Page 100 of Tracked and Taken

“I’m not moving.”

He does not come closer. Not yet. His sidearm is in his right hand, loose, pointed at the floor. His blade — I see it now — is in a sheath at his left hip. He is dying and his reflexes are still, by the way he is holding his body, Tier 2.

My hand at my side. The scalpel in my palm.

My stomach is sick.

Not fear. The sick of a woman who is in a room with a male who is going to do something to her.

I breathe.

“Tell me what’s happening.”

“Why?”

“Because I would like to understand.”

“Your tracker is behind you and will be at this door in a minute. You are not going to change what is going to happen by understanding it.”

“I would like to understand anyway.”

A pause. He reads my face in the way that his kind reads a face when his overlay is still trained to clock human micro-expressions.

“The ceiling manifold delivers a pheromone compound. At saturation, the compound triggers pair-identification biology in a Draelith male within proximity of a compatible female. My body will drop canines. My canines will set a mate-mark on you. I will not choose to. My body will. The compound overrides the discipline.”

He says this flatly as if reporting a specification.

“A mate-mark?”

“Yes.”

“You are going to force a bond on me.”

“Yes.”

My stomach drops as the word lands in a way I have not had a word land in some years.

Tael has not used the word bond with me. He has used the word mate, and he has held his canines off a place at my throat when his biology was asking him to use them, and he has let me hold my thumb to a matching place on his throat without ever telling me what either of our throats were for.

I know the word. I do not know the protocol.

And this male is the one who is going to teach me the protocol.

I breathe.

“Why?”

“Because when your tracker arrives at this door, he will clock another male’s pair-signature on your throat. His body has been compensating for five days at a baseline that is already drifting. Our mark will accelerate the cascade. He will die within the hour.”

My whole body goes still.

“The cascade.”

“Yes.”

“What cascade?”

He reads my face again. Slower this time. Whatever he sees on it surprises him.