Page 33 of Delivered and Devoured
She deserves slow. She deserves thorough and deliberate and asked.
I count to seventy. Then I stop pretending.
“HORATIO.”
“Captain.” Immediate. No theater. “Lights?”
“Low. Full ship. My preference.”
The lights go down. Amber-bronze. Predator-configuration. My slit pupils widen, and the world sharpens into edges and heat signatures and the faint chemical trail of everything that has passed through this galley in the last hour.
She has passed through this galley. The air is saturated with her — tea and soap and the warm-sweet arousal she broadcast when I told her what I was going to do to her neck. The warm-sweet when I saidrun, little human.The warm-sweetness that spiked so hard when I said it that the air between us went thick enough to taste without the tongue and I tasted it anyway.
I kick my boots off under the table. The hunt doesn’t work in boots. The hunt works in bare feet on cold deck plating, in the silence of a body built to move through dark spaces without sound.
My tongue reads her. My body saysgo.
I stand. The calm that comes is not performance. It is the thing underneath the hunt — the certainty of a male who knows where his mate is. The instinct does not make me frantic. It makes me patient. Patient in a way I have never been patient about anything, including the route, including the nebula, including the fourteen years of careful, competent control that were, I understand now, a rehearsal. Practice for this. The thing I was built for and told I would never have.
Every second of her hiding feeds something in me that has been empty my whole adult life. The emptiness is filling, and the filling feels like the first breath after drowning.
I leave the galley. The ship is dark and warm and mine. Every corridor. Every hatch. Every crawl space and access panel, and dead end.Nine years. I know the distance between bulkheads by stride count. I know which deck plates creak and which stay silent. I know the ventilation flow at every junction — which way the air moves, which ducts pull and which push, where a scent trail concentrates and where it disperses.
She is on my ship. In the dark. Her heart hammering. Her scent trailing behind her like a lit fuse.
Find her.
She told me she hid in the maintenance tunnels, that nobody had ever found her. She told me she learned to make herself invisible at nine years old because the alternative was being cornered by people who didn’t deserve to find her.
I check the maintenance tunnels first.
Primary access panel. Port side of the lower corridor. I crouch. My face level with the vent. My tongue flicks into the opening — tasting the metal, the recycled air, the ghost of her. She was here. The scent is warm but fading. Residual. She pressed herself into the duct entrance, held for maybe twenty seconds, then backed out.
She’s not here; she doubled back.
She told me where she hid on purpose. Gave me the maintenance tunnels like a gift and used them as misdirection. She went where I’d look first, left her scent, and moved to somewhere I wouldn’t expect.
I am going to marry this woman.
The thought arrives between breaths, and I let it sit. I don’t interrogate it. It is a fact. Like the nebula. Like the route.
I move through the lower corridor. Not hunting speed. Courting speed. The difference is everything. Hunting speed closes the distance. Courting speed builds it. Every step placed. Every breath drawn through the tongue. The body loose and low, the gait fluid — jointsunlocked into the predator-walk that civilian-Jazil has never used because civilian-Jazil never had a reason. This-Jazil has a reason. The reason is five foot two and hiding in his ship and can hear him coming.
“Lorri.” Into the corridor. Not loud. Conversational. Intimate. The voice you use when you know the person you’re talking to is listening from somewhere they think you can’t reach. “I checked the maintenance tunnels.”
Silence. The ship hums around us. Her heartbeat is in the silence — faint, fast, two corridors away.
“You weren’t there. You told me you hid in tunnels because you wanted me to go there first. So you could go somewhere else.”
I pause at the junction. Taste. The trail branches. She went left. The left branch is warmer. Fresher. The warm-sweetness is stronger here — not just the baseline scent of her but the layered, complicated,interestedversion. The version that spikes when I speak. “That was clever, little human. Using your own story as misdirection. I should have expected that from the woman who talked a Vrennak into lying down with a cat trick.”
I turn left. Follow her warmth.
“But here’s the thing about Skiveth scent-tracking in a sealed ship. You can move. You can double back. You can use the ventilation ducts to scatter your trail — and you are using them, I can taste the dispersal pattern, very smart. But you can’t change your chemistry.”
My tongue flicks. Both tips reading the air. The concentration is building. She is ahead of me and she is aroused and the arousal is intensifying with every word I say and the intensifying is making my skin run cold in the way it does when the hunt-bond is fully active — Skiveth thermoregulation dropping; the body conserving heat forcontact, for when cool meets warm and the difference becomes a conversation between skins.
“And your chemistry right now, Lorri, is telling me exactly how much you want me to find you. I can taste the exact moment each promise lands. I tasted the spike when I told you about your throat. I tasted the one when I said I’d go lower. And right now — right now your body is broadcasting something into the air of my ship that I could track through three closed hatches and a hull breach.”
