Chapter 10 Organized Chaos #3
“I didn’t pay Blackstar directly. The funds are held in escrow pending the Commerce Authority investigation. This means your debt can’t be classified as delinquent while the investigation is active, because the funds exist and are earmarked for resolution. They can’t claim default.”
“You paid my debt.” My voice rises. “You paid seventy-three thousand credits of my debt without asking me.”
“I secured the funds. I didn’t pay Blackstar. The distinction is—”
“The distinction is semantics!” I push away from him. “You can’t just throw money at my problems and call it strategy!”
“Dove—”
“That’s my debt! Mine! I took on those loans, I missed those payments, I made those choices!” I’m pacing now, the carefully organized operations center blurring at the edges. “You think I want to be the broke courier who got bailed out by the rich scientist? You think that’s what I—”
“Stop.” He doesn’t raise his voice. Doesn’t need to. The harmonics cut through my spiral with surgical precision. “This isn’t about money. It’s about legal positioning.”
“It’s about you deciding I need saving!”
“You do need saving!” His control cracks.
Markings blazing, claws extending, voice rough with frequencies that make the air vibrate.
“You have armed collectors arriving in less than thirty-six hours with authorization to physically detain you, and you’re angry that I found a way to invalidate their legal basis? ”
“I’m angry that you did it without telling me! Without asking! Three days ago, Cetus—you’ve been sitting on this for three days while I was making plans to run, while I was packing my bag, while I was—”
“While you were preparing to sacrifice yourself to protect me and Tavia. Yes. I know.” He closes the distance between us. I back into the filing cabinet—nowhere to go. “And I was supposed to let you? Watch you fly into danger because your pride is more important than your life?”
“It’s not pride, it’s—”
“It’s independence. I understand. I respect it.
But independence doesn’t mean you have to be alone.
” His hands brace on either side of me, caging me against the cabinet, his body a wall of warmth and barely-leashed intensity.
“I’m not trying to rescue you. I’m trying to fight beside you. There’s a difference.”
“That’s very poetic, but you still made a seventy-three-thousand-credit decision without—”
“Because you would have said no.”
“Of course I would have said no!”
“Exactly. So I took the tactically sound option and secured your position without giving you the opportunity to self-sabotage out of misplaced guilt.”
I open my mouth to argue. Close it. Open it again.
“Did you just... admit to strategically circumventing my consent?”
“I prefer ‘proactive protective positioning.’”
“You’re impossible.”
“I’m Lividian. We protect what’s ours.” His eyes hold mine. Bright. Burning. “Are you going to keep fighting me, or are you going to let me help you survive this?”
The fight drains out of me in a rush that leaves me shaking. Not with anger. With something scarier than anger. With the terrifying, bone-deep relief of not having to carry this alone.
“I hate this,” I whisper. “I hate needing help.”
“I know.” His hands slide from the cabinet to my waist. Careful. Asking. “I know you do.”
“It doesn’t make me weak.”
“Nothing about you is weak.” He pulls me closer. Not demanding. Offering. “Your strength is why I’m standing here. Because you fight your way out of everything alone, and I’m asking you—just this once—to let me stand with you.”
My forehead drops against his chest. The misbuttoned shirt gapes, and my skin meets teal skin that runs fever-warm, and the markings under my cheek pulse in a rhythm that feels like his heartbeat.
“You should have told me,” I murmur into his chest.
“Yes. I should have.”
“Three days, Cetus.”
“I was waiting for the right moment. Then the storms escalated. Then the evidence package. Then you packed your bag.” His arms wrap around me. “Every time I tried, something interrupted.”
“Pickles probably has a statistical analysis of your missed opportunities.”
“I have catalogued fourteen instances in which the Terraforming Specialist attempted and failed to disclose the escrow transfer,” Pickles confirms. “The primary interruption categories are: Tavia-related events, storm alerts, the Captain’s own evasive behavior, and the Specialist losing his nerve.”
“I did not lose my nerve.”
“Instance seven: the Captain bent over to retrieve a dropped tool, and you forgot how to form sentences for eleven seconds. I classify that as nerve loss.”
I laugh against his chest. It comes out wet and shaky and real.
“So we have the escrow. We have the PDC inspection. We have the Commerce Authority raid incoming.” I pull back enough to meet his eyes. “What else?”
“Mother Morrison has six OOPS couriers on standby as character witnesses. Luzrak is filing an emergency injunction against the seizure authorization. And Pickles has compiled enough evidence to bury Blackstar in litigation for the next decade.”
“You’ve been busy.”
“I had excellent motivation.” His hand cups my jaw. Thumb tracing my cheekbone. Markings casting warm light across both of us. “Are we done fighting?”
“For now.” I turn my face into his palm. Press my lips against the base of his thumb without thinking. Feel the pad of muscle shift under my mouth, the ridge of tendon, the faint throb of his pulse.
His whole body locks. Not a shudder—a seize.
Every muscle going taut at once, his claws extending fully before snapping back, his markings flaring in a pattern I haven’t seen before.
Not the steady warmth of attraction or the bright pulse of emotion.
This is erratic. Flickering. Like a system overloading.
“Dove.” The word scrapes out of him in harmonics that bypass my brain entirely and land somewhere south of my navel. Warning and want and something raw underneath both.
“I’m stress-processing.” But I don’t pull away. “I stress-bake, but there’s no dough rising, so I’m improvising.”
“You’re improvising by kissing my hand.”
“The alternative was yelling at you more.” I press another kiss to his wrist. Open-mouthed this time, tasting salt and the faint metallic sweetness of his skin. His pulse slams against my lips. “This seemed more productive.”
A sound tears out of his chest—not a word, not a growl.
A frequency between both that hums through the air and makes my knees soften.
His hand slides from my jaw to the back of my neck, fingers threading into my hair, pulling the tie loose so the whole mess of it spills over his wrist. The touch starts gentle but his grip firms, tilting my head back until I’m looking up at him and there’s nowhere to hide.
His eyes have changed. The yellow is brighter, almost molten, pupils blown so wide the black nearly swallows the color. I’ve seen him protective. I’ve seen him careful. I’ve seen him controlled.
This isn’t any of those things.
“If you keep doing that,” he says, his voice a low harmonic that rolls through my skull, down my spine, into places I refuse to name, “I’m going to kiss you properly. And I’m not going to stop.”
“Is that a threat or a promise?”
“Both.”
I should step back. We have work to do. There’s an inspection team incoming and collectors on their heels and approximately zero time for—
“I had seventy-three thousand reasons to stay rational.” His thumb traces the line of my jaw. “I don’t care about any of them right now.”
His mouth finds mine.
The kiss starts soft. Careful. The barest pressure, his lips warm against mine, giving me every chance to pull away.
I don’t pull away.
I grab the front of his misbuttoned shirt and pull him closer, and the last thread of restraint snaps.
In him. In me. In whatever we’ve been clinging to for four days.
The kiss turns hungry. His hand fists in my hair and his arm crushes me against his chest and the careful precision evaporates into need—graceless and urgent.
The harmonics in his voice shift—I feel it more than hear it, a subsonic frequency that reverberates through his mouth into mine, vibrating against my lips, my teeth, my tongue.
Not the gentle courtship tones. These are lower.
Rougher. Possessive in a way that bypasses thought and speaks directly to instinct.
I make a sound I don’t recognize. High and needy and nothing like a woman who doesn’t need anyone.
He lifts me. One smooth motion, hands gripping under my thighs—fingers splayed wide, claws sheathed but I can feel the points of them through the fabric, five hot pinpricks of barely-leashed restraint.
He sets me on the filing cabinet and steps between my legs and I wrap around him before conscious thought approves the action.
The new angle presses us flush from hip to chest. And I feel him.
Oh.
Not subtle. Not ambiguous. Hard against the seam of my pants where my legs lock around his hips, and even through layers of clothing there’s texture—raised ridges pressing against me in a way that no human male anatomy could replicate.
Each ridge a distinct line of pressure, and when I shift—when I breathe—they drag.
My brain shorts out.
Even through clothes, I can map them—count the nodes, imagine what that texture would feel like against bare skin, inside me. The thought hits like a lightning strike and I nearly choke on it.
“This is—” I start. Try to form a joke about terrible ideas. Try to be the Dove who banters her way through everything. But his mouth finds the spot below my ear and his teeth graze and the words disintegrate into a gasp that I couldn’t fake if I tried.
“Tell me to stop,” he says against my throat, and the rumble of his voice on my skin nearly finishes me.
“Don’t—” My fingers dig into his shoulders. My hips roll forward without my permission, grinding against the ridge of him, and the friction shocks a moan out of both of us. “Don’t you dare.”