I watch her retreating back, wondering why she was down here.
“She doesn't like me.” Maeve's observation pulls my attention back to where it wants to be anyway. Her face, her scent, the warmth radiating from her body beside mine. “Most of your staff ignore me. She was assessing me.”
“Vezra assesses everything. She's good at her job. She's worked for me for fifteen years. I trust her.”
I catch Maeve’s frown as I open the pharmaceutical storage with my palm signatures, and the door seals behind us with a weight that makes the narrow space contract around us both. Climate-controlled cases line the walls, their contents catalogued and monitored, and the terminal she needs sits at the far end like a destination that requires crossing a particular kind of distance to reach.
She moves past me toward it, and her shoulder brushes my arm in a contact that lasts less than a second. Fabric against fabric, the barest graze of proximity, and the sensation cascades through my nervous system like a current that refuses to ground. Heat floods through muscle and bone, and the scent of her arousal spikes in a signature so unmistakable that my fangs ache against my gums with the effort of keeping them sheathed.
Her heartbeat accelerates in a rhythm I can hear across the distance she's putting between us, her chemistry shifting toward the same want I'm fighting to suppress. She doesn't turn, doesn't acknowledge what just passed between us, but her pace increases as she moves toward the terminal in a retreat that tells me everything her silence tries to hide.
“The access logs go back eighteen months, which should cover all three incidents.” Her voice holds steady through what must be sheer force of will, and she sits at the terminal with her back to me in a posture that offers either vulnerability or dismissal.
“Take whatever you need.”
She pulls up a file, frowns at the screen, and mutters under her breath. “Who designed this system? A sadist with a grudge against logic?”
The complaint is so ordinary, so human amid the tension strangling the air between us, that a sound escapes my chest. Not quite a laugh. Close enough.
She freezes. Turns. “Did you just laugh?”
“No.”
“That was a laugh.” The corner of her mouth curves, and the sight of it does damage I wasn't expecting. “I didn't think you could.”
“You're mistaken.”
“The most feared enforcer on Vahiri Prime.” She turns back to the terminal, but I catch the smile before she hides it. “Brought low by filing systems.”
I don't respond. Can't. The warmth spreading through my chest has no place in this room, in this moment, in the space between a monster and his property.
She returns to the access logs, her focus sharpening into professionalism. The moment passes. The tension doesn't.
“You don't have to stay.” Her fingers move across the interface, but the tension in her shoulders says she's tracking my position in her peripheral vision.
“You need authorization for some of these files.”
“So authorize them remotely.”
“I prefer to observe the process.”
She turns in the chair, and her dark eyes find mine across the narrow space with a directness that refuses to let me hide. “You prefer to observe me. The process is incidental.”
She's right, has been right about everything, has seen through every excuse I've constructed. She's a soldier who has learned to track every detail in her environment. I should remember that.
“I prefer to observe you.” The admission pulls from me.
Her expression shifts into something that isn't surprise because she already knew, has probably known since the first night I stood outside her door listening to her breathe. “Why?”
Because she disrupts my order. Asks questions I can't answer. Makes me feel things I have no right to feel. Because she looks at me like I'm not the monster everyone else sees.
“Be careful what you ask, female. I own you. You should fear me. I've killed more people than you have saved, have done things that would horrify you if I named them. I am the weapon my father built, and weapons don't stop being dangerous.”
She rises from the chair, and the distance between us shrinks from three feet to two to one, close enough now that her warmth radiates against my skin in a pressure I feel through every nerve. “I'm looking at you, and I see more than that.”
“What do you see?”
The question makes me vulnerable. It makes me weak, and yet I still want to hear what she has to say.
