"You don't know that."
Now he turns. His eyes find mine across the dim room, and there's no apology in them. No softness. Just the flat, calm assessment of a man who has already run every calculation and arrived at the answer he can live with.
"The message said your father was alive, Talia. You would have walked into that trap with or without my permission. At least this way, I was watching."
The word permission lands like a slap. Not because he's wrong about my choice. Because he's right. Because I would have gone, would have torn through every locked door on this station with my bare hands for the chance that my father was breathing somewhere on the other side. And he knew that. He counted on it. He used the best part of me as bait and called it tactics.
"You don't get to decide what risks I take."
"Someone has to."
"Not you." I close the distance between us. Three steps. Four. Until I can see the individual striations of his irises, the place where grey bleeds into something almost colorless, alien. "Not the person who set the trap in the first place."
"I didn't set it. I let it spring."
"That's worse."
His jaw tightens. Just barely, just a millimeter of tension in the hinge of it, but I'm standing close enough to see. Close enough to smell him. Sandalwood and something sharper underneath, the copper-edge scent of spent adrenaline. My body remembers what happened last time I stood this close to him and my pulse picks up, traitor that it is.
I hit him.
Open-handed, across the face, hard enough that the sound of it cracks through the quiet room like a shot. His head turns with it. Comes back to center. His marks flare once, a pulse of silver-blue that races from his throat to his jaw and fades.
He doesn't move.
I hit him again. Harder. My palm stinging now, the bones of my hand aching with the impact, and something in my chest is cracking open, something I've been holding sealed since the moment I woke up in that corridor with hishands on me and his voice in my ear telling me I was safe when I wasn't. When I'm not. When safety is a concept that stopped applying to my life the moment I set foot on this station.
Again. The third blow is more shove than slap, both hands against his chest, and I can feel the muscle under his shirt, the solidity of him, the way he absorbs the impact without stepping back. He's letting me. The bastard is just standing there and letting me, and the tears are coming now, hot and furious, streaking down my face, and I hate them. I hate that he can feel them. I hate that every sob is data to him, every hiccup of grief feeding through whatever empathic conduit runs between us, letting him feel my weakness like it's his own.
"Stop it." My voice breaks on the second word. "Stop letting me hit you. Fight back."
His hands stay at his sides. "No."
"Fight back." I shove him again, and this time he does move, a single step backward, his calves hitting the edge of the low couch behind him. "You don't get to just stand there and take it like that makes you noble. You're not noble. You used me, and you'd do it again, and we both know it, so stop pretending you're sorry and fight back."
"I'm not pretending I'm sorry."
The honesty of that stops me mid-swing. My fist hovering between us, knuckles white, arm shaking. He looks at my hand, then at my face, and what I see in his expression is worse than cruelty. It's recognition. He sees exactly what I am right now: broken open and furious and wanting something I can't name, something that lives in the space between hitting him and kissing him, and he's not going to choose for me.
I choose.
I grab the front of his shirt and drag his mouth down to mine. The kiss is nothing like before. Not the first time, when he tasted like a question, and not the second, when he tasted like an answer I wasn't ready for. This time he tastes like a fight I'm starting. I bite his lower lip hard enough to feel skin give, and the sound he makes is low and rough, closer to a growl than anything human, and his hands finally come up. One in my hair, fisting it, pulling my head back. The other at my hip, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise.
Good. I want bruises. I want evidence that this happened, proof written on my skin in his handwriting, something I can look at tomorrow and know was real and terrible and mine.
"Don't be gentle," I tell him against his mouth. The words taste like blood. His. Blue-tinged and faintly metallic, wrong in the way everything about him is wrong, alien under a human mask. "I don't want gentle."
He pulls back enough to look at me. His marks are lit, brighter than I've seen them, racing along his collarbones and up the sides of his throat like circuits carrying too much current. "What do you want?"
"To feel something other than what I'm feeling."
It's the most honest thing I've said all night.
He picks me up like I weigh nothing, and maybe to him I don't. I wrap my legs around his waist and feel him hard against me, and the heat of it punches through my clothes and into my belly, low and tight and angry. He carries me through the doorway to his bedroom without breaking the kiss, and I rake my nails down the back of his neck and feel skin part under them. When I pull my hand away, there's something luminous on my fingertips. His blood. Blue and faintly glowing, like I've torn open a vein of starlight.
He drops me on the bed and I bounce, already reaching for him, pulling him down. He comes willingly but not gently, his weight settling over me like a collapse, and I spread my thighs and hook my heels behind his hips and grind up against him, graceless and desperate. We're both still dressed and it's not enough, not close to enough. I need skin. I need the violence of skin on skin, the punishment of it, the way bodies can say things mouths don't have the vocabulary for.
I pull at his shirt. He pulls at mine. Something tears. Neither of us cares. His mouth is on my throat and his teeth are there too, the edge of them pressing against my pulse, and I arch into it, daring him, begging him without words to bite down. He does. The pain is bright and specific, a flare that races down my spine and detonates between my legs, and the sound I make is not pretty. It's wrecked. It's the sound of a woman who stopped pretending ten minutes ago that she didn't want exactly this.
