and discard her jeans. Still on his feet, Kaplan ditched the last of his clothing—completely annihilating her efforts to catch breath.

With a couple of yanks, he ended her struggle with her jeans and underwear.

Anticipation and nerves skittered as his gaze cut over her. Disorienting whispers rose again, along with a sense of sinking into deep water, making her again question what the hell she was doing. She felt faintly high. The hot punch of her blood didn't feel strictly hers, like something other than her own recklessness drove it. Damn, what had been in Channing's mind-altering cocktail?

And who exactly cared?

Dropping a look down Kaplan's body, she threw all concerns aside. Hell, she'd done worse drunk. And if this was straight out madness, she'd enjoy the frigging ride for once.

She pounced, dragging Kaplan down onto the bed to straddle him.

He flipped them both over before she could slap her cowgirl hat on. Grabbing her hands to stop her grabbing him, he pinned her.

The long, hard length of him about made her want to swallow her tongue.

In no mood to slow things down, she hooked a leg over his, brought them groin to groin—and set about taunting him and wrecking her last steady nerve. The kiss Kaplan laid on her had that dark water closing in over her head again. A familiar buzz flared—

Dizziness hit.

Her mind went under like a dropped stone.

A glimpse of the abyss. A roar in her skull: the surge of hot blood. Then pain—a thousand burning needles pressing on her brain.

Panic clawed up.

Real pain struck next: a nip of teeth at her lip.

Reality spun back: Kaplan above her, breathing hard, a tense question in his eyes. Her stomach dipped fast, on a rollercoaster. He'd sensed her glitch, snapped her out of it. She should've been grateful, but to have someone that attuned—

A rough brush of fingers against her cheek. "Jinx? You still with me?"

Irritation kicked fear in the arse. "You have me under house arrest. Where the hell else would I be?" She pulled his lips back to hers—and felt the psionic bastard resist, could practically hear him debating whether she was mentally competent enough to screw. She sunk her teeth into his lip and slid a hand around the piece of him that had no interest in her mental wellbeing. "This ends one of two ways, alterant. I'll enjoy both. You won't."

Kaplan freed himself. She got in another unfriendly kiss and a jab to his ribs before he recaptured her hands. Pinning them either side of her head, he straddled her. She braced for another aggravating query about her health—got a neuron-killing kiss instead.

The buzz he put in her skull became a hot haze that stole her air. Her awareness narrowed ... to his mouth, to the restless shift of his body above hers, to his hands—releasing hers to slide up over her heated flesh, then down, down and...

She snatched at his shoulders, gave up trying to breathe. Yeah ... any debate about her competence was clearly over. God. Heart a drum, she arched into his touch—and got herself a hell of a lot more trouble. Her head filled with noise. Her body tensed. Nerves wound taut as a serious meltdown threatened.

Her curse got lost in a hot, open-mouthed kiss. She tightened her grip, pressed up against Kaplan, aligning their bodies, willing him to finish what he'd goddamn started—before she did violence.

Ripping his mouth from hers, Kaplan braced himself—slid home.

A gut punch of pleasure locked her spine.

And kicked her off another mental cliff.

A raw haze. Whispers that burned.

She groped for a mental anchor—

Taut fingers linked with hers. The world jolted back: harsh breaths; desperate bodies. Relief sung through her as Kaplan didn't stop, didn't ask questions, didn't goddamn hold back. Her release tore through her, overwhelming, disorienting—totally insane—an instant before she felt Kaplan tense and go over the edge with her. Surreal, chaotic images and sensations overlaid reality, like the extrasensory kick of a psychedelic or some augmented-reality tech.

Or some new brand of psychosis.

Fear gave exhilaration an adrenalised edge.

For a moment, there was only the rush of freefall; an airless, brilliant moment on the flip side of hell.

Then reality returned without sympathy or grace, dumping her in a heap, her lungs screaming for air, her sight blurred. For a few beats, her heart drowned out everything.

The next beat, her mind slammed into overdrive.

She'd tripped out during sex. An embarrassing first, and a sign she was seriously losing it. God. She'd had multiple major glitches within six hours. She needed to leave, get on the first shuttle to—

A blunt kiss derailed her thoughts. A rare, low oath came next, right against her lips.

Still breathing fast, Kaplan pressed his forehead to hers, his linked fingers clenching around her hand. "Whatever mayhem you're planning, it can wait until morning."

Those words—as droll as they were accurate—froze her in place. For a second, she'd forgotten just who—what—she'd landed in bed with. "Getting better at reading my mind, freakazoid?"

Kaplan trailed his free hand over her hip, setting her belly jumping. "Proximity helps. Along with physical and emotional intimacy."

"That why you laid me like a five-year long-hauler finding port? To get inside my skull?"

Kaplan lifted his head, the humour in his gaze not strictly friendly. "Would you prefer it if I said 'yes'?"

He caught her other hand before she could drive a fist into his ribs, anticipating the move an instant after she'd conceived it. Her pulse boomed—then scrambled as he kissed her and kept doing so, killing her accusations and the argument she wanted to start. As a new twist of lust derailed her anger and something akin to, but far scarier than, regret woke, a couple of unnerving realisations hit.

Whether he could hear her thoughts or not, the psychic bastard had got into her head, could read her all too well. And she'd been wrong when she'd thought she couldn't mess things up worse than they already were. She'd only been concerned Kaplan would try to help her, that he'd ask her to try to fight fate.

She hadn't expected to want to take up that pointless battle.

She tightened her grip on Kaplan's hands, arched up into his kiss. She couldn't go there—wouldn't. It didn't matter what she wanted or what she felt. Nothing had changed. Including her plans.

In the morning, she'd ditch ship, keep the promise she'd made herself years ago.

With her father, intervention had come too late. The disease had bloodied him and everyone around him, dragging them down with him.

She'd take herself out before she'd allow the same.