Steadier.
His heartbeat.
The mark pulses in time with him.
It takes maybe three minutes. It feels like three years. When the device lifts away, the whine fades, and there is a silence in the room that is also a completion.
"Open your eyes."
I do.
He's holding a mirror. Not a medical instrument, not a holo-display. An actual mirror, black-framed, small enough to hold in one hand. Old-fashioned in a way that feels deliberate. He wanted me to see this in glass, not light.
The woman in the mirror has my face. My eyes, bloodshot and wet. My mouth, bitten raw. My unwashed hair and my bare skin and my cheap black bra.
But her throat.
On the left side of her neck, from just below the ear tothe collarbone, a pattern glows. Bioluminescent blue-white, the same shade as the lines on his skin, the same steady pulse. It's beautiful. That's the worst part. It's not a brand: it's not ugly or brutal or crude. It's an intricate series of curves and lines that follow the architecture of my throat as if they were always meant to be there, as if my skin had been waiting for them.
The pattern pulses.
I feel it, a warmth, a hum, a low frequency that vibrates against my vocal cords. With each pulse, I feel him. Not his thoughts or words but his presence. A weight at the edge of my awareness, like a hand hovering over my skin without touching.
I look at the woman in the mirror and I don't recognize her. I should be horrified. I am horrified. My stomach is a fist and my eyes are burning and every rational thought I own is cataloguing this as violation, as assault, as the physical manifestation of everything that has been taken from me.
But underneath the horror, in a place I will not examine, something else.
Something quiet and terrible that feels like:finally. Something decided and settled after three days of not knowing, of being shuttled and processed and held and moved and waiting, someone has drawn a line and put me on one side of it.
I am here. I belong to him. The mark says so. The mark will always say so.
I set the mirror facedown on the table.
He takes it back withoutcomment.
I keep waitingfor the push.
They give me clothes. Not another processing jumpsuit but real clothes, soft and dark, fitted in a way that suggests my measurements were taken during the medical exam. I dress in the same room where I was marked, and the new fabric against the mark on my throat feels like a second skin over a wound.
Astra returns to lead me through corridors that get wider and quieter the deeper we go into the station's core. The ceilings climb and the lighting shifts from medical white to something warmer, amber underlaid with the faintest blue. I see fewer people but better-armed ones. Art on the walls. Real art, not holo-projections. Paintings from Earth, I think. Old ones. worth more than some direlect stations I've seen.
Zane walks ahead of us. I watch the back of his neck where his own bioluminescence glows steady and calm, and I match its pulse against the one in my throat.
In sync.
Perfect rhythm.
People step aside for him. Not dramatically, not with bowed heads and shuffling feet. More natural than that. More insidious. They simply... adjust. A woman carrying a data-stack takes two steps left without looking up, clearing his path as if she'd always intended to walk that way. A guard at a junction point relaxes his stance, his hand drifting away from his weapon, his face easing into an expression of benign inattention. A man arguing into a comm unit lowers his voice, his tone smoothing from aggression to calm without missing a word of his conversation.
None of them seem to notice they're doing it.
I notice.
My pulse ticks higher and the mark on my throat flares in response, brighter for a heartbeat, and Zane's shoulders shift the smallest fraction. He felt that. My spike of fear. My recognition of what he is.
He doesn't turn around.
And the push doesn't come. That's what breaks me open more than the mark, more than the mirror, more than the cold table and the careful hands. I am waiting for the moment he reaches into my chest and rearranges what he finds there. I am bracing for the violation of my own want, the theft of my fear, the moment I stop feeling what I feel and start feeling what he decides.
