She stares at me. I see her working through it. The intelligence I've been watching on the feeds, operating in real time now, three feet away, close enough that I can smell the station coffee on her breath and the industrial soap from the hygiene facility and underneath both, something warmer, something that's just her skin and her fury and the animal reality of a body under stress.
"You're a monster," she says quietly. Not as an insult. As a classification. She's filing me.
"Yes."
She blinks. She expected denial, or deflection, or the performance of wounded humanity that men like my father used to make the cruelty seem reasonable. She got agreement instead, and it's thrown her off her axis by a degree she's trying to hide.
"At least you're honest about it."
"I'm honest about everything. It's my one virtue. Don't get used to it."
She almost smiles. Catches it. Kills it before it reaches her mouth. But I saw it; the ghost of it, the muscular precursor, and my marks pulse once, bright enough to see through my sleeves.
Her eyes drop to my forearms. To the light moving under my skin in the blue-violet spectrum ofwant.She stares.
"They react to emotion," she says slowly. "I read about it. The Empri bioluminescence. Genetic marker. Tied to your limbic system."
"You've done your research."
"I've been kidnapped by a crime lord with mood-ring skin. Research seemed prudent."
She steps closer.
One step. Deliberate. Into the space between us that I've been maintaining like a perimeter, the distance that lets me want her without the wanting becoming unmanageable. She crosses it and the air changes, station-recycled and sterile, but now carrying her heat, the micro-climate of her body disrupting the atmospheric equilibrium of the room.
She's close enough that I'd have to tilt my head to meet her eyes. Close enough that if I reached out, my hand would find her hip, the curve of bone under the standard-issue fabric. I don't reach. My hands stay on my knees. The discipline of not taking what I could easily have is the only prayer I know how to say.
"You can feel everything I feel," she says. Not a question. She's working it out, the implications of my biology, the vulnerability embedded in the power. "The bioluminescence, it's empathic reception, isn't it? Not just a display. You'rereadingme."
"At this distance. Yes."
"So feel this."
She opens.
That's the only word for it. Something behind her eyes, a wall, a dam, whatever architecture she's been using to hold herself together, shifts, and what pours through the gap hits me like a hull breach.
Hatred. White-hot, clean, righteous: the hatred of a woman who's been stolen from her life by a man who sits in a missing tyrant's chair and calls it inheritance. It floods through the narrow space between us and my marks blaze in response, lighting up along my forearms, crawling toward my neck, a map of her fury rendered in light under my skin.
Terror. Under the hatred, feeding it: the animal knowledge that she is alone on a station full of people who answer to me, that no one is coming for her, that her survival depends on the restraint of a man whose father had none. The terror tastes like acid on my tongue and I have to breathe through it.
Grief. God, the grief.
For her father, for her freedom, for whoever she was three days ago before a cargo hold and a collar and a set of coordinates that ended at my door. It's a black hole at the center of everything else, pulling the other emotions into its gravity, and I feel it in my chest like a fist closing around something vital.
And underneath.
Underneath all of it.
The thing she can't hide from me.
Attraction. Unwilling, furious, ashamed. The biological recognition of a body responding to proximity, to the specific frequency of my voice, to whatever chemicalaccident of genetics makes her nerve endings fire when I'm near. Shehatesthat she feels it. The hatred and the attraction are braided together so tightly they're almost the same thing, and feeling them simultaneously is like touching a live wire. It's pain and electricity and the inability to let go.
My marks are blazing. Full spectrum now, blue-violet up to the near-ultraviolet that the human eye barely registers but the body feels. It's a pressure, a hum, the sense of standing too close to something radioactive. My pupils are doing whatever they're doing, dilating, probably, the involuntary response to stimulation I can't suppress because my biology is a traitor and always has been.
My control cracks.
Not breaks. Cracks. A fissure, hairline, running through the wall I've built between wanting and taking. For one second, less, a fraction, the distance between us becomes a choice I'm actively making rather than a default state, and the effort of maintaining it shows on my face.
