Page 132 of Tracked and Taken

I go down her throat.

My mouth at her jaw. My mouth at her pulse, open, wet, sucking there until there is a human bruise beside the alien one, and her hands say she wants both. Then the spot. The hollow where a Draelith sets his mark, which I have known the location of on her body since a bar on Velarkis and have not looked directly at since, the way a male does not look directly at a thing he has decided not to have.

I kiss it. Once. Slow. Then the flat of my tongue drags across it and her back comes off the bunk.

The welt is under my lips.

Her own nails made it in my shower this morning, trying to get another male off her skin, and she made it in front of me and I could not stop her fast enough. My head lifts an inch. My thumb traces the edge, and my thumb has never been this careful with anything.

“The mark chemistry takes the whole site,” I tell her. “When it closes, it closes everything. This too.”

Her breath changes. Whatever that sentence does to her, it does a great deal.

“Do it.”

My canines drop.

Nine years at SRS. Three years freelance. Forty-one years of a body built and calibrated and maintained for exactly one function, which is this one, and which I have never performed, and which I had until this morning accepted I would die without performing. Every Draelith male carries the mechanism. Most of us use it once. A male who never uses it dies with his hand at his own throat, and I have seen that.

Her eyes are on mine. She has gone somewhere for half a second, and I know precisely where, because his canines were the last ones she saw at that distance.

Then she comes back. She looks at my eyes and she comes back, and whatever she settles about the teeth in front of her, she settles without me.

“Tell me yes,” I say.

“Yes. Bite me. Make me yours. I want to feel you in my blood.”

I set my canines in her throat.

The skin gives at the pressure my anatomy is calibrated for. Two punctures. The compound delivers, and I feel it deliver, a thing no briefing prepared me for, because the mechanism reports back. My chemistry goes out of me and into her, and my body registers the leaving the way it would register a limb it has been carrying folded for four decades finally straightening.

She moans.

My hips grind once against her, helpless, and the growl goes through the bite into the wound, and I hold for a count of three with my mate’s blood in my mouth and her pulse against my teeth.

I lift my head.

Her blood is on my lower lip. I take it with my tongue, because it belongs there, and because there is no version of me that was ever going to do anything else.

The mark is set.

Two small punctures closing under my eyes at a rate her species closes nothing, the site running two degrees above the surrounding skin. The welt is going with it. My chemistry is doing that. Mine, in her, rewriting the last thing that room did to her.

She is half-marked.

Half is not a configuration. Half is a male standing on one foot. Every register I run is now oriented at my throat and she has not yet put her mouth on it. The wanting is not sexual, or is not only sexual; it is the unbearable incompleteness of a circuit with one terminal live.

“Tael.”

“Sweetheart.”

“Come here.”

I come. My face above hers. My weight on my forearm above her head. My throat over her at the angle the bunk allows.

Her hand comes to the back of my neck.

She pulls me down.