23. The Quiet Pattern #3
“While my tail is on your clit. Yes. I know where it is. I put it there.”
He switches breasts. Bites, gentle, then sucks the sting. The tail changes direction. I sob once, ugly, honest.
He goes lower.
Sternum. Belly. The line of hair below my navel. He breathes against my cunt and does not yet put his mouth on it, and I lift my hips like a woman who has forgotten she runs a station.
“That sound is going on the list, sweetheart.”
“There is a list.”
“There has been a list since day one. It is comprehensive. You just added to it.”
Then he uses his mouth.
I make a sound in his hair that is not a word.
He is not polite. He licks me open, slow, then seals his mouth over my clit and sucks, and the bond detonates.
I feel my own taste hit his tongue, I feel how much he likes it, I feel the feral thing in him slam forward and stay.
His hand under my thigh holds me open. His other hand stays on my sternum so the purr never leaves my ribs.
The tail does not withdraw. It stays on my clit beside his tongue, two rhythms, neither of them the same, and I cannot keep up and I am not supposed to.
“Tael—“
“Mm.” The vibration hits my clit. I jerk. “Take it.”
“Please—“
“I said take it, Natalie.”
I take it.
His tongue fucks into me. His tail rubs my clit. The mark at my throat burns warm. I come so hard I stop breathing. No word. A raw sound that goes on and on while the purr peaks in my sternum and his tail holds the rhythm and does not falter.
He works me through it.
He does not stop.
“Tael—I can’t—“
“You can.”
“I just—“
“You can come again. The tail is not stopping. My mouth is not stopping. You are going to give me another one because I want it and because you are wet enough to drown me and because you said yes. Take it.”
I take it.
The second one is meaner. Smaller at the start, then it locks and wrings and I sob his name into the dark while he licks me through it like he is starving. When he lifts his mouth, his chin is shining and the half-grin is wrecked and proud.
“There,” he says. “Better.”
I cannot answer.
He kisses the inside of my thigh. Hip. Belly. Sternum. The mark, canines set, not biting, my pulse jumping again. And then my mouth. I taste myself. I suck his lower lip. He growls into me.
The jacket and the field kit hit the floor between one kiss and the next. None of the care he spent folding mine.
He is inside me before the kiss finishes.
The head of him breaches me, and I moan into his mouth.
Thick. Hot. The first ridge catches and pops through, and my back arches.
Second. Third. He watches my face as if it is the only data that has ever mattered, and he feeds me the rest of him until he is seated, hips flush, so deep I feel him behind my navel.
“Look at you,” he says, ruined. “Taking me. Open. Mine.”
“Yours. Move. Please move.”
He moves.
Deep. Not fast. Each stroke drags those ridges over the place inside me that whites my vision. His hand pins my hip so I cannot chase; I can only take. The tail wraps my thigh, tight, and the tip finds my clit again and resumes that small, filthy circle in time with his thrusts.
“Stay there, sweetheart.”
I stay.
“That is the right answer.”
His mouth on my mouth. His eyes on mine when his mouth is not. His thumb on the mark, pressing, just to feel me shudder around him.
I shudder.
“There it is.”
“Tael—“
“My good girl.”
I come again on my.
The bonded climax hits both of us. I feel him finish from the inside: heat pumping, his pleasure detonating behind my teeth, the whole male delivered with his eyes open. I clench around the ridges and milk him, and he swears against my throat in a language I do not have.
He does not pull out.
He stays. Weight on me. Tail loosening from my thigh to my ankle, I have you wrap. Purr dropping to the deep after-register. Mouth at the mark.
“Mm,” he says, against it.
I make a sound.
“You are, sweetheart, very good at being quiet.”
I make another sound.
He laughs, low, against the mark.
“I am taking that as a compliment.”
I make a third sound that is an agreement.
He kisses the mark.
He stays.
The comm chimes at 2253.
Not the quiet chime. The override.
Flossie.
Tael, beside me, is awake at the chime.
I take the comm.
“Flossie.”
“Lovey.”
The dispatch voice.
“What’s wrong?”
“Charlie’s gone. Thane is in the wind. The safe house is empty. Twelve minutes of dead air on the perimeter feed at 2241. Petra called it in at 2244.”
A pause.
“There is blood, lovey. By the back door. A great deal of it. Not Petra’s. Petra is on my screen. She is fine.”
“Whose?”
“I do not know yet. There is no body. There is a track from the back door across the service corridor, fast, heavy, one male, and the track stops at the maintenance lift. We have, on the security feed, a glimpse of the male as he goes. Species unclear. Civilian kit, tattoos visible at the shoulder, hand at his side where the wound is, by the volume of the blood, going to need attention in the next hour.”
“And Charlie.”
“Gone, lovey. With Thane I assume. By the boot prints in the corridor, Thane carried her out the south service door at 2240, ahead of the male coming in the back.”
I sit up. The blanket falls. Tael is already up, sitting on the bed, pulling the field jacket over his shoulders in the time it has taken me to register that the comm has not yet ended.
“Flossie. Hold.”
“Holding.”
“Tael.”
“On it.”
He has my comm earpiece in his hand.
“JINX.”
“On the line, Tael.”
“Open private channel to Thane. Now. Override Florence’s joint-coordination archive. This one we are taking direct.”
“Connecting.”
A click. Static. The static lasts two and a half seconds.
Then Thane, on the speaker, voice low. Quieter than I have ever heard him.
“Vosk.”
“Thane. Are you all right?”
A pause.
“I need to tell you a few things and I do not, on this comm, have the time to be careful about them.”
“Talk to me.”
“Two contractors came in. One on the back-door feed I’m sure is still bleeding somewhere on Junction One. The second is on me. He cleared the south service corridor sixty seconds after I did. He has Charlie’s photograph on a comm tag and he is going to make another attempt.”
“Thane.”
“He is going to take it Vosk, so I am taking her off-station now.”
“Where?”
“Not saying on this comm.”
“Thane—“
“Vosk.”
A beat.
“All right. Check in when it’s secure. Don’t be reckless.”
“We’ll be out for some hours. Back when I am back. Tell Florence the bleeding contractor needs eyes on every medbay, every gray-market chemist, every back-corridor merchant who sells trauma kit without a manifest. He will, in the next ninety minutes, surface for treatment.”
“Copy.”
“Vosk.”
“Mm.”
“There is a thing I have to tell you and I would rather not.”
“Say it.”
A longer pause.
“My hands are stained, Vosk.”
“Stained.”
“Blue. The color does not come off. I have, in the last eight hours, washed twice. The color permanent on my skin.”
I look at Tael.
Tael’s eyes have gone still.
“Thane.”
“From the notebook, Vosk”
A pause.
“Thane. Is that—“
“In Korrhai law, yes.”
The room stills.
“Vosk. The first claim is made by the female. Not the male. She did it at 1447 this afternoon, at Florence’s desk, with a notebook full of ink she has been carrying on her hands for six months and the intent of putting her work in my hand.
Her biology cannot tell that intent from the other intent.
By Korrhai law, the two are the same intent.
The mark is on my skin. The mark cannot now come out. ”
“Does Charlie know?”
“She does not know. She has not asked why I have been carrying her, why I have not put her down, why I am not during this op or beyond, leaving her side. She thinks it’s protection. It is. But Korrhai law calls the second stage pursuit.”
“Thane.”
“Vosk.”
“And the third.”
“I am not, on this comm, going to explain the third to a Draelith.”
A beat.
“Vosk?”
“Mm.”
“Tell Natalie I am sorry. The whole of this. Her station. Her people. The mess of it. I would be at the SNAG office tonight to help her work it if I could. But I cannot.”
I take the comm gently from Tael’s hand.
“Thane.”
A pause.
“Natalie.”
“Apology accepted. Take care of your female. Comm us when you can.”
A long breath on the other end.
“Thank you, Natalie.”
“Bring her back, Thane.”
“I am going to bring her back, Natalie.”
“Good.”
I hand the comm back.
“Thane. When she wakes. The notebook. You are going to have to show her your hands.”
“Yes.”
A beat.
“I am, Vosk, going to make her understand what she has done. The conversation is mine. Do not comm me. I will comm you.”
The line cuts.
The bedroom is dark.
Tael’s silver eyes find mine. His thumb finds the mark on my throat.
The conduit warms.
“Tael.”
“Sweetheart.”
“That little human female marked him at nine seconds at Florence’s desk.”
“She did.”
“In ink.”
“In ink.”
“We should call Florence.”
He picks up the comm.
“JINX. Open Florence.”
“Opening, Tael.”
A click.
“Florence.”
“Vosk.”
“You are going to want to put the kettle on.”
“I am, lovey, already making tea for an emergency intake. The big kettle has been on since 2245.”
“You are going to need a second kettle. Charlie made the first claim on Thane this afternoon at your desk.”
Silence.
Long.
“Vosk.”
“Yes, Florence.”
“Define the first claim.”
“Korrhai law. Female mark-initiated. His hands are stained ink blue, Florence.”
A pause.
“I am going to need the second kettle.”
“Yes, Florence.”
“And Petra.”
“Yes.”
“And the small biscuits I keep for a midnight operational catastrophe.”
“Yes, Florence.”
“Bring your Natalie.”
“My mate is putting on her boots.”
I am, in fact, putting on my boots.
“See you in twenty, lovey.”
The comm cuts.
We go.