Page 46 of Fought and Found

He looks up at me—silver eyes, the luminous blue skin, that calculated almost-smile—and says, with the easy confidence of a male who has never had charm fail him: “Xax always did have good taste. Or—well. He never had any taste at all, before. This is new.” The silver eyes hold mine. “I can see why he broke protocol. If the circumstances were different—“

“They’re not.” I holster Betsy. Look down at him. “The circumstances are that you came here to kill him, or me, or both. So the knee is splinted and the door is sealing and you can save the charm for your debrief.” I pause. “Which you will be giving. Because you’re going to help us figure out who built that contract.”

He blinks. First genuine surprise I’ve seen from him. “Is that so.”

“The routing irregularities you flagged? We’re going to need the specifics.” I hold his gaze. “Think about it.”

The door seals.

In the corridor, I lean against the wall and breathe. The adrenaline is running hot still. The blood on my cheek has begun to dry. I need to deal with that. I file it under later, along with the shaking that has started in my hands.

Xor is at the pursuit craft’s console. He jacked in through the starboard airlock—the craft is docked against the Petal like a parasite, small and angular, built for speed and silence, and the comms array is military-grade.

He looks up as I approach, and I see it—the question he won’t ask. His nostrils flared the moment I came out of the bunk. He can smell Saar on me, or the proximity, or whatever Xarthian olfactory processing does with the information that the woman whose pheromones he has been cataloging for days just spent five minutes in a small room with a handsome Yulx operative.

His claws are extended. Just the tips. Pricking into the console polymer.

“His knee is splinted,” I say. “He’ll live. He’s also going to help us—he flagged the contract routing before he deployed. Third-party relay. He knew something was wrong and came anyway.” I lean against the console beside him. Close. The combat proximity. “He’s more useful to us breathing.”

Something in his jaw releases. The claws retract—not all the way, but enough.

“Saar uses charm as a tactical instrument,” he says. “It is—effective. Against most targets.”

The pause before most targets is doing a lot of work.

“I’ve been flying with you long enough, lovey.” My shoulder against his arm. “I’m not going to be undone by a nice jawline and a smooth voice. I have very specific taste, and my specific taste runs to seven feet tall with fuzz and a purr and a tail that has opinions.”

His tail wraps my ankle. Immediate. Involuntary. The possessive reflex that his waking mind has stopped trying to moderate, and the tension in his shoulders drops by degrees.

I don’t look at him when I say it. I look at the display. But I can feel the purr start—low, steady, the frequency that means mine—and the smile I’m hiding behind the console is the size of a small planet.

“Sprout, route the comms data through the secondary display.”

“Routing. The encryption is SRS standard, which I cracked in approximately four seconds. I would like this noted.”

“Noted.”

The comms data populates. Mission briefing. Agent Saar’s deployment orders. The kill order—the same nine words, the same Trellclearance code.

Except.

“The routing,” Xor says. He has gone very still. “The routing is wrong.”

I look. I’m not SRS intelligence, but twelve years of courier work means I can read a transmission chain. The kill order has Trell’s clearance code but the routing signature—the digital fingerprint of the server that originated the message—doesn’t match SRS command architecture. It matches the third-party relay Saar flagged.

“The order didn’t originate from Trell.” His voice is flat. The tactical brain running hot. “The clearance code was spoofed. Someone injected the kill order into SRS channels using Trell’s authentication.”

“Someone with access to SRS encryption.”

“Someone with access to SRS encryption, knowledge of the operational chain, and a specific interest in having you eliminated by your own protection.”

The elegant brutality of it hits me. Someone wanted me dead and they didn’t send their own people. They hacked SRS comms and sent Xor. Used the organization’s own architecture to turn the male protecting me into the weapon aimed at me. If he’d been the agent SRS built—the 98% compliance rate, the weapon they wheel out—I would be dead and the container would be gone and Xor would be filing a mission report that no one would question.

“Sprout, can you trace the originating server?”

“Working. The spoofing is sophisticated—multiple relay bounces, encrypted proxy layers. But the encryption style has a signature.” A pause. The orb cycling rapid gold. “Varren Drask. The encryption matches known Drask Acquisitions methodology.”

Drask. I don’t know the name. I look at Xor.