Page 113 of Tracked and Taken

“You are going to shower.”

“Tael, I do not have the energy to—”

“Sweetheart. His chemistry is on you. Not the manufactured compound — that is metabolizing inside you, the shot is handling it. His chemistry. His pair-signature. From the cradle of his hand at the back of your neck. From the proximity at peak saturation. It is on your skin and it is on your throat and it is the smell my biology is registering at every breath I take in this cabin.”

Her face when I say his is the face of a woman who has not been told about every aspect of what was done to her and who is learning one of them now.

“His chemistry is on me.”

“Yes.”

“Get it off me, Tael.”

“Copy.”

The shower cubicle is tactical-small.

One person at standard. Two if the two are compressed against each other in ways the engineer did not design for.

I get her tactical kit off at the cubicle door. Boots. Belt. Field jacket. The underlayer. The silk underneath the underlayer — bra, underwear, both bloodied at the side seam where the rib graze bled through. All of it set on the bench beside the cubicle.

I do not look.

I will not allow my body to read her body as mate while I am stripping her of clothing that has carried another male’s chemistry into my cabin.

She is naked at the cubicle door.

I get my kit off in the same thirty seconds.

I turn the water on. Hot. The setting Helia’s Reach runs for medical.

I get her under the water.

She makes a sound. Not a word. The sound a body makes when it has, in the last hour, been through four separate categories of wrong and is having hot water on its skin for the first time since the wrong began.

Then she moves.

She takes the soap out of the tray before I reach it. She scrubs the mate-mark spot at her own throat — hard, then harder, her nails involved, the skin going from wet-brown to a raw abraded red in four passes, her jaw locked, her eyes fixed on the drain like the drain is the case.

“Natalie.”

She does not stop. The fifth pass leaves a welt.

I catch her wrist. She fights it — one hard wrench of a trained arm — and I let the wrench spend itself against my grip so her wrist empties its force without getting free.

“You are taking skin off, sweetheart.”

“Then it will grow back clean.”

The sentence comes out of her in the report voice. Flat. Filed. It is the worst sentence I have ever heard her say.

Something in my chest makes a sound I did not authorize. Not the purr. My hand around her wrist is shaking worse than her wrist is, and for the length of one breath the clinical register is not available to me — there is only a male in a wet cubicle holding the wrist of the woman who is trying to scrub herself off her own body.

She needs the register. She does not need the male.

I rebuild it. It costs more than the door did.

“Let me,” I say. “Nat. Let me. You cannot reach what needs reaching — you cannot smell it. I can. Let me get it off you, all of it, and then you will know it is gone, because I will know.”