Chapter 6 Talia
Talia
Seven days.
Seven days of his gravitational pull, and I've learned the shape of every room he lets me occupy.
The command center with its wall of feeds and the ghost-light of data scrolling across his face.
The galley where I eat alone most mornings, picking at food that's better than anything I've had before because even his scraps are luxuries.
The corridor between my quarters and his, which I've walked enough times now that my feet know the slight dip in the floor plating near the third junction, the place where the recycled air shifts from cold to colder.
But I have never been inside his quarters at night until now.
The door slides shut behind me and the sound is soft, almost polite, and that's the worst part. Everything in Zane Torrence's world has manners. The violence is well-dressed. The cage has tasteful lighting.
"Sit," he says without looking up.
He's at the long table near the view port, my father's cargo manifests spread across the surface in overlapping holographic layers.
Blue light catches the angles of his face and turns him into something carved from the dark between stars.
His sleeves are rolled to his forearms, which is a new cruelty I wasn't prepared for.
The corded muscle there, the veins, the way his hands move through the data like he's conducting something only he can hear.
I sit.
The chair is real leather. I don't know what animal died for it, or on what planet, but it's soft enough to make me hate myself for noticing.
His quarters are nothing like what I expected, and exactly what I should have known.
Sparse where it matters, opulent where it cuts.
No clutter. No personal effects except a single shelf of physical books with cracked spines, which tells me more about him than any dossier.
The walls are a dark composite that absorbs light, and the view port dominates the far wall like a wound in the station's hull, black space bleeding through with scattered stars.
Cold. Beautiful. His.
"Route seven," he says, pulling one manifest forward and expanding it. The blue glow intensifies, painting the table, painting his hands. "Your father used it exclusively for medical supplies until two years ago. Then the cargo weights changed."
I lean forward. The holographic display is detailed enough that I can read individual line items, and he's right. The tonnage shifted. Same route, same declared contents, but the actual mass increased by thirty percent across six consecutive runs.
"He was layering," I say, my voice steadier than I feel. "Legitimate cargo on top, something heavier underneath. The medical supplies were cover."
Zane's eyes lift to mine. Just for a beat. Long enough to feel like a hand pressing against my sternum.
"You recognize the pattern."
"I grew up in his house. I didn't need to see the manifests to know when the shipments were wrong.
The security got tighter. He stopped eating dinner with us.
" I pull another route overlay closer, my fingers moving through the light.
"Route twelve is the same. Look at the fuel consumption logs versus the declared weight.
He was burning twenty percent more fuel than the cargo justified. "
The corner of his mouth shifts. Not quite a smile. Something closer to satisfaction, and I shouldn't feel warmed by it, but my body doesn't care about should.
We work.
For an hour, maybe longer, we work side by side and it's the closest to normal I've felt since I arrived.
My mind does what it was trained to do: pattern recognition, data analysis, the quiet forensic work of following money through the gaps in paperwork.
I'm no analyst, but knowing the mechanics of things makes me valuable enough that Zane lets me lead.
That's the dangerous part. He asks questions that aren't condescending, that are actually sharp enough to push my thinking in directions I hadn't considered.
He listens when I explain the routing anomalies with the focus of a man who understands that good intelligence is worth more than good soldiers.
And the whole time, I am aware of him.
The way he sits, controlled and still, spending no energy on anything unnecessary.
The low hum of his breathing. The scent of him, which I have catalogued against my will over seven days, and which I can now identify at component level: something woody and warm that might be real sandalwood, the metallic trace of whatever oil he uses on the sidearm he thinks I haven't noticed in the shoulder holster he removed when I sat down, and underneath all of it, underneath the station's recycled nothing-air, something that is just skin.
Just him. Warm and alive and close enough that if I shifted my weight two inches to the left, my shoulder would touch his arm.
I don't shift.
I watch his hands instead.
They move through the holographic data with precision, fingers long and deliberate, and I think about those hands on the throat of the man in the docking bay three days ago.
How they'd squeezed without trembling. How he'd held the man's gaze the whole time, patient as a surgeon, and then let go at the exact moment the man's eyes started to roll back.
Controlled even in violence. Especially in violence.
I think about those hands on me and the thought arrives fully formed, not a whisper but a shout, and my whole body responds to it at once.
Heat crawls up my throat. My pulse kicks hard enough that I can feel it in my wrists, between my legs, at the base of my skull where something tightens like a fist.
And his marks flare.
The bioluminescent lines along his forearms pulse from dormant to vivid in the space of a breath, cyan-blue light bleeding through his skin like a bruise made of electricity. It's beautiful and alien and it means he felt that.
Felt me feeling that, the marked bond between us carrying my arousal to him like a signal flare in the dark.
His hands stop moving.
The holographic data hangs in the air between us, forgotten.
My father's secrets, his cargo routes, the evidence I've been building all evening, all of it suddenly irrelevant because Zane Torrence is looking at me with those flat, controlled eyes, and the light pulsing under his skin is saying everything his face won't.
I should look away.
I don't.
"Stop pretending you're not thinking about it," I say, and my voice comes out lower than I intend, rougher, like something that's been scraped raw.
He doesn't move. Doesn't blink. The marks on his forearms pulse once, slow, like a heartbeat.
"I never pretended." His voice is quiet. Level. The voice of a man who has lived so long inside his own control that even this, even the cyan glow betraying him, doesn't crack the surface. "The question is whether you'll admit you're thinking about it too."
The words land in my chest and detonate on a delay.
I could lie. The thought surfaces and sinks in the same instant, because he would feel the lie through the bond before it finished leaving my mouth.
He would feel the spike of my pulse, the heat in my blood, the way my body has been leaning toward him all evening like a plant toward the only light source in a dark room.
I could say no. Walk out.
Go back to my quarters and lie in the bed he provided in the room he allows me to occupy on the station he owns where I am, legally and materially, his property. I could refuse and he might let me, and that might is the thing that makes this impossible.
Might.
Not will.
Because I don't know what refusal costs here. I don't know if his patience has a floor, if his restraint has a shelf life.
That's the coercion. Not his hand on my arm, not a threat, not a locked door. Just the architecture of my situation pressing in on all sides like the station walls themselves, and me inside it, trying to find the difference between choosing and capitulating when the cage is already closed.
But here's the thing he knows, because he can feel it, because the bond is a traitor and my body is a collaborator: I want this.
The wanting has been building for days like pressure in an airlock, and I can dress it up in survival strategy, in the logic of keeping my captor satisfied, in the cold calculation of a woman making the best of an impossible situation.
I can frame it however I need to. But underneath the framing, underneath the rationalization, there is the raw, humiliating truth that his hands on the holographic display made me wet, and he felt it happen, and we both know.
I stand up.
The chair slides back. The leather sighs.
And I step forward.
Not toward the door.
He doesn't move when I kiss him.
I planned it as a challenge, a gauntlet thrown, proof that I am choosing this and therefore it cannot be taken from me. My hand on his jaw, my mouth on his, hard enough to say I am not surrendering.
For three seconds, he is stone.
Then his hand comes up and closes around the back of my neck and he takes the kiss from me like I never owned it.
Tilts my head the way he wants it, parts my lips with his tongue, and the taste of him is dark and warm and nothing I have a name for.
His other hand finds my hip and his grip is precise the way everything about him is precise, fingers pressing into the bone like he's measuring me, mapping me, claiming territory by touch.
I make a sound. I don't mean to. It comes from somewhere behind my ribs, caught between a gasp and something worse, something hungrier, and his marks blaze brighter in response. I can see the light through my closed eyelids, cyan burning against the dark.
He pulls back just far enough to speak. His lips brush mine with every word.
"Say it."
"I already stepped forward."
"That's not what I asked."