I'm through the control booth door and down themaintenance ladder before the word finishes leaving my mouth. The tactical team is already breaching from three points, Dexter's work, and the corridor fills with the sound of pulse fire and shouting and the particular wet thud of bodies meeting walls at speed. I don't use a weapon. I had one. I holstered it somewhere between the booth and the corridor. I want my hands.
The first operative goes down in the junction between Sublevel Nine and the vehicle bay access. He's turning toward the sound of the breach when I reach him. My hand closes around his throat and I use his own momentum to slam him into the bulkhead hard enough to dent the panel. His spine makes a sound like a branch breaking under snow. I hold him there and watch the light leave his eyes with a focus that should disturb me more than it does.
It doesn't disturb me at all.
The second is running. Smart, but not fast enough. I catch him in three strides. He gets a hand on his sidearm and manages one wild shot that scorches the wall behind my ear, close enough to singe, and then I have him by the wrist and I'm twisting until the joint gives with a pop I feel in my own fingers. He screams. I put my other hand on the back of his head and introduce his face to the corridor wall. Once. Twice. The third time is excessive.
I do it anyway.
The operative who yanked Talia by her zip ties, the one whose grip will be bruised into her skin for the next week, has dropped her and drawn his weapon. He's backing away, and I can smell his fear, sour and sharp, nothing like the copper-bright terror that pours off Talia. His fear is simple. Animal. He sees what's coming and his body knows before his brain does.
I close the distance. He fires. The pulse roundcatches my shoulder and the pain is distant, academic, something to address later. I take the carbine from his hands by breaking three of his fingers and then I take his life by breaking his neck. The sound is very small. Intimate, almost. Like cracking a knuckle.
The fourth is already down when I reach him. Dexter's work, clean and professional. My brother stands over the body with his weapon still raised and his eyes on me, and in his expression I see something I haven't seen directed at me in a long time. Not fear. Wariness.
"Clear," Astra announces in my ear.
The corridor is quiet. The recycled air hums. Four bodies cool on the deck. Blue blood on my hands, theirs, and the pulse-burn in my shoulder throbs with each heartbeat.
Talia is on the ground where they dropped her.
She's curled on her side, wrists still bound, eyes open but empty in a way that makes my marks flare with something that isn't anger and isn't desire and isn't anything I have a name for. Something with teeth that lives in the place where the bond roots into my chest. I kneel beside her. The corridor floor is cold through my trousers. She doesn't flinch when I reach for her, but she doesn't lean in either. She's so far inside herself that my hands on the zip ties feel like they're touching a shell she left behind.
I cut the ties. The skin beneath is raw, already swelling, and I hold her wrists with a gentleness that would make every operative on this station question their reality. I rub circulation back into her fingers one by one, methodical, careful, the same hands that just killed four people with the unhurried precision of a man performing a task he was designed for.
She comes back to herself in pieces. A blink. A breaththat shakes. And then her eyes focus on my face, on the blue blood streaked across my jaw and the burn mark on my shoulder and the bodies behind me that she can see if she turns her head, and I watch something move through her expression like weather over open water. Relief, first. Quick and involuntary. Then confusion. Then, slow and terrible and absolute, understanding.
"You knew." Her voice is wrecked. Hoarse from the silent screaming the stunner forced into her diaphragm. "You let them take me."
I don't deny it. There is nothing to deny. "I needed to see the network."
She stares at me. Seconds pass that feel like geological events. Then she hits me.
Her fist connects with my mouth. Not a slap, not a shove, a closed-fist punch with her whole body behind it, and she's learned more from Astra than I realized because the impact splits my lip and blue blood floods my tongue. I let her. My head turns with the blow and I taste copper and something sweeter underneath that's purely mine, and I let her because she earned this.
She hits me again. Same spot. The pain blooms bright and honest and I take that too.
"You felt it." She's shaking. Not with fear anymore. With something that burns hotter and colder at the same time. "You felt everything they did. You felt me think you left me to die. And you waited."
"Yes."
The word hangs between us in the corridor's recycled air, surrounded by the bodies of men I killed for touching her, men I let touch her first because the information was worth her terror. The math of it is clean and indefensible. Iweighed her fear against the intelligence value and I chose the data.
She hits me a third time, and this one draws blood from inside my cheek that mixes with the blood from my lip, and I swallow it down like communion.
Medical bay issterile white and the hum of diagnostic equipment. Talia sits on the examination table while the medic scans her wrists, her ribs where the stunner connected, the raw patches on her arms from the operatives' grip. I stand by the door. Not close enough to touch. Close enough that the bond still vibrates between us like a wire pulled taut enough to cut.
The medic applies dermal patches to her wrists and murmurs something about keeping them dry for twelve hours. She nods without looking at him. Without looking at me. The bruises are already surfacing, dark against her brown skin, and I catalogue each one with the precision of a man compiling evidence against himself.
The medic leaves. The door seals. The silence is a living thing between us with its own heartbeat.
"You used me as bait." She says it flatly. Testing the words. Tasting them the way I taste blue blood in my mouth.
"Yes."
"You would have let them kill me."
"No." The word comes out before the calculation finishes, and we both hear it for what it is. The first lie I've told her. I've given her hard truths, cold truths, truths that cut. I have never lied to her, and the sound of it between us now is obscene, a wrong note in a frequency we've bothlearned to tune to. I correct it, because she deserves better than my cowardice. "I calculated the risk. The probability of lethal intent was low based on their operational profile. They wanted you as leverage, not as a casualty."
