Chapter 6
One drink. That had been the plan.
Kellat stood near the end of the long mess table with a cup of something the quartermaster swore was j’trin spirit in his hand, and revised his estimate of how long his determination not to throttle anyone would hold.
The wake was in full swing around him. Warriors packed the mess hall, and the stories about Daae were already growing in the telling, as they always did at these things.
The last one had the fallen warrior taking down two krin with a broken arm and half a rifle in a way that Kellat was fairly sure violated the laws of physics and every field report he’d ever read.
But nobody cared because that was the point of a wake.
The dead warrior got to be a legend for a night as his friends said goodbye.
He drank, letting the spirit burn its way down to his stomach, keeping Delilah in the corner of his eye.
She was a few paces away, a small figure in that shifting plum-and-silver gown.
He knew exactly where she was. The problem was, every unmated male in the room knew as well.
He’d been watching their sideways glances since they’d arrived, answering each one with a flat glare that sent them back to their drinks.
Then a heavy hand clapped him on the shoulder, sloshing the spirit in his cup.
“Lead Healer,” a scarred warrior demanded, shoving into his personal space, his breath reeking of j’trin. “Settle a bet. It’s true a male can survive a gut wound from a level-four drakeen, right? As long as he packs the injury fast enough.”
Kellat didn’t bother hiding his exasperation. “No. He draanthing well cannot.”
The warrior scowled. “Are you sure? Because Vaarec swore his old unit commander took a slash to the belly and walked it off.”
“Then whoever told him that story is a liar,” Kellat said flatly. “A level-four drakeen has a strike force that would cave in even null-atmosphere power armor. Nobody is walking that off. And they’re fast. Your insides would hit the ground before you did.”
The warrior blinked as he pictured it, then grumbled a curse and turned back to argue with his squadmates.
Turning around, Kellat looked for Delilah again and came up with nothing. Draanth, he’d taken his eyes off her for ten seconds, maybe twelve, and he’d lost her.
Then the sound of her laugh, bright and easy, cut through the room.
He turned automatically. She’d drifted toward the far end of the table, laughing at something the pilot had said.
Nivaak S’Maar. Young, broad-shouldered, and with the kind of looks females of all species stared at, he was leaning in toward Delilah.
He said something, and she laughed again, her hand coming up to cover her mouth as her eyes crinkled at the corners.
The cup shattered in Kellat’s hand.
“Draanth it all to draanthing hell!” he hissed, retreating to the edge of the table to drop the broken remains of the cup. The sting where the shards had cut him and the j’trin mingling with his blood barely registered as he watched the pilot charm her.
His heart slammed, hard enough to hurt, his gut twisting after it, low and ugly.
For a moment he couldn’t put a name on what was wrong with him, which was ridiculous.
He was a healer for God’s sake… He could name every structure in the latharian body and diagnose a hemorrhage from across a triage tent, but he stood there like a first-year student, thinking about his own symptoms with no draanthing idea—
He was jealous. Of a pilot. A boy with barely any braids, who had no claim on the female in front of him, and no reason in this life or the next to be standing that close to her.
Mine. MINE.
His control cracked, and he crossed the room in three strides.
“Delilah,” he growled, and her smile died as she turned.
Nivaak straightened and stepped back in one smooth motion, his expression carefully neutral. Smart boy. Perhaps he’d live to see his next rank after all.
“I need to run some tests,” Kellat said. “Your neural pathways. It won’t take long.”
Her brows snapped together. “What, now?”
“Yes. Now.”
He turned to leave without waiting to see if she’d follow.
She did. He could hear her behind him the whole way to the shuttle’s small medical bay, the whisper of the gown against the deck plating, the sharp little breaths of a female building up a head of steam. Palming the door open, he walked in, and had made it exactly two steps inside before—
“What is your problem?”
He stopped, his back to her, and dragged a hand through his hair. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Bullshit.” The brightness was gone from her voice, stripped out and replaced with a hard note.
“You’ve been hot and cold with me since I woke up.
Nice one minute, growling the next. Locking me in rooms. Dragging me out of parties.
And I’m done guessing, so either tell me what the hell is going on, or leave me alone. ”
He turned to find her standing with her arms crossed and her eyes blazing. Junior healers went pale when he raised his voice, and warriors twice her size would never dare speak to him like that. But she did.
He opened his mouth. Then closed it.
“You hauled me out of there like I did something wrong.” She took a step toward him. “I was talking to him. That’s it. Talking. And you came over there looking like you wanted to put him through a wall. So what is it? What are you so angry about?”
The answer burned a hole in his chest. Ninety-nine point eight percent. Five words, and she’d know everything. But the moment he said it, there would be no taking it back. And she was still healing…
She took another step forward, close enough now that he caught her scent, warm and floral and his, the gown shifting and clinging to her curves as she moved.
His gown. He’d bought it years ago on some festival concourse, the day he’d heard the empire had finally found compatible females.
He opened his mouth to answer, but then the primal need and the jealousy all collided at once, and he was there. He cupped her jaw with a big hand, his thumb brushing the line of her cheekbone. Her breath caught. Her eyes went wide, her lips parting.
He looked at her mouth.
And stopped.
His control caught again, hauling him back from the edge like a hand fisted in his collar. He dropped his hand from her face and stepped back, his breathing rough, pulse hammering like he’d run a combat circuit.
She stared at him, her chest rising and falling. The confusion in her eyes was already turning into hurt, and draanth it all to hell, that was worse than the fury.
“Kellat—“
“I can’t.” The words came out harder than he meant them to. “I can’t do this.”
He turned, hitting the door release, and walked out on her. Left her standing alone in the middle of the medical bay and kept walking.
The passage was empty and cold, the way this class of ship always ran cold away from the engines. Bracing a hand against the bulkhead, he let his head drop forward, dragging in a breath.
He’d nearly kissed her.
He’d wanted to. Wanted to more than he’d wanted anything in a very long life of wanting very little, but he’d stopped. Back on the station, he’d have called that caution, or clinical judgment… the correct course when dealing with a recovering patient.
But standing alone in a cold corridor with the ghost of her scent swirling around him and the memory of her soft skin under his fingertips, it didn’t feel like caution at all.
It felt like cowardice instead.
Men were an absolute fucking mystery.
Delilah sat on the edge of her bunk, staring at the closed door as the last five minutes ran in a loop in her head.
Kellat’s hand on her face, so careful it made her chest hurt, and the look in his eyes.
She knew that look; she’d spent enough years in bars watching men decide things about her to know hungry when she saw it…
But then it was like a wall had slammed down and he was gone, leaving her standing alone like the punchline of a joke she hadn’t been told.
She was not going to cry about it. No way, no how. She was also not going to sit here picking the whole thing apart, because that road ended with her deciding it was her fault, and she’d been down that road so many times she might as well have a loyalty card.
Something nudged her ankle gently. She looked down, and the little robot chirped, a small questioning sound that cracked her emotional doom-spiral clean in half.
“Yeah,” she said. “You’re right. Walkies.”
Walking the dog, walking the bot. Whatever. It didn’t judge her for being a disaster, and right now that made it her best friend in the entire galaxy.
Digging the little rubbery ball out of the supply bin she’d checked earlier in the room, she headed for the door.
She didn’t change out of the dress. It was pretty, and she wanted to feel like a princess for a little longer, even if the only being to see her in it was the little bot.
She wanted to be the woman in the porthole reflection for one more hour before she went back to being the girl in the borrowed hoodie.
Flicking the ball down the corridor, she watched as the bot went after it like its life depended on the outcome, all six legs scrambling, claws clicking and skidding on the deck plating.
It ricocheted off the wall, completely overshot the ball, and had to reverse.
She giggled, the sound bouncing back at her off the metal.
“Get it! Go on, get it. You can do it!”
The bot batted the ball ahead of itself, chasing it around a corner, and she followed, the skirt swishing around her legs. It was only when the corridor opened up, and the air went electric against her skin that she realized where they’d ended up.