"Keep them apart," I say. "Don't make it obvious. Don't make it an order she'll rebel against. Just keep them apart."
Dexter nods. Neither of us acknowledges the thing we both know: that the command is already too late.
I findTalia in my quarters.
She's sitting on the edge of the bed, still dressed, staring at something on a personal screen that she closes when I enter. The gesture is quick but not guilty. Private. There's a difference, and I've learned to respect it even when every possessive instinct in me demands full access to every thought behind those grey eyes.
The door seals behind me. The sound it makes is definitive, the external world and its cascading threats closed out for however long I can keep them there.
"You read everything," I say.
"Everything your systems had access to." She sets the screen aside. "My father was more careful than I gave him credit for. And more desperate."
I pull off my jacket, roll the tension from my shoulders. The marks along my arms pulse in the low light of the quarters, responding to her proximity, to the bond that hums between us like a frequency only we can hear. She watches me with those eyes that see too much, that catalogued my weaknesses before she even knew she was doing it, that made me want her before I'd decided whether to keep her or break her.
"He went through the anomaly carrying Malachar'sresearch," she says. "He chose that over coming back for me."
"I know."
"I've been trying to be angry about it. I think I should be angry about it." She looks at her hands. "But I understand him. He saw something worth the cost, and he paid it. That's what people do in this world. They calculate what they can afford to lose, and they lose it."
"And you were what he could afford to lose."
Her jaw tightens. "Apparently."
I cross the room. Sit beside her, close enough that our arms almost touch, that the bond thrums with the static-charge intimacy of near contact. I don't reach for her. Not yet. Some conversations need to happen in the space between bodies, not pressed against skin.
"I'm not who I was," she says. The words come slowly, tested against her teeth before she releases them. "I was a mechanic with a debt contract I didn't understand and a father I was still defending. Now I've informed on people who trusted me. I've killed a man during the siege. I've chosen you over the debtors who looked to me as one of their own." She turns her head. Meets my eyes. "Does that make me a monster?"
The question hangs in the air between us, and I feel the weight behind it through the bond. Not just the words. The fear underneath them, the genuine uncertainty of a woman standing at the edge of who she's become and not sure if the ground will hold.
I could reassure her. Could tell her she did what she had to, that survival demands compromise, that the people she informed on were planning violence that would have killed thousands. All of it true. All of it beside the point.
"It makes you mine," I say.
Her breath catches. I feel it in my own lungs, that hitch, that split-second recalibration. The bond translates it instantly: relief and recognition and something fiercer underneath, something that doesn't want comfort. That wants to be seen exactly as she is and claimed anyway.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one that matters."
She stares at me for a long moment. The mark at her throat glows, soft and steady, a rhythm that matches my own pulse exactly. Six weeks ago I put that mark on her skin as a brand of ownership, a declaration to every person on this station that she belonged to me and would be treated accordingly. She hadn't chosen it. Hadn't wanted it. Had looked at me with eyes full of hatred and terror in equal measure.
Now it pulses with something else entirely.
She reaches for my hand. Takes it. Guides it to the mark at her throat, pressing my palm flat against the warm glow of it, and the bond opens like a door thrown wide.
"Feel this," she says. "Feel all of it."
I do.
It floods through the contact point, unfiltered and raw in a way she's never allowed before. Every barrier she's built, every wall she's maintained even as the bond drew us closer, gone. What rushes in isn't simple. Isn't clean.
Love, yes. But not the kind that lives in gentle words and soft mornings. This is love that grew in captivity and broke its own chains, love that chose the monster and means it. I feel her desire, not just physical but existential, the wanting of a woman who has decided that this dark, brutal, blood-soaked life is hers and she will hold it with both hands. I feel her fear, because she's not stupid, because loving me is a death sentence or a life sentence andshe hasn't decided which is worse. I feel the grief for her father, now settled into the bedrock of her, not gone but load-bearing, a foundation she's built on rather than a wound she's nursing.
And underneath all of it, the commitment. Not a promise. Not a vow.
Something harder than either. A choice, made with open eyes, made daily, made in full awareness of what it costs.
