A guard stood in the center of it. Human. One of Corsine’s operatives, not station security. I recognized him. Harrick. He ran contraband through the Forgotten Corridors and supplemented his income by threatening prisoners who could not fight back.
His hand was on Kira’s arm. His fingers dug into the flesh above her elbow, and she was pressed against the desk, and the data terminals were scattered where she had been shoved backward into them. Her face was turned away from him, her other arm braced against his chest, holding distance. Her lip was split. Blood on her chin.
Blood.
Her blood.
The red in my vision went total.
What followed was not a decision. It was a biological event. Three hundred thousand years of Zethrani warrior genetics detonating through a nervous system that had been selectively bred for exactly this purpose and then, supposedly, decommissioned.
The bond had reactivated more than the mating instinct. It had reactivated the killing one.
I crossed the room in two strides. My hand closed around Harrick’s throat. My fingers wrapped the column of his neck, and the claws I had retracted for fourteen days in Kira’s presence extended to their full length and pressed against the skin beneath his jaw.
He left the ground. The motion was lateral, a full-arm displacement that sent his body across the room and into the far wall. The impact cracked the metal sheeting. He hit the floor and scrambled, reaching for the weapon on his belt, and I was already there.
I pinned him with one hand on his chest. My knee on his thigh. My claws dimpled the body armor over his sternum, and the pressure I applied was measured by a calculation that occurred below conscious thought: the exact force required to puncture the armor without reaching the organs beneath. The line between restraint and killing is measured in millimeters.
“You touched her.” My voice was gone. What came out was a register I had not used in years, a sub-harmonic frequency that resonated in the walls and the floor and the bones of the man beneath me. A sound designed by evolution to paralyze prey. “You put your hands on her.”
Harrick’s face was white. His mouth moved. No sound came out. His hands clawed at my forearm, and his fingers could not close around the circumference of my wrist.
“Do you understand what you have done?” The words came from a place in my throat that tasted like copper and fire. My scales were burning. I felt the heat surge through them, past calm, past arousal, into something older.
Harrick’s wide, wet eyes reflected it back at me. Red. A deep, pulsing crimson. The color of a Zethrani male in killing mode. “Do you understand what I will do to anyone who touches her?”
“Corsine sent me.” He choked the words out. “She wanted the engineer. Wanted her brought to the lab. I was following orders.”
Corsine.
The name cut through the red haze by a fraction. Enough to register. Not enough to stop.
“Corsine does not give orders regarding prisoners in my custody.” I leaned closer. My claws pressed deeper. The armor creaked. “I give orders. And my order is this.”
I brought my face to within inches of his. My pupils were slits. My scales were casting a red glow across his skin. Every sub-harmonic frequency I possessed was tuned to the register that said, in every language my species had ever spoken:you are prey.
“If you touch her again. If you speak to her. If you occupy the same corridor as her. I will remove your hands from your body and send them to Corsine in a specimen jar.”
A sound from the doorway. Boots on the grating. Another guard, drawn by the impact, appeared in the threshold. He took one look at the scene and raised his weapon.
A Thermal-Prod.
The blue flare caught me on the left shoulder.
The pain was designed for my species. Thermal-Prods generated a targeted electromagnetic pulse calibrated to disrupt the Zethrani nervous system at the cellular level. It hit my neural pathways and burned. Every sensory channel I possessed fired simultaneously, and the conflicting signals collapsed my motor coordination.
My hand released Harrick. My body locked. Muscles seized in contradictory spasms, and the world tilted as my knee gave and I went sideways.
A second charge. This one hit my ribs. The pain was blinding. White-hot and absolute, and it tore through the bond, and I felt Kira’s responding surge of panic, felt her fear for me rather than of me, and that distinction was the only thing that kept me from losing consciousness.
The guard with the Prod advanced. Harrick scrambled free, coughing, clutching his throat.
I got to my knees. The Prod had disrupted my coordination but not my musculature. The neurons were misfiring, but the muscles themselves were intact, and a Zethrani warrior did not need coordinated neural signals to stand. We needed will.
I stood.
The guard with the Prod stepped back.
