He returns ten minutes later with a tray holding more food than I consume in a day: some kind of protein, a grain I don't recognize, a beverage steaming in the recycled air.
“Eat.” He sets the tray on the console beside my workspace. “The records will take time to compile. You may as well be functional when they arrive.”
“Is that concern I hear?”
The words emerge before I can stop them, tinged with the sharp humor I deploy when situations get too complicated to face. His gaze finds mine, and something shifts in those silver depths as his pupils expand and his nostrils flare, scenting what I cannot hide.
“Would it bother you if it were?”
I don't have an answer. The question lodges beneath my sternum alongside all the other things I refuse to examine: the wanting, the wondering, the way I'm leaning toward him without permission.
“Eat.” The word comes out rough, lower than his usual register. “We have work to do.”
The food is rich and filling, prepared with a care that seems at odds with Vahiri Prime. He turns to the console and pulls up the records I requested, and I tell myself to focus on the meal instead of the male three feet away. I fail.
The amber light traces the silver threading beneath his skin, luminous lines that pulse when his heart rate changes. His hands move across the controls with his claws retracted, and my gaze keeps snagging on the flex of tendons in his forearms, the breadth of wrists thick enough to crush a human throat one-handed. Those claws have killed. Those hands have ended lives in ways I don't want to imagine. I should be afraid of them.
I'm not.
When he shifts position, I glimpse fangs behind parted lips, white and sharp and built for tearing flesh from bone. His eyes reflect the console's glow, silver discs that hold no pupils when the light hits them wrong, and for a moment he looks like themonster the galaxy believes him to be. Seven feet of contained violence. The thing other predators run from.
He's pretending to work. I'm pretending not to notice that his attention keeps drifting back to me, that hunter's focus fixed on my mouth each time I raise the fork. When I glance up, he's studying the screen. When I look away, his gaze settles against my skin again.
The thing is, I've seen monsters. I've patched soldiers torn apart by creatures with less conscience than a plasma round. I've held dying men while the things that killed them circled back for more. I learned to recognize evil by the absence behind its eyes, the hollow space where mercy should live.
Drazex has no hollow space. When he looks at me, there's too much behind those silver discs, not too little. Hunger, yes. Restraint. A patience that costs him more than he wants me to see. He's dangerous in a thousand ways I can name and a thousand more I can't, but dangerous isn't the same as monstrous.
And that's the problem, isn't it? I'd find this easier if he were what he appears to be.
He leaves to verify a supply chain detail. Twenty minutes, he says. Thirty at most.
An hour passes.
I keep working, cross-referencing access logs against the timeline we've built, but his absence registers in ways I can't justify. The medical bay holds his warmth differently when he's not in it. The silence has a texture I notice only because he's not filling it.
When the door opens, I don't look up. I give myself three seconds to smooth my expression into professional focus before I turn.
Dust clings to his boots. Pale, mineral-fine, nothing like the polished floors of the compound's upper levels. A scent threadsbeneath his usual warmth, earthen and old, from somewhere deep. His shoulders hold a looseness that wasn't there when he left, a quality that vanishes the moment he catches me looking.
I don't ask where he went. The question would require acknowledging too much.
There are levels of this compound I haven't seen. Places he goes that appear on no schematic I've been given. I add the observation to everything else I'm learning about him. I don't let myself wonder what it means.
We work in silence after, side by side in the medical bay, building a picture of conspiracy and betrayal one data point at a time. When I reach for a file at the same moment he does, our fingers brush.
The contact lasts less than a second, skin against skin, and the temperature of him sears through me in a flash of sensation that steals breath. I pull back. He doesn't.
For one suspended heartbeat, his fingers hover near mine, close enough that I can sense them without renewed contact. His claws are retracted and his hand is steady, but the tips of his fangs press white against his lower lip, extending without his permission, and the sight of that involuntary response sends liquid fire through my veins.
His control is costing him. I can see it in the tension along his forearm, the flex of muscle as he forces himself not to close the distance. His scent reaches me now, something mineral and male and layered with musk that makes me want to press my face to his throat and breathe.
“I need to check the timestamps on the authorization codes.” The words come out thin, scraped raw.
He hands them to me without a word, and his fingers don't touch mine again.
I turn back to the console and pull up the timestamps, but the numbers blur on the screen. My hands aren't steady. My pulsewon't slow. He shifts position, putting distance between us that should make breathing easier.
It doesn't.
