Page 63 of Tracked and Taken

“Upgraded.”

A pause. I take a breath, and a second breath, and I am not going to say what I am going to say next, and then I say it.

“Rename it.”

“From the behavioral file to—“

“Mate.”

A longer pause. SENTRY’s voice, when it returns, is the careful register of an AI that has observed me for years and has just received an instruction it did not predict.

“Renamed. The file is currently Mate: priority.”

“Noted.”

“Natalie. For the record, I have not previously held a priority category for anything not directly case-related. I note that you also chose to rename the file. The renaming is, in my assessment, the more significant of the two decisions.”

“SENTRY.”

“Logging. Quietly.”

Through the viewport, the track to Parr’s Anchor. Rust-colored periphery. A Tier 3 SRS operator named Rethlor asleep in a layover berth, unaware he is in the window of a conversation he will not enjoy.

The bunk is silent behind me. The purr through the ship is steady. My face is still warm.

11

Silk

Tael

The bunk smells like her.

I have been awake for ninety seconds and have not opened my eyes for any of them, because opening them will require me to admit that the warmth in the mattress is hers and the dent at my hip is the dent her hipbone made and the trace at the pillow-edge — soap and cold air and her — is the only thing my nervous system is processing. My cock is already half-hard against the sheets from the scent alone. Nine hours of her in this bunk on the way out, and my body has decided the mattress is a claim.

The purr has not stopped since the cache.

JINX, low: “The thermal envelope is up another half-degree. I am logging.”

“Quietly, JINX.”

Quietly.

I open my eyes. The ceiling. The amber. The blanket she slept under on the way out. My mate is at the helm. The word arrives without authorization, and I do not push it away. It sits in my chest the same way her scent sits in the bunk: already decided.

The galley is the smallest room on Helia’s Reach, and it is occupied by a piece of evidence I did not expect to be reckoning with mid-transit.

Her duffel bag is now on the bench.

She must have left it here so as not to disturb my sleep. I have seen her open it twice. Once for the cardigan. Once for a clean shirt. The bottom of it has not, by my reading, been disturbed.

I walk past the duffel and make her coffee. I am the male who makes coffee for her.

The thermos goes on the counter. The smell rises. I look at the duffel bag.

A Head of Station Security’s duffel would not, by any professional standard, be left half-open on a colleague’s galley bench. She knows this. She is going to come back to the galley, and the duffel is going to be the first thing she sees, and she is going to be, in the register I have come to read as Torres-uncomfortable, privately mortified.

I do her a favor. I close the duffel bag. I am a gentleman.