Her hands, which had gathered her skirts and lifted them to her hips, stopped."Sorry," he huffed. "It's hard to think straight when I'm doing this." H... stopped stroking and set to taking his own clothes off.Within a minute their pale skin shone in the moonlight. It was a balmy night, warm enough that being naked was not uncomfortable in any way. Becky rubbed until her knees began to feel weak, and then sank down in the soft grass to lie back with her legs spread. Frank, wanting to be closer to. "They're coming in!"Jeff looked down and saw dozens of marines crawling out of their cover positions and scrambling upward, many more than had advanced on them before."Fire at will!" Walker said. "Stick to your zones!"Drogan sent an extended burst downward with the SAW. Woo sent a grenade down to explode in front of a group of three marines who had made the mistake of being too close together. Jeff put his recticle on the closest marine in his zone and fired, dropping him."There's no covering. He found out, of course. He killed my lover. He almost killed me.Then he killed himself.No. I killed him.I know. I have no right to live on. But I do.I could annoy you with repentance and remorse, but I won't. Not because I don't honestly feel it. I do feel remorse, about ten tons of it and they all weigh on my heart.But there is no point, is there?My love is dead. George is gone. So is every dream I ever had. I carelessly and thoughtlessly threw them away. I betrayed and killed the one good. She had screamed then as well, stumbling, but staying erect. Tallosia seemed exuberant at this. "Drag them to the Temple! They shall make fine subjects. And now, for the rest of you..." she had turned away, just as preistesses had seized the hair of Syne and Elise and borne them away to the Temple.Her life had been a nightmare since then. She had, for possibly months, spent 16 hours a day as a test subject for the aptly named Preistesses of Pain. The remaining 8 hours, she was bound up in some.