Page 121 of Tracked and Taken

My hands are steady on my knees. I have checked them four times since I woke up. The checking is new.

I let the fury speak first.

“You should have told me, Tael!”

“I know.”

“From day one!”

“I know, sweetheart.”

“Don’t sweetheart me.”

His mouth closes. His jaw goes to the configuration it goes to at the moment his discipline catches him doing the wrong thing. He nods.

“Copy. Natalie.”

“You have been dying since the morning you walked into my office and you decided I did not need to know?”

“Yes.”

“You decided what I could be told and what I could not be told. About your body. About your life. About what was riding on my decisions. You made my information environment for me. You made it without me. You have been making it for five days.”

“Yes.”

“I have been clocking the failing and not knowing what it really meant. That is what you have done to me, Tael. You made me an accomplice to my own deception. You made me complicit in not knowing what I was looking at. I have been falling in love with you and you are dying in front of me and you let me do it blind.”

The sentence is out before I hear what is in it.

Falling in love.

I said it in a cockpit, at speed, inside an indictment. I did not plan it. It is out. I leave it out.

Tael has gone very still.

The purr starts in his chest — involuntary, one second of it — and he kills it. His hand at the yoke does not move. His eyes do not leave mine. He will not claim a word I fired at him as evidence. The discipline it is costing him to not reach for the first love I have ever said in his hearing is visible from four feet away.

He files it. The way I filed it.

“Yes, Natalie.”

“Do you understand what you took from me?”

“I understand.”

“Why?”

His hand comes off the yoke. He turns to me in the pilot’s seat. His face is — I have not, in five days, seen the face he turns to me with now. His composure is gone. The cocky is gone. The half-grin is gone. What is left is the male who refused to mark me in the lab and who told me he loved me at the moment he was refusing me, and the male is looking at me with the look of a Draelith tracker who has, by his own reckoning, made the wrong choice and is owed his accounting.

“Because telling you would have weighted your choice. Because I have, for nine years, watched the bond chemistry pull females toward Draelith males the females did not, in the daylight, want. Because I knew, the morning I walked into your office, that you were the female whose pull I was going to spend the rest of my life under, and I knew that telling you the cost would put a thumb on your scale that you did not ask for. Because you did not have time to fall in love with me before the chemistry committed me, and because I was, by the math of my honor, willing to spend the eighteen months to give you the daylight to decide who you were, without my biology making the decision for you.”

He breathes.

“I was incorrect, Natalie.”

“Tael.”

“I was wrong. It was your decision and I deprived you of the information your decision was built on. I told myself it was honor. It was my discomfort with the asking. I did not want to ask you to choose me knowing the cost. I did not want to put the cost in front of you. I would rather have died than put the cost in front of you. That is not honor. That is the failure to trust you with the information you needed to be the female I am looking at.”