11. The Corridor #3
The ridge response is — I will attempt to note this clinically and I will not succeed.
Every ridge thickens. Simultaneously. The wave of it hits the base of my shaft and travels upward and I hear myself make a sound that is not the purr.
It is the other frequency. The one the Dens excised as thoroughly as the bonding signal, and it is returning now, without permission, because she said every ridge and looked at me while she said it and her scent has changed, and my body has updated its assessment of the situation to: imminent.
My thumb traces her cheekbone. Her lips part wider.
Her mouth is — I need to kiss her. The biology is a straightforward document on this point: I need to kiss her, and if I kiss her I need to keep kissing her, and the escalation from there is not one either of us will be walking away from easily, and I find that I cannot make this sound like a warning.
One inch. Her nose brushes mine.
The contact is small, and my entire body comes apart with it.
The purr detonates — a new register entirely, the frequency dropping into something sub-vocal that I feel in my sternum before I hear it — and her grip on my tail goes tight, all five fingers, and the sensation rockets from the underside straight through my spine and into the knot and my hips drive forward against the chair and the sound that comes out of me is nothing the Dens would recognize and nothing SRS trained for, and I am not capable of regulating it.
Her breath crosses my lips — peppermint, warm, the specific temperature of a mouth about to open — and her scent is so close it is not scent anymore, it is information, it is her body speaking directly to mine, and what it is saying is yes.
She smiles against the gap. I can feel it. The curve of her mouth an inch from mine.
“There’s the brick wall,” she murmurs, and the words ghost across my lips, warm and deliberate, and her hand slides from my wrist to the back of my neck, fingers threading into the fuzz at my nape —
The sensation at the base of my horn fires.
Not gradually. Not the slow build of the corridor hours.
All at once — the full nerve chain from horn-root to groin igniting in a single uninterrupted cascade, and my claws extend without instruction, all ten points driving through the armrest, and the purr drops into something I have no name for, the biological equivalent of a door held shut for thirty years swinging open, and I am one inch from her mouth, and I am going to —
The emergency channel screams.
Not Sprout. The channel that bypasses every suppression protocol, every mineral shadow. The frequency reserved for imminent threat.
Sprout’s orb blazes white. “Contact. Single vessel. Inside the corridor. Bearing zero-nine-three mark seven. They followed us in.”
The gap between our mouths is one inch. Her breath on my lips. Her fingers in my fuzz. The purr running so loud it vibrates through the console.
“SRS configuration. Pursuit class. Running a Tier 1 transponder code.”
Trell did not wait. Trell sent someone like me.
She pulls back. I pull back. The cold air fills the gap like water into a wound and the absence of her hand on my neck registers as physical damage.
Her face changes — not fear. The Morrison override.
Warm Flossie banking, cold Flossie arriving.
Her hand drops from my neck, finds the flight controls.
She is a pilot before she is anything else.
“How good?” Steady. Professional. A woman who was one inch from kissing me and is now running combat vectors.
“If Trell sent a Tier 1, they are very good.”
“Better than you?”
“No one Trell has is better than me.” Assessment, not arrogance. “But they will not need to be better than me. They will need to be better than us.”
Her mouth curves. Not a smile. The architecture of one, built on adrenaline and interrupted want and the specific fury of a woman who has been one inch from a kiss twice now and the galaxy keeps interrupting.
“Betsy.” She reaches for the holster without looking. “Morning, Bets. Company.”
She reaches for Betsy. She is not looking at me.
The hold is two meters aft. I brace against the bulkhead with one forearm and get my hand around the ridges and the sound that comes out of me is one I have not made outside of combat — low, involuntary, and not the purr.
Nine hours. Nine hours of her thumb dragging the length of my tail’s underside, her arousal thick in the recycled air, her mouth one inch from mine and every ridge, said with the easy certainty of a woman reporting established fact.
The ridges are so engorged the grip is almost pain and the knot is so full it presses back against my palm and what my body supplies — without consultation, the imagery precise and thorough and entirely her — is: the wet gleam of her tongue behind parted lips.
Her hand threading into the fuzz at my nape.
Her nose against mine and her breath warm across my lips.
The specific weight of her in the bunk, her hips rolling back against me in her sleep, knowing and not-knowing and choosing.
The knot will not release. The biology for that requires her specifically, and she is in the cockpit and I have fifteen seconds.
I work the ridges with the focused efficiency of a male with one operational priority and finish with her name caught between my back teeth, silent — a sound I do not permit out loud.
The shaking in my hands lasts four seconds.
I retract it the way I retract everything.
The container the kill order concerns is two meters behind me. I have not looked at it once.
I return to the cockpit.
She talks to her weapon. I am in love with a woman who talks to her weapon.
The thought arrives. I do not examine it. There is a Tier 1 pursuit craft closing and the corridor is narrowing and the woman I —
The thought does not complete.
I stand. Claws extend — retract. Extend again, deliberately this time. The cockpit is small and combat-ready and her scent is in my lungs and the gap between our mouths is a debt the galaxy owes me.
“Let them come,” I say.
She grins. The full one. The one that crinkles her eyes.
“That’s my line, lovey.”