It doesn't come.
My fear stays. My anger stays.
The low, sick revulsion at the mark on my throat stays.
The confusing grief and the sharper, more shameful curiosity, all of it mine, remains untouched. He leaves it all exactly where it is.
I want to scream at him. I want to grab his shoulder and spin him around and demand that he do it. Push me. Manipulate me. Make this easier, make me compliant, make me stop feeling every single thing at once. If he's going to own me, if he's already burned his signature into my skin, then the least he could do is take the pain of it too. Make me numb. and willing, something less than this shaking, furious, branded girl in borrowed clothes who can feel his heartbeat in her neck and her own heart trying to outrun it.
He doesn't. He just walks. And I follow. And every feeling is mine, and there is no one to blame for them but myself.
A door opens to a room that shouldn't exist on a station like this.
The quarters are enormous. Living space, sleeping space, a bathroom I can see through a half-open partition that contains an actual water shower, not sonic, not recycled. Water. The furniture is dark, angular, chosen with a precision that suggests taste or at least the resources to hire someone with taste. The fabrics are real. and woven, not printed. The sheets on the bed are the kind of material I've only seen in shops I couldn't enter on stations I could barely afford to walk through.
But the wall. The far wall.
It's a view port. Floor to ceiling, wall to wall, nothing between me and the void but a curve of transparent alloy. Stars. Thousands of them. Not the dim, filtered view from a porthole on a cargo runner. This is the raw feed. Unfiltered starlight in every spectrum, so dense and bright that the room doesn't need its own lights. The stars do the work. They pour in like cold water, white and blue and the faintest gold, and the void between them is so black it looks solid. Like you could press your hand to the glass and feel the nothing on the other side pressing back.
I stand in front of it and I can't breathe. Not because it's beautiful, though it is. Because it's infinite and I am very, very small, and the room has no lock I can access, and the stars don't care.
"Adjacent to my quarters," Zane says from behind me. I can see his reflection in the view port glass, his bioluminescence painting blue lines over the stars. "The door between us is there." He indicates a panel in the wall to my right. "Keyed to me."
Not to me. To him.
"And the main door?"
"Keyed to Astra and to me."
"So I'm a prisoner in a nicer cell."
"You're alive in a room with a real shower and a bed that isn't a cot." His voice doesn't change. No heat, no cruelty, no amusement. Just a fact, delivered like one. "There are worse outcomes and we both know it."
I turn from the view port. He's leaning against the door frame, arms crossed, the picture of careless power. But his eyes are tracking me the way they have since the processing bay. Reading me. Every micro-expression, every shift of weight, every breath I take that's too fast or too shallow.
And through the mark, I can feel him feeling me. A hum at the base of my throat that tells me he knows my heart rate, my cortisol levels, the exact flavor of my fury.
"What are the rules," I say.
"Astra will brief you tomorrow. Tonight, sleep. Eat." He nods toward a panel near the bed. "The console has a full menu. Order whatever you want."
I stare at him. "That's it?"
"For tonight."
I want him to be monstrous.
I need him to be monstrous.
If he's monstrous, I can hate him simply, and simple hate is the only weapon I have left. Instead he stands there and gives me food and a bed and a shower and all of my own goddamn feelings and I want to claw the mark off my throat with my fingernails.
He watches me want it. I know he feels the surge of it. The bright, vicious fantasy of tearing his brand out of my skin.
His bioluminescence doesn't waver.
He turns to leave. One step into the corridor and then he stops, his hand on the door frame with his back to me, the line of his spine visible through the dark fabric, his own bioluminescence casting his shadow blue on the far wall.
"Your father ran cargo for my family." His voice is quiet. Conversational. The kind of quiet that lives right next to an explosion. "The last job he took was for my father. Three months ago." A beat. "Neither of them came back."
