Page 122 of Tracked and Taken

The breath stops in my chest.

He has not finished.

“You are a Head of Station. You are a former Military Police who took the discharge for punching a CO over trafficking. You are the female who packed silk on the morning of day one because your body was already, by some part of you that ran ahead of your brain, decided. You have been making the decisions in your life for forty years. I had no honest right to make this one for you, and I made it for you anyway. I am sorry, Natalie. I am sorry as deep as I have the language for. I will not do it again.”

The cockpit is silent.

The drive vector is very steady.

I look at him.

The fury holds but I set it down because it has been honestly answered.

The remaining thing is the tiredness.

I am tired in the way only a woman who has, in the last day, killed a male and learned her male was dying and been chemically violated and burned at 40.4 on his bunk while he counted my pulse out loud and been bathed by the male whose chemistry she now wants to choose can be tired.

Under the tired, when I blink, there are canines. Not his.

I know the canines are going to be there for a while. I file that too. The filing is how I stay. I am running this conversation like an incident review because an incident review is a room I know how to stand in, and every other room available to me right now has Kesh in it.

“Tael. I would have made the same decision.”

His face moves a quarter-inch.

“But I would have made it knowing. And the knowing matters. The knowing is the difference between a decision I made and a decision that happened to me. I have spent four years making sure no decision happens to me. I have built a station around it. I am not going to let the most important decision of my life happen to me because the male I am choosing decided I could not, in his read, be trusted with the information.”

“I know, Natalie.”

“You will not do it again.”

“No.”

“Anything. Ever. About your body. About your life. About what is riding on the things I am choosing. You will tell me. You will tell me bad. You will tell me without softening. You will tell me when I do not want to hear it. That is the only protocol I am accepting between us.”

My voice cracks on the last word. Neither of us pretends it did not.

“Copy, Natalie.”

“Say it back to me.”

“I will tell you everything. The bad. Without softening. Even when you do not want to hear it. That is the protocol.”

I breathe.

“Good.”

His silver eyes hold mine for three seconds. My chest does a small stutter when his silver eyes hold mine.

“Tael.”

“Sweetheart.”

“I am going to mark you.”

He breathes out. Relieved.

“I had hoped, Natalie.”