"We're on a crime lord's station. Don't talk to me about legally."
He doesn't react to that. Just watches me with those dark eyes, the bioluminescence steady now, and I become acutely aware that I am standing in my underwear in front of a man who owns me. The white light leaves nothing to imagination. I resist the urge to cross my arms. I will not give him the satisfaction of seeing me try to cover what he's already decided is his.
"Astra told you about the mark," he says.
Not a question, so I don't react, I simply stare.
He moves to the counter along the far wall and picks up something I hadn't noticed. A device, matte black, roughlythe size and shape of a stylus but thicker at one end, where a ring of micro-emitters gleams faintly blue. It looks surgical. Precise. The tool of a procedure, not a punishment.
"This will encode a biosignature tag at the cellular level," he says, turning it in his fingers. "The mark will be visible. Subcutaneous bioluminescent pigment keyed to my frequency. It can't be removed without killing the tissue around it."
The room shrinks. Not physically. But the walls feel closer, the ceiling lower, the air thicker.
"Where," I manage.
He touches his own throat. The left side, just below the jaw. Where his bioluminescence is brightest.
The same place on me.
"It will sync to my bio-readings. When I'm near, it will pulse." His eyes hold mine. "Everyone who sees it will know what it means."
"That I'm property."
"That you're under my protection."
"Same thing," I say again, but my voice is thinner this time.
He hears it. I know he hears it because his bioluminescence shifts, a barely perceptible quickening, and I understand with a sickness in my gut that he can feel what I feel. He's reading my fear, my anger, the cold sweat gathering at the base of my spine. He's inside my emotional landscape without ever entering my body, and there is nowhere in this room, on this station, in this life, where I can hide from that.
"Lie down," he says.
I don't move. My hands are fists at my sides and my jaw is locked so tight I can hear my molars grinding. This is the moment: I can fight. I can scream. I can throw myself at theguards or at him or at the mirrored wall until I break something, the glass or myself.
I run the numbers the way my father taught me. Every scenario is a cargo equation. What are you carrying, what are the odds, what does it cost.
Zero percent chance of escape. One hundred percent chance of pain. One hundred percent chance of being marked anyway, but now with bruises and the memory of my own futile thrashing for company.
I lie down on the table.
The surface is cold through the thin fabric of my bra. I feel it against my shoulder blades, the backs of my arms, the strip of bare skin above my waistband. The examination light directly above me is blinding. I close my eyes and it burns orange through my lids.
He stands over me. I feel him there, his warmth distinct from the sterile chill, a presence that has its own gravity. The bioluminescence from his skin casts faint light across my closed eyelids. Blue on orange.
"Turn your head."
I do. Left cheek pressed to the cold table, exposing the right side of my neck. Throat offered, jugular up. Every survival instinct I possess screams against the position and I hold it anyway because what are my options.
What have my options ever been?
His fingers touch my jaw, positioning me. They're warm but the contact is clinical and precise, tilting my chin up a fraction. I hate that my first thought is that his hands are careful. I don't want him to be careful. I want him to be rough and careless so that I can hate him simply, cleanly, without complication.
The device touches my neck.
I hear it before I feel it. A high-pitched whine at theedge of hearing, like a frequency designed to set teeth on edge. Then the heat. Not a burn exactly. Deeper than a burn. It's in the skin and under it, in the muscle and the blood, a warmth that writes itself into me at a level I can't reach to undo. It spreads in a pattern I can feel. Lines. Curves. A shape being branded into my cells.
I don't scream. My body tries to. My throat tightens around the sound and I swallow it, hold it in my chest where it sits like a coal. My fingers grip the edges of the examination table until my knuckles ache. My back arches off the surface, just an inch, just enough that the cold air finds the sweat between my shoulder blades.
The device moves lower on my throat and the pattern extends. Each line of it pulses as it settles, and I realize with a dizzy horror that I can feel a rhythm in the pulsing. A rhythm that isn't mine. Slower than my own heartbeat.
