12. The Airlock #2
The two behind him have registered that a woman in a clean field jacket has put their lead man on the ground without hurrying, that she now holds an acquired sidearm, and that the six-foot-five Draelith behind her with the claws out has not moved.
They turn. They walk. They clear the corridor at the pace of men who have decided retreat is career-survivable and engagement is not.
I zip-tie the lead man to a bulkhead pipe. I do not take his datacard; he is not worth the storage. I stand. I turn.
Tael has not moved from his half-pace step-back.
His face is different. Pupils at full, and not the operational full; the other full.
Jaw loose. All five claws on his right hand extended, which I have seen once, at V-6, and not since.
The purr is audible through four meters of corridor.
His gaze is on my mouth, then my hands, then the place I am standing over a man I just put on the deck, and the look is not professional.
The look is hunger with a leash still on it.
He is not moving.
I cross the four meters, but I do not touch him. I stand a foot away and look up.
“Ship, Vosk. Now.”
“Copy.”
He walks a half-pace behind me. I hit the airlock cycle. The outer hatch closes. Fifteen seconds of decompression.
He is a foot away. Pupils blown. Jaw loose. The claws have retracted on the walk. He is breathing through his nose in measured, counted intervals, his control deciding how to address the female in front of him.
He addresses me.
“Torres. That was reckless.”
“It was three station thugs, Vosk—“
“Three. Armed. In a sealed corridor, in a configuration they set up while we were on the lift. Three men who were going to put a knife in you for whatever they thought you were carrying.”
“They were not going to—“
“You walked toward them alone. You told me to wait, Torres.
You did not ask. You did not check. You did not consult the partner whose biology has mapped you as the female he is going to be putting his body between and any threat for the rest of his operational career, and you walked alone at three armed men with your hand in your pocket and your sidearm holstered and—“
I kiss him.
For one full second, he does not move. The most operationally aware tracker in the Velarkis sector goes still, the tense outline of a lecture which has been interrupted by a kiss he did not authorize from a female whose competence he has just spent forty-five seconds itemizing.
The next second is different.
His hands come up to my face. Not gentle.
His grip discipline has been holding for days and has, in the last second, taken a structural injury he is no longer interested in repairing.
His thumbs at my jaw. The purr goes from audible to loud, and the loud transfers through skin contact into my ribcage, and my body does the thing it has been preparing to do without consulting me.
His mouth is warm. Warm in the way no human mouth has ever been warm, the architecture of a Draelith jaw at the corner of my mouth, a canine I can feel with my tongue, and the heat goes through my sternum and down between my legs in one fast electric line my nervous system has stopped pretending to file.
I make a sound in his mouth. He swallows it.
His pulse, under my palm where I have braced on his chest, is fast. Mine is faster. I feel them adjust. I feel my heart find his frequency and stay there, and my whole body does something I do not have a word for.
His tail finds my waist. Light. Then tighter.
A wrap, settling at the small of my back on the line his hand took at the wake-up.
The muscle that has been reaching for me involuntarily for days is finally where it wants to be.
He uses it to pull me flush against him, and I feel him, hard, through two layers of kit, pressed to my hip. The sound I make is not professional.
I press closer. Grind once, deliberately, because I am done pretending I do not know what I am doing. His breath catches at the press, a low rough intake the purr does not cover, the sound of a male whose discipline has stopped being the dominant operating instruction of his nervous system.
“Fuck,” he says against my mouth. “Natalie.”
His canine grazes my lower lip. The graze is a question. The answer is a sound I have not made in four years. I open for him. His tongue is in my mouth, and his hand is in my hair, and I am kissing him like I have been starving for it, because I have.
He makes a sound back, the gravel at its deepest register, and his hand slides from my jaw down my throat and stops at my collarbone. Not lower. The stop lasts half a second. Then his palm flattens over my breast through the kit, thumb finding the silk underneath it, and he groans when he feels it.
The stop was discipline but his discipline breaking is hotter.
I pull back an inch. Forehead on forehead. His thumb at my jaw. The purr synced to my pulse. The tail at my waist. His cock hard against my hip and neither of us pretending it isn’t.
“This doesn’t mean yes.”
“I know.”
“To the larger question. I haven’t decided.”
“I know, sweetheart. “Whatever you decide.” His voice is wrecked. “But if you kiss me like that again I am going to put you on the nearest flat surface and find out if you are wearing the lace too.”
I look at his mouth. I look at his silver eyes and I kiss him a second time.
Slower. His response is immediate; his mouth opens for me, his thumb at my jaw tightens a fraction, and the only things that change are the purr, which locks a half-register deeper, and the sync, which settles into something my ribcage reads as a permanent configuration.
I bite his lower lip. He swears into my mouth.
The interior hatch cycles green. The decompression check clicks complete. Neither of us moves. Three more seconds. His hand is still on my breast. My thigh is between his.
Then I pull back, with control I do not have, my hand on his chest where his heart is beating to the rhythm of mine.
“Vosk?”
“Torres”
“On the ship?”
“On the ship.”
We cycle through the interior hatch. Two steps. He pushes me against the bulkhead.
Not gently this time. The push is deliberate, and the bulkhead is at my back, and his mouth is on mine before the hatch fully seals.
My hands come up to his field jacket; it comes off at his shoulders.
Mine follows, pushed off by his hands at my arms, both jackets on the decking between our boots.
The purr has gone to a frequency I feel in my teeth.
His mouth at my jaw. My throat. The hollow where my pulse is outrunning his. He sucks there, hard enough to mark, and I gasp and fist his shirt.
“Been wanting to do that since the bar,” he says against my skin. “Wanted my mouth on you in front of that keeper. Wanted my hand between your legs under the table while you drank that green shit and pretended you weren’t wet.”
“Vosk—“
“Rook. Or Tael. Pick one and say it while I take this off you.”
My fingers at the hem of his shirt; it comes up and off, the fabric landing somewhere, my palm flat on the rosettes over his heart. His skin is burning. I drag my nails down his abdomen, and he shudders.
“Bunk, Vosk.”
He does not say anything. He gets his arm under my thighs and moves.
Corridor, bulkhead curve, the galley door I do not look at, the bunk hatch.
He sets me down on the bunk and kneels on the deck in front of me, silver eyes level with mine, his hands at my hips, the purr audible through every layer of fabric between us.
“Lie back.”
“That is not a request.”
“It is not a request, sweetheart. Lie back.”
I lie back. He pulls my boots off. Then the pants. Slow enough that I feel every inch of them leaving my legs. The lace is black. He sees it and goes completely still.
“Fuck.”
His hands land on my thighs. Spread them wide. He looks at the lace as if it is a problem he is going to solve with his mouth.
“You wore this on an op.” His voice is wrecked. “You wore this under kit while I sat two meters away wondering if you’d put it on.”
“Yes.”
“Cruel.” He kisses the inside of my knee. Then higher. “I am going to ruin these.”
“Then ruin them.”
His mouth at my throat. My collarbone. His hand slides up under the tactical kit. Under the under-layer. Up my waist, and — His hand stops.
His breath catches.
His palm is flat against the silk.
Black silk. At my ribs. The bra he found in the galley, which I have been wearing for the last six hours under a field jacket on an op, and which he has just discovered with the flat of his hand as I lie back on his crew bunk in the matching lace with his mouth at my collarbone.
The purr stops.
Actually stops. For the first time since the cache, the ambient frequency cuts out.
In the silence, his mouth against my throat, low and wrecked, the gravel cracking on the syllable—
“Good—“
He stops himself.
He stops the word at the second syllable. I feel the exact shape of it against my pulse. The good and the start of the girl, and he hears himself saying it and stops.
I heard the beginning of it. He knows I heard.
His forehead drops to my collarbone. His palm against the silk is shaking.
“Say it,” I tell him. My voice is not steady. “You started it. Finish it.”
“Natalie—“
“Say it, Tael.”