Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
DRAZEX
The reports blur on my display, numbers and logistics that should command my full attention dissolving into meaningless shapes while my thoughts circle back to where they have no business dwelling.
Three hours since I left her quarters. Three hours since I walked away from the heat of her body pressed against mine, her breath evening into sleep while I held her through the dark hours and let myself be someone I barely recognized.
I hummed the song. My mother's song, the melody I haven't made since her blood stained the execution platform and my father's hand cracked across my face for weeping.
The notes rose from a place I thought I'd sealed off decades ago, called forth by the trembling female in my arms who shattered against my chest and let me witness every jagged piece.
The memory lodges beneath my sternum now, heavier than any blade wound I've survived. Her scent clings to my skin despite the hours that pass, soap and heat and the particular sweetness that belongs only to her, and my body refuses to release the ghost of her weight against my chest.
Love makes you weak. My father's lessons carve through my thoughts, beaten into me before I understood what lessons cost. It made her betray us.
I am not in love. The denial rises automatic, reflexive, the same wall I've been reconstructing since dawn. The female is an asset. A complication. A debt contract with skills that serve House Draven's interests. Whatever happened in her quarters changes nothing about our arrangement.
The lie tastes bitter on my tongue.
I reach for the security controls, pulling up the feed from the medical bay because I cannot stop myself. She appears on my display in the glow of the medical bay's lighting, bent over the analysis equipment I acquired for her, her lips moving as she talks to herself.
The rigid tension that has defined her posture since her arrival has eased into stillness, her spine carrying less of the burden that had been pressing down on her. Settled. The word surfaces, and ice threads through my veins.
She should be more guarded after what passed between us. I should never show softness. It’s a side of me I'd thought dead.
She moves through the medical bay like a female who has stopped expecting the ground to collapse beneath her feet.
She's staying. Not physically, not in any manner the contract doesn't already guarantee, but her spirit has ceased fighting to escape.
Her gaze flicks to the camera I'm looking at her through and her plump lips curve before she goes back to her work.
I want her in my arms again. Want her to fall asleep knowing she's safest next to me, her body tucked against mine, her breath warm on my throat.
I want to touch her through the night, scent her, taste the salt of her skin on my tongue.
I want to bury my face between her thighs and coat my tongue with her pleasure until she shatters against my mouth.
Bury my cock in her and never pull out. Let her live the rest of her years impaled on me, filled and claimed and ruined for anyone else.
My cock strains against my pants, the ridge of it pressing hard enough to ache.
I can't think this way. But she smiled at me, knowing I'd be watching, and I was powerless against the flood.
A colder truth follows: if I can see the shift in her, others will too.
They'll see that she matters to me and things that matter to me become weapons in the hands of those who would destroy me.
I close the feed before the hunger can sink its teeth any deeper. She needs to work. I need distance. I need the hours between now and whenever I next see her to rebuild the defenses she keeps dismantling. The distance lasts approximately three hours before I manufacture a reason to check on her.
The medical bay doors open at my approach, and she looks up from the console. Our gazes lock, and the air compresses into a density too thick to breathe.
“Progress?” The word scrapes out of me, raw from the effort of maintaining distance when my cock presses hard against the seam of my pants.
Her gaze narrows as it travels over me, lingering on the evidence of what she does to me before returning to my face. She sees. I can hide nothing from this female.
“Thank you for asking. I've made significant progress.” She turns back to the display, gesturing for me to join her at the console, and I close the distance because the investigation demands it.
Not because her proximity makes the restless ache in my chest ease into a bearable rhythm.
“The samples from the Bazaar allowed me to isolate the compound's molecular signature. Here.”
Her analysis fills the screen, chemical structures annotated in her neat hand.
I track the data without comprehending it, too aware of how close she stands, how her heat reaches me across the remaining inches, how the memory of her body pressed against mine keeps surfacing despite every effort to drown it.
“Manufacturing leaves signatures.” Her words cut through the haze.
“Every facility has tells. Trace elements from their equipment, patterns in how they synthesize.” She zooms in on a particular cluster of markers.
“This compound has markers I've never seen.
They don't match the manufacturing profiles from any of the three facilities we identified.”
I list off the suspected labs. “The Zhael labs. The Syndicate facility. Our pharmaceutical division.”
“None of them.” She meets my gaze, and the gravity in her dark eyes mirrors what takes root in my bones. “This compound didn’t come from Vahiri. Or if someone made it here, they used equipment that didn’t originate on this planet. Someone’s smuggling in materials to arm your traitor.”
Equipment acquisition routes through logistics. Through Vezra's division, with its authorization codes and supply chain documentation. If military-grade pharmaceutical equipment entered my territory without my knowledge, someone in her division processed the shipment or helped bury it.
Someone outside provided the equipment, and someone inside received it. The implication reshapes everything I thought I understood about the threat.
“Another House.”
“That would be my guess. Someone with resources and motivation to weaken House Draven's enforcement arm without triggering open conflict.” She pulls up additional data, evidence of her thorough mind at work. “The question is which House, and why now.”
The question burns through possibilities.
House Korvan manufactures weapons and pharmaceuticals both.
The markers she’s identified could match their military-grade output.
House Zhael runs spies who could identify targets and coordinate strikes.
House Sethrak wants us weakened after we fought over territory and bloodied both houses three years ago.
I need to think. To move. To not be in this room where her scent clouds my judgment and her safety has become tangled with my sanity.
She's making progress the traitor won't ignore. If they learn what she's uncovered, she becomes a target. If they see what she is to me, she becomes leverage.
I've put her in danger. Unacceptable.
“Keep working.” The words come out clipped, colder than I mean them. “Identify the markers. I need exact specifications of what we're dealing with.”
I need to think and there's only one place I can do that without eyes on me. I'm through the door before she can respond. I cannot afford the distraction of craving her. Cannot afford the softness.
The corridor stretches before me, and I walk until the medical bay disappears behind me, until her scent fades from the recycled air, until I can breathe again without remembering how she sounded when she asked me to stay.
The walls growing rougher as I pass maintenance access points and utility junctions, the lights dimming to emergency standards because no one comes down here who has no reason to hide.
I have reason. I've had reason for thirty years, since I was a boy newly made heir with blood on his hands and nowhere to put the softness my father kept trying to beat out of me.
The maintenance tunnels open to a natural alcove where canyon rock meets compound stone, a space too small to matter and too hidden to notice.
The creviks emerge from the shadows before I finish descending the final steps, six-legged bodies covered in coarse grey-brown fur that provides poor camouflage against the darker rock.
They're scavengers, native to Vahiri's canyon depths, survivors who exist in the cracks between territories that belong to species who would kill them for sport if the killing didn't require more effort than ignoring them.
No one wants them. They hold no value. No purpose beyond existing. I've been feeding them since I was nineteen years old and newly returned from my first collection, the debtor's daughter's face burned into my memory alongside the blood I couldn't wash from beneath my claws.
The scraps I saved from my morning meal emerge from my pocket, simple protein discarded from the kitchen.
The creviks approach with the hesitant movements of prey that has learned to recognize a specific predator as safe, their small bodies pressing forward, soft chittering sounds rising from throats too small to produce anything that might draw attention.
I crouch. Extend my palm. Let them eat from my hand while their bodies press against my knees and their small hearts beat against my legs. This is the only gentleness I allow myself. This, and the night I spent in her bed.
She looked at me this morning like she’d seen a person worth seeing. Not the monster, the enforcer, the weapon his father built to serve House Draven’s bloody purposes. She saw me underneath all that armor, and the recognition in her eyes hollowed out my lungs.