Chapter 3 #3
The corner of my mouth does something I don't authorize. She sees it. Her eyes narrow.
"This isn't a negotiation," she says.
"Everything is a negotiation. Your father knew that." I watch the words land, the flinch she tries to hide, the way her nostrils flare with the effort of keeping her expression level. I'm using her father as leverage and I feel the ugliness of it settle into my sternum like a swallowed coal.
But this is what I am.
"You want to know what happened to him. I want your cooperation."
"Cooperation." She tastes the word like poison. "Meaning what? You want me docile? Grateful? Should I get on my knees and thank you for the recycled air and the surveillance?"
"I want you to stop mapping escape routes that don't exist and start understanding that your best chance of surviving what's coming is me."
"The man who kidnapped me is my best chance of survival." Flat. Disbelieving. "That's what you're selling."
"I'm not selling anything. I'm telling you the market conditions."
She stares at me. I see her working through it.
The intelligence I've been watching on the feeds, operating in real time now, three feet away, close enough that I can smell the station coffee on her breath and the industrial soap from the hygiene facility and underneath both, something warmer, something that's just her skin and her fury and the animal reality of a body under stress.
"You're a monster," she says quietly. Not as an insult. As a classification. She's filing me.
"Yes."
She blinks. She expected denial, or deflection, or the performance of wounded humanity that men like my father used to make the cruelty seem reasonable. She got agreement instead, and it's thrown her off her axis by a degree she's trying to hide.
"At least you're honest about it."
"I'm honest about everything. It's my one virtue. Don't get used to it."
She almost smiles. Catches it. Kills it before it reaches her mouth. But I saw it; the ghost of it, the muscular precursor, and my marks pulse once, bright enough to see through my sleeves.
Her eyes drop to my forearms. To the light moving under my skin in the blue-violet spectrum of want. She stares.
"They react to emotion," she says slowly. "I read about it. The Empri bioluminescence. Genetic marker. Tied to your limbic system."
"You've done your research."
"I've been kidnapped by a crime lord with mood-ring skin. Research seemed prudent."
She steps closer.
One step. Deliberate. Into the space between us that I've been maintaining like a perimeter, the distance that lets me want her without the wanting becoming unmanageable.
She crosses it and the air changes, station-recycled and sterile, but now carrying her heat, the micro-climate of her body disrupting the atmospheric equilibrium of the room.
She's close enough that I'd have to tilt my head to meet her eyes.
Close enough that if I reached out, my hand would find her hip, the curve of bone under the standard-issue fabric.
I don't reach. My hands stay on my knees.
The discipline of not taking what I could easily have is the only prayer I know how to say.
"You can feel everything I feel," she says. Not a question. She's working it out, the implications of my biology, the vulnerability embedded in the power. "The bioluminescence, it's empathic reception, isn't it? Not just a display. You're reading me."
"At this distance. Yes."
"So feel this."
She opens.
That's the only word for it. Something behind her eyes, a wall, a dam, whatever architecture she's been using to hold herself together, shifts, and what pours through the gap hits me like a hull breach.
Hatred. White-hot, clean, righteous: the hatred of a woman who's been stolen from her life by a man who sits in a missing tyrant's chair and calls it inheritance.
It floods through the narrow space between us and my marks blaze in response, lighting up along my forearms, crawling toward my neck, a map of her fury rendered in light under my skin.
Terror. Under the hatred, feeding it: the animal knowledge that she is alone on a station full of people who answer to me, that no one is coming for her, that her survival depends on the restraint of a man whose father had none.
The terror tastes like acid on my tongue and I have to breathe through it.
Grief. God, the grief.
For her father, for her freedom, for whoever she was three days ago before a cargo hold and a collar and a set of coordinates that ended at my door.
It's a black hole at the center of everything else, pulling the other emotions into its gravity, and I feel it in my chest like a fist closing around something vital.
And underneath.
Underneath all of it.
The thing she can't hide from me.
Attraction. Unwilling, furious, ashamed.
The biological recognition of a body responding to proximity, to the specific frequency of my voice, to whatever chemical accident of genetics makes her nerve endings fire when I'm near.
She hates that she feels it. The hatred and the attraction are braided together so tightly they're almost the same thing, and feeling them simultaneously is like touching a live wire.
It's pain and electricity and the inability to let go.
My marks are blazing. Full spectrum now, blue-violet up to the near-ultraviolet that the human eye barely registers but the body feels.
It's a pressure, a hum, the sense of standing too close to something radioactive.
My pupils are doing whatever they're doing, dilating, probably, the involuntary response to stimulation I can't suppress because my biology is a traitor and always has been.
My control cracks.
Not breaks. Cracks. A fissure, hairline, running through the wall I've built between wanting and taking. For one second, less, a fraction, the distance between us becomes a choice I'm actively making rather than a default state, and the effort of maintaining it shows on my face.
She sees it. Her breath catches. Her eyes widen. And I watch her realize, truly, fully realize: she has power here. Not the power of the captor, not the power of violence or authority or empire.
The power of being wanted by something dangerous, and knowing exactly what lever to pull.
"Careful," I breathe. My voice sounds like a stranger's, low, strained, scraped raw by the effort of not moving. "You're teaching me what buttons to push."
"Maybe I want you to push them." She snarls it.
Actually snarls, her lip pulling back from her teeth, and the combination of aggression and proximity and the cocktail of her emotions still crashing through my nervous system makes my vision narrow to her mouth.
"At least then I could hate you honestly. "
She's challenging me to do the thing I've refused to do.
To close the distance. To put my hands on her.
To prove that I'm exactly what she called me: a monster, her classification, accurate, irrefutable.
She wants me to lash out so that she can stop being confused about the wanting and settle into the clean simplicity of being a victim.
She wants me to be my father because my father was simple. My father was a problem with a clear shape, a villain with a legible script, and you could hate him without complication.
I am not simple. And she knows it. And that's the thing she can't forgive.
I stand slowly. She doesn't step back and the space between us compresses to inches and my marks are so bright they cast light on her face; blue-violet shadows pooling in the hollows of her cheeks, under her jaw, in the dip of her throat where her pulse is hammering fast enough that I can count it.
I don't touch her.
I lean close enough that my mouth is near her ear and I hear her breathing stop, and I feel the full-body clench of her wanting me to and hating herself for it, and it takes everything I have, every molecule of the discipline that separates me from the dead man in the portrait, to just speak.
"When you're ready to stop testing me and start surviving, you know where to find me."
I step back.
I leave.
The door seals between us and I stand in the corridor with my marks blazing under my clothes and my hands shaking at my sides and the taste of her emotions still on my tongue like something sweet that I'm going to think about when I shouldn't, in the dark, in the quiet hours when the station hums and I'm alone with the portrait and the empire and the wanting.
Dexter returns in three days.
My brother is coming home, and I have a woman in my quarters who's learning to weaponize her own heartbeat against me, and Ethan knows something about her father that he's holding like a knife behind his back, and the Collective is circling, everything my father built is trembling on the axis of what I do next.
I press my palm flat against the sealed door. On the other side, I feel her: standing exactly where I left her.
Not pacing or moving. Breathing.
I pull my hand back before the warmth of her registers through the metal.