“Tonight, maybe. After she gets off shift. Remind her she's just property here.”
The glass in my hand cracked. Spider web fractures spreading through reinforced crystal.
They kept talking. Details about her route. Her door code they had somehow acquired. What they planned to do.
I set the broken glass down carefully. Paid my tab. Followed them out.
They split up at the first corridor junction, confident. An amateur mistake.
I took the first one in a service alcove. He opened his mouth to shout, but my hand covered it. I did not say a word. I simply let him feel a fraction of my strength, my thumb pressing against the nerve cluster under his jaw. I let him see the promise in my eyes. He went limp, bladder letting go. I let him slide to the floor, whimpering. He would not be getting up for some time.
The second I found near the waste recyclers. He heard a noise, turned, and saw me emerge from the shadows. He drew his weapon. I was on him before he could aim, disarming him and pinning him against the wall. His friends were not coming. He was alone with me in the dark. I whispered what I would do to him, in graphic detail, if he ever went within a hundred meters of her quarters again. I did not have to touch him further. The terror in his eyes was enough. He collapsed when I released him.
The third, their leader, made it almost to the residential block before I cornered him. He was smarter, faster. He tried to fight. I let him. I let him exhaust himself against me, his punches doing nothing, his threats turning to panicked pleas. When he was spent, I held him against the wall by his throat, feet dangling above the deck.
“She is not property,” I said. It was the only thing I said to any of them.
He understood.
Her quarters were at the end of Section B. Number 247. The corridor was silent. I stood outside her door, knowing she was awake inside. I could feel her presence through the thin metal, that awareness that had been building since day one.
She knew I was there. Had to. The way her breathing changed, audible through the door if you had Vinduthi hearing. The way the air itself felt charged between us.
Neither of us spoke. Neither of us moved.
I pressed my palm flat against her door. On the other side, I heard her shift, maybe moving closer. Maybe pressing her own hand to the metal that separated us.
We stayed like that for seventeen breaths. Seventeen moments of silence that said everything. About want. About fear. About inevitability.
I pulled my hand away and left without a word. There was no resolution, but standing on opposite sides of that door, we both knew the truth of what was building between us.
SABINE
Ihad felt him through the door. Twenty centimeters of reinforced steel between us, and somehow I had known exactly where he stood, how his hand pressed against the metal, the seventeen breaths he had taken before leaving.
The memory followed me through my morning routine. Shower, protein paste, dealer uniform. Normal actions that felt anything but normal when my mind kept circling back to last night's kiss. The heat of his mouth. The careful way he had touched my face, like I might shatter or disappear. The raw, immediate memory of it was a brand on my thoughts.
Distance. I needed distance. For both our sakes.
Whatever game we were playing had shifted into something neither of us could control. The smart move was to stop. Cut losses. Return to the safety of dealer and gambler, professional boundaries intact.
I took the service lift, like always. Touched my collar in the empty elevator, my nervous tell he had identified. When had someone watching me shifted from threat to comfort?
My shift began with the second rotation. The usual suspects were there. Ambassador Krell, now borrowing credits from increasingly dangerous sources. A new Nexian merchant tryingto impress business partners. The Poraki twins, who had found a new scam I shut down without conscious thought.
Varrick did not come.
I had told myself I did not want him there. Too dangerous, too distracting, too much everything. But my eyes tracked every new arrival. Every tall figure with gray skin made my pulse jump. Every time the mezzanine stairs creaked, I looked up.
He did not come.
Good. This was good. Safer. Smarter. The hollow feeling in my chest was just adjustment, nothing more.
Just as the shift hit its second rotation lull, Kreeg appeared. He stood at the maximum professional distance from my table. “Everything running smoothly?” His voice stayed carefully neutral.
“Yes, sir.”
He nodded and left without another word. Varrick had done that. Made my supervisor afraid to even look at me too long. The protection should have felt suffocating. Instead, it felt like armor I had not known I needed.
