Page 8 of Tracked and Taken

“You’re telling me someone hacked your security infrastructure.”

“I’m telling you someone with maintenance-level access modified a diagnostic parameter I’ve been monitoring since I took this post.” Her hands tighten on the scanner. Knuckles pale. Her scar catches the light, and for half a second, she looks exactly like what she is: a female who’s been punching systems her entire career, and the systems keep getting back up. “The modification was designed to look like a routine calibration update. I didn’t catch it because it was built to pass my own review criteria. They used my system against the people it was supposed to protect.”

The bay goes quiet. Not the ambient hum; the silence between two people who’ve arrived at the same ugly conclusion from different directions.

I found the what: Xarthian male, stationary, dosed with something synthetic, extracted by ship. She found the how: engineered camera gap, bypassed docking log, inside access. We don’t reach the full picture alone.

This is a problem. Not the case; the case is a problem I understand. The other problem is that Natalie Torres is standing in a docking bay with tool marks and a hacked camera system, and she’s not breaking. She’s furious, the compressed I-told-you-this-would-happen fury of a female who warned everyone and nobody listened, and it makes her look like she could dismantle this bay with her bare hands, and I want to watch her do it. I want to hand her the wrench. I want to put my mouth on the pulse under her jaw while she does it and see if she makes a sound when the fury finally has somewhere to go.

The instinct to say something lands before I can stop it. Something about how it’s not her fault, about how institutions eat their own, about how I know—

She’s already moving. Scanner up. Back to the evidence. The shutters coming down behind her eyes so fast I can almost hear them, and I recognize the move because I’ve used it. Deflect. Redirect. Don’t let anyone see the structural damage.

My claws are still out. Extended for tracking, grip and precision, the tools doing what tools do. But the tracking is done. I’m standing two feet from a woman whose body is held rigid with fury, whose hands are white-knuckled on a scanner, who is vibrating at a frequency my senses read as distress and my biology is responding to with a clarity that has nothing to do with the case and everything to do with the two feet of cold air between us I am not closing.

I let her redirect. This time.

My claws retract.

Not because I decide to retract them. They slide back into my fingers as if my hands got a memo my brain didn’t send. Draelith biology. The body deciding, on its own, without consultation or consent, that the female standing next to me is safe. Not-threat. Not-enemy. Something the claws don’t come out for. Something the rest of me is already half-hard and aching for.

My hands go soft.

She doesn’t see it. She’s looking at her scanner, at the evidence of someone turning her life’s work into a corridor for kidnapping, and she doesn’t know that the male standing next to her just lost a fight with his own biology because her pain short-circuited something he didn’t know could be short-circuited. She doesn’t know that the same biology is currently mapping the exact temperature of the air between her body and mine and calculating how little it would take to close it.

“JINX.”

“Yes?”

“Don’t log that.”

“Log what? I have no idea what you’re referring to. I have, however, logged your request not to log something, which is itself a log entry. This is the paradox of surveillance. You’re welcome.”

She’s at the loading dock clamps. Reviewing the tool marks. Standing close because the marks are small and she needs to be near the surface to read them properly. Near the surface and near me, because I haven’t moved, because the smart thing would be to take two steps back and let the investigation breathe, and instead I’m standing here like my boots have fused to the deck plating. The heat of her is a constant pressure against my left side. I can smell the soap. I can smell the warmer places under the uniform that the cold air hasn’t reached yet.

The ventilation pushes air that’s been recycled through cargo infrastructure and stripped of anything approaching warmth. I run five degrees above human standard. In this bay, I’m the warmest thing in the room.

She’s leaning. Not toward me; toward the warmth. Two degrees off vertical, maybe three, angled in my direction the way a body angles toward a heat source without consulting the brain it reports to. She doesn’t know she’s doing it. Her breathing is steady. Her scent hasn’t shifted. She’s cold and her body is solving the problem the simplest way it knows how—by seeking the nearest source of heat. Mine.

I don’t step away.

I should. Two steps back. Let the cold air fill the space. Be the tracker, not the male whose entire sensory array has narrowed to the two-degree angle, leaning toward his body heat in a cold docking bay while reading tool marks and having absolutely no idea what she’s doing to my scent overlay. No idea that every degree she drifts closer makes the ache between my legs pulse harder. No idea that I am cataloging the exact shape of the space her body is occupying and filing it under things I am not allowed to want.

JINX says nothing.

Smart.

“We need to trace the maintenance-level access,” she says, straightening. Back to vertical. The lean gone. The absence of it is almost worse. “Someone with credentials modified the diagnostic cycle. I can pull the access logs.”

“How long?”

“Three days. Proper channels.”

“Or I can narrow the pool in three hours through scent elimination. Every person who accessed this bay during the Torek window left biological trace. I can match the traces to the maintenance crew roster.”

“Scent elimination is not an admissible investigative methodology under Junction One protocols.”

“It’s admissible under Draelith hunting protocols.”