Page 42 of Fought and Found

“Flossie.”

“Don’t say my name like that if you’re going to be noble about this.”

I lean.

Slow. Inch by inch. Giving her time to pull back, to choose, to close the distance or widen it. My hand lifts from the armrest and finds her jaw — claws retracted, every point, smooth pads against the hinge of her jaw and the pad of my thumb against her cheekbone. Her skin is cool against my palm. Five degrees between us. The gap that has been a negotiation since the bunk.

She leans into my hand. Like my palm on her face is a thing she has been waiting for. Like she is not afraid of the hands that carry her death warrant.

The purr surges. Loud — the loudest it has ever been, filling the cockpit, traveling through my hand into her jaw, and I feel her swallow against my palm. Her eyes flutter closed for one second. Thetrust in that — closed eyes, exposed throat, the woman letting the predator cup her face — destroys something in me that I will not be rebuilding.

She does not know what is in my channel. She is closing her eyes for the threat.

“I need you to understand,” I say, and the words are wrecked, the purr shredding every consonant, “that Xarthian bonding is not — the biology does not permit partial responses. If I kiss you —“ My thumb traces her cheekbone. Her lips part. I can see her tongue, the wet gleam of it, and the sight drives a spike of heat through my body so hard my vision whites at the edges. “If I kiss you I will need to keep kissing you. The escalation is not —“

“I know what the escalation is.” Her eyes open. Brown, steady, certain, dilated in the mineral light until the irises are mostly black. Her hand comes up and wraps around my wrist — not pulling, not pushing, holding. Her pulse against mine. “I’ve been pressed against the escalation since the bunk, lovey. I felt every ridge. I know exactly what happens next.”

Every ridge.

She felt every ridge. She knows the anatomy — not theory, not inference. She lay against me for six hours and learned my body the way she learned this corridor: in the dark, by feel, with the attentive silence of a woman who catalogs what she touches. She knows the ridges, and she knows the knot and she knows what the escalation means, and she is holding my wrist against her own pulse and telling me she knows exactly what happens next with the calm certainty of a decision made some time ago that she has simply been waiting to act on.

The ridge response is — I will attempt to note this clinically and I will not succeed. Every ridge thickens. Simultaneously. The wave of it hits the base of my shaft and travels upward and I hear myself make asound that is not the purr. It is the other frequency. The one the Dens excised as thoroughly as the bonding signal, and it is returning now, without permission, because she said every ridge and looked at me while she said it and her scent has changed, and my body has updated its assessment of the situation to: imminent.

My thumb traces her cheekbone. Her lips part wider. Her mouth is — I need to kiss her. The biology is a straightforward document on this point: I need to kiss her, and if I kiss her I need to keep kissing her, and the escalation from there is not one either of us will be walking away from easily, and I find that I cannot make this sound like a warning.

One inch. Her nose brushes mine.

The contact is small, and my entire body comes apart with it. The purr detonates — a new register entirely, the frequency dropping into something sub-vocal that I feel in my sternum before I hear it — and her grip on my tail goes tight, all five fingers, and the sensation rockets from the underside straight through my spine and into the knot and my hips drive forward against the chair and the sound that comes out of me is nothing the Dens would recognize and nothing SRS trained for, and I am not capable of regulating it. Her breath crosses my lips — peppermint, warm, the specific temperature of a mouth about to open — and her scent is so close it is not scent anymore, it is information, it is her body speaking directly to mine, and what it is saying is yes.

She smiles against the gap. I can feel it. The curve of her mouth an inch from mine.

“There’s the brick wall,” she murmurs, and the words ghost across my lips, warm and deliberate, and her hand slides from my wrist to the back of my neck, fingers threading into the fuzz at my nape —

The sensation at the base of my horn fires.

Not gradually. Not the slow build of the corridor hours. All at once — the full nerve chain from horn-root to groin igniting in a single uninterrupted cascade, and my claws extend without instruction, all ten points driving through the armrest, and the purr drops into something I have no name for, the biological equivalent of a door held shut for thirty years swinging open, and I am one inch from her mouth, and I am going to —

The emergency channel screams.

Not Sprout. The channel that bypasses every suppression protocol, every mineral shadow. The frequency reserved for imminent threat.

Sprout’s orb blazes white. “Contact. Single vessel. Inside the corridor. Bearing zero-nine-three mark seven. They followed us in.”

The gap between our mouths is one inch. Her breath on my lips. Her fingers in my fuzz. The purr running so loud it vibrates through the console.

“SRS configuration. Pursuit class. Running a Tier 1 transponder code.”

Trell did not wait. Trell sent someone like me.

She pulls back. I pull back. The cold air fills the gap like water into a wound and the absence of her hand on my neck registers as physical damage. Her face changes — not fear. The Morrison override. Warm Flossie banking, cold Flossie arriving. Her hand drops from my neck, finds the flight controls. She is a pilot before she is anything else.

“How good?” Steady. Professional. A woman who was one inch from kissing me and is now running combat vectors.

“If Trell sent a Tier 1, they are very good.”

“Better than you?”

“No one Trell has is better than me.” Assessment, not arrogance. “But they will not need to be better than me. They will need to be better than us.”