17. The Secret
The Secret
Tael
The door tears at the seventh slam.
The frame gives at the welded seam. The transparent wall beside it shatters.
I am through the opening before the frame finishes falling.
Claws out. Canines dropped. The sound in my chest is not a purr.
It is the sound a male makes when he has been on the wrong side of glass while another male bent to his mate’s throat.
The tear of the frame pulls Kesh’s head up off her throat.
I see three things in the first half-second.
Natalie. Center of the chamber. A scalpel at her own throat, the blade pressed against the mate-mark spot, her right hand shaking. Her dark eyes glazed. She has found the only leverage left in the room: if he bites, there will be nothing left to bite.
Kesh. Four inches from her face. Canines fully dropped. His hand at the back of her neck in the cradle a male’s hand makes when he is about to set a mark.
The console. Amber light. The timer is at one hundred percent.
And the smell.
The chamber stinks of pair-bond compound at a saturation I have never breathed.
And under the manufactured compound — under it — the small wrong of Kesh’s own pair-signature on her throat.
He has not set the mark. He has been close enough, long enough, that his chemistry is on her skin where the mark would go.
His chemistry. On her.
On the place I did not take last night because she asked me not to.
Mine.
The sound that comes out of me is not one I have made. It empties the room of every other noise. Kesh hears it. His body knows what it is.
Kesh’s silver eyes come to mine. He does not speak. His mouth is open at the angle where his canines are committed to the drop and whose body is milliseconds from closing the last four inches.
I close them.
I do not disable him.
I remove the distance.
The first hit is my claws through the back of his right shoulder, driven to the tile behind him. I pull. Muscle comes with the pull. He makes a sound. I put my other hand in his hair and smash his face into the console housing. Once. The amber flickers. Twice. Blood on the display.
The Draelith curve in his off-hand is already rising. I clock the rise. I pivot. The blade grazes my forearm where the rosette on the inside of my elbow sits. Pain registers somewhere I am not occupying. I rip the blade out of his grip and throw it. It hits the far wall and stays.
I want him dead. I want him off her. I want his mouth erased from the air she is breathing.
Natalie is moving.
The scalpel is off her own throat. Her MP blade is out of her ankle. Both blades in her hands. Six inches from Kesh’s left side at the angle my first cut has created.
Kesh turns to her.
He sees the two blades.
I should finish him. My body is already winding for the throat.
Then I see her face — and this is the only thing in the chamber my biology has the capacity to read in the next half-second — and it is not the face of the Head of Station Natalie Torres who held a briefing in her office at 0900 on day one.
It is the face of a woman who has been told, in the last three minutes, that the male she has chosen is dying, and who has decided that the male in front of her is going to pay for the information.
I hold. One second. I give her the second.
She drives the scalpel in below his jaw.
Not the throat — the small hollow above the collarbone where the carotid sits closest to the surface at her angle. The kill-angle MP combat instructors teach at nineteen. She has held it in her muscle memory ever since.
The scalpel goes in to the hilt.
Her MP blade sets at his ribs as insurance.
Kesh’s body registers the hit a half-second after his face does. His left hand opens. The sound of his knees on the chamber floor is the first thing in this chamber that is not the manifold or the breathing of the three of us.
I still have my claws in his shoulder. I do not let go until his weight is already going. Once is going to have to be enough. My body does not agree.
Natalie follows him down. Her hand on the scalpel. The blade still in. Her other hand bracing his shoulder.
Kesh’s silver eyes come to her face.
Not to mine.
He looks at her. His mouth moves. No sound.
What he manages is one syllable.
“Torres.”
His hand comes up. Slowly. It stops at his own throat — the spot Mira would have set on him four years ago.
He dies with his hand at the empty spot on his own throat.
Natalie lays him against the chamber floor. Her hand on the scalpel until his weight has settled. Then she pulls the blade out.
The blood comes.
She does not look at the blood.
She looks at me.
And I know what is in the look, because I heard every word that put it there.
Five days I have been carrying the thing I was going to tell her.
After Iris-Nine. Torek home, her station safe, her hands free of the case.
I was going to put the whole truth on the table where she could walk away from it.
I was going to give it to her the way a male gives his mate the worst thing he has: on his knees, with the exits unlocked.
Kesh gave it to her instead. In his voice. In his order. Through a speaker, with a manifold counting up over her head and a scalpel in her fist.
The telling was mine.
It was the last thing I had that was only mine to give her.
He spent it in front of me, through a door I could not get through fast enough.
* * *
The compound is still at saturation.
I take a breath I should not take, and the compound goes through my lungs and into my bloodstream and my biology commits.
My canines drop. My rosettes go to peak. My tail uncoils and cracks tile. The need to put my mouth on her throat is immediate and total. Kesh’s scent is still on her. I want it off. I want it replaced. I want my mark where his hand was until there is nothing left of him in this room.
The compound is in me too.
I have minutes.
Maybe less.
I do not know.
If I touch her throat, I will bite. If I bite, I am him.
JINX, on the private channel, tight: “Tael. The console housing is ferromagnetic. I can route a kill to the manifold from your position. Three steps to the console. Strike the housing at the welded seam.”
I cross.
My shoulder breaks the housing at the angle JINX has flagged. The amber light dies. The hum cuts. The timer freezes.
The air does not stop.
The compound is already delivered. The cabin is full of it.
JINX: “Saturation is logged at peak. I cannot tell you how long it stays in the air. I do not have data on this compound’s dissipation rate. I am sorry, Tael.”
“Copy.”
SENTRY, on the shared channel, gentler than I have ever heard her: “Tael. Officer Torres’s vitals are at the edge of my calibration. Her pulse is climbing. Her cortisol is at three times baseline. Her pupillary response is not hers. I am routing the feed to your overlay. I am here.”
“Copy, SENTRY. I have her.”
My arms under her. I lift her off the floor.
Her head against my collarbone — too close to my mouth.
I turn my face into her hair instead. Her hand with the MP blade comes up to my chest. The blade points away.
I take it from her hand and set it at my belt.
I do not trust what she might do with it in the next few minutes through no fault of her own.
I do not trust what I might do if she offers me her throat.
“Nat. Nat. I am getting you out.”
She does not speak.
I move.
The lab is across the corridor. I clocked the door on the way in.
I kick it open hard enough that the panel leaves the frame.
It is a medium-sized research space. A row of biometric monitors along the back wall, quietly displaying data from chambers I have been clearing. Cabinets along the near wall, all locked.
I set Natalie against the bulkhead. Gently. Where I can see her. Where I can put my body between her and the door. Where I can keep my teeth in my own mouth.
I break the first cabinet with my fist.
Nothing useful. Lab consumables. Glassware. Reagent bottles I do not recognize.
Second cabinet. Same. I put my claws through the lock because opening it properly would take seconds I do not have.
Specimen samples. A row of vials in cold storage. I scan the labels — none of them say counteragent. None of them say exposure protocol.
JINX, urgent: “Tael. Far wall. Right corner. Cabinet labelled in red.”
I cross. I see it. PERSONNEL SAFETY PROTOCOL. COMPOUND EXPOSURE.
I break the lock. The metal screams.
Three vials. One auto-injector.
I pick up the vial whose label reads SB-COUNTER-7 // INDUCTION COMPOUND // PRE-BOND PROTOCOL.
JINX, fast: “Tael. The label fragment ‘SB-COUNTER-7’ matches a partial entry in the BioSystems compound database I pulled from V-6. The entry indicates broad-spectrum efficacy across at least three Draelith-equivalent species. I cannot confirm efficacy on humans. I have no calibration data for this formulation in human physiology. I cannot tell you it will work. I cannot tell you it will not hurt her.”
“Copy.”
My hand on the vial. My biology is going where the compound is taking it. The lab is not far enough from the chamber for the air to be clean. Every breath is a fight not to put her on the floor and finish what he started with my mouth.
I am gambling.
I am gambling on a vial whose label JINX cannot fully read against the chemistry that is working on my mate.
The alternative is I mark her in a room that still smells like him.
I load the auto-injector.
“Natalie. I am going to inject you. JINX cannot confirm this works in humans. I am out of options. Tell me yes.”
She looks at me.
Her eyes are glazed, but they find mine. The set of her jaw — somewhere under the compound she is herself enough to give me a yes.
“Yes.”
The auto-injector goes into the artery in her neck. Three seconds. The vial empties. I pull it out.
I hold her.
I keep my teeth off her. It is the hardest thing I have done in five days. Harder than the door. Harder than not killing him myself.
The first minute, the counteragent does not, by anything I can read, do anything.
She is still saturated. Her skin still flushed. Her pupils still at full dilation. Her breath still shallow.
Her hand comes up to the front of my tactical kit.
“Tael.”
“I’m here.”
“Tael — the compound — I—“
I shake my head against her hair. I cannot say it.
“I need you to—“
“No, Nat.”
“Mark me.”
My biology is already there. The canines.
The rosettes. The pair-bond response broadcasting at saturation.
My tail uncoils and comes up around her waist on its own.
My mouth, which has been holding the discipline since her office, is no longer holding it.
One inch down is the spot. One inch. My body has stopped asking. My body is only waiting for the inch.
The discipline is the front of my brain only.
The front of my brain is the thing standing between her and a mark.
The front of my brain is the smallest part of me.
And here is the part I will not say out loud while the compound is in her: I want to.
My body wants to. The male wants to. She is asking me for the exact thing I have wanted since I walked into that briefing room and she put her hand out and did not flinch at the claws.
The wanting never stopped. It will not stop while I am alive, and the number of months I will be alive is the reason I am allowed to want and not allowed to take.
I am saying no to her and to myself with the same word.
“No, Natalie.”
“Tael — please—“
“No.”
“I am asking you.”
“You are not. The compound is. And I am — Nat, I am not going to mark you under another male’s chemistry. When you, the actual you, when the compound is out and you are looking at me — when you ask me then, I will say yes. I will say yes the second you say it. But not now. Not here. Not like this.”
The fury rises in her eyes at the rate the compound routes emotion through whatever channel is available.
“You are telling me no.”
“Yes.”
“Why.”
My voice breaks.
“Because I love you. Because you are not the one asking. Because I am not going to let what he did to you turn into what we did to each other. Because if I put my mouth on you now I will not stop, and I will hate myself, and you will hate me for taking your choice. I am holding the line for both of us until you are out of the compound and you can ask me again, and you will, and I will say yes, and we will do it together and clean.” If this works.
Her face.
The fury holds for a half-second.
Then it breaks.
Not in anger. The cry of a woman who has, in the last hour, been chemically hijacked, watched another male die with her blade in his throat, learned that her male has been dying of a condition he did not tell her about, and who is being refused the only thing her body is telling her would fix any of it, by the male refusing because he loves her enough to hold the line when she cannot.
She cries.
I sit down with her. I get my back against the bulkhead and I pull her into my lap and I hold her with both arms against my chest. My tail moves on its own — not at her waist. At her ankle.
The small wrap a Draelith male’s tail makes around the smallest joint of his mate when he is, by no choice of his own, in a configuration of I have you, I have all of you, I am not letting any part of you go.
My canines are still dropped. I keep my mouth in her hair. Not on her throat. The difference is a millimeter. The millimeter is all I have left.
I rock her.
I have never rocked anyone. I am not a male whose body does rock. My body is doing it whether or not I have a precedent for it.
My face at her hair. My mouth not on her. My hand on her shoulder, on her back, on her shoulder again. My biology is screaming at the discipline to break. The discipline holding by the millimeter.
She cries against my chest.
I do not have a sound for it.
The sound my chest makes — somewhere between the purr at the bottom register and a thing I do not have a word for in either language I speak — is the only sound I can give her.
It is a sound a Draelith male makes when his mate is breaking against his chest and he cannot, by his own refusal, give her what her body is asking for.
She makes a small sound back. Recognition.
She knows what the sound means.
Her crying loosens.
JINX, quiet: “Counteragent registering metabolic effect at three-minute mark. Compound clearing at approximately three times passive rate. Officer Torres’s pulse falling.”
SENTRY: “I have her, Tael. Vitals normalizing. I will alert you the second she is at clear baseline. Hold her.”
“Copy. Thank you.”
Natalie’s breathing slows against my chest. Her hand on my sternum. Her face wet at my collarbone. She has stopped crying on the surface. The wet stays.
“Tael.”
“I’m here, sweetheart.”
“Get me off this deck.”
“Copy.”