Page 129 of Tracked and Taken

That is the discipline. If she comes, my biology gets its stay, and I get the rest of a life I had already spent. If she does not come, or comes tomorrow and says the daylight showed her something else, then I have seventeen months and twenty-four days of being useful to her, and I will spend every one of them without once making the not-coming her burden to carry. She will never know the number from me again. She has it now, and having it is enough, and the male who handed his mate a countdown twice is not offering information. He is applying pressure.

The chime goes.

Every rosette on my body comes up at once.

Her scent arrives through the seal a half-second ahead of the cycle, and my nose has been calibrated to that scent since Bay Seven, and what it brings me now is not the arrangement I have been reading for five days. Soap. Skin. The iron-and-warm under it. And a register my biology identifies before my brain gets a vote, that a female walked to a male’s door with her body already answering the question.

Discipline. She has not said anything yet. I get up.

The door cycles.

Natalie Torres in the corridor light. Her hair down. The soft clothes, not the kit. Boots she put back on to make a one-floor walk, which means she took them off somewhere and had to decide, and the deciding happened in a room I was not in.

The welt is still angry on her throat.

My mouth opens. Nothing arrives in it. She could be here to tell me she is going to sleep on it and wanted to say so to my face, which is precisely the courtesy she would extend and precisely the courtesy that would take me apart. Or she could be here for the other thing.

I do not know which.

Nine years of reading bodies across rooms, and I cannot read hers. Not this time.

So I stand in my own doorway and I wait, and I have no face on, there is nothing available to put there.

“I have decided. I want to do it now. On the bunk.”

My eyes close.

What happens within my core is not an emotion. It is mechanical. My lungs have been running eleven percent short for five days; the shallow overhead a Draelith body carries when its chemistry has committed and its committing has not been answered, and at the sentence the eleven percent comes back. One breath. My ribs go where ribs are supposed to go.

The count stops.

Not falls. Stops. Seventeen months and twenty-four days sit in my head with nothing under it, the way a load sits after the cable is cut, and my body has no protocol for the sudden absence of a weight it had organized itself around carrying.

Something is happening to my eyes. I let it. She is going to see it, and she has earned the seeing.

“Sweetheart.”

“Tael.”

Five days I have not let myself run this scene, because running it would have made every hour without it a loss instead of a fact. And under that discipline, in the place a male keeps the things he does not examine, I have been hoping since the morning she walked through my airlock in a cardigan a size too big.

She does not need me to say that. She said the thing that made it unnecessary.

My hand comes up.

It comes up slowly, as my hand is not a part of my body I currently trust with a decision. It stops in the air between us.

She takes it. She puts it on her jaw.

Her skin under my palm. My thumb finds the corner of her mouth, and she opens for it without being asked, and the pad of my thumb drags her lower lip down, and the sound that comes out of me is not one I have ever made in front of another person. Low. Not filed. The sound of a male whose leash has been handed back to him with the buckle already open.

“Natalie.”

“Yes.”

“You are sure?”

“I am sure.”