Page 103 of Tracked and Taken

The pheromone compound hits me.

It is — not what I expect. It is not heavy. It is not chemical. It is warm, the way a summer afternoon on a body you have been neglecting is warm. My skin prickles. My heart pounds in a way I cannot choose for it to stop.

SENTRY, on my private channel, the prim register gone tight: Natalie. “Your pulse has elevated beyond baseline. You are in distress.”

“Yes.”

“I am logging. I have requested Tael’s overlay pair your biometric feed to his emergency channel. He has acknowledged. He is aware.”

“Thank you, SENTRY.”

My body is responding.

I can feel it responding.

I do not want it to respond.

“Kesh.”

“Yes.”

“What is this?”

“Saturation. Twenty-five percent.”

“It is—“

“I know.”

I am warm in places I do not want to be warm. My hand at my side. My hand at my hip. The scalpel in my palm. The warmth spreading. My body — the body that has been running on Tael’s chemistry for five days, the body that last night took him the way it took him and chose to not mark him and waited — that body is responding to a compound it has not consented to responding to.

The horror of it is the warmth.

If this were a chemical assault, I could brace myself. If it were pain, I could brace. It is a pleasure. It is my body’s system being hijacked into saying yes in a register I did not authorize it to say yes in.

A third impact on the corridor wall. A door slamming. The sound of Tael’s body — I know the weight of him against a wall, because I have spent all morning learning it — hitting the class-three door of the induction chamber.

“Nat.”

The voice through the speaker on the exterior wall.

Wrecked.

The Nat goes through me the way the compound is going through me, except the Nat is a register my body chose, and the compound is not.

I close my eyes for a half-second.

I open them.

Kesh is three meters away.

The console chimes.

“Chamber at fifty percent saturation.”

My pulse is in my ears.

The warmth is not warmth anymore. It is a pull. My skin is asking me to be touched. The demand of a nervous system that has been chemically told there is a compatible Draelith male in the room and is prioritizing contact over operational math.