2. Reading the Air #3
She’s leaning. Not toward me; toward the warmth.
Two degrees off vertical, maybe three, angled in my direction the way a body angles toward a heat source without consulting the brain it reports to.
She doesn’t know she’s doing it. Her breathing is steady.
Her scent hasn’t shifted. She’s cold and her body is solving the problem the simplest way it knows how—by seeking the nearest source of heat. Mine.
I don’t step away.
I should. Two steps back. Let the cold air fill the space.
Be the tracker, not the male whose entire sensory array has narrowed to the two-degree angle, leaning toward his body heat in a cold docking bay while reading tool marks and having absolutely no idea what she’s doing to my scent overlay.
No idea that every degree she drifts closer makes the ache between my legs pulse harder.
No idea that I am cataloging the exact shape of the space her body is occupying and filing it under things I am not allowed to want.
JINX says nothing.
Smart.
“We need to trace the maintenance-level access,” she says, straightening. Back to vertical. The lean gone. The absence of it is almost worse. “Someone with credentials modified the diagnostic cycle. I can pull the access logs.”
“How long?”
“Three days. Proper channels.”
“Or I can narrow the pool in three hours through scent elimination. Every person who accessed this bay during the Torek window left biological trace. I can match the traces to the maintenance crew roster.”
“Scent elimination is not an admissible investigative methodology under Junction One protocols.”
“It’s admissible under Draelith hunting protocols.”
“We’re not on Draelithia. We’re on Junction One. My station. My protocols.”
“Your protocols that someone used to—“
Stop.
Your protocols, which someone exploited to take a male from under your cameras.
I hear it before it clears my throat and I catch it, because I watched her show me the denial chain this morning and her expression was the look about who’d been right about something terrible and would have given anything to be mistaken, and I’m an asshole, but I have limits, and the limit is right there in the rigid line of her shoulders and the way she’s holding herself like fury is the only thing keeping her upright.
“Your protocols,” I say instead, “need supplementing. With my methods. Supervised by you.”
She looks at me. Full attention. Her dark eyes stripping away the smirk and the swagger and the ninety-four percent.
The underneath is still hard, still aching, still remembering the way she leaned toward my heat like her body already knew something her mind hasn’t admitted.
My tail is doing something I’m going to pretend it isn’t doing—the loose, slow curl that only happens when the rest of me has already decided this is not a hunt anymore.
“Three hours,” she says. Flat. Controlled. “Scent elimination. Supervised by me. Documented through proper channels. If you find something admissible, we proceed through my protocols. If you find something inadmissible, I pretend I didn’t see it and file a retrospective authorization.”
My brain stalls.
She bent her rules. Not broke. Bent. Found the loophole in her own framework and walked me through it with chain-of-custody documentation and a straight face.
I expected the wall. I expected the regulations, but she held the door open and dared me to walk through it, and the sound of her voice delivering that sentence went straight to my cock and stayed there, heavy and hot.
“Torres.”
“What?”
“That was the most attractive thing anyone has ever said to me.”
“Get out of my docking bay, Vosk.”
I get out of her docking bay. My claws are still soft. My tail is doing something I haven’t authorized: the loose configuration, the unwound curl. Not the working tension, not the deliberate spiral.
The corridor is empty. My comm chirps. Flossie.
“How was Bay 7?”
“She found a security modification I missed. Someone extended the diagnostic gap by six minutes. They hacked the camera cycle from inside the system.”
Silence. Then the sound of a pen on paper. Flossie is writing in her notebook.
“From inside,” Flossie says. Quiet. The warm voice pulled inward, protected. “Maintenance-level access.”
“Someone on Junction One helped take Torek.”
More scratching. Then: “Come back to the office, lovey. We need to brief Xor.”
A pause. Softer: “This is going to hit Torres hard. Who had access? Who was trusted? Whose system was turned against them? That’s going to land on the same wound.”
The same wound. I don’t ask which wound, but I’ve seen the scar. I’ve seen the denial chain, and the controlled voice, and the shoulders going rigid, and recognized every piece because I have damage shaped the same way, earned differently, paid the same.
“Yeah,” I say. “I understand.”
“Good. Then you’ll know when to be careful with her.”
The comm closes. I walk through the corridor.
Claws soft. Tail loose. JINX is quiet for once, which means JINX is logging something he considers too important to ruin with commentary.
Or running the other numbers, the ones I told him to stop reporting to me.
Either way, I’m in more trouble than I thought.