Page 120 of Tracked and Taken

“I heard counting.”

“You were not available to do it yourself.”

Her eyes close. One breath. Two. When they open, they are wet, and she does not let the tears fall.

“We will have that conversation.”

“I know.”

“Not today.”

“Copy.”

She sits up slowly. Her hand at her ribs at the patch. She finds a pin on the shelf and puts her hair up, not loose — the configuration she uses when she has decided to have a conversation.

I get up from the deck. I go back to the pilot’s seat because the conversation she has pinned her hair for is one we are going to have side by side, facing the same stars.

She comes to the co-pilot’s seat, sits and straps in. Her face is tired but clear.

For forty seconds, we don’t speak.

She is looking at me.

The stars outside the viewport are moving.

She does not soften the question. She does not shape it as something her Head-of-Station voice can deliver clean. She delivers it the way she means it.

“You were going to die for me and not tell me?”

My hand on the yoke does not move.

JINX, somewhere in the background, logging.

My mate looking at me with her dark eyes clear and her composure honest and her hand at her ribs over the patch I set.

There is only one word available.

“Yes.”

19

In the Daylight

Natalie

The word yes sits between us in the cockpit for some seconds.

The viewport. The drive vector. The stars at speed. JINX at quiet on the shared channel. SENTRY at quiet on mine. My hand at my ribs over the patch he set. His hand at the yoke at the configuration his hand has been at for nine years.

His silver eyes do not leave mine.

He said it. He did not soften it. He did not look away.

My body is doing ten thousand things at once, and the loudest of the ten thousand is want. The want of a woman who has seen her male carry her two corridors and refuse her at the cost of his own body and clean another male’s chemistry off her in a tactical shower at the cost of his composure, and who is sitting four feet from him in a cockpit and has no operational protocol for what to do with the want.

The next-loudest is the fury.

The welt at my throat stings when I swallow. My own nails made it. I file that where it fits, which is nowhere.