12. The Fight #2
He looks at me. The markings drain another degree—just enough. “He’s the only one who knows how this contract was built,” I say. “How it was routed. Who signed off. Kill him and whoever sent him sends ten more, and the next one won’t know us.” A breath. “We need what he knows.”
He swallows. The below-language sound dies. The markings drain from black toward dark, degree by degree. The claws pull back from the agent’s throat—not all the way, but enough. When he looks at me again the gold is still blown wide and the pupils are vast and dark but the register has shifted.
He is holding back now. I can see the restraint in every line of him—the claws that could still close, the tail that could crush, the combat chemistry still running hot and the male overriding it one deliberate breath at a time.
The restraint is doing something to me that the fighting alone did not.
The restraint is choosing me. I can see exactly what it costs.
“I know him.” His voice scrapes out raw. Not clinical. Not operational. “Operative Saar. Tier 1, recruited two years after me. We trained together at SRS’s advanced program.”
He knows him. He is holding a former colleague to my deck plating with the combat claws that were just ready to end him, and the restraint isn’t only mercy. It’s grief.
“Sprout, can you disable the pursuit craft from the engineering panel?”
“Already in progress. The automated systems are SRS standard—predictable and, I must say, insulting. Thirty seconds.”
“Xor. Can Saar be contained?”
“The cargo bunk. The door seals from outside.” His voice is rough. The combat chemicals still running. “Saar, you will stand down. You will enter the containment area. You will not be harmed.”
The agent on the floor—Saar—turns his head.
Silver eyes finding Xor’s face, bright and assessing even from the deck plating.
Up close, the blue skin is flawless—no scars, no visible wear, as though the male fights for a living and has never once been caught doing it.
The bone structure is worse at this distance.
Sharper. The kind of handsome that is clearly a professional asset and has been weaponized accordingly.
“Xax.” His voice is smooth—even winded, even with Xor’s claws at his throat, the voice is cultured and unhurried, the accent of someone educated across multiple systems. “They said you’d gone non-compliant.
” The silver eyes shift—not to Xor’s face but past him.
To me. The assessment is instant, thorough, and not remotely subtle.
“They said the courier compromised you. I’m beginning to see why. ”
My grip on Betsy doesn’t shift. I file the comment where it belongs.
“The courier has a name,” Xor says. And the way he says it—the weight, the certainty, the complete absence of hesitation—lands in my sternum like a fist.
Saar is in the cargo bunk. Door sealed. Sprout monitoring vitals—the injured knee needs medical attention that I will provide when the adrenaline drops, because that is what I do, I fix things, even the things that were just trying to kill me.
The medical kit is under the berth. Thermal thread, antiseptic, a splint that adjusts to non-human bone density—Morrison trained me to patch up anyone, any species, because in the Outer Rim you don’t get to be choosy about your patients.
I unseal the bunk door, kit in one hand, Betsy in the other, because I am not an idiot.
Saar is sitting on the bunk. The silver eyes track me from the doorway—calm, curious, the expression of a male who has been in containment before and considers it a temporary inconvenience.
The injured knee is at an angle that makes me wince.
Up close, in decent light, I can see what the emergency strips hid.
The blue skin has a faint luminescence to it—not glowing, exactly, but catching light in a way that makes it look lit from within.
High cheekbones. A mouth that has probably talked its way out of more situations than Xor’s claws have fought through.
He is, objectively, a strikingly handsome male.
He is also the male who came here to kill us, and the handsomeness lands with all the warmth of a well-polished weapon.
“I’m going to splint that knee,” I say. No pet name. No “lovey.” I reserve those for people who haven’t recently attempted to murder the male was one inch from kissing when you walked through that airlock. “Don’t move. Don’t be clever.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.” The smooth voice again.
He watches me kneel, watches my hands work the splint with the efficiency Morrison drilled into me, and the silver eyes are doing something I recognize because I’ve seen Xor do it—cataloging.
Every detail. My hands, my face, the cardigan, the blaster within my reach.
“You know, when they briefed me on this assignment, the courier was described as a low-priority civilian target. OOPS delivery personnel. Non-threatening.” A pause.
“Nobody mentioned the aim. Or the cardigan. Is that a fox?”
“It’s a fox. Hold still.”
“Also—“ he says, and his voice shifts just slightly, the professional charm giving way to something more considered, “—the contract routing had irregularities I should have escalated. Tier 1 deployments don’t usually arrive via third-party relay servers. I flagged it. Command said proceed.” The silver eyes move to the sealed cargo door and back.
Assessing. “I am finding that decision progressively harder to defend.”
I tighten the splint. He doesn’t flinch, which tells me everything about his pain tolerance. I don’t comment on the routing. I file it—flag, relay server, third party—under things Xor needs to hear the moment the door is sealed.
“She doesn’t want to talk to you,” Sprout announces from the corridor, orb pulsing a warning amber. “I can confirm this based on twelve years of vocal pattern analysis. The current tone is reserved for customs officials and people who have recently tried to kill her.”
“Your AI is charming.”
“My AI is correct.” I stand. “Knee’s stabilized. Don’t put weight on it for six hours. Sprout will monitor.”
He looks up at me—silver eyes, the luminous blue skin, that calculated almost-smile—and says, with the easy confidence of a male who has never had charm fail him: “Xax always did have good taste. Or—well. He never had any taste at all, before. This is new.” The silver eyes hold mine.
“I can see why he broke protocol. If the circumstances were different—“
“They’re not.” I holster Betsy. Look down at him.
“The circumstances are that you came here to kill him, or me, or both. So the knee is splinted and the door is sealing and you can save the charm for your debrief.” I pause.
“Which you will be giving. Because you’re going to help us figure out who built that contract. ”
He blinks. First genuine surprise I’ve seen from him. “Is that so.”
“The routing irregularities you flagged? We’re going to need the specifics.” I hold his gaze. “Think about it.”
The door seals.
In the corridor, I lean against the wall and breathe. The adrenaline is running hot still. The blood on my cheek has begun to dry. I need to deal with that. I file it under later, along with the shaking that has started in my hands.
Xor is at the pursuit craft’s console. He jacked in through the starboard airlock—the craft is docked against the Petal like a parasite, small and angular, built for speed and silence, and the comms array is military-grade.
He looks up as I approach, and I see it—the question he won’t ask.
His nostrils flared the moment I came out of the bunk.
He can smell Saar on me, or the proximity, or whatever Xarthian olfactory processing does with the information that the woman whose pheromones he has been cataloging for days just spent five minutes in a small room with a handsome Yulx operative.
His claws are extended. Just the tips. Pricking into the console polymer.
“His knee is splinted,” I say. “He’ll live. He’s also going to help us—he flagged the contract routing before he deployed. Third-party relay. He knew something was wrong and came anyway.” I lean against the console beside him. Close. The combat proximity. “He’s more useful to us breathing.”
Something in his jaw releases. The claws retract—not all the way, but enough.
“Saar uses charm as a tactical instrument,” he says. “It is—effective. Against most targets.”
The pause before most targets is doing a lot of work.
“I’ve been flying with you long enough, lovey.” My shoulder against his arm. “I’m not going to be undone by a nice jawline and a smooth voice. I have very specific taste, and my specific taste runs to seven feet tall with fuzz and a purr and a tail that has opinions.”
His tail wraps my ankle. Immediate. Involuntary. The possessive reflex that his waking mind has stopped trying to moderate, and the tension in his shoulders drops by degrees.
I don’t look at him when I say it. I look at the display. But I can feel the purr start—low, steady, the frequency that means mine—and the smile I’m hiding behind the console is the size of a small planet.
“Sprout, route the comms data through the secondary display.”
“Routing. The encryption is SRS standard, which I cracked in approximately four seconds. I would like this noted.”
“Noted.”
The comms data populates. Mission briefing. Agent Saar’s deployment orders. The kill order—the same nine words, the same Trell clearance code.
Except.
“The routing,” Xor says. He has gone very still. “The routing is wrong.”
I look. I’m not SRS intelligence, but twelve years of courier work means I can read a transmission chain.
The kill order has Trell’s clearance code but the routing signature—the digital fingerprint of the server that originated the message—doesn’t match SRS command architecture.
It matches the third-party relay Saar flagged.