8. Waking #2
“Flossie.” Her name in my mouth. Not a warning. Not a title. A sound I have no context for making — rough, wrecked, the tactical vocabulary stripped to the single word that matters.
She tips her face up. Slowly. Deliberately. The movement of a woman who knows exactly what she is doing and is giving me time to stop her.
I do not stop her.
Her mouth is inches from mine. Close enough that I can see the pale freckle on her lower lip, the way her pupils have widened in the amber half-light until the brown is almost gone.
Her breath crosses my lips. Warm. Peppermint.
The smell of her want thick enough that every inhale is an act of destruction.
My hand moves from her stomach to her jaw.
Claws retracted — every point, both hands, a choice my body makes before my brain catches up.
My thumb against the hinge of her jaw, the pad of it tracing the line of bone, and she leans into my palm.
Like my hand on her face is a thing she has been waiting for.
Like she is not afraid of the man attached to it.
The gap between our mouths is two inches. Then one. My chin tilts down. Her nose brushes mine and the contact is so small, so nothing, and it sends a tremor through my arm that I cannot suppress.
She smiles against the almost-kiss. I can feel the shape of it. The curve of her lips an inch from mine, close enough that the warmth of her mouth is on my skin, and she is smiling, and I am going to —
“Incoming transmission from SRS.” Sprout’s voice, clipped and bright, from the corridor. The orb pulses tactical white. “Priority channel. Shall I route to the console, or would you prefer to remain horizontal?”
Neither of us moves for three full seconds. Her breath against my lips. My hand on her jaw. The gap so small that closing it would take nothing, less than nothing, a lean the weight of a thought.
Then the distance arrives. She pulls back.
I pull back. The cold air rushes into the space between us like water filling a wound.
Her cheeks are flushed, her lips parted, the skin of her throat red where the blush spreads below her collar.
My markings are running hot enough that the geometric lines must be visible, darkened, broadcasting what I was feeling to anyone with functional eyesight.
My body registers the absence of her as damage.
“Route it to the console.” My voice is wrecked. The residue of the purr dragging through every consonant, the growl lodged in the lower frequencies. I sound like a man who was two seconds from kissing a woman he has no protocol for kissing, because that is exactly what I am.
I stand. The bunk creaks. My tail is the last to cooperate, unwinding from where it has been anchoring me to her, and the loss of contact registers as a physical ache from base to mid-spine.
The state of my body is not subtle. There is no operational protocol for this — for standing at full height in a cargo bunk with the evidence of what a sleeping courier does to my anatomy visible through standard-issue trousers, no available concealment, and a Tier 1 threat rating that has ceased to feel relevant.
I reach for the framework. I am Xor Xax.
Nine years. Ninety-eight percent. I have neutralized assets in fourteen jurisdictions and I do not stand in cargo bunks wanting civilians.
The framework slides off like water. It has nothing to say about this.
She is watching me from the mattress. Hair loose, shirt rucked above one hip, the cardigan pooled beside the pillow.
Her gaze moves. Down, with the deliberate inventory of a woman who catalogues things because someone should, and what she is cataloguing right now is the full evidence of what a night pressed against her has done to Xarthian anatomy. Down. Holds. Up.
She meets my eyes with the look she wears when she opens the notebook.
Not pity. Not embarrassment. Not the performance of modesty from a woman who slept pressed against me half the night and knows precisely what she chose to stay near.
The look that says: someone should be paying attention to this.
And then the corner of her mouth moves. The small involuntary shift of a woman who is delighted by something and is only half-trying to conceal it.
The place her eyes rested is burning. Not embarrassment — I do not have embarrassment for this.
I have thirty years of combat conditioning and the body that comes with it and she looked at the evidence of what she does to me and the corner of her mouth moved and that small involuntary curve is going to be in my operational memory until Trell sends someone to end my career and possibly beyond that.
I leave before the sentence my mouth is building can arrive.
The console takes the transmission. Handler Merik — mid-tier, predictable.
“Agent Xax. Status report on the OOPS courier and the sealed container.”
“The courier is cooperating.” The lie exits clean. Practiced. I have lied to SRS handlers with a proficiency that used to feel like competence and now feels like — “Container remains secured. Trajectory unchanged.”
“Director Trell wants confirmation that the courier is not a complication.”
My claws dig into the console edge. Four crescent marks in the polymer, precise.
“The courier is not a complication.”
The lie holds. Merik terminates the connection and I stand in the cockpit staring at the co-pilot’s chair — not empty, not anymore, her cardigan draped over the back and a tea ring stain on the armrest — and the word complication is so inadequate for what Flossie Knight is that I want to laugh, and I have not wanted to laugh in longer than I can calculate.
The courier is not a complication.
The courier is a detonation.
I return to the bunk as Xor Xax. Tier 1 operative.
Ninety-eight percent compliance. Thirty-six-hour window before a flag.
Tactical parameters only. She is dressed — cardigan buttoned, hair re-braided, tactical vest visible at the collar, cross-legged on the mattress with the notebook in her lap and the pen moving in the quick, deliberate strokes I have learned to read from across a room.
She looks up when I enter and the Tier 1 operative lasts approximately one second.
She closes it before I can see. The gesture is fast, practiced. But the look she gives me over the notebook’s edge is not closed.
“Handler suspicious?” she asks.
“Handler is mid-tier. Limited analytical capacity.”
“That doesn’t answer the question, lovey.”
She is right. It does not. I sit on the edge of the bunk and the distance between us shrinks to eighteen inches and the purr, which I had managed to suppress for the duration of the call, stirs in my chest like an engine turning over.
“Merik reports to Trell on a fixed cycle. My deception will hold for a day and a half, perhaps less, before inconsistencies generate a flag.”
“Thirty-six hours.” She taps the pen against the notebook. The Morrison-trained operative calculating behind the warm brown eyes. “That’s not long.”
“No.”
“And after the flag?”
After the flag. After Trell identifies the lie and recategorizes me from asset to threat. After the kill order — not if, when — because Director Trell does not tolerate non-compliance and the 2% was never this. Was never choosing a courier over the organization that made me.