Chapter 36
TASK
SFS POLARIS
She brings him breakfast the next morning, avoiding his eyes as she sets it down a tray with the Polaris’ specialties — rehydrated scrambled eggs and freeze-dried strawberries. “I thought you might be hungry,” she says.
I’m still ravenous for you, he thinks, but keeps his mouth shut. The memory of her biting into his neck as she gasped out his name threatens to overtake him. They could again now, if she was quiet.
She’s left her hair down. It falls in soft waves over her shoulder, and he swallows hard, trying to focus on the pain where his skin has knitted back together down his abdomen, even as his eyes skim over the bruises on her neck. The ones he’d left.
“Thanks,” he says, his voice raspy from disuse overnight.
“Of course,” she says quietly, still avoiding his eyes. “How are you doing?”
He reaches for the tin of coffee and takes a sip, considering what to say. He’s fucking phenomenal, all things considered. He kissed her last night. Had her in his arms, made her make the most delicious noises. And he’s alive, thanks to her. He says none of that, though, settling on, “I’m alright.”
“Good,” Kit replies, finally looking up at him. “Can I see the wound again?” She’s standing several steps away from him, her hands clasped in front of her.
Task nods, moving the tray to the table next to him and beckoning her forward. She lifts the blanket, her warm fingers dragging down his abdomen, and he’s immediately turned on. He rests his head back on the pillows, looking at the ceiling as he sucks in a breath.
“Sorry,” she says, determinedly keeping her fingers far away from his waistband, from where she touched him yesterday. “Does it hurt?”
“A little,” Task says, honestly. “But you don’t have to —”
He startles as a warm jolt of magic settles into him, the skin turning a lighter pink. “This feels oddly familiar,” he tries to joke, but she’s tense, clearly embarrassed about what they did last night.
He grabs her wrist, and she startles. “I don’t regret it,” he almost growls.
She should know that he’s not embarrassed, even if she is.
That he needed her in a way he couldn’t articulate, and that he doesn’t think he’ll ever stop needing her.
“In fact….” He drags her hand lower, pressing it to where his cock stands at attention, and she gasps.
“Feel what you’re doing to me right now. ”
“Task,” she admonishes, lifting her hand and stepping back from the bed again, though he sees a splotch of pink bloom on her chest and creep up her neck, peeking out from beneath her shirt.
“Sorry, love,” he smirks, though he’s not.
She takes a deep breath, and he braces himself for whatever she’s about to say.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” she says, and his heart falls, unsure where she’s going with this.
“But yesterday, I broke every rule I swore to follow when I became a Luminary. I took advantage of you in a vulnerable state. I shouldn’t have.
If this was any other circumstance, I would resign, but I can’t right now. ”
“Kit,” he says firmly. “You did nothing wrong. I didn’t ask you to stop. I wanted you there. Wanted you.” It’s the truth, even if he was a bit high on a combination of Pain Draught and leftover adrenaline.
She worries her lip between her teeth, her green eyes flitting between him and the curtain surrounding his bed. “I…I just —”
“If you don’t want this, that’s fine,” Task cuts in, his heart breaking even as he says the words. Even as he knows it’s better if she doesn’t. “If you’re regretting it, I understand.”
“Task, that’s not —”
“But you didn’t take advantage of me.” He snorts a laugh. He catches her gaze, making sure her eyes are on him. “And I still want you.”
She’s silent as he leans his head back again, feeling as though he’s been turned inside out, his emotions tumbling around inside of him in a way he hates. It makes him uncomfortable, feeling things.
Finally, he hears her say, “I liked it.”
He feels victorious hearing those words, even as she covers her face with her hands and lets out a nervous laugh. “I can’t believe I’m saying that. Out loud. To you.”
“To me?” Task asks, raising his eyebrows.
“You must know you’re insufferable, like, ninety-five percent of the time,” she says.
“Voss tells me ninety-nine, but I’ll take your estimate,” he replies, lips tilting up into a smile. “Come here.” He gestures to her.
She hesitates, but she moves back to him, cautiously sitting next to him on the edge of the bed, still keeping a bit of distance.
He doesn’t want to be cautious, though, wants to touch her again, feel her against him. He wraps an arm around her, resting it gently along her back and curving it around her hip. His skin tingles where it touches her, but he instantly feels a sense of calm.
She settles into him, and he brings a hand to her cheek, running his thumb along her jaw. He can feel goosebumps rise along her skin, and she shivers against his touch. His heart is thumping against his chest, threatening to burst free of his ribcage as he asks, “Can I kiss you?”
She swallows, running her tongue along her bottom lip, and he doesn’t know how much longer he can wait for her to respond, wants her mouth against his more than he wants anything else in his life. “Yes,” she says, after what feels like an eternity.
He pulls her into him, pressing his lips to hers softly, sighing when she brings her hand to his neck and deepens their kiss, opening her mouth to his. It feels like falling at the same time as flying, a rush through his entire body that sets all his nerve endings alight.
She pulls back before he wants it to end, surges up to meet her lips again, but she shakes her head with a small smile. “I need to go check on Voss.”
“Are you sure?” Task pleads, a bit pathetically. If he wasn’t aroused before, now he’s practically panting with desire, so hard it’s almost painful.
“Sorry,” Kit sings, and now he knows she’s teasing him as she stands up, adjusting her shirt from where his hands had tangled in it, a little flame burning in her green eyes. “I’ll be back later.” She points to the abandoned tray. “Eat.”
“I’m looking forward to later,” Task says, winking at her, and she turns on her heel, rolling her eyes.
Kit
Nevis is with Voss when Kit pulls back the curtains around his bed across the medical bay.
This is why she was concerned about getting close to Task.
Nevis could have barged in at any moment, seen them kissing each other, touching.
She’d kept it together this time, made him stop with only a kiss, but her entire body feels like it’s been set on fire.
Nevis eyes her as if she can tell, and Kit feels her face get hot.
She turns to Voss, who is very much awake, his reddish-brown hair mussed from sleep, his bandaged leg bent loosely atop the sheets. “How are you?”
“Better since Nevis arrived.” He throws her a grin and she blushes, almost dropping the syringe she’s busy filling. If Kit didn’t know any better, she’d say her friend had a crush.
“I’m glad she’s curing all your ills,” Kit says, turning to Nevis and shooting her a smile. “Have you redressed the wound yet?”
“I was about to, before you so rudely interrupted,” Nevis says, flipping Voss’s IV port open, injecting him with the solution.
“Well, don’t let me get in your way,” Kit says, hands up. “I just wanted to talk to Voss about the attack.”
“Ask away,” Voss says, leaning back into the white pillows at the head of the infirmary bed.
Nevis bends over him, deftly unwrapping the bandages from Voss’ thigh, a pinkish blush traveling up her neck and to her face as her fingers reach his groin.
She’s trying to keep a straight face, remain professional, but her breathing is slightly too fast. Neither she nor Voss says a word, but Kit thinks she could cut the tension in the room with a lumi-dagger.
“Who were they?” Kit asks, breaking the silence.
Voss’ eyes shoot up to her, and he rubs his beard, sighing.
“I’m not entirely certain. We’ll need to wait until the one we captured is…
recovered enough to speak.” He shoots her a pointed look, as she recalls what she’d done to save Task, that she’d done it in front of Voss. That he now knows what she can do.
“It was necessary,” she says.
“You don’t see me arguing,” Voss says. “But Nevis was saying it could be days before he’s awake.”
Kit sighs. She’d thought that Voss might know more, that he could provide answers that Task couldn’t, seeing as he’d been awake longer and is recovering far more quickly.
“But,” Voss says, grabbing her attention again, “I clocked them when they came in. All black, the yellow triangles on their armbands. If those symbols mean what I think they do, I’ve dealt with them before. They’re mercenaries — call themselves the Falcons.”
“And what do they want?” She’s almost positive they were after her, but she needs to hear someone else confirm it.
“I’d think that was obvious,” Voss says, wincing as Nevis applies a paste to the tender skin she’d unveiled.
“Humor me.”
“You, of course,” he says, as if it’s simple. “You’re a Vitalis, aren’t you?”
Kit is silent. If they’re as rare as Amaltheia has made it seem, she’s not certain this is a fact she should be widely sharing. Even if Voss saw it with his own two eyes.
“I…I think so,” Kit says, after pondering for a minute, figuring that Voss is safe enough. “Yes. But I don’t know how.”
Voss is quiet, chewing the inside of his lip as he thinks. “Well, in any event, someone hired them to come after you.”
“Who?” Kit asks.
“I’m hoping to find that out shortly,” he says. “As soon as Neve here heals me and I can walk again, I’ll go get it out of him.” He throws a grin toward Nevis, his tone light despite his words.
Kit doesn’t particularly want to envision what getting it out of him might entail, but she swallows over the lump in her throat and nods. “Promise me you’ll tell me when you know.”
Voss studies her, tilts his head as if seeing her for the first time. “Of course,” he says, as if this is obvious.
Nevis hovers awkwardly between them, eyes darting back and forth as she tries to parse out what is being left unsaid.
Kit doesn’t blame her. She often feels this way — finds herself examining Task’s face for the slightest muscle twitch, a tiny arch of a brow, a slight pull of his lips.
He’s so guarded most of the time, unwilling to let her in, but when he does…
she almost sighs, her stomach swooping as she remembers last night, the way she’d almost lost him but managed to keep him, the way he’d kissed her only ten minutes ago as if she was air itself.
“Kit.” She comes back to reality, jarred from the reverie she’d found herself caught up in. “How are you doing?”
Great question, she thinks. Too much happened yesterday — too many things she hasn’t yet had the opportunity to process, to unpack.
The only thing she was certain of when she woke up this morning was that she’d broken every rule she’d sworn to uphold as a Luminary.
Not only regarding fraternizing with a patient — which was strictly forbidden — but to also do no harm.
The thing about her power, the thing she hadn’t yet come to grips with, was that she was. Whenever she was imbuing something with life, she was harming something else. She’d healed Task, but she’d crippled someone else.
“You there, Kitty?” Voss asks, and when she forces herself back to the small room, she notes that Nevis has stepped out. She slumps against the wall near the doorway, head resting against it as she stares up at the ceiling.
“Sorry,” she breathes. “It was a long night.”
“I can tell.” She can almost hear the smirk in his voice, and she snaps her gaze to his. Sure enough, he’s biting back a smile, eyebrows raised. She flushes with the realization that he knows. He somehow knows.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Kit huffs, her heart racing.
Voss points to her neck, waves his finger back and forth. “Just a bit of leftover evidence.”
Kit claps her hand over her neck, her cheeks suddenly flaming.
Why hadn’t she thought to look at herself before barreling in here?
She runs to the tiny mirror over the sink in the corner.
“Dammit,” she mutters as she peels her fingers away, revealing the purple bruises leftover from their activities last night.
He’d marked her, and she’d been so lost in it she hadn’t noticed.
It’s there, clear as day. A trail of love bites down her neck that Voss and surely Nevis had seen.
“For what it’s worth,” Voss calls over to her, “I’m happy you two finally got your heads out of your asses. Though I wish it hadn’t taken Task almost dying for one of you to stop being so goddamn stubborn.”
She can’t help but think that he’s a good friend, even as she digests what he’s saying.
That they were not as stealthy as she’d thought.
That apparently the thing that had been blossoming between them was visible to everyone else in a way they’d kept hiding from themselves.
“It’s nothing,” she finds herself saying.
“It better not be nothing,” Voss says, more to himself than to her, but she hears him anyway and raises a brow. “He’s not built for nothing, no matter how much he tries to convince himself he is.”
Kit nods, pushes a piece of hair behind her ear, feels the heat still in her cheeks. This is Task’s best friend, arguably the person who knows him best. She shrugs a little, says, “It might be something.”
“He deserves something,” Voss says, with an air of finality. Then more quietly, “After all this time, he deserves something good.”