Chapter 11
Zane
I feel her lie before she tells it.
A ripple through the bond, faint as a pressure change before a hull breach.
Not deception exactly. More like omission, the careful architecture of someone building a wall one brick at a time while smiling at you over the mortar.
Talia is getting dressed in my quarters, pulling on boots with the methodical focus of a woman preparing for something she doesn't want me to see, and the taste of copper floods the back of my throat.
She's afraid.
Not of me. Not today. This is a different flavor, metallic and bright, laced with something that takes me a moment to place. Hope. The most dangerous substance in the known systems.
"Going to the commissary," she says without looking up. "Astra said something about recalibrating my fitness benchmarks."
The lie sits between us like a loaded weapon on a table.
I could pick it up. Could press her against the bulkhead and take it apart piece by piece until she told me the truth, until that stubborn mouth gave up its secrets the way it gives up everything else when I push hard enough.
My hand is already half-raised, fingers curled toward her jaw, before I stop myself.
Not because I've suddenly developed restraint.
Because I already know.
I intercepted the message fourteen minutes ago.
Anonymous relay, bounced through six proxy nodes, the routing designed to look sophisticated but ultimately traceable if you have the right tools.
I have the right tools. The message promised information about Marcus St. Laurent, her father, the man who vanished into the black three years ago and left nothing behind but debts and a daughter who still believes he's alive.
The coordinates point to an abandoned cargo bay on Sublevel Nine.
The timing is set for two hours from now.
Every instinct I have says trap.
Every analytical framework I possess confirms it.
The message structure matches Zalt Consortium communication patterns with a seventy-three percent confidence interval, and the routing nodes pass through two systems where Consortium shell operations maintain infrastructure.
Someone is dangling her father like meat on a hook, and Talia is about to walk straight into the jaw that's waiting.
I ignore what this truly means: that Talia is clearly worth something to me, and that fact puts her in danger. It's no longer a secret. It was never a secret to begin with, but I've been less than careful.
Taking my own invincibility for granted.
I watch her zip her jacket. The one Astra gave her, fitted, with reinforced panels at the ribs that could stop a blade but not a pulse round.
Astra's training carved something new into her, and I can see it in the way she moves, each gesture a fraction more economical than it was when she first arrived on this station believing she was nothing more than a transaction.
"I'll be back in a couple hours," she says, and this time she does look at me. Those dark eyes searching my face for suspicion. Finding, I'm certain, nothing. Because I am very, very good at nothing.
"Take a comm unit," I tell her.
She nods. Talia takes a moment, pauses and leans forward.
She kisses my cheek on, a gesture so domestic it lands like a fist to the sternum.
The door seals behind her and I stand in the silence of my own quarters, breathing recycled air that still carries the ghost of her shampoo, something floral the station synthesizers produce that smells nothing like real flowers but that I've come to associate so completely with her skin that the scent alone can make my blood hot.
I count to ten. Then I open a secure channel.
"Dexter."
My brother's voice comes back clipped, already on edge. He runs at a higher frequency than I do, always has. Where my anger is a cold thing, patient and geological, his runs hot and fast and tends to leave scorch marks.
"What."
"Sublevel Nine. Cargo bay seven-seven-alpha. I need a tactical team in position within ninety minutes. Perimeter only, no engagement without my direct order."
A pause. "What's on Sublevel Nine?"
"Talia's walking into a Consortium trap."
The silence that follows has its own texture. I can hear Dexter processing, can almost feel the heat of his reaction through the comm. When he speaks, his voice has dropped to that register he uses when he's trying not to shout. "And you're letting her."
"I'm using it."
"Using it." The words come back at me like I spit them at a wall. "She may as well be your wife, Zane. You're going to use her like this?"
"She's also the only lead we have on the Consortium's network in this sector.
Someone inside their operation made contact.
If I stop her, the channel closes. If I let her walk in, I can map every operative they've positioned, trace the communication chain back to its source, and identify whoever authorized the operation. "
"And if they kill her."
I close my eyes. The bond hums between my ribs, a low frequency I've learned to read the way a pilot reads instrument panels. Her heartbeat, fast but steady. Her fear, that copper taste, building but managed. Her hope, the most dangerous part, burning like phosphorus.
"They won't kill her. She's more valuable alive. They want leverage against me, not a corpse."
"You're gambling with her life on a probability assessment."
"I gamble with lives every day. That's the job."
"Not her life." Dexter's voice has gone quiet in a way that concerns me more than shouting would. "You know you'll feel everything they do to her, won't you? Through the bond you've wrecklessly formed with her."
Yes. Every second of it.
"Get the team in position," I say, and cut the channel.
I route through the maintenance corridors to reach Sublevel Nine ahead of her, moving through the station's guts where the lighting runs amber-emergency and the air tastes like machine oil and old rust. My marks pulse under my shirt, responding to the growing proximity of her fear the way iron responds to a magnet.
I can feel her descending through the station.
The bond tracks her like a targeting system I never asked for and cannot disable.
The cargo bay is a gutted shell, one of dozens abandoned when this section of the station was decommissioned for structural concerns that were never actually addressed.
Crates line the walls in stacked rows that create natural sight lines and blind corners.
The lighting is sparse, emergency strips casting everything in that sick yellow that makes human skin look cadaverous and alien skin look worse.
I position myself in the control booth overlooking the bay floor, behind filthy plexiglass that hasn't been cleaned since the sector went dark. From here I can see everything.
Astra's voice comes through my earpiece, low and professional. "I have eyes on four heat signatures inside the bay. Two concealed behind the crate stack at the north wall. Two in the access corridor at the east entrance. They've set a crossfire pattern."
"Weapons?"
"Pulse carbines. One stunner, three lethal. They came prepared for resistance but not for a firefight. This is a snatch team, not an assassination squad."
Good. My assessment confirmed.
"Dexter's team?"
"In position. Six operators, three entry points. On your word."
"Hold."
I settle in to wait.
She arrives on time. Punctual even walking into disaster, and something about that, her reliability, the way she keeps showing up, makes my chest cavity feel two sizes too small.
I watch her enter through the south corridor, moving with that new alertness Astra beat into her, checking corners, keeping her back to the wall.
Not enough. Not nearly enough for what's waiting. But something.
She stops in the center of the bay. Turns a slow circle. The overhead strips paint her in bands of yellow and shadow, and from up here she looks small in a way she doesn't look when she's underneath me, when she's taking up every inch of space in my head.
"Hello?" Her voice echoes off the metal walls. "I'm here. I got your message."
Nothing moves. Ten seconds. Twenty. I can feel her heartbeat accelerating, can feel the hope starting to curdle at the edges.
"I'm looking for information about Marcus St. Laurent," she tries again. Louder. Braver than the tremor in her pulse would suggest. "You said you had something."
The north wall crates shift.
She sees them before they reach her. Credit to Astra for that.
The first operative comes fast, low, reaching for her arm, and Talia drops her weight and twists the way Astra likely drilled into her.
The grab misses. She throws an elbow that connects with something, and I hear the grunt through my surveillance mic.
The second operative is already behind her.
She kicks backward, catches a shin, buys herself a half-second of space.
It's not enough. It was never going to be enough.
The east corridor operatives converge. Four on one.
She fights all of them, and for a span of six, maybe seven seconds she is magnificent, all that training firing at once, her body doing things she didn't know it could do.
She breaks someone's nose. I hear the crunch.
She gets a hand on one of the pulse carbines and almost, almost turns it before the stunner hits her in the side and her muscles lock.
She goes down.
The sound she makes when she hits the deck goes through me like current, blue and scorching, and my marks flare so bright they burn through the fabric of my shirt.
The bond opens like a wound and her terror floods into me.
Not the clean copper fear of earlier. This is animal panic, black and vast and drowning.
Her lungs are locked from the stunner and she can't breathe and she thinks she's dying.
She thinks I don't know. She thinks she's alone.