Page 90 of Tracked and Taken

She turns in my arms. Her hand on my chest, at the rosette. Her cheek at my collarbone. Settling. She drifts. Not asleep yet. The intermediate state — breathing even, pulse settling, the body processing the new calibration. Her hand on my sternum. Her thumb at the edge of the rosette, tracing slowly.

Her thumb stops at the rosette. Her breathing deepens.

Remember this.

I do not let the thought finish. For now, the back of my brain says, the truer version.

For now.

She sleeps.

I do not.

I lie under her with her hair across my chest and the purr at the ambient register and the pulse-sync at eighty-eight, and I watch the bulkhead amber strip-light move across the ceiling in the slow cycle Helia’s Reach’s cabin lights run every eleven minutes. Her hand on my sternum. Her breath at my collarbone. Her thigh across my hip.

I am memorizing her.

The weight of her head at my collarbone. The rhythm of her breath when her pulse is at eighty-eight. The small sound she makes when she turns her face further into my throat in the specific way she does when she is settling deeper into sleep. The shape of her hand on my sternum — thumb on the rosette, fingers spread across my ribs. The pattern of fingernail indents at my back from the third round. The bruise at her hip I kissed. The spot that is not marked. The smell of sex still in the bunk. The taste of her still in my mouth.

I am memorizing her because this is what I have, and this might be all I have, and I am going to have had it fully.

The cold thing presses up under my sternum. Slower this time. You knew the price. You paid it.

I do not push it back.

JINX, on the private channel, in the quietest register he has ever used: “Tael.”

“Mm.”

“Ten-minute warning in fourteen.”

“Copy.”

“Tael.”

“What?”

She chose you.

A pause.

“For now, JINX.”

A longer pause. I can feel JINX registering the correction. He does not push.

“Tael?”

“Yes.”

“I will remain available at the ambient register. You do not have to think about it.”

“Copy. Thank you, JINX.”

“Let her sleep, Tael.”

“Quietly.”

The ten-minute warning sounds at the low chime JINX has set it to, gentle enough not to wake her fully, firm enough to signal.