She slid a glance sideways at him. His expression had shuttered but she forged on. "Have you ever... I mean, have you..."
She didn't finish. She didn't need to. His jaw worked, and his hands, resting on his thighs, went absolutely still.
"The bond is not something we discuss in detail," he said evenly. "It's considered extremely private."
Shit. He was bonded. He had to be.
He was bonded and she’d been… thinking about him. Like that. Even though she hadn’t meant to.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
She pushed to her feet, spilling a complaining Barnaby off her lap.
“I need to… I need some air.”
She needed some air… on a spaceship. That didn't make sense.
The air was the air on the ship, and it was the same wherever she went. He looked over at the cat.
Barnaby, despite being less than a tenth of his size, somehow managed to look down his nose at Thyaar. Then he swished his tail in annoyance and closed his eyes, effectively dismissing him.
Thyaar groaned and dropped his head back against the headrest with a thunk. He'd upset her. Draanth.
Why hadn't he told her about the bond? He'd felt it as soon as she'd broken his nose with that bat. A broken nose was nothing to him, he’d broken the thing more times than he could remember.
But the moment he'd seen her, all the pain had disappeared. His world, his reality… in fact, his entire existence, had reset with her in the center. A fact he'd been ignoring, or at least trying to ignore, ever since.
But it was no good. He'd known that last night when he'd lain awake just to hear her breathe. He, one of the Emperor's most feared and trusted bodyguards, a sub-commander, had lain awake all night just to listen to a female sleep. He had it just as bad as Raaevik, but with the advantage that no other male had a claim on his female.
Opening his eyes, he stared at the interlocking plates of the bridge ceiling. His female. Draanth, that sounded good.
The scanner pinged.
Not the steady ping it had been giving for hours, the one that meant the C'Vaal were still sitting at the edge of the field doing nothing. This was sharper. Different. He sat up in the chair, eyes on the display.
The three ships had changed their sweep vectors.
He recognized the pattern immediately and his blood went cold. The three ships were intersecting their scan fields for a deep-density resonance scan, the kind that read straight through rock looking for heat signatures. The asteroid that had been hiding the Vett'an from optics and standard scans wouldn't hide her from this. Powered down and just idling or not, she still generated heat. She had to, or they wouldn’t still be alive.
Draanth. Draanth, draanth, draanth.
He couldn't sit here and let it find them, but he couldn't outrun three ships twice his size on a drive limping along at sixty percent. He closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. He had one move left and it was a bad one. But when that was the only option, he had no choice.
He had to break them from cover, while they still had the element of surprise, and get a head start.
"Barnaby," he said, "off."
The cat didn’t move. He didn’t so much as crack an eyelid, even though Thyaar knew he was awake.
Reaching over, he scooped the cat out of the pilot's chair, and dropped him on the deck. The yowl in response was outraged and loud enough to shatter glass. He ignored it and dropped into the seat, hands already flying across the board.
"Amelia!" He pitched his voice to carry down the corridor. "Bridge. Now. Strap in."
He brought the drive up. It snarled at him, a rough hitch in the harmonics where the bypass was holding things together with nothing more than a hope and a prayer, but it caught. He kept his eye on the readouts as he pushed it up. Sixty percent and climbing. He just had to hope it held.
Then he broke cover.
He took the Vett'an out of the shaft and down into the asteroid field in one move, fast and low, the nose pitched at the first gap he could thread. Rock screamed past the viewscreen, building-sized and scarred with old mining cuts, close enough that the proximity sensors shrieked. He killed the audio alert with a slap and kept flying. The bigger ships couldn't follow him in here. That was the whole point. He just had to stay in gaps smaller than they were.
