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“A weapons shipment tip, three days out, sourced well enough that it held up under everything I checked it against. The Sovereign told me to take it; I argued, he insisted, I went. The shipment didn’t exist. It was a stage set, built for one audience, because their whole plan had a single point of failure and it was me being in the building.”

His voice stayed level, the same voice he used for route briefings, and that was the worst thing in the room.

“I went over it afterward. If I’d refused him. If I’d checked one source deeper. If the return burn had been eleven hours shorter. I’ve replayed that night more times than I’ve run the Spire. Every version ends with me in a corridor light-years out, feeling nothing. I had no way to know he was already on a throne room floor.”

He turned the schematic one degree, needlessly.

“Your brother held a door I should have been in that building to defend. I’ve read his duty log four times since the Virelle. He held the east door nineteen minutes. It took me six years to learn there was a man on that door at all, because they erased him, and the file you stole undid that. Whatever else happens in that building. That part is already done.”

“Do you still check sources the way you did before?” I asked.

“I check everything three times and trust it once.” A pause. “The men find it slow. None of them has ever asked me why.”

I couldn’t say thank you. Saying it out loud would have meant surviving it out loud. So I looked at his profile and said nothing. He let me.

We went back to the vectors because work was easier for both of us. The security-level-five junction. The lift override sequence. His hand and mine went for the same datapad in the same second.

His fingers came down over mine.

Neither of us moved.

We’d brushed hands a dozen times while working. This time his hand stayed. One second, two, heat coming off him the way it had in the shuttle, and my pulse went loud enough that a Vinduthi could certainly hear it.

I saw the small change in his face when he did. I did not take my hand back. He did not lift his.

His thumb moved once over my knuckles. My breath caught. I turned my hand slightly toward his instead of away. His breathing changed too.

“Tell me to move,” he said.

The words were level. The fangs were not. They had descended enough to show, white against the dark of his mouth. The hand over mine was hotter than the table light had any right to make it.

“Move closer.”

He came around the table immediately. One second there was a schematic between us; the next my chair had turned under his hand and his body filled the space between my knees. He paused long enough for me to change my mind. I caught the front of his shirt and pulled him closer.

The first kiss was careful, his mouth firm against mine while he waited for my response. I opened for him. His fangs grazed my lower lip, and the second kiss was not careful at all.

His hand went into my hair, keeping clear of the pin as he drew me closer. Mine found the violet line at his throat. The table edge pressed into my spine; he lifted me onto it without breaking the kiss, and every datapad and contingency slate became a hazard we ignored.

Heat poured off him. His mouth moved from mine to the place below my ear where the collar had sat under his thumb. The scrape of a fang there sent my legs tight around his hips.

“This is not the security-level-five junction,” I said, breathless into his hair.

“No.” His mouth returned to mine. “The security-level-five junction is less dangerous.”

That was almost a joke. From him. I laughed against his lips, and whatever control he had left went with it. His palm spread over my thigh, dragging me to the edge of the table until the hard length of him pressed where I had been trying not to imagine it.

My pulse raced. He heard it and made a low, rough sound I had never heard from him before.

His fingers found the hem of my shirt. Mine found the fastening at his waist.

“Rylos.” Talon’s voice cracked out of the table comm. “Course correction at the drift boundary in ten. Need your confirm on the fuel burn. And before you answer, the war table is transmitting three unsecured biometric anomalies: both heart rates and one thermal spike.”

Rylos went still with his mouth at my throat and one hand under my shirt. I had never understood the strategic value of murder more clearly.

“Confirmed,” he said, voice wrecked but functional. “Do it.”

“Copy. Secure the table. Go to sleep, both of you. In whichever order seems survivable.” The channel closed.