The word sits in my chest like a swallowed stone. He could have written obey. He could have written anything that reminded me of my position, my status, the transaction that put me here. Instead he wrote trust, and the choice of that word over any other is either manipulation or honesty, and I am beginning to understand that with Zane Torrence those two things might be the same.
I eat the fruit. It's sweet and bright and nothing like the reconstituted produce on Meridian. The coffee is strong enough to make my sinuses burn, and I drink it standing at the view port, naked, looking at stars that don't belong to me.
Last night replays in fragments. His mouth between my legs. The moment he stopped. The moment I told him notto. His voice, wrecked and desperate, saying come for me like a prayer to something he doesn't believe in. The clinical tenderness of being washed by hands that have killed. The six inches of mattress between us that felt like the answer to a question I was afraid to ask.
I should feel used. I catalogue the reasons: I am his property, this was always inevitable, the power imbalance could fill a cargo bay, and the coercion is built into every wall of this station. I should feel violated. Regretful. Dirty in a way the shower couldn't reach.
I pull his shirt on. The one he dropped on the floor last night, still carrying his warmth, sandalwood and metal and underneath it the specific scent that is just him. The fabric falls to my thighs and I catch my reflection in the view port glass, superimposed over the stars, and the woman looking back at me is someone I'm still learning to recognize.
I feel powerful.
That's the most dangerous thing that's happened since I arrived.
More dangerous than the debt.
More dangerous than the bond or the marks or the man who bears them.
Because a woman who feels used can be rescued.
A woman who feels victimized can be saved.
But a woman who feels powerful in her captor's shirt, in his quarters, in the aftermath of a choice she made with open eyes?
That woman can't be saved. She doesn't want to be.
I press my palm flat against the view port glass. The cold bites into my skin and somewhere deep in my neck, beneath the flesh, my mark pulses with a slow, steady rhythm. Not my heartbeat. His. Translated through the bond across three corridors and however many steel walls,his heart beating in my skin like it has always been there, like it always will be.
In the mirror across the room, I can see it glowing. A faint, warm light that rises and falls, rises and falls, in perfect time with someone I cannot see and cannot escape and am no longer certain I want to.
I pick up the note. Read it again. Fold it carefully and press it between the pages of one of his books, the one with the most cracked spine.
Then I go back to my quarters to wait.
Chapter 7
Zane
The docking clampsengage with a sound like bones locking into a joint, and I feel my brother before I see him.
His emotional signature hits me from the other side of the airlock seal. Controlled rage compressed into something dense and portable, the way military men learn to carry their damage. Grief underneath, but buried deep, packed tight under layers of discipline and pragmatism like ordnance stored in a hull cavity where nobody looks.
Six years on the outer rim did that to him, turned Dexter's feelings into ammunition he keeps inventoried but never spends.
The inner airlock cycles. Pressurization hisses through the seals. I stand at the edge of the docking bay with my hands clasped behind my back because that's what Father would have done.
Astra stands four paces to my left. Protocol. The head of security greets all arriving family vessels, scans for threats, verifies identity, logs the arrival in three separate encrypted systems. She's in full tactical kit, sidearm on her hip, herdark hair pulled back so tight it looks painted on. Her face gives away nothing.
But her heartbeat does.
It kicks up twelve beats per minute the moment the airlock seal breaks. I don't have to try to feel it. It just arrives in my awareness like sound through water, impossible to ignore. Twelve beats. For Astra Venn, who maintained a resting pulse of fifty-eight while being shot at last week, twelve beats is practically screaming.
I have the sense however, to say nothing.
The airlock opens, and Dexter Torrence walks onto my station like he's taking a beachhead.
He's taller than I remember. Or maybe he just carries himself like the extra inches are owed to him. Same turquoise skin as mine, but his has a weathered quality, years of outer-rim UV bombardment leaving it slightly rougher, less luminous. His bioluminescent markings run in sharper patterns than mine, concentrated along his jaw and the backs of his hands, and they pulse with a low, steady light that says nothing.
Controlled. Everything about him is controlled. His electric blue eyes sweep the docking bay in a combat scan I recognize from our father's training drills, checking sight lines, exits, positions of personnel, threats. He catalogues me last.
