Page 123 of Tracked and Taken

“I know you had.”

“I did not allow myself to expect.”

“I know.”

A pause.

“Not in transit. Not in the cockpit. Not in the next thirty minutes.”

“Copy, sweetheart.”

“In my own time. With the door closed. With no one’s chemistry on me. Because it is what I want.”

“Yes.”

“Because I love you.”

His silver eyes come to mine.

The first time I said the word, minutes ago, I fired it at him inside an indictment, and he had the discipline not to catch it. This time I hand it to him.

The purr starts.

He does not kill it.

His eyes close for one second. When they open, the silver is bright in the way Kesh’s had stopped being.

“Yes, Natalie.”

The same two words he filed the indictment. They do not mean the same thing. We both hear the difference.

A long pause.

His hand comes back to the yoke. His face, when he turns back to the viewport, has the half-grin at the corner — the one I have, in five days, come to read as the smallest possible Tael Vosk acknowledgment of a thing he is very pleased about.

“Stop smirking, Tael.”

“Copy.”

The smirk does not leave his face.

I close my eyes for a count of three.

The cockpit at quiet. The drive vector. The viewport. The stars at speed. My male four feet from me with his hand at the yoke and the half-grin at the corner of his mouth and the set of his shoulders telling me his discipline is, finally, allowed to soften by a degree.

He is going to live.

The thing my body has been carrying since the chamber, the thing I have not let myself name in the registers it has been demanding to be named — he is going to live, because I am going to mark him, and the mark is going to set the bond, and the bond is going to reset the cascade, and he is going to live.

I open my eyes.

His silver eyes are on me through the viewport reflection. He is, by the small set of his face, watching me realize.

“Tael?”

“Yes, sweetheart.”

“You are going to live.”