Page 51 of Tracked and Taken

Low. Deep. It rolls out of his chest into the couch and into my palm through the gauze, and from my palm it travels, I can feel it travel, wrist, forearm, elbow, sternum, where it meets my heartbeat and disagrees with it. Not the volume of the bar. Continuous. As if his body has been holding it back for an hour.

He does not kill it. He does not bother.

I look up. Pupils blown. The tips of his ears are a darker charcoal. The corner of his mouth doing the half-inch that is, for him, a full grin. He is sitting with a blade wound across his ribs and a slash on his shoulder he has not mentioned and his entire body humming through my palm, and his face is not sorry about any of it.

“Vosk.”

“Torres.”

“You’re—”

“I know.”

“This is the thing your body does in proximity to a female.”

“It’s a thing my body does in proximity to one female, Torres, and we’ve established that, so let’s get on with the next question.”

I sit on that for two seconds. Then I press the gauze.

The purr deepens at the press. His abdominals tighten under my bracing hand, corded, hot, the architecture built along predator lines and not bulk, and his thigh under my elbow has gone tense in a way I am cataloguing without permission. His scent is in my face at this range, warm wood and spice and male, a body that has been working at full capacity and is now sitting still and bleeding while a female he has identified as a mate puts her hands on his skin.

Mate. The word arrives in my head before my mouth catches up. I file it. I am going to be unfiling it inside a minute.

The bleeding slows under my gauze faster than I expect. Faster than human medicine. The briefing said accelerated regeneration, and I read the line and did not understand it the way I understand it now, which is that the wound is closing under my hand in real time. Hours, not days.

I apply the bio-adhesive and smooth the seal with the side of my thumb, and the purr at my thumb is the loudest it has been, and his pupils are at full dilation and his hands are flat on the couch beside his thighs and his claws are not extended.

His claws are not extended. His hands have gone soft on the couch.

The species briefing was specific about what retracted claws mean when a male is this close to a female he has identified. I know what it means. He knows I know.

I sit back on my heels. He does not move.

“Vosk.”

“Torres.”

“Mate. At the keeper’s counter. You said it instead of liaison.”

“I did.”

“Define it. Plain language.”

The half-grin sharpens. “Jixians read pheromones, sweetheart. He’d have smelled me lying if I’d said liaison. So I told him the truth.”

The sweetheart slides under the rest of it. I do not let him see what it does.

“The truth.”

“My body identified you as compatible for pair-bonding the second you walked into my case. I have been managing it. The management has been visible to you. Tonight it failed in a corridor when I saw a blade on your forearm, and my body is telling you the rest through every part of me that hasn’t been disciplined into silence, and I am sitting on my own couch bleeding in front of you, and I am not going to apologize for any of it.” His eyes are steady. His claws are still soft on the couch. “That’s the plain-language version, Torres. The short version is yes, the word means what you think it means, and I picked it on purpose, and I’d pick it again.”

I do not answer him aloud.

I sit on my heels with a Draelith male’s eyes on me and a patch sealing over a wound he took for me, and I run back through the days since he walked into my office the way I run a case file when one piece of evidence has just reorganized the timeline. The smirks. The too-long looks. The hand on the small of my back. Sweetheart, four times in a bar. The thumb on the bare strip of skin at my hip. The bunk he made up for me. Mate.

I have been filing the wrong file.

I file the new one.