Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
DRAZEX
The investigation requires her to be kept close.
I have repeated this truth seventeen times since dawn, each iteration an anchor against the current pulling me toward admissions I cannot afford.
She notices patterns my enforcers miss, and her medical expertise identified the poison when standard screening failed.
Her insights have already narrowed the suspect pool from dozens to seven names, each one a potential knife aimed at the heart of House Draven.
I am exceptionally skilled at lying to myself when the alternative is examination.
Four nights now, I've stood in the corridor outside her quarters like a lovesick fool who has forgotten who and what he is.
The first time might have been curiosity, the second a concern for an asset, but the third strained any reasonable justification I could construct.
Last night I stayed for an hour, listening to her breathe through the wall until the rhythm synced with the pulse in my chest, and I left only when my legs ached from standing and my fangs had extended from the wanting.
I've endured worse than this. Blades through muscle, plasma burns that took months to heal, the brutal precision of my father's training sessions designed to strip weakness from bone. Physical discomfort is a language I speak fluently, and I've never let it dictate my actions.
Yet this human female has slipped past defenses that held against far more direct assaults, and I can't identify the breach point or understand why my usual countermeasures fail. The not-knowing gnaws at me worse than the wanting itself. I'm not a male who tolerates mysteries.
I'll understand this. I'll dissect whatever flaw in my armor allowed her entry, find the weakness and seal it. Understanding is the first step toward control, and control is all I have.
The compound settles into morning routine beyond my office walls, and I reach for the security controls, temptation overriding common sense.
Her quarters appear on the central display, then the medical bay, then the corridor between them.
She emerged at 0534, earlier than normal, and walked to the medical bay with that stride that belongs only to her.
Spine straight, shoulders back, a soldier's carriage in a body too small for the weight it carries.
She reviews Torvin's toxicology results now, her lips moving as she works through the data in that habit she has of talking to herself when problems resist easy solutions.
Questions and answers, a conversation with herself that helps her think, and she doesn't know I've memorized the exact pitch of her voice when she does it or catalogued the way her brow furrows when concentration takes hold.
Love makes you weak, my father told me while my mother's blood still stained the execution platform. It made her betray us. The moment you care about anyone more than you care about the house, you have given your enemies a weapon they will use to destroy you.
What I feel isn't love. I don't care about her. She is an asset, a temporary complication in the ordered structure of my existence, valuable for her skills and nothing more.
The lie sits poorly in my chest, lodged beneath my sternum where truth refuses to be buried.
Samai would laugh himself sick if he could see me now, the brother who has mocked my control for decades finding vindication in watching me destroy it for a human female who has lived in my compound for five days.
He would ask what happened to the male who warned him about the dangers of attachment, who counseled distance, who built an existence on the foundation of never needing anyone.
That male is standing at his office window at dawn, watching a security feed he has no business watching, counting the minutes until he can manufacture another reason to be near her.
The feed goes dark beneath my fingers as discipline reasserts itself, and I force myself to sit at the desk, to review reports, to be what I’ve always been.
I pull up the personnel records Maeve requested. Names, access levels, assignment histories. Mechanical work, a task to anchor my focus while I fight the urge to check the surveillance feed.
Cross-referencing current rosters against the archive should be straightforward. Except the gaps keep catching.
Torvin. Not the enforcer poisoned last week, but an older male who bore the same name.
He trained me in close-quarters combat when I was fourteen, corrected my grip without mockery, told me once that I had my mother's instincts.
Transfer to a mining outpost on the northern shelf.
Dead within the year. Equipment failure.
Kesh. The enforcer who pulled me from a collection gone wrong when I was twenty-three, who took a blade meant for my throat and laughed about the scar it left. Reassigned to surface patrol. Killed by sandstorm exposure three months later.
Rennix. A quiet male who noticed when I hadn't slept, who left protein rations outside my quarters without comment, who once told me I didn't have to become my father. Broken neck at the bottom of an elevator shaft. The investigation concluded he'd been drinking.
Draven. An older cousin who slipped me ration bars during my father's discipline sessions, who never asked questions, who simply saw that I was hungry and acted. Accused of skimming profits. Executed before I could speak on his behalf.
Not failure. Not incompetence.
Each of them showed me kindness. Each of them might follow me over my father if the choice had ever been offered.
I don't finish that thought. Can't afford to follow it where it leads. I close the files. The weight of it sits beneath my sternum like shrapnel I can't reach, and I don't have the luxury of examining what it means. Not now. Not yet.
I'm at the surveillance controls before I register moving.
She's humming again when I reach the observation window overlooking the medical bay, that soft melody surfacing whenever her focus deepens until it weaves through the ambient hum of equipment like a thread of warmth in cold air.
Terran, perhaps, a tune from her childhood or her military service, some fragment of memory made audible that she doesn't seem aware she's making.
I notice everything about her now, and the noticing has become its own form of torture.
Forty-three minutes pass while she works, and she hasn't once looked up from the toxicology results scrolling across her display. She talks herself through the data in murmured questions and answers, building theories, discarding them, reaching for new ones with relentless persistence.
Her fingers drift to the scar on her forearm, tracing the ridge of healed tissue in an unconscious motion that broadcasts stress to anyone watching closely enough to recognize the tell.
Shrapnel from Kepler IV, earned in a battle that killed thirteen of her unit while she kept the survivors breathing through sheer stubborn refusal to let them go.
Her scent reaches me even through the observation window's filters, soap and antiseptic layered over female warmth.
When frustration takes hold, her chemistry sharpens into an edge I detect on the recycled air.
When concentration mellows her, it turns inviting, almost sweet, and when I stand too close, when our eyes meet across a room, arousal blooms beneath all of it in an unmistakable signature that my body responds to before my mind can intervene.
She cannot hide from me. Her body tells truths her face tries to withhold.
Yesterday, when our fingers brushed over a shared file, I learned what that truth looks like.
Her scent was sweet and warm and undeniable, the chemical signature of wanting that no human female should direct at a monster like me.
Every muscle in my body locked against the urge to close the distance, fangs pressing against my gums as claws scraped the inside of my fingertips, and I stood frozen in the battle between instinct and control while she pulled back and pretended the contact meant nothing.
We both pretended, and the lie hangs between us.
She looks up from the console, and her gaze finds the observation window with the precision of someone who has known she was being watched and chose not to acknowledge it until now. Our eyes meet across the medical bay, and the air leaves my lungs in a rush that betrays more than I intended.
“You're doing it again.” Her voice carries through the speakers, the communication channel left open in an oversight that reveals how thoroughly she has dismantled my discipline.
“The investigation requires oversight.”
“The investigation requires data analysis, and oversight requires a single check-in per hour, not continuous surveillance.” She rises from the console, stretching in a motion that pulls fabric taut across her shoulders and chest, the swell of her breasts pressing against the thin material.
My cock thickens against my thigh, a response so immediate and undeniable that I shift my stance.
She releases the stretch, and the fabric settles back into place, but the image has already burned itself into my memory alongside every other detail I've collected.
“If you're going to hover, you could make yourself useful.”
“How?”
“You could bring me food.” The command in her voice should irritate me.
I give orders. I don't take them. Instead, the authority in her tone sends another pulse of heat straight to my groin, and the evidence of my response strains against the front of my pants in a ridge I can only hope she doesn't notice.
“I'll have the kitchen send something.”
“You could have said that an hour ago, but you stayed anyway.” She holds my gaze through the window, and the challenge in her expression sharpens into a blade aimed at the pretense I've been hiding behind. “Why are you really here, Drazex?”