"Calculated." She laughs, and the sound is glass breaking against tile, sharp and scattered and impossible to reassemble. "You can feel everything I feel, Zane. That's what you told me. The bond goes both ways. You felt me terrified. You felt me thinking you'd abandoned me. You felt me give up." Her voice cracks on the last two words and she closes her eyes and I watch the muscles in her jaw work as she forces herself back together. "And you waited."
I have no defense. The truth has no defense. It simply is.
She opens her eyes. They've changed. Not the color, still that grey that reminds me of nothing in my world and everything in hers, but the quality of what lives behind them. Something has been burned out. Something else has been burned in.
"I would do it again." I say it because she deserves it. Because the truth, even monstrous, is the only currency I've never debased between us. "If the situation required it. If the intelligence value warranted the risk. I would sacrifice you. That's who I am."
She doesn't flinch. Doesn't hit me again. She just looks at me with those changed eyes and I feel through the bond something so complex I can't parse it in real time. Anger, yes, enormous and justified. Grief for whatever version of me she'd been building in her mind, the one who wouldn't, the one who'd choose her first. And underneath both, so deep it's almost inaudible, a thread of something that refuses to die no matter how many times I give it reason.
She still wants me.
I can feel it the way I feel her heartbeat. Constant.Involuntary. A biological fact she cannot override no matter how much she should.
"Get out," she says.
I go. The door seals behind me and I stand in the corridor outside medical bay with four dead operatives' blood drying under my fingernails and the taste of my own lies still coating my tongue, and I listen through the bond as Talia St. Laurent, alone on an examination table in the station's stark white light, puts her face in her bandaged hands and weeps.
I don't move.
I stand there and I feel all of it. Every wracking sob. Every wave of betrayal that crashes through the bond like radiation through an unshielded hull. I let it pour into me the way I let her punches land, without resistance, without defense, because I earned this too.
The worst part is not that I did it.
The worst part is not that I would do it again.
The worst part is that she knows both of those things, and when I reach through the bond, tentative, barely a whisper of presence against the edge of her awareness, she doesn't shut me out.
She should. Every survival instinct she has should be screaming to sever the connection, to wall herself off from the man who used her body as bait and her terror as a tactical delay. She should cut me out the way you cut out a tumor.
She doesn't.
Through the door, through the bond, through the quiet catastrophe of what I've done to us, I feel her reach back.
Chapter 12
Talia
I should goto my own quarters.
The thought moves through me like a signal with nowhere to land, pinging off every rational surface I have left. My quarters are forty meters down the corridor. A locked door. A bed that doesn't smell like him. A place where I could sit in the dark and catalogue every way he used me tonight, build a clean taxonomy of betrayal, file it all away under the heading of lessons learned.
I follow him to his instead.
My boots fall in step behind his, and I watch the back of his neck where the marks have gone dim, banked down to almost nothing, just the faintest tracery of silver-blue beneath his skin like veins carrying light instead of blood. He doesn't look back. He doesn't slow down or speed up. He just walks, and I walk behind him, and neither of us pretends this is anything other than what it is.
I know why I'm following him. I've known since the sealed section, since his hands on me in the dark, since the taste of his mouth and the sound of his voice saying my name like it cost him something. I know why, and theknowing sits in my chest like a stone I swallowed whole, too heavy to cough up, too sharp to digest.
I just don't want to say it yet.
His door opens to his palm print. The quarters beyond are dim, station-night lighting casting everything in blue-grey tones that make the space look like the inside of a bruise. I step through behind him and the door seals shut, and the click of the lock sounds like a period at the end of a sentence I wrote myself.
He moves to the view port. Stands there with his back to me, hands loose at his sides, looking out at the station's exterior where maintenance drones crawl across the hull like luminous insects. Beyond them, stars. The vast, indifferent scatter of them, burning without purpose or audience.
I should say something measured. Something that preserves the architecture of my anger, keeps it structural and load-bearing instead of letting it collapse into the mess underneath.
"You could have warned me." My voice comes out serrated. "You could have come with me. You could have done anything except use me like a chess piece."
He doesn't turn around. His reflection in the view port glass is a ghost of him, translucent and edgeless. "You would have gone anyway."
