Page 107 of Tracked and Taken

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.