Epilogue Three Months Later #3
This one is also not a word.
The pheromone reservoir at the back of the brass, registers the bonded chemistry at her skin and begins to release at the low concentration Velran calibrated.
I clock the first wave at four seconds. The scent is mine.
The scent is mine at the bonded register a Draelith male’s rosettes only release when his bonded female is naked under him. Her scent at this moment is outrageous.
She does not, at this moment, register the scent.
Her own bonded chemistry has calibrated to mine at the saturation level her body no longer notices.
She is, this evening, carrying the pheromone register of a bonded female who has just been mounted by her bonded male in her own bed, walking it, breathing it, broadcasting it, and she does not, at this moment, know.
She is going to know.
She is not, this evening, going to know.
Her hand goes to the disc. Her thumb at the front face, at the engraved Junction One pair-sigil. Her palm cups the brass. Her fingers curl around it and finds the back.
Her thumb at the back.
Her thumb at the script.
She does not, at this moment, lift the disc to read it. She is not, at this moment, looking. She is, by every read I have on her, feeling the brass at her own bonded skin and registering the chemistry the bond has just locked at the conduit and the disc at the same time. Her eyes are on mine.
Her thumb traces the engraved characters on the back without looking at them.
She does not ask what the script says.
I do not tell her.
She will ask. She is going to ask some evening from now when she takes the disc off in this bed and turns it over and reads it and lifts her dark eyes to mine and says one word, Tael, at the register the female says when she has just found a thing her bonded male did to her in the formal Draelith script of his own dead language and has, by the Natalie protocol, decided what she is going to do about it.
I am going to deserve what she does about it.
The smirk holds.
I kiss the disc once, at her sternum.
Then I sit back.
The second disc is still in my palm.
She looks at it.
Her eyes go from the disc to my throat. To the hollow where the mark she set sits. Where there is no brass.
Her eyes come back to my palm.
“Tael.”
“Sweetheart.”
“And the second.”
“Mine, sweetheart. By Draelith protocol the matched pair is always commissioned together. The male wears the half with the female’s name on it, at his throat, every day for the rest of his bonded life.
The female wears the half with the male’s name on it, at her throat, every day for the rest of her bonded life.
The discs are, by Master Velran’s commission, one. ”
“Then why is yours—“
“In my palm and not at my throat.”
“Yes.”
A pause.
“Because, by the protocol some hundreds of years older than my grandfather, the male does not put his own disc on. The male hands the disc to the female. The female puts the disc on the male. Or.”
“Or.”
“Or she does not.”
She looks at me.
Her dark eyes hold mine.
“The protocol allows her to refuse?”
“It does.”
“Has any female, in those hundreds of years, refused?”
“Some have, sweetheart.”
“And what happens, in the protocol, when the female refuses?”
“The male keeps the disc. He does not, by the protocol, ever put it on himself. He carries it. The disc waits.”
“For what?”
“For her to change her mind. Or for him to die.”
She looks at the disc in my palm.
She looks at me.
“Tael?”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
“Hand it to me.”
I hand her the disc.
She takes it.
Her hand on the brass. The cord at her wrist. The disc, in her palm. Her hand closes. Her dark eyes are on mine.
“On your knees, Vosk.”
I am, in half a second, off the bed and on my knees on the floor in front of her. My bondmark at my throat under her gaze and my hands at my thighs
She kneels up on the bed.
She is naked. The blanket at the bedclothes behind her. The disc at her own sternum, warm already. Her hair at her shoulders. The matched disc, mine, in her palm.
She lifts the leather cord.
She holds it open between her two hands.
She leans forward.
She lifts the cord over my head.
The cord settles at the back of my neck, under the short hair at my nape.
The disc settles in the hollow. At the spot where her mark sits. Where her pheromone has been at the warm for three months. The brass touches my bonded skin.
I make a sound.
The sound of a bonded male whose body has just been told a thing about the female he is bonded to that he has hoped against every instinct she would tell him.
She tells me.
Her hands stay at the cord at the back of my neck. Her thumbs at my nape. Her dark eyes find mine.
“Tael Vosk.”
“Sweetheart.”
“You are mine.”
“I am, sweetheart, yours.”
She lowers her hands. Her thumbs trace the cord at the front, at my collarbones, at the disc. The brass warming under her thumbs. My bond at her throat, opposite, conducting the chemistry through the bond at a joint frequency the matched pair has started running at.
She kisses the disc.
Then she kisses my mouth.
Then something in me that is not protocol breaks.
The reservoir is pumping my own scent back at me off her skin.
Her pulse is over a hundred. The spike Velran built hits the air between us like a hand around my spine.
She smells like I have just fucked her and like I am still inside her and like every male on this station is going to know both things if I take her into a corridor right now.
I make a sound against her mouth that is not civilized.
“Tael—“
“Sweetheart.” My hands are on her waist. Lifting. “I need you again.”
“You just—“
“I know what I just did. The disc is doing the rest. You smell like mine. You smell like I am in you. I need to be in you.”
I put her on her back.
I push in on one stroke because she is still wet from me, still open, and the sound she makes is startled and filthy and yes.
The discs knock together when my chest hits hers, brass on brass, her name on my throat, my name on hers, and I fuck her like that, forehead to forehead, the cords tangled, the pheromones spiking every time her pulse jumps.
“On your knees was protocol,” I tell her. My voice is gone. “This is not.”
“Then take it.”
“Say it.”
“Take it. I’m yours. The disc is yours. Please—Tael—harder—“
I give her harder.
Tail around her thigh. Tip on her clit. Mouth on the disc at her sternum because I cannot decide between brass and mark, so I take both. She climbs fast, too fast, the reservoir feeding the climb, and this time I do not make her wait.
“Come.”
“I—“
“Good girl. Come on your disc. Come on mine. Now.”
She comes with my name in pieces. I follow her, buried, the brass between us hot, the bond slamming so hard I see white. I empty into her with her hands in my hair and her disc under my mouth and the knowledge that I am going to wear her name at my throat until I die.
I stay inside her.
I stay until I can speak.
Then I kiss the disc at her sternum once more, because it is hers, and because I put a secret in the back of it, and because she is going to kill me for it, and because I am going to love her through the killing.
She pulls me down beside her.
She tilts her face up. Her mouth finds mine. The kiss is slow now.
“Tael.”
“Sweetheart.”
“This is—“
“Yes.”
“For the rest of—“
“For the rest, Natalie.”
“All of it.”
“All of it, sweetheart.”
She lies back down.
I lie down beside her.
Her hand goes to the disc at her sternum. Her other hand reaches across me and finds mine at the hollow of my throat, and now her two hands are at the matched pair, one on each disc, on each of our throats, the brass at her palm and the brass at my hollow at the same warm.
I am the luckiest male.
Natalie and Tael's story is complete. The marks are set. The discs are on. And the file is nowhere near closed.
A woman who wrote the wrong thing down. A contractor with her photograph on a comm tag. And a Korrhai male whose hands will not come clean.
Somebody wants what Charlie knows. Thane is not going to let them have her.