Page 22 of Fought and Found

His hand lands on my shoulder. Not a decision — a placement, his palm against the slope of muscle where the cardigan has slipped, his fingers curving over the ridge. The warmth sinks through fabric into skin and I can feel every individual fingertip, blunt, claws retracted, gentle with a deliberateness that tells me gentleness does not come naturally to these hands and he is choosing it anyway.

“We have a problem,” he says.

“The mercs?”

“The mercs are running SRS transponder codes.”

The words land in my sternum. His hand tightens on my shoulder — half a degree, blunt fingertips pressing into the muscle with an urgency that is not tactical — and his eyes are gold and dark and looking at me with something that might be fear, if fear wore the face of a man who has just realized the only structure he’s ever known has sent people to kill him.

“SRS sent them,” I say. Not a question.

“SRS sent them.” His voice is steady. His hand is shaking. “And I told them exactly where to find us.”

7

Shared Berth

Flossie

SRSsentthem.Andhe told them exactly where to find us.

The sentence sits in the cockpit like a live round. His hand is on my shoulder. His tail is on my thigh. Eight merc signatures blink on the tactical display, running SRS transponder codes, and I am looking at a man who has been honest with me about the worst possible thing.

“Right,” I say. My voice comes out steady, which is Morrison’s doing, not mine. “So we have six hours before the people you work for arrive to kill us.”

“The transponder codes indicate SRS involvement. This does not necessarily—”

“Xor.” No pet name. His actual name, and the weight of it lands because this morning he gave it to me like it cost himsomething. “They’re running your employer’s codes on an intercept course that matches the trajectory you reported. Don’t manage me.”

His hand lifts from my shoulder first. The absence arrives before I’ve processed it — the precise shape of his palm still radiating through my shirt, the muscle beneath it too aware of where he was. I’ve been shirtless-adjacent with this man. I’ve had my hands on the geometric lines of him and felt the heat spike under my fingertips and heard the sound he makes when you find the right spot. My shoulder has opinions about this.

The tail follows. Slow withdrawal, each inch deliberate, and my thigh tracks the whole slow length of the leaving . The weight of it was specific. The heat of it was specific. The particular pressure of three and a half feet of prehensile muscle choosing, without authorization, to hold me — specific. My body has filed all of it under significant and is currently staging a protest about the withdrawal that I am firmly overruling, because eight SRS vessels are on an intercept course and I am a professional.

“I am not managing you.” Low. Something closer to the way he sounded when he saidgentle. “I am stating that the situation requires recalculation.”

“The situation requires you to pick a side.” I stand. The cockpit is small enough that standing puts me inside his heat radius—the invisible line where his 103 degrees meets my 98.6—and I don’t step back. “Are you with SRS, or are you with me?”

He knows what I’m asking. The gold of his eyes darkens at the center, pupils widening, and his claws—which retracted for me an hour ago, both hands, a choice his body made before his brain caught up—dig into his own palms.

I see the crescent marks forming. Four small half-moons pressed into crimson skin.

My fingers twitch. The reach. I want to take his hand and open his fist and press my thumb into those marks. The specificity of that want is alarming. Not comfort him. My thumb. His palm. The precise pressure of sayingstop hurting yourselfwith my hands.

I fold my arms instead. Press the wanting down behind my sternum where it can sit with everything else I’m not examining tonight.

“You.” He says it like a coordinate locked into a nav system. “I am standing next to you.”

The man who gave me his name an hour ago has been replaced by someone I want to hit with a data pad.

We spend two hours making the Petal invisible, and every minute of it Xor is colder, sharper, more condescending than he was before the touch, beforebeautiful, before the purr. As if the last six hours never happened. As if I didn’t have my fingers in the fuzz at his nape and feel him come apart beneath my hand.

He barks orders. Actual orders, on my ship, as if the SRS command structure has spontaneously reinstated itself in my cockpit.

“Recalibrate the port-side scanner array. The sensitivity threshold is inadequate.”

“Recalibrate it yourself, lovey. You know where the controls are.”

“The courier should focus on navigation. Technical recalibrationrequires—”