Page 48 of Fought and Found

And Then

Flossie

Thefightlastedlessthan four minutes.

I know this because Sprout logged it. 00:03:47 from breach to containment, and my body does not believe this number. My body believes it lasted an hour, believes the mineral wall is still at my back and the tactical weight is still in the air and Morrison's voice is still cutting through the static. Going down is dying, Flossie.

I didn't go down.

He is standing in the corridor outside the cargo bunk. Blood on his jaw. The repair seam in his tactical suit at the shoulder—the same shoulder, the remembered gap of crimson skin and geometric markings and dark fuzz. My fingers have been twitching toward that spot since the day he boarded, and they are twitching now.

He moves first this time.

Not toward the pursuit craft console. Toward me. The combat chemistry is still running—I can feel the heat radiating off him across two feet of corridor, the 103 degrees the recyclers are losing against—but his face is doing the thing where the weapon and the male are both present and the male is winning.

His hands find my face. Slowly—he gives me time to see them coming, the slowness deliberate, and I appreciate it—and then the smooth pads are at my jaw, tilting my head toward the light. His thumbs are careful around the cut. Very careful. The claws are retracted all the way, every point, and I can feel the fuzz at his knuckles against my cheekbone and I hold still and let him look.

He looks at the cut for longer than is medically necessary.

"It needs closing," he says. The stripped-down voice—no architecture, no operational distance. Just: this is true, and it needs doing, and I am going to do it. "The thermal thread in the field kit—"

"I can do it myself," I say. Which is true.

"I know." He doesn't move his hands. "I'm going to do it anyway."

I close my mouth.

His hands are steady. Both of them—the same hands that had Saar's throat five minutes ago, the claws that were in and not dimpling, the weight that was about to come down—and now they are holding my jaw with a precision I am going to be thinking about for a long time. He produces the thermal thread from the tactical kit at his side and works with his head bent close to mine, his breath warm against my cheekbone, and the purr starts in his chest again—low, the frequency that means she's here, she's close, hold on—and I hold very still and let the predator mend what the fight broke.

When he's done he doesn't step back. His hands stay at my jaw. His thumb traces the line of the closed cut, once—the same slow stroke he used on my cheekbone in the cockpit, before the channel screamed—and the touch is so careful it takes something out of me.

"You went feral," I say. My voice is low. He is four inches from my face.

"Yes."

"You were going to kill him."

A pause. "Yes."

I let that sit. "And if I hadn't said your name?"

The gold eyes. Still wide, the pupils large, the combat chemistry working its way down from the red end of the scale. "I would have stopped." The pause before the next word is long enough to be honest. "Eventually."

The shaking has started in my hands. Post-combat tremor—the adrenaline finding nowhere to go—and it is not only the fight. It is the wall. The white edges. The copper taste. The fraction of a second between my dodge and not quite fast enough.

An inch to the left and I don't get to do this.

An inch—and the second drone has a clear shot and the three hours to Junction One are someone else's problem and the male four inchesfrom my face is required to file a report about it. I think about him filing that report. The clinical language, the operational framework, the way he would have put what happened in the hold and the corridor and the cockpit into SRS-standard terminology, and filed it, and carried it. I think about that and something fierce and hot fills up behind my sternum and crowds out everything Morrison ever said about staying professional.

I am done staying professional.

I stop redirecting.

"Twice," I say. My voice is not steady. My voice is the voice of a woman who has been interrupted twice and is not going to be interrupted a third time. "Twice I have been one inch from your mouth and something has intervened. I almost didn't get to say that. The tactical weight was an inch off, and I almost didn't get to say anything at all." I look at him. The blood on his jaw. The shaking in my hands. "If you want to say something noble about biology or bonding protocols or escalation, say it now. In about three seconds I am going to kiss you and I would prefer not to have the conversation while I'm doing it."

"I—" His throat works. The purr is building in his chest. I can feel it through his hands against my jaw. "I have no objections to—the bonding protocols are not—"

"Three seconds is up."