Page 111 of Tracked and Taken

My face at her hair. My mouth not on her. My hand on her shoulder, on her back, on her shoulder again. My biology is screaming at the discipline to break. The discipline holding by the millimeter.

She cries against my chest.

I do not have a sound for it.

The sound my chest makes — somewhere between the purr at the bottom register and a thing I do not have a word for in either language I speak — is the only sound I can give her.

It is a sound a Draelith male makes when his mate is breaking against his chest and he cannot, by his own refusal, give her what her body is asking for.

She makes a small sound back. Recognition.

She knows what the sound means.

Her crying loosens.

JINX, quiet: “Counteragent registering metabolic effect at three-minute mark. Compound clearing at approximately three times passive rate. Officer Torres’s pulse falling.”

SENTRY: “I have her, Tael. Vitals normalizing. I will alert you the second she is at clear baseline. Hold her.”

“Copy. Thank you.”

Natalie’s breathing slows against my chest. Her hand on my sternum. Her face wet at my collarbone. She has stopped crying on the surface. The wet stays.

“Tael.”

“I’m here, sweetheart.”

“Get me off this deck.”

“Copy.”

18

Clean

Tael

I carry her.

Her weight against my chest. Her arm around my neck. Her face at my shoulder.

Her pulse where my forearm crosses her back: one hundred and twelve.

I count it the whole walk. There is a corridor, and there are bodies in it, and there is a manifest to build and a comm to make, and under all of it, at the floor of me, there is one number.

The corridors are empty.

At the junction before the Torek chamber, I pass the first of the three contractors I went through on the way in. Throat open. Sidearm in his off-hand. Natalie’s face against my shoulder does not turn.

One hundred and nine.

The second at the next junction.

The third at the chamber door. I used the claws on this one at a register I am not proud of. His face is, by any professional standard, not extractable for identification. Natalie’s hand at my kit tightens by a quarter-inch as we pass him. She does not speak.

I do not need her to.

One hundred and six.