"Package confirmed," one of them says into a comm. "St. Laurent's daughter. Moving to extraction point."

  "Copy. Vehicle bay twelve."

  I have what I need. The comm frequency. The extraction route. If I follow them to vehicle bay twelve, I get the transport, the pilot, the next link in the chain.

  Dexter's voice in my ear, vibrating with barely contained fury. "Extract now, Zane."

  "Not yet."

  "She's terrified. She thinks we've left her."

  "I know what she thinks." I can feel it, every shade and frequency of it. Abandonment the size of a black hole opening in her chest. The certainty, total and crushing, that nobody is coming. She's unaware that the man she trusted, the man she let inside her body and her mind, weighed her life on a scale and found it lighter than information.

  They haul her upright. She can barely stand, the stunner's aftereffects turning her legs to water, and two of them grip her arms with careless force that will leave bruises I'll catalogue later in the precise shape of each finger. They start moving her toward the east corridor. Toward vehicle bay twelve.

  I track their progress through the surveillance feeds Astra patches to my display. Corridor by corridor. Junction by junction. Talia stumbles once, and the operative on her left yanks her upright by the zip ties, wrenching her shoulders in a way that sends a lance of white pain through the bond so sharp I bite through my own lip. Blue blood fills my mouth.

  "Zane." Dexter again. "We're losing the window. If they get her to the vehicle bay, we're looking at a ship-to-ship pursuit. The risk profile changes."

  He's right. He knows he's right. I know he's right.

  But it's not the tactical assessment that moves me.

  It's the moment, captured on surveillance feed, when Talia stops struggling. When her face goes still and empty and she closes her eyes and I feel through the bond the exact second she gives up. Not fighting. Not afraid. Just gone. A candle flame pinched between two fingers. She retreats to somewhere inside herself where nobody can reach her, and the connection between us goes so quiet I can barely feel it, like she's already decided I'm not on the other end.

  That silence is worse than her screaming.

  "Now," I say.

  I'm through the control booth door and down the maintenance ladder before the word finishes leaving my mouth. The tactical team is already breaching from three points, Dexter's work, and the corridor fills with the sound of pulse fire and shouting and the particular wet thud of bodies meeting walls at speed. I don't use a weapon. I had one. I holstered it somewhere between the booth and the corridor. I want my hands.

  The first operative goes down in the junction between Sublevel Nine and the vehicle bay access. He's turning toward the sound of the breach when I reach him. My hand closes around his throat and I use his own momentum to slam him into the bulkhead hard enough to dent the panel. His spine makes a sound like a branch breaking under snow. I hold him there and watch the light leave his eyes with a focus that should disturb me more than it does.

  It doesn't disturb me at all.

  The second is running. Smart, but not fast enough. I catch him in three strides. He gets a hand on his sidearm and manages one wild shot that scorches the wall behind my ear, close enough to singe, and then I have him by the wrist and I'm twisting until the joint gives with a pop I feel in my own fingers. He screams. I put my other hand on the back of his head and introduce his face to the corridor wall. Once. Twice. The third time is excessive.

  I do it anyway.

  The operative who yanked Talia by her zip ties, the one whose grip will be bruised into her skin for the next week, has dropped her and drawn his weapon. He's backing away, and I can smell his fear, sour and sharp, nothing like the copper-bright terror that pours off Talia. His fear is simple. Animal. He sees what's coming and his body knows before his brain does.

  I close the distance. He fires. The pulse round catches my shoulder and the pain is distant, academic, something to address later. I take the carbine from his hands by breaking three of his fingers and then I take his life by breaking his neck. The sound is very small. Intimate, almost. Like cracking a knuckle.

  The fourth is already down when I reach him. Dexter's work, clean and professional. My brother stands over the body with his weapon still raised and his eyes on me, and in his expression I see something I haven't seen directed at me in a long time. Not fear. Wariness.

  "Clear," Astra announces in my ear.

  The corridor is quiet. The recycled air hums. Four bodies cool on the deck. Blue blood on my hands, theirs, and the pulse-burn in my shoulder throbs with each heartbeat.

  Talia is on the ground where they dropped her.

  She's curled on her side, wrists still bound, eyes open but empty in a way that makes my marks flare with something that isn't anger and isn't desire and isn't anything I have a name for. Something with teeth that lives in the place where the bond roots into my chest. I kneel beside her. The corridor floor is cold through my trousers. She doesn't flinch when I reach for her, but she doesn't lean in either. She's so far inside herself that my hands on the zip ties feel like they're touching a shell she left behind.

  I cut the ties. The skin beneath is raw, already swelling, and I hold her wrists with a gentleness that would make every operative on this station question their reality. I rub circulation back into her fingers one by one, methodical, careful, the same hands that just killed four people with the unhurried precision of a man performing a task he was designed for.

  She comes back to herself in pieces. A blink. A breath that shakes. And then her eyes focus on my face, on the blue blood streaked across my jaw and the burn mark on my shoulder and the bodies behind me that she can see if she turns her head, and I watch something move through her expression like weather over open water. Relief, first. Quick and involuntary. Then confusion. Then, slow and terrible and absolute, understanding.

  "You knew." Her voice is wrecked. Hoarse from the silent screaming the stunner forced into her diaphragm. "You let them take me."

  I don't deny it. There is nothing to deny. "I needed to see the network."

  She stares at me. Seconds pass that feel like geological events. Then she hits me.

  Her fist connects with my mouth. Not a slap, not a shove, a closed-fist punch with her whole body behind it, and she's learned more from Astra than I realized because the impact splits my lip and blue blood floods my tongue. I let her. My head turns with the blow and I taste copper and something sweeter underneath that's purely mine, and I let her because she earned this.

  She hits me again. Same spot. The pain blooms bright and honest and I take that too.

  "You felt it." She's shaking. Not with fear anymore. With something that burns hotter and colder at the same time. "You felt everything they did. You felt me think you left me to die. And you waited."

  "Yes."

  The word hangs between us in the corridor's recycled air, surrounded by the bodies of men I killed for touching her, men I let touch her first because the information was worth her terror. The math of it is clean and indefensible. I weighed her fear against the intelligence value and I chose the data.

  She hits me a third time, and this one draws blood from inside my cheek that mixes with the blood from my lip, and I swallow it down like communion.

  Medical bay is sterile white and the hum of diagnostic equipment. Talia sits on the examination table while the medic scans her wrists, her ribs where the stunner connected, the raw patches on her arms from the operatives' grip. I stand by the door. Not close enough to touch. Close enough that the bond still vibrates between us like a wire pulled taut enough to cut.

  The medic applies dermal patches to her wrists and murmurs something about keeping them dry for twelve hours. She nods without looking at him. Without looking at me. The bruises are already surfacing, dark against her brown skin, and I catalogue each one with the precision of a man compiling evidence against himself.

  The medic leaves. The door seals. The silence is a living thing between us with its own heartbeat.

  "You used me as bait." She says it flatly. Testing the words. Tasting them the way I taste blue blood in my mouth.

  "Yes."

  "You would have let them kill me."

  "No." The word comes out before the calculation finishes, and we both hear it for what it is. The first lie I've told her. I've given her hard truths, cold truths, truths that cut. I have never lied to her, and the sound of it between us now is obscene, a wrong note in a frequency we've both learned to tune to. I correct it, because she deserves better than my cowardice. "I calculated the risk. The probability of lethal intent was low based on their operational profile. They wanted you as leverage, not as a casualty."

  "Calculated." She laughs, and the sound is glass breaking against tile, sharp and scattered and impossible to reassemble. "You can feel everything I feel, Zane. That's what you told me. The bond goes both ways. You felt me terrified. You felt me thinking you'd abandoned me. You felt me give up." Her voice cracks on the last two words and she closes her eyes and I watch the muscles in her jaw work as she forces herself back together. "And you waited."

  I have no defense. The truth has no defense. It simply is.

  She opens her eyes. They've changed. Not the color, still that grey that reminds me of nothing in my world and everything in hers, but the quality of what lives behind them. Something has been burned out. Something else has been burned in.

  "I would do it again." I say it because she deserves it. Because the truth, even monstrous, is the only currency I've never debased between us. "If the situation required it. If the intelligence value warranted the risk. I would sacrifice you. That's who I am."

  She doesn't flinch. Doesn't hit me again. She just looks at me with those changed eyes and I feel through the bond something so complex I can't parse it in real time. Anger, yes, enormous and justified. Grief for whatever version of me she'd been building in her mind, the one who wouldn't, the one who'd choose her first. And underneath both, so deep it's almost inaudible, a thread of something that refuses to die no matter how many times I give it reason.

  She still wants me.

  I can feel it the way I feel her heartbeat. Constant. Involuntary. A biological fact she cannot override no matter how much she should.

  "Get out," she says.

  I go. The door seals behind me and I stand in the corridor outside medical bay with four dead operatives' blood drying under my fingernails and the taste of my own lies still coating my tongue, and I listen through the bond as Talia St. Laurent, alone on an examination table in the station's stark white light, puts her face in her bandaged hands and weeps.

  I don't move.

  I stand there and I feel all of it. Every wracking sob. Every wave of betrayal that crashes through the bond like radiation through an unshielded hull. I let it pour into me the way I let her punches land, without resistance, without defense, because I earned this too.

  The worst part is not that I did it.

  The worst part is not that I would do it again.

  The worst part is that she knows both of those things, and when I reach through the bond, tentative, barely a whisper of presence against the edge of her awareness, she doesn't shut me out.

  She should. Every survival instinct she has should be screaming to sever the connection, to wall herself off from the man who used her body as bait and her terror as a tactical delay. She should cut me out the way you cut out a tumor.

  She doesn't.

  Through the door, through the bond, through the quiet catastrophe of what I've done to us, I feel her reach back.

  Chapter 12

  Talia

  I should go to my own quarters.

  The thought moves through me like a signal with nowhere to land, pinging off every rational surface I have left. My quarters are forty meters down the corridor. A locked door. A bed that doesn't smell like him. A place where I could sit in the dark and catalogue every way he used me tonight, build a clean taxonomy of betrayal, file it all away under the heading of lessons learned.

  I follow him to his instead.

  My boots fall in step behind his, and I watch the back of his neck where the marks have gone dim, banked down to almost nothing, just the faintest tracery of silver-blue beneath his skin like veins carrying light instead of blood. He doesn't look back. He doesn't slow down or speed up. He just walks, and I walk behind him, and neither of us pretends this is anything other than what it is.

  I know why I'm following him. I've known since the sealed section, since his hands on me in the dark, since the taste of his mouth and the sound of his voice saying my name like it cost him something. I know why, and the knowing sits in my chest like a stone I swallowed whole, too heavy to cough up, too sharp to digest.

  I just don't want to say it yet.

  His door opens to his palm print. The quarters beyond are dim, station-night lighting casting everything in blue-grey tones that make the space look like the inside of a bruise. I step through behind him and the door seals shut, and the click of the lock sounds like a period at the end of a sentence I wrote myself.

  He moves to the view port. Stands there with his back to me, hands loose at his sides, looking out at the station's exterior where maintenance drones crawl across the hull like luminous insects. Beyond them, stars. The vast, indifferent scatter of them, burning without purpose or audience.

  I should say something measured. Something that preserves the architecture of my anger, keeps it structural and load-bearing instead of letting it collapse into the mess underneath.

  "You could have warned me." My voice comes out serrated. "You could have come with me. You could have done anything except use me like a chess piece."

  He doesn't turn around. His reflection in the view port glass is a ghost of him, translucent and edgeless. "You would have gone anyway."

  "You don't know that."

  Now he turns. His eyes find mine across the dim room, and there's no apology in them. No softness. Just the flat, calm assessment of a man who has already run every calculation and arrived at the answer he can live with.

  "The message said your father was alive, Talia. You would have walked into that trap with or without my permission. At least this way, I was watching."

  The word permission lands like a slap. Not because he's wrong about my choice. Because he's right. Because I would have gone, would have torn through every locked door on this station with my bare hands for the chance that my father was breathing somewhere on the other side. And he knew that. He counted on it. He used the best part of me as bait and called it tactics.

  "You don't get to decide what risks I take."

  "Someone has to."

  "Not you." I close the distance between us. Three steps. Four. Until I can see the individual striations of his irises, the place where grey bleeds into something almost colorless, alien. "Not the person who set the trap in the first place."

  "I didn't set it. I let it spring."

  "That's worse."

  His jaw tightens. Just barely, just a millimeter of tension in the hinge of it, but I'm standing close enough to see. Close enough to smell him. Sandalwood and something sharper underneath, the copper-edge scent of spent adrenaline. My body remembers what happened last time I stood this close to him and my pulse picks up, traitor that it is.

  I hit him.

  Open-handed, across the face, hard enough that the sound of it cracks through the quiet room like a shot. His head turns with it. Comes back to center. His marks flare once, a pulse of silver-blue that races from his throat to his jaw and fades.

  He doesn't move.

  I hit him again. Harder. My palm stinging now, the bones of my hand aching with the impact, and something in my chest is cracking open, something I've been holding sealed since the moment I woke up in that corridor with his hands on me and his voice in my ear telling me I was safe when I wasn't. When I'm not. When safety is a concept that stopped applying to my life the moment I set foot on this station.

  Again. The third blow is more shove than slap, both hands against his chest, and I can feel the muscle under his shirt, the solidity of him, the way he absorbs the impact without stepping back. He's letting me. The bastard is just standing there and letting me, and the tears are coming now, hot and furious, streaking down my face, and I hate them. I hate that he can feel them. I hate that every sob is data to him, every hiccup of grief feeding through whatever empathic conduit runs between us, letting him feel my weakness like it's his own.

  "Stop it." My voice breaks on the second word. "Stop letting me hit you. Fight back."

  His hands stay at his sides. "No."

  "Fight back." I shove him again, and this time he does move, a single step backward, his calves hitting the edge of the low couch behind him. "You don't get to just stand there and take it like that makes you noble. You're not noble. You used me, and you'd do it again, and we both know it, so stop pretending you're sorry and fight back."

  "I'm not pretending I'm sorry."

  The honesty of that stops me mid-swing. My fist hovering between us, knuckles white, arm shaking. He looks at my hand, then at my face, and what I see in his expression is worse than cruelty. It's recognition. He sees exactly what I am right now: broken open and furious and wanting something I can't name, something that lives in the space between hitting him and kissing him, and he's not going to choose for me.

  I choose.

  I grab the front of his shirt and drag his mouth down to mine. The kiss is nothing like before. Not the first time, when he tasted like a question, and not the second, when he tasted like an answer I wasn't ready for. This time he tastes like a fight I'm starting. I bite his lower lip hard enough to feel skin give, and the sound he makes is low and rough, closer to a growl than anything human, and his hands finally come up. One in my hair, fisting it, pulling my head back. The other at my hip, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise.