Page 106 of Tracked and Taken

The console chimes.

“Chamber at one hundred percent saturation.”

The manifold above us hums to a peak. The warmth is no longer warmth. It is want, at a register my body cannot refuse. My hand with the scalpel trembles against my pulse. Kesh’s face is six inches from mine. His canines are fully dropped. His silver eyes are on the mate-mark spot at my throat.

Somewhere far down, in the last room of myself that is still mine, a voice with my accent is taking notes for the report I will file if I live: airborne. Involuntary. Eleven minutes from first exposure to loss of motor priority.

A fifth slam at the door.

The frame shears. The wall cracks to the ceiling. Still not through.

A sixth slam.

Tael’s voice through the speaker, no longer words, the sound a pair-identified male makes when his mate is, at the moment of the sound, one second from being marked by another male.

Kesh’s head bends.

His canines at my throat.

The scalpel at my own.

17

The Secret

Tael

The door tears at the seventh slam.

The frame gives at the welded seam. The transparent wall beside it shatters. I am through the opening before the frame finishes falling. Claws out. Canines dropped. The sound in my chest is not a purr. It is the sound a male makes when he has been on the wrong side of glass while another male bent to his mate’s throat.

The tear of the frame pulls Kesh’s head up off her throat.

I see three things in the first half-second.

Natalie. Center of the chamber. A scalpel at her own throat, the blade pressed against the mate-mark spot, her right hand shaking. Her dark eyes glazed. She has found the only leverage left in the room: if he bites, there will be nothing left to bite.

Kesh. Four inches from her face. Canines fully dropped. His hand at the back of her neck in the cradle a male’s hand makes when he is about to set a mark.

The console. Amber light. The timer is at one hundred percent.

And the smell.

The chamber stinks of pair-bond compound at a saturation I have never breathed. And under the manufactured compound — under it — the small wrong of Kesh’s own pair-signature on her throat. He has not set the mark. He has been close enough, long enough, that his chemistry is on her skin where the mark would go.

His chemistry. On her.

On the place I did not take last night because she asked me not to.

Mine.

The sound that comes out of me is not one I have made. It empties the room of every other noise. Kesh hears it. His body knows what it is.

Kesh’s silver eyes come to mine. He does not speak. His mouth is open at the angle where his canines are committed to the drop and whose body is milliseconds from closing the last four inches.

I close them.

I do not disable him.