Page 160 of Tracked and Taken

“He is a very good deputy, Natalie.”

She watches me for one more beat. The corner of her mouth twitches.

“You’re being weird.”

“I am, sweetheart, being charming.”

“You’re being weird and charming.”

“This is a feature.”

She lets it go. Goes back to her noodles. She will probably file this exchange under Tael being mildly territorial about my deputy, and she is, by what her face is doing, pleased about it.

I do not correct her.

I will not walk into her professional life and tell her the male she has trusted for three years smells wrong to me. Not based on one lunch and one lungful. Not without something to put on the table beside it.

She finishes. I pay. We walk out of the noodle stand together, my hand at the small of her back, spread low, the touch that tells the radial whose she is without making her do the work.

I walk my mate to her own door and leave her at her desk at 1347, and two corridors past her lift I open a private channel.

“JINX.”

“Tael.”

“Pull what you can on Ardent. Quietly. Shift assignments. Comms metadata. Off-duty movements. Last quarter.”

“Pulling.”

A pause.

“Tael.”

“Yes.”

“Do you want me to flag it to Sentry.”

“No.”

“Tael.”

“Quietly, JINX.”

“Quietly.”

I get back to SNAG at 1402 in the smug mood of a mated male who has just had lunch with his bonded mate and would like everyone in the room to know it.

The reinforced chair is still empty. I sit in it. Across the room Xor turns a page and does not look up, which is Xor for welcome back.

The intake queue chimes.

Three fresh cases. Flossie sends them across on the working channel without comment. Survey, Tael, lovey. Pick.

Case one. A Ferran salt merchant’s lost dowry shipment, intercepted in commercial space, low operator skill, recoverable within seventy-two hours. Boring. Below my rate. Take it for the easy paperwork and more time on Junction One. With my mate.

Case two. A missing junior diplomat, voluntary disappearance probable, family in denial, sensitive. Skip. That is somebody else’s case all day.

Case three. A research vessel logged data core, intercepted in unaffiliated space, professional-grade extraction. Skip. Same hands as the case the human female on the intake calendar is, by the clock on Flossie’s desk, forty-five minutes from walking in here to brief us on, and my bonded mate has a Junction One operational priority that does not, on the record, accommodate me running an unaffiliated-space recovery for the next three weeks.