Aurelia Talbott was not having a good day. Normally, getting off to a bad start on work days meant sleeping in, but unfortunately today the opposite had been true. Aurie had been ripped from the gentle embrace of sleep at three thirty in the morning by her neighbor’s colicky infant. The same child who a week before Aurie had offered to set up a free consultation for with a pediatrician friend if only to be able to get more than four hours of sleep a night, only for the mother to glare at her for daring to recommend she take her precious child to one of “those know-it-all poison-peddlers.”
After lying in bed for two hours, completely awake, she had stripped, stepped into her shower, and discovered that the water was icy cold no matter how long she waited or how hard she twisted the handles. Teeth chattering, she’d fixed herself breakfast, eyeing the stove warily, and when her eggs neither spontaneously combusted or turned out to be poison she chalked it up to a rough start, arrived to work fifteen minutes early, and was promptly informed that she was being summoned to her supervisor’s office.
After thirty minutes of a gentle lecture on appropriate workplace behaviors, during which at no point did Mr. Friedrichson look above her collarbone, she was finally released to go fulfill the duties of her residency, which went normally, meaning she spent the rest of the day growing slowly more and more irritated with everything but especially insurance companies. She managed to catch about ten minutes of sleep in two plastic waiting room chairs pressed together, which only made her more tired and frustrated rather than less, before having to assist in an uncomfortably touch and go surgery on a twelve-year-old with a brain tumor.
By the time she finally walked back out of Grand View General Hospital, she was angry, tired, dreading returning to her own apartment, and on the verge of tears.
And that’s when she got kidnapped.
She supposed, as she was gently but firmly herded towards what appeared to be a decently sized cargo ship, that it said something when your kidnappers where nicer than your coworkers and your neighbors combined. There were three of them: a tall, dark man with an eyepatch who’s remaining golden eye gave him away as a shifter immediately who seemed significantly more annoyed at kidnapping Aurie than Aurie was at being kidnapped, a woman with her hair swept back by a patterned cloth and no discernable expression, and a slight, pale girl with dark hair and eyes who quietly apologized the whole way to the ship.
“I really am so sorry about all this,” she said.
“I’m sure you are,” Aurie said in her most reasonable voice, “but you appear to be doing it anyways, which sort of negates your apology.”
The pale girl winced. “Would it make you feel better if I told you we aren’t going to hurt you?”
Aurie considered it. “Yes, but not as much as, say, letting me go would.”
“See, that would sort of defeat the purpose of us doing this in the first place,” the man said in a voice that implied that he would rather be just about anywhere in the universe other than kidnapping an innocent medical student, a feeling which Aurie could definitely empathize with. “Look at it this way: unexpected vacation days.”
Aurie considered trying to consider fighting them off as a ramp leading into the ship lowered, but decided that she was probably exhausted enough that she’d just fall asleep trying to run. At the top of the ramp stood a broad, hairy man and a tall woman with dark red hair.
“Which one’s this?” the broad man asked.
“Aurelia Talbott. Still a student but almost done with her residency,” the pale girl answered.
The man at the top of the ramp grunted and walked into the ship as Aurie and her kidnappers began to trek up the ramp.
“Any difficulties?” the red-aired woman asked once they reached the top.
“No,” dark-skinned woman said. “Where’s Dom?”
“Where do you think?” the red-haired woman answered with a raised eyebrow before turning to Aurie. “Hello. I’m terribly sorry about all this, but, unfortunately, needs must. I’m Annie. This is Hyde, Zosha, and Delphine.”
“Sure, go ahead,” Hyde grumbled. “Tell her our names. Do you want to help her fill out a police report, too?”
“Yeah, it would really suck if we went to jail for kidnapping instead of, you know, all the other illegal shit we do,” Zosha told him, deadpan.
Hyde sent her a look that was pure venom and opened his mouth to say something in response, but Annie cut him off.
“Alright,” she said. “Zosha, you and Delphine take Aurelia here to your quarters. I’ll comm you when Dom is ready. Hyde, go do your job.”
Hyde walked off, muttering under his breath. Zosha giggled.
“Don’t mind Hyde, he’s always grumpy. I have no idea what Thalia sees in him, honestly.”
“I’m… sure he has many nice qualities?” Aurie responded hesitantly, unaware of what the correct procedure was for gossiping with one kidnapper about another kidnapper’s love life was.
“Not really,” Annie said, sounding highly amused. “Make sure she’s got anything she needs, okay?”
“Of course,” Delphine said quietly.
The group of women moved towards what appeared to be a hallway, Delphine’s grip light but solid on Aurie’s arm.
“Why’s Hyde so pissy about her being here, anyways?” Zosha asked. “I mean, he likes Dominic.”
“I think he’s just frustrated that there’s not really much he can do to help,” Annie told her as they reached a crossway. “Now remember: anything she needs.”
“’Kay,” Zosha said. “See you soon.”
They split apart, Annie going further down the hallways and Zosha, Delphine, and Aurie turning down a corridor that reminded Aurie of living in the dorms.
Zosha walked up to one room and punched a code into the keypad by the door. “This is my room,” she said as the door hissed open. “Well, my room and Rick’s room. You’ll meet him later. Anyways, this is where you’ll be staying while you’re here. Due to the whole thing where you’re technically our prisoner, either Delphine or I—or anyone else that’s part of the Breakwater’s crew—has to stay with you at all times. You can wear anything of mine, though, and you can watch any of the holovids we have.”
“Great,” Aurie said, moving to sit down on the bed. She had been tired at the hospital. Now, she was exhausted. All she wanted was to be in her own apartment, in her own bed, but instead she was getting abducted by the world’s most cheerful kidnappers. Unable to resist the cloud of sleep that crept through her mind, Aurie felt her eyelids drift shut. Maybe this was all a bad dream, and when she woke back up everything would be fixed.
As per her usual luck, when she woke back up, nothing was fixed.
Zosha was standing next to the bed, leaning over Aurie with her hand on her shoulder.
“Good morning,” she said. “The bathroom’s attached if you need it. There’s a new toothbrush in there, too, so feel free to use it.”
“Thank you,” Aurie said. “That’s very polite of you, especially in light of the whole kidnapping thing.”
Zosha winced. “I am sorry about that. It’s a complicated situation. Captain Ingram’ll explain it all, I promise.”
“That sounds… promising,” Aurie sighed. “Bathroom’s through here?”
At Zosha’s nod, Aurie walked into the small connected bathroom and shut the door behind her. It had a shower stall, a toilet, and a sink with a sonic tap and a water tap. According to the holovids, this was the point where Aurie would tap into her inner genius and figure out a way to escape. Unfortunately, Aurie was no vid hero, and even if she managed to somehow escape she had no idea how to get planetside again. She looked her reflection in the tired eyes and sighed, grabbing the toothbrush Zosha had left out. As she brushed her teeth, she ran over the things she knew and the things she needed to find out. The things she knew were: she had been kidnapped, her kidnappers seemed like pretty decent people other than that one glaring flaw, and that there was a pretty good chance that if she kept her head down and did what was asked of her she’d get out alive. What she needed to know was what, exactly, they needed her to do. She decided to hold off on a full-fledged panic attack until someone asked her to, for instance, sew a bag of something illegal into someone stomach or perform a lethal injection. For all she knew, they just really desperately needed someone to take out an appendix.
“So,” she said, walking back out of the bathroom. “Where’s this captain I need to speak with?”
“Breakfast,” Zosha said. “I hope you like dehydrated fruit.”
Aurie, suddenly starving, followed her dutifully into the rest of the ship.
Annie was sitting at the table next to Hyde, a tall brunette man, and a prodigiously hairy barrel-chested man.
“I brought her!” Zosha declared cheerfully and they entered the kitchen.
“Fantastic,” the hairy man said. “Aurelia, right? You’ve already met Zosha, Hyde, and Annie, and this is Rick. I’m Leo Ingram, I’m the captain of the Breakwater. We deal in acquisitions and transportation.”
“Sooo… smuggling,” Aurie translated.
“Smuggling,” the captain agreed. “It’s… well, I guess that’s all a bit irrelevant to you. You’re here because my mechanic needs medical and, obviously, we can’t just waltz into a hospital equipped to handle it, what with our criminal records and active bounties and lack of medical insurance.”
“I have medical insurance,” said a new female voice from behind Aurie. She turned to see a yawning freckled brunette about her height in a loose shirt and pajama shorts. “Is there any coffee left?”
“Wait, why do you have medical insurance?” Hyde asked, slightly incredulous. “You’ve been here for months. How are you even paying the bills?”
“I took my lifestyle change as an opportunity to reconnect with my mother. She put me back under her plan,” the brunette said, plopping down in Hyde’s lap and taking a long sip of his coffee.
“And your mother’s insurance provider doesn’t care that you’re part of a band of intergalatically infamous smugglers?” Hyde asked.
The woman shrugged. “She’s reasonably sure that her lawyers can plead Stockholm Syndrome if I ever get arrested, so, no. Is that the doctor?”
“Yeah, her names Aurelia,” Zosha answered, leaning back on her heels. “That’s Thalia,” she murmured to Aurie. She stalked Hyde across at least one system and then dismantled a corrupt government, and now they’re in love and she’s learning basic engine maintenance from Dom.”
“Who’s Dom?” Aurie asked.
“I’m so glad you asked,” Thalia said. “You’re going to be getting very well acquainted with him.”
“That’s the one who needs my help, then,” Aurie said, resigned.
“Got it in one. He should be in the room you guys set up, by the way,” Thalia said, taking another long gulp of Hyde’s coffee. Hyde swatted her shoulder and took the cup back.
“Good to know. Thalia, why don’t you show Aurie there?” Annie said.
“Because I just sat down?” Thalia replied.
“And you’re not actually doing anything until Gamma shift, which gives you plenty of time to come back later,” Annie told her calmly.
“Fine,” Thalia said, rolling her eyes. She leaned back to peck Hyde on the cheek before sliding off his lap and walking towards Aurie and Zosha.
“Tag me into lead kidnapper duties, Z,” Thalia said, holding her hand up. Zosha grinned and high-fived her.
“Have fun.”
“Okay, so, any question?” Thalia asked as they stepped back into the hallway.
“I don’t know where to begin,” Aurie said. “Your crew… isn’t what I was expecting for a bunch of kidnappers.”
“Alright,” Thalia sighed. “Rundown of the crew: the original crew was Hyde, Dom, Rick, Leo, and Custer. All of them are bear shifters. They picked up Annie through a series of happenings of soap opera proportions, which sort of set off their trend of picking up women in various parts of the galaxy, myself included. Leo and Annie are together. They’re both reasonable, but don’t fuck around with either of them. Zosha’s with Rick—that’s the brown-haired dude—and has been since she accidentally got the crew into the U4 game. Zosha’s sweet, but she’s smart and she’s spent her whole life in an uphill battle for survival, not to mention she’s seriously connected. Rick’s the first mate, and if someone says that Dad said to go do something they’re talking about him. Delphine was sent to kill the crew and got captured instead, leading to her and Custer falling in love, which will make sense after you meet Custer, who defies description so I’m not wasting my time. My name, again, is Thalia. I’m a journalist, and I’m with Hyde, the technician. The last member is Dom, who you’re about to meet. Quiet, sweet, reserved. Oh, look, here we are.”
The room Thalia lead her to had obviously been recently repurposed, boxes pushed against the wall to make room for some medical equipment and a table in the center of the room with the man Aurie assumed was Dom sitting shirtless on it.
If this was another day manning the walk-in clinic, the man on the table would have been the highlight of her week. Even sitting she could tell he was short, but he more than made up for that with the almost delicate structure of his face that should have contrasted sharply with the hardness of his body but somehow didn’t. He had the same golden eyes as the other men on the ship and close-cropped dark hair.
He looked up. “This her?”
“This is her,” Thalia confirmed. “Dominic, meet Aurelia; Aurelia meet Dom.”
“The very least you could do in this God-forsaken situation is call me Aurie,” Aurie muttered.
Thalia quirked an eyebrow at her but said nothing.
Aurie turned her attention back to the man on the table.
“So, what seems to be the problem?” she asked.
He gestured behind himself to what, on further observation, was a more rudimentary version of the X-ray machine she used back at Grand View. “There’s something in my neck. It needs to come out.”
Aurie walked around him and inspected the medical equipment, deciding she didn’t really want to know where it came from. It was easy enough to boot up and select the “localized scan” option, waiting for the attached wand to light up blue. Picking it up, she turned back to Dominic.
“Alright, let’s get this over with,” she told him. “Face forward and lean over.”
He complied. She was about to ask where, exactly, she should start looking when she saw it: a thin, pale line in his tan skin approximately an inch and a half across.
“This will tingle a little, but you shouldn’t feel any pain,” she said, placing the wand against his neck and waiting for it to do its job. It only took a few seconds for the image on the screen to clear and for Aurie, heart sinking, to see a very specific problem with her kidnappers’ request.
“So, um,” she started with no little amount of apprehension, “there may be a slight… complication.”
“Complication?” Thalia asked in a terrifyingly mild voice.
“Yeah, um, you see this?” Aurie asked, pointing at a small white square on the screen. “This is a chip—I’m assuming that’s what you wanted me to look for?—that’s imbedded in Dominic here’s neck. It doesn’t look like it’s hurting anything, it’s pretty small, but from this X-ray it looks like it was put in before he finished growing. That means it’s pretty deeply imbedded in his neck and what’s more, I’m a bit wary of how close it is to his spine. Honestly, I don’t have the skill to get this out and even if I did, I couldn’t recommend going through with it. He’s much safer leaving it in.”
“No, he’s not,” Thalia sighed, “and neither are we.” She opened up a comm channel on her multi-tool. “Hey, guys, I really hope you’re still in the kitchen, because we’re about to need to have a little family meeting. Me, Dom, and Aurie will be up in five.” She clicked the link out.
Aurie stared at her. “I don’t think you understand. He’s not in mortal danger from this. It’s…annoying, maybe, but not fatal.”
“He has Rogerson disorder,” Thalia told her.
Aurie blinked and leaned slightly away from Dominic. “Oh.”
“The chip generates some kind of high-pitched noise, or something that his brain reads as a high-pitched noise, that causes him to shift unexpectedly,” Thalia continued.
Aurie had, in her many years working in various hospitals in various areas of the city, learned the very important lesson of not blaming people for their medical conditions. It was poor medical practice. With that said, the knowledge that she was standing next to a man who might, spontaneously and without warning, turn into a feral bear at any second was…alarming.
“Oh,” she said again in a slightly higher voice. “That’s… oh.”
Dominic snorted. “Don’t worry, Princess. They’re keeping me under a mild sedation until we figure this out.”
“And that’s working?” Aurie asked.
“Well, they wouldn’t keep wasting the medication if it weren’t,” he replied with far less sarcasm than she probably deserved.
“That’s just fantastic,” Aurie said woodenly. “So, we need to get back to the kitchen?”
“We do,” Thalia said. “Come on.”
Aurie walked stiffly behind her as they returned to the rest of the crew.
“Breathe,” Dominic muttered behind her.
“What?” she asked.
“I said breathe,” he said. “They’re not going to blame you. You’re going to be fine.”
Aurie swallowed. “Thank you.” Then, “you have excellent bedside manner, do you know that?”
Dom chuckled softly. “Thank you. I assume you do as well, when you haven’t been recently kidnapped.”
“Oh, no, I’m about this bad all the time,” Aurie replied.
In front of them, Thalia snorted.
“If you want Custer to ever stop making fun of you, you might want to stop flirting before we get in earshot.”
Aurie felt her cheeks heat. She needed to lay off the rom vids—there was a very, very low chance that her kidnappers were going to secretly all have hearts of gold, and that she and Dominic would fall madly in love and she’d go off gallivanting in the stars with them forever. That just wasn’t the way her life was laid out.
Dominic sighed. “Don’t be like that, Tali, I’d hate to have to ask you to pull another double shift.”
“Ooooh, you asshole,” Thalia hissed at him, though Aurie could see that she was smiling. She looked like she was about to say something else, but they reached the kitchen first.
Despite Dom’s assurance that she would be fine, she instinctively curled in on herself as they entered the room. The crew of the Breakwater, other than Zosha, had never seemed particularly cheerful, but with the anticipation of receiving bad news they seemed sinister.
“So what seems to be the problem, Aurelia?” the captain asked.
Aurie swallowed. “The chip? That you wanted me to remove? He’s grown around it. If I tried to take it out, especially without the right equipment, I’d paralyze him. If you want it out, you need to take him to a specialist.”
“Think she’s lying?” Hyde asked, eyes narrow.
“Well, I don’t exactly have a wealth of medical training,” Thalia replied, dry as a desert, “but I’d say she realizes she’d be more expendable if she couldn’t do it, so no, I don’t think she’s lying.”
“So where can we get this done?” Annie asked, eyes like needles.
Aurie hesitated. She wasn’t one to play hero, but at the same time, she knew she’d never forgive herself if she handed someone else to them.
“Look,” a blond man she hadn’t met yet drawled, “it’s like this. If you don’t tell us where we can get someone to do the operation, we have to do this all over again and, for obvious reasons, we can’t let you go until we’re done. Now, maybe this next person is good for the operation. But maybe not. Maybe we have to do this a whole bunch of times. Or, you can give us a name, and it all ends with no one getting hurt and no one disturbed that doesn’t need to be.”
“Custer’s right,” Annie said, not unkindly. “We don’t want to hurt anyone we don’t have to, but this has to happen.”
Aurie chewed it over for a moment. “I… my advisor. Former advisor. She’s the best bet. If I call and ask her to set up a time to operate on a friend who can’t answer any questions, she’ll do it. She used to work in a clinic that catered specifically to people who couldn’t go to a hospital until it got shut down and since she’s an otorhinolaryngologist she’s the best choice.”
The entire crew stared at her.
“A what now?” Thalia asked.
“An otorhinolaryngologist. It’s a medical professional specializing in the head and neck region,” Aurie explained.
“You’re fucking with us,” Zosha said accusatorily.
“They’re also called ENT surgeons, if that’s easier to remember,” Delphine said quietly. Aurie nodded.
“Huh.” The captain leaned back in his chair. “You learn something new every day. And this Ottoman-whatever friend of yours, she can get the chip?”
“If anyone can, she can,” Aurie told him. “Otorhinolaryngologists are sort of the most trained for this, and she’s the best I’ve ever met.”
“Why is that even a specialty you need?” Rick asked.
“Grand View is the hospital of choice for about fifteen different full-contact sports teams,” Aurie answered wearily.
“We’re off track,” Annie said. “Aurelia, you contact your ENT friend. Set it up. Other than that, I’m putting you in charge of giving Dom the sedatives he needs to keep stable. That’s a daily thing for now, so I hope you two get along. Thalia, Zosha, one of you needs to be monitoring her when you’re not on shift. If neither of you can do it, find Delphine. Everyone, get where you need to be.”
“I guess we’re sticking together for a little longer,” Thalia said to Aurie as the others took their leave. “Believe it or not, you won’t hate it here.”
It took three days, but Aurie found she was right.
It was strange that her life on a smuggler’s ship she was being held on against her will was better than the one she’d had before. She felt guilty thinking it, but it was true. True to Dom’s word, no one so much as looked vaguely threatening in Aurie’s direction and with the fear for her safety gone she could see that these flawed people had created a family for themselves. It didn’t help that after a few days of talking with Dom, Aurie could understand all too well the urge to do whatever it took to protect him. It had been a gradual thing—at first, she’d been resentful and still a bit afraid and he had been respectful of her boundaries. But soon the emotional exhaustion wore down on Aurie and she tentatively opened up a little to Dom, only for him to do the same. On the tenth day, she finally got the nerve up to ask him about the chip.
“It’s because I have Rogerson’s, see,” he explained. “Bunch of rich assholes wanted a guard bear. They implanted it so they could control when I shifted. It didn’t end well for them.”
“Well, it sounds like they got what they deserved,” Aurie had replied, thinking about how young he must have been.
“You sound surprisingly okay with that.”
Aurie had smiled. “I’m a foster child. I’ve got a list of people I wish had gotten what they deserve.”
The encounter had broken down whatever arbitrary wall Aurie had constructed, and as the days counted down until the date Dr. Lee had sent them in response to Aurie’s comm, Aurie grew more and more certain that she’d miss the Breakwater when she was returned to her normal, everyday life.
Then one day Annie cornered her after she had finished with Dom.
“Hello,” she said. “I need to talk with you for a moment.”
“What about?” Aurie asked. She was still a bit frightened of Annie, but she’d come to respect the other woman nonetheless.
“Dom,” Annie answered. “And you. Dr. Lee changed her price for the surgery. The embargo set around Do’n means that the hospital isn’t getting the usual brand of anesthetics. She wants us to go around it. I need you to explain to her that we can’t?”
“May I ask why?” Aurie asked.
“Our main employer has certain personal stakes in the embargo being respected. He’s not someone we want to anger,” said Annie. “Just let her know that it’s a no go. Other than that, I wanted to know how you’re doing.”
“I…” Aurie trailed off, collecting her words. “Am better than expected, honestly.”
“You look it,” Annie said. “Thalia says you’re a lot more colorful now.”
“I appreciate you asking after me,” Aurie said with a smile.
“Oh, it’s not a selfless endeavor,” Annie replied. “You like Dom. You like Zosha, and Thalia, and Delphine. And you can stand the rest of us, even Custer. It seems like a lot more than I could say about you and you old coworkers.”
“I don’t understand,” Aurie admitted.
“I’m saying, once Dom’s chip-free, we’ll drop you off anywhere in the universe you want to go. But if you want to stick around, there’s room for you here.” With that, Annie strode off. Aurie, in a daze, just sent Dr. Lee the comm Annie had asked her to, leading to several days where despite Aurie’s best wheedling, Dr. Lee refused to budge, which in turn did its part to gradually ratchet up the tension on the ship.
Aurie was on her way to her and Dom’s daily checkup when she ran into Hyde walking the opposite way.
“You may want to give it a minute,” he told her as he passed her. “He’s pretty upset. This isn’t easy on him.”
Warily, Annie continued toward the room. She could hear muffled swearing and movement and the scrape of something being dragged across the floor. She had almost reached the doorway when she heard a loud thud, followed by a moan of pain. Alarmed, she looked into the room only to see the chair overturned and Dom grimacing and clutching his bleeding hand, blood smudged on the wall where he’d punched it.
Aurie gave him a look she generally reserved for her trouble patients.
“And what did that accomplish?” she asked patiently.
Dom deflated. “Nothing. It… it’s all nothing.”
Aurie studied him for a moment. “Hop on the table.”
“What?” Dom asked.
“I said, hop on the table,” she repeated. “I need to put something on your knuckles.”
Dom stared at her for a moment, then obeyed.
“I don’t know why you bother,” he told her, a quiet confession. “Even if you could do the surgery, it wouldn’t do anything, not really. I still wouldn’t have any control over my shifts.”
Aurie hummed as she looked for antiseptic and something to cover the wound with. “Do you know how long it takes to become a qualified doctor? Classes, exams shadowing, residency? The technical answer is a really fucking long time.”
“That’s nice,” Dom said, clearly a little confused.
“But you know why we do it?” Aurie asked. “Because if we do, someday we get to be the big fancy doctors. Because if we succeed in the end, then we succeed now. I think it’s similar with you. Even if it all seems impossible because there aren’t any clear victories around you at the moment, the war’s not lost yet, you know? It’s about the finish line. And you’ll get there. You’re strong, and you’ve got a lot of help.” She made a noise of victory in the back of her throat as she dug up a bottle of antiseptic spray.
“Well, thank you,” Dom told her, swallowing. “I hope you’re right.”
“Usually am,” she told him. “Now give me your hand.”
He did, and she inspected the broken skin, wiping the blood away.
“You guys really need to hire a doctor, you know that?” Aurie sighed as she applied the antiseptic spray to the abrasions on Dom’s knuckles.
“You offering, Princess?” he asked her, a small smirk playing across his lips.
“Me? On a smuggler ship?” she asked, batting her eyes at Dom. “Oh, no, Mister, I’m too delicate and sensitive—don’t let the fact that I’ve almost completed my residency as a neurosurgeon fool you, if I see one drop of blood, I’ll pass right out.”
Dom rolled his eyes. “Keep milking that, why don’t you.”
Aurie beamed at him. “Don’t worry, I plan to,” she told him sweetly.
“Really though, are you happy at Grand View? Every time you talk about it, it just sounds like you hate it,” he said, pinning her with his hypnotic eyes.
Aurie shifted uncomfortably. “I mean, its stressful, sure, but that’s medicine. And I don’t have to get along with everybody to work with them efficiently, so…”
“But if you had the chance to work somewhere else, would you take it?” Dom asked, almost demanding.
“I…I don’t understand,” Aurie admitted softly.
“I just—” he started, but whatever he was about to say was cut off by a cry of pain as he jolted forward, clutching his head in his hands.
“Dom?” Aurie asked, taking a step forward as her heart leapt into her throat. He shook his head, sinking to his knees and leaning over so his forehead touched the ground as he continued to grunt in pain.
“Dom, what’s wrong?” Aurie felt frantic despite years of training. She hadn’t been this scared since her first surgery where she had to do more than actually observe. “I need you to talk to me.”
Dom just curled in on himself more, fingernails cutting into the skin of his scalp. Aurie realized that he was shaking so hard he was practically vibrating. At first, she thought it was some sort of seizure, but as a ripple ran through his muscles, causing him to buck back sharply, an understanding of what was happening flooded through her life ice water.
“Oh no,” she breathed out, taking a step back as Dom bucked back again, this time leaving the back of his shirt split as the bones of his spine seemed to try and break free of his skin. “Oh shit.”
She knew she needed to get out of there as quickly as possible, but as soon as she turned to flee down the hallway it seemed like Dom lost whatever shred of inner strength was keeping the transformation at bay. In a roar of blood and muscle and bone he shifted outward until Aurie was staring in terror at the hulking, fur-covered form of a black bear. He snuffled at the tattered remains of his shirt for a moment before stilling and turning his golden gaze on Aurie.
Looking into his eyes, Aurie lost all remaining hope that somewhere, deep down, the bear was still Dominic. There was nothing hypnotic or soft in the bear’s stare, only an animalistic rage. The bear stood back on his hind legs and growled low in his throat, the bass reverberating through Aurie’s bones.
“Okay,” she said softly. “Okay, we’re just going to—”
The bear dropped back down on all fours and roared. Aurie shrieked and ran for the doorway, pulling down the medicine cabinet on her way out. She heard the thud of impact as the bear barreled into it and the following bellow of anger and pain that chased her down the hallway. As she turned the corner so quickly she skidded into the wall, she could see the dark mountain of fur push his way through the remnants of the ruined cabinet and started down the hallway after her.
Aurie had been scared a lot. Scared of the dark, of foster fathers, of failing classes, of burning out before she completed her residency, of some of the patients that came in during the late shift. An hour ago, she would even have said she was terrified of those things. Now she knew differently. Real terror was everything seeming to go in slow motion, like she was running underwater, and the only thing that was moving at a normal speed was the monster after her. Real terror was the adrenaline seeming to shrink her skin until she thought she’d burst out of it and clouding her thoughts until there was nothing left but run, run, you’ll die if you don’t run. It was the way the only two things that she knew were real were herself and the bear to the point that every time she put a foot down she was only half sure it would actually connect with the floor. Terror was feeling yourself sinking and fighting for air, or waking up to find yourself in freefall, or trying desperately to keep ahead of a faster, sharper animal.
Aurie was so close to the main body of the ship. If she could just get to one of the other shifters, or even Delphine, she’d have a chance.
Thalia found them first.
She rounded the corner, looking like someone who was about to threaten to file a noise complaint, and then froze as she took in the sight of a terrified doctor and an enraged mass of fur and claws barreling down the hallway at her. To her eternal credit, she reacted much more swiftly than Aurie had. Turning and dashing back down the hall, she opened the door to her and Hyde’s room, then leaned back and yanked Aurie inside and slammed the button to close the doors. A split second after the lock engaged, a muffled, angry snarl sounded from right outside before the sound of an impact shook the doorframe.
Aurie and Thalia looked at each other, breathing heavily.
“Okay,” Thalia said in a tone that could be best described as placating, “I need you to not freak out, but that door’s not going to hold until Dominic shifts back.”
“What?” Aurie demanded, voice coming out shriller than she could ever remember it being. “You live on a ship with five bear shifters and that’s not a precaution anyone ever thought might come in handy?”
Thalia walked towards the bed as the pounding on the door continued. “First of all, the other four are in control no matter what form they’re in, meaning they’re only as likely to try and break a door down as a bear as they are as a human. Second, there’s a reinforced room by the engine room that can hold him. The problem is, he can usually recognize a shift and get there, or let someone know to get him there, in time to be locked down before he’s completely shifted. That stupid fucking chip, however, is messing with that. He can’t predict his shifts anymore. The sedatives were supposed to counter it.”
“I think he’s built up a resistance to them,” Aurie said faintly, afraid to take her eyes off the door.
“No shit, really?” Thalia asked as she thumbed a button on an intercom system identical to the one in Zosha’s room. “Hyde, you better be at your fucking station.”
Hyde’s sigh crackled through the intercom. “What’d I do now?”
“I need you to get over here now. I’m in—” she broke off as a particularly loud thump came from the door. “I’m in our room,” she finished with a not insignificant amount of panic.
Aurie was slowly backing away from the door on shaking legs, still unable to look away from it, as Hyde’s voice, now attentive and worried, asked, “why? What’s happening?”
“It’s...fuck. Oh, oh fuck,” she said as the bear rammed into the door so hard one of the panels jutted into the room, exposing the wiring as the growling from the other side grew more audible. “Aurie, bathroom, now.”
Aurie whimpered a little, rooted in place.
“Bathroom!” Thalia barked. “Hyde, I need you here ten minutes ago, bring Custer or the captain if you can.”
“Thalia? Thalia, what’s happening?” Hyde asked, sounding frantic, but Thalia was pushing Aurie into the bathroom and closing the door behind them.
“We’re going to be okay,” she told Aurie. “We’re going to be absolutely fine, this is a smallish ship and there’s no way Dom can break through both sets of doors before someone gets here.”
“Are you sure?” Aurie demanded with just a tad of hysteria.
“Look, I don’t fucking know, I’m a journalist,” Thalia snapped.
She and Aurie stared at each other for a moment, the only sound the snarling and thuds and metallic groans form the other room, then burst out laughing.
“Oh,” Aurie gasped. “Oh, my God. I’m a medical student, and you’re a journalism student, and we’re about to get eaten by a bear. They didn’t cover this in my orientation, did they cover it in yours?”
“Nope,” Thalia giggled helplessly. “But suck it, academia elitists. You may think journalism is a useless major but I can tell you it’s exactly as helpful as a medical degree in spontaneous bear attacks.”
They both broke down again, clinging to each other, as there was a loud roar from outside, followed by another roar, followed by the sound of two equally pissed off bears colliding. Thalia slapped a hand over Aurie’s mouth as they listened, wide-eyed, to the struggle. It only lasted a few moments before quiet settled, interrupted once again by the sound of a very human set of footsteps making its way quickly towards the bathroom.
The door swung open to reveal Hyde, panting and naked, which Aurie decided to magnanimously excuse due to mitigating circumstances. He reached down as Thalia reached up and then they were in each other’s arms, Hyde burying his face in Thalia’s hair and whispering fiercely to her. Aurie, not knowing what else to do, stayed sitting and staring dumbly up at them. Delphine walked up and nudged them gently to the side so she could get by and crouch by Aurie.
“Are you alright?” she asked in what Aurie was realizing was Delphine’s brand of concern.
Aurie nodded and then, humiliatingly, burst into tears. Delphine hesitantly reached out a hand, which hovered for a moment before landing gently on Aurie’s shoulder.
“It’s okay, you’re safe now,” she murmured as Aurie sobbed into her shoulder. “Dom’s sedated and he’ll shift back before he wakes up. This won’t happen again.”
Aurie shook her head, gasping for breath around the sobs escaping her throat and mortifyingly aware that the sound was probably carrying pretty far.
“I just,” she choked out. “I-I just couldn’t do anything. I just…”
“You did enough,” Delphine told her. “You’re alive, and Dom’s alive, and that’s all anyone could ask for.”
She tugged gently at Aurie’s arms, pulling her until they were both standing.
“We need to go talk to Annie and the captain,” Delphine murmured. “Wash your face, then we’ll go.”
Aurie nodded miserably and turned to the sink to splash cold water over her ruddy face. She tugged her sleeves over her hands and used them to pat her face dry before reaching over to grab toilet paper to blow her nose on.
“Okay,” she sniffled. “I’m ready.”
They maneuvered awkwardly around Thalia and Hyde and made their way to kitchen, where it turned out talking to Annie and Captain Ingram really meant talking to Annie, Captain Ingram, Rick, Zosha, and Custer.
“I’m so sorry,” Zosha bawled as soon as they entered, crossing over to hug Aurie tightly. “I promised you that nothing would happen to you and then this happened to you and I’m so, so sorry.”
Annie’s eyes flickered impassively over Aurie’s tear-stained face before landing on Delphine. “Where are Thalia and Hyde?”
“Hyde is, presumably, putting pants on and returning to the charade that he doesn’t have actual emotions and will be here with Thalia once that’s under control,” Delphine answered.
Annie nodded sharply, crossing her arms. “Aurie, sit down.”
“No, really, I’m—” Aurie started to protest. Annie just snapped her fingers and pointed at the chair.
Aurie sat. It turned out to be pretty good advice as her legs gave out halfway down and she collapsed awkwardly into the chair with an oof.
“Thank you,” Annie said before turning back to the captain. “Do you still have all the estimates?”
“Probably,” he replied. “If not, they’re easy enough to rerun. Ah, Hyde, Thalia, glad you’re here. Let’s get started.”
Hyde nodded sharply and tugged Thalia towards the table where they both sat down. Aurie tried not to be conspicuous in the way she stared at their clasped hands.
“Okay,” Annie said, “in light of very recent events, it appears that we need to reevaluate a few things. Obviously, this cannot happen again. We need to have a working plan about how we go about that, and it needs to be decisive. Obviously, keeping him sedated isn’t going to do shit.”
“I can’t abandon Dom,” Hyde said quietly. “He’s like a brother to me, and he’s always stood by me. You don’t just abandon that. But,” he went on, squeezing Thalia’s hand, “he almost killed Thalia, and I can’t let that happen either. I don’t want to abandon Dom, but it’s not just us shifters anymore, and this afternoon was an exercise in what happens when someone who isn’t one of us gets caught by Dom in one of his shifts. So that means the only real solutions we have are kick Dom, our main mechanic who’s been loyal for years, to the curb, drop everyone who isn’t a shifter off at the nearest station, or fix this chip for good. I know what my vote is.”
“But getting the chip out would require circumventing the Do’n embargo,” Rick said, “and that means risking getting on Sylas’s bad side, which means getting on Spinner’s bad side. I trust him to put Zosha ahead of whatever he’s got going on with Sylas, but the rest of us? If he didn’t see most of us as expendable we’d have a line of surgeons begging to operate on Dom in the cargo hold.”
“Sylas always had a pretty good reputation for being fair for a criminal overlord,” Zosha said, a bit nervously. “We’re model employees, or as close to it as he gets. He’d probably count it as a strike against us, but I don’t think he’d react too harshly unless it looked like we didn’t respect his authority.”
Annie huffed. “I feel like the only real question here is if we drop Sylas a courtesy call before we do this. As someone who can’t turn into a bear at will, I would prefer not to be caught off guard by Dom shifting, but I want to stay. This is my home. And as shitty as it is, doing the run for Lee looks like the best way to protect it.”
Leo sighed and shook his head, rubbing at his temples. “Shoulda known Dom would be all trouble.”
Annie cracked a smile at that. “All of us are all trouble. That’s what you get for being the captain of a smuggling ship.”
Aurie sat there, processing. The crash of adrenaline and the surge of relief had left her feeling almost numb emotionally, like her head was an empty cavern echoing what everyone else was saying. She was relieved that a decision had been made, on some level, but she was also afraid. There were the obvious things to fear, of course, like bear shifters and criminals and criminal bear shifters, and then there were the fears that she couldn’t or wouldn’t put into words. There was the sickening lurch of failure in her stomach, the shame of being so helpless, not just in the face of Dom’s shift but in her utter uselessness at preventing it. The creeping dread of being dropped back into thirty hour shifts and a colicky baby and coworkers who would never, never do anything but look down on her. Her thoughts spun around each other like a Moebius strip but it was like swimming through static to find them, and Aurie didn’t think that it was worth the effort. Instead, she focused on the people in front of her.
“So we’re definitely running this little errand for Dr. Lee,” Rick clarified.
The captain nodded. “Best choice we’ve got. I’ll chart a course for Do’n. Is Dom secure?”
“In the fortified room,” Hyde answered. “I say we leave him in there until it’s time to take him in for surgery. We can’t risk him shifting while we’re trying to get this done and honestly, I don’t think he’s going to be much for socializing right now.”
“Great,” Captain Ingram sighed, scrubbing his hands over his face. “Do’n is, what, six hours from here? I’ll take the cockpit. Rick, you, Annie, and Zosha get us a plan going. Custer, you’re in the engine room until we dock. Delphine, Thalia… see where you can help.”
“Um…” Aurie started, rising partway out of her seat.
“You, get some rest,” the captain said, pointing at her. Zosha’s got a bottle of purple pills in her room that help her get to sleep. I recommend taking one. When you wake up we should be back on our way to Centrata. You’ve had enough stress for one day.”
Aurie nodded and hovered awkwardly for a moment as everyone else grouped up and went about figuring out how to work a miracle before slinking to Zosha’s room. She checked the bedside table and sure enough, there was a little plastic container of pills. Swallowing one dry, she plunked down on the bed, kicked off her shoes, and waited for it to kick in. There was nothing that she wanted to concentrate on, specifically, but clearing her mind didn’t work either. The past few days flickered through her mind, running together and blurring, until she succumbed to the effects of the pill.
She woke up, groggy but feeling better, approximately ten hours later according to her multi-tool. There was a message from Zosha, who Aurie was somewhat unsurprised had managed to get her contact information without her knowledge. It was brief and to the point—Sylas was displeased, but their contact on Do’n had come through and they were heading back to Centrata. Dr. Lee had been informed of their pending arrival and was expecting to see Aurie in person to verify her safety.
Aurie read it over twice, then stood almost mechanically and went into the bathroom to brush the disgusting taste out of her mouth. She spat the paste into the sink basin and rinsed it out, then leaned forward to press her forehead against the cool surface of the mirror and closed her eyes. Now that she was awake she had to do something, but there wasn’t anything she wanted to do. She didn’t know how to help the others, and she didn’t really want to talk to them anyways. There was only one person she did want to talk to and he was apparently locked up at the moment.
Aurie opened her eyes. Silver lining: she knew where to find him.
The trek to the engine room was short. She stepped inside and looked around, waving awkwardly when Custer looked up from his multi-tool and beamed at her.
“Hello there,” he crooned. “Are you looking for me or Dom?”
“Dom,” she answered quietly.
“I thought so,” he said. “The two of you glow together, do you know that? I’m so glad we kidnapped you.”
“Thank you,” Aurie said after a short pause.
“And you, of course, are glad we kidnapped you,” Custer said, still smiling.
Aurie started. “That’s—” she started.
Custer cut her off with a wave of his hand. “Don’t bother lying to me. I’m actually very smart, you know. People assume I help the others do their jobs because I’m not capable of doing any of them on my own. Delphine did, at first. The truth is, it’s because I’m capable of doing all of them. Always they underestimate me. You know what that’s like, don’t you? I can see it in your eyes. You succeed out of spite because someone told you you couldn’t. That’s admirable, almost. Somewhere along the way you realized that you were meant for more and your drive to succeed switched from satisfying a grudge to the need to find a purpose for your life. I know people like you, and believe me, even though leaving behind a promising career to hop on board with a bunch of smugglers is, objectively, a terrible career move, if you don’t do it you’ll never stop wondering what would happen if you did.”
“And that’s when my self-preservation instinct pipes up to remind me how well I usually do against bears,” Aurie said drily. “And guns.”
Custer shrugged. “Self-preservation instincts are for people over fifty and democratically elected leaders. You need to live a little. Besides, Annie’s going to be trying to convince you to stay anyways. She’s very persuasive.”
“She’s mentioned it,” Aurie told him. “I guess it makes sense to want to have a doctor ready on a ship like this.”
Custer snorted. “That too. But mainly she wants you here because she’s pregnant, and even though you specialize in something completely unrelated you’re both a good fit and more knowledgeable than any of us.”
Aurie was momentarily sidetracked by the image of a hugely pregnant Annie. “That assumes I would be willing to be here when the craving and mood swings kick in.”
“Honestly, I’m looking forward to it. She managed to stay calm enough to help engineer the death of her almost-husband when he wouldn’t leave her alone. Seeing if she loses control should be interesting.”
Aurie stared. “Annie killed her fiancé?”
“And a few of his guards,” Custer confirmed. “Don’t feel bad for them. He was a warlord.”
Aurie had no response to that. “So, about Dominic.”
Custer pointed. “If you move that metal panel there’s a short hallway, then his special room.”
“Thanks,” Aurie said before trotting off to follow his instructions.
The secret hallway was wider than the main corridor with long scratch marks gouged out of the wall. It looked like something out of a horror movie, and Aurie’s heart cracked a bit as she thought about the amount of time Dom must spend in here.
The door at the end was metal, like the rest of the hallway, with a small window a few inches above Aurie’s head and another at her feet.
“Dom?” she asked hesitantly, her voice seeming thunderous in the quiet. She waited a few moments and then sat, crossing her legs and wrapping her arms around them. “Are you upset with me?”
After another breathless, still moment sitting on the ground next to the door, his reply filtered through the cutout.
“Why would I be mad at you?” he asked in a soft, raspy voice.
“Because I couldn’t help you,” she said. “I really thought I could, you know. I thought I could look at pictures of your brain and fix it all. I didn’t even think to check that the sedatives were still working.”
“It’s not your fault,” Dom replied wearily.
“Well, it’s not yours, either,” she told him. “And I’m hoping it’s not just destiny—it seems too cruel. So where does that leave us?”
There was another pause. “Random happenstance?”
“Works for me if it works for you,” she said, and they settled back into silence. Aurie was just wondering whether her presence was irritating Dom when he spoke up.
“Do you really think any of this is your fault?” he asked.
“I’m a very self-centered person,” she told him. “I know, logically, that I’ve been doing my best and that it’s not my fault that it wasn’t enough, but I still seem to be able to blame myself for situations outside of my control. Also, I don’t like my best not being enough. And…” she trailed off for a moment to collect her thoughts. “I like you. A lot. I want to help you. The fact that I’m not good enough to is frustrating for more than just injured pride.”
“You shouldn’t feel bad about it, you know,” Dom rasped through the door. “Not being able to help me, I mean.”
“I was just so useless,” Aurie bit out, frustrated. “I couldn’t even help myself.”
“No one would expect you to be able to. This isn’t exactly your area of expertise,” Dom told her gently.
“So? Thalia’s a journalist, and she had it under control.”
Dom snorted. “Thalia is, by best guess, from a mob family.”
“Huh.” Aurie filed that tidbit away for later.
“So, yeah. You not being able to help someone with a horrible, incurable disease? Not your fault.”
“Hey,” Aurie said, a little more sharply than she meant to. “None of that. Finish line, remember?”
Dom laughed. It sounded choked. “I don’t think there’s a finish line for me, Princess.”
“Well, keep fucking looking,” Aurie all but snarled. “And stop calling me Princess.”
“Why? It suits you. You’ve got the princess name, the princess hair… just like fairy tales.”
“You think about things that don’t apply to real life too much. I’m not a princess, you’re not a monster, and we’re two hours out from Grand View, so you better get your shit together enough to be able to let my dear advisor stab you in the neck.”
“And there’s that bedside manner,” Dom teased. He was avoiding what she said, but since his voice sounded a shade warmer and more stable, Aurie let it go.
“Yeah, well,” she said, “forgive me for not treating the bear shifter with kid gloves.”
They settled into a slightly more comfortable silence.
“I can leave, if you want me too,” she offered.
“Nah,” Dom sighed. “I’m going to tell you something, and I expect for you not to pass it around. The world is loud, to me. It’s just so much noise scraping around the inside of my skull. But you? You make the world quiet. And I’m a selfish man. It’s my fault that you’re here instead of anywhere you’d ever be by choice. So I’m going to take advantage of that for as long as I can.”
“Oh,” Aurie said, feeling suddenly warm, and the two remained in a soothing, companionable silence until the Breakwater touched down.
It was strange to see Grand View again. She’d have thought that it would be the most welcome sight in the world, but all it was was a monument of too much stress, too little sleep, and coworkers who were, at best, apathetic.
Aurie and Dom were accompanied to the emergency entrance by Hyde and Thalia. Aurie had no idea how Dr. Lee had managed to get the place cleared out and didn’t really want to know. Instead, she focused on putting one foot a head of the other and getting herself and Dom where they needed to be.
Dr. Lee was waiting for them by the emergency entrance, intimidating despite her short stature and pixie cut. She crossed her arms and gave them the most controlled yet lethal glare Aurie had ever been on the receiving end of in her life.
“Aurie,” Dr. Lee greeted crisply. “Fine friends you’ve made here.”
Aurie winced. “It wasn’t on purpose?”
Dr. Lee snorted and shook her head. “You can explain it to me on the way down. Might affect how his operation goes,” she said as she swiped her ID card over the reader to reveal two uniformed assistants. “Correli, Marcus, please show these fine folks to the theater.”
The taller assistant nodded and beckoned. “Come with us, please.”
Dom, Aurie, Hyde, and Thalia all looked at each other, then moved forward. Dr. Lee caught Aurie’s hand in an iron grip.
“You and I need to talk,” she said. “The others can get prep done.”
“That’s… she’s kidding about messing up the operation, I promise,” Aurie assured the others as they were led down the hallway.
“So how’d you end up in this mess?” Dr. Lee asked when Aurie caught up to her.
“I think they just had a register of the people who worked with brains and scalpels,” Aurie told her. “I just drew the short straw.”
Dr. Lee harrumphed. “You’re not going to be taking part in the surgery. I don’t need a backseat doctor.”
Aurie swallowed, thinking about having to cut Dom open. “No, I didn’t think so.”
“You ain’t coming back to work any time soon, are you?” Dr. Lee asked, sideyeing Aurie.
“I haven’t decided yet, ma’am,” Aurie said truthfully. “But it doesn’t look good.”
Dr. Lee was silent for a long moment. “I don’t have to tell you how stupid this is, right? Gallivanting off with a bunch of kidnappers because one of them’s pretty?”
“Oh, I’m not doing it for Thalia,” Aurie joked nervously before wilting under Dr. Lee’s hard stare. “And I’m not doing it for Dom, either. I like him. I think I like him a lot. But I’ve always thought there was more than being resident number five, you know, the one with the tits. I think this might be my more.”
Dr. Lee exhaled long and hard through her nose. “If you need something, be it a ride home or anything else, comm me. But let it be known that I will be saying I told you so until the day you die.”
Aurie gave her a weak but genuine smile. “Thanks. That means a lot.”
“Alright,” Dr. Lee said, rolling her shoulders back. “Let’s go get this chip out.”
The walk to the operating theater was, by design, less than a minute from the emergency entrance. Dr. Lee’s assistants were in full surgery, plasticy caps and all, and Hyde and Thalia were seated in the non-employee waiting room, the one that didn’t have a window to look in on the surgery. Dom looked smaller than ever, laid out on the table, eyes closed as the anesthesia worked its magic. Logically, Aurie knew that this was the best and safest place for him to be right now, but her breath still caught in her throat as she looked down at him.
Dr. Lee squeezed her shoulder. “Go sit with the others. This will be fast.”
Aurie, unsure of what else to do, obeyed.
Hyde and Thalia looked up as she closed the door to the waiting room quietly behind her.
“I kind of thought you’d be in there,” Thalia told her.
Aurie shook her head. “Not my area of expertise, remember? Also, I… I don’t think I’d do to well with this one, even if it were. There’s just so much at stake here. Not that there isn’t always so much at stake, but—”
“—but now it’s personal. We get it,” Thalia told her.
They sat in awkward silence for a moment, every second seeming to take a year, before Thalia spoke up again.
“So,” she said. “You and Dom. That’s a little weird. Good, but weird.”
Hyde sighed. “Thalia…”
“No, really, I’m glad that the girl we kidnapped has managed to find it in her heart to forgive us through the healing power of seeing Dom shirtless.”
“Thalia,” Hyde said again.
“I mean, it’s a pretty fair trade off. If my type wasn’t apparently one-eyes assholes with terrible tastes in eyepatches and worse taste in drink, I’d go for it. Well, I would if he was taller. And didn’t whack me with cleaning brushes when I say something rude on shift.”
“That’s sweet, I think,” Aurie said before blurting the first thing that came to her mind, which was: “so are you actually from an organized crime family?”
Thalia stared at her for a second, then burst out laughing. “Is that what you guys think?” she asked, wiping tears from her eyes. “Oh, my God. I needed that, thank you. Hyde, baby, did you think I was from a mob family?”
Hyde shifted in his seat. “It just made more sense than a lot of other things. Like the possibility of you being from a normal family and turning out this way anyways.”
Thalia started laughing again. “This is great. Both of you are in charge of helping me convince Zosha that that’s absolutely the case. Maybe the captain, too, if you think we can swing it.”
“Let’s nobody swing anything,” Hyde grumbled, barely audible over Thalia’s giggling.
Aurie checked her watch. A little over five minutes had passed. Since Grand View had the best equipment possible for this sort of surgery, and since the chip was relatively close to the surface, one way or another the operation would be over soon. It seemed strange that such a huge event took so little time.
Sure enough, the buzzer sounded to alert anyone in the waiting area that the surgery was over. Aurie bolted upright as Hyde strode past her to the door. She willed herself to follow him, but it seemed like her feet were stuck.
Thalia came up behind her and poked her back. “Come on. One way or another, it’s over, and not knowing is worse than any possible outcome here.”
“Pick that up in your family’s criminal empire?” Aurie asked faintly.
“Oh, honey, there is nothing criminal about my family’s empire,” Thalia said, pushing Aurie towards the door.
Getting chased through the halls by a berserk Dom had been the most terrifying experience of Aurie’s life. Walking steadily towards the door with no idea whether or not it had succeeded was a close second.
Seeing Dom wincing as he touched the bandage on the back of his neck, Hyde smiling down at him, was like being able to breathe again. Dr. Lee took one look at Aurie’s face and rolled her eyes.
“Alright,” she said, handing Hyde a bag. “There’s everything you need to treat the incision, including instructions. Now get out of my hospital before someone who isn’t as nice as me comes along.”
Dom smiled and reached out for Aurie, who with trembling fingers took his hand as they made their way back to the ship. Aurie honestly couldn’t say what happened on the trek back, other than that Dom was there and that she was happier than she had been in recent memory. Time only returned to her when she and Dom were sitting next to each other on the floor of the engine room, smiling and talking.
“I can’t believe the miracle of medicine has been handed to you and you just want to go back to your job,” Aurie said, laughing.
Dom shrugged, then winced. “I missed my normal life. It’s nice to get back into the schedule.”
“I’m glad,” Aurie said quietly. “Do you want me to look at the scar?”
“If you wouldn’t mind,” he said, turning his back to her. She jerked awkwardly up to her knees and peeled back the bandage. The dermal regenerator had done wonders, but he’d still need to keep the bandage on for another twenty-four hours and the skin would feel tight until he got used to it.
“Looks good,” she told him, prodding him gently to test the elasticity of his skin. “Unless you’re feeling actual sharp pain, I’d say everything’s as it should be. Sorry to be poking my hands all over your scar, by the way.”
Dominic hummed. “That’s fine. I like your hands.”
Aurie stilled. This was it. This was the moment when she chose, no looking back.
It was, surprisingly, the easiest choice she’d ever made.
It was so quiet, only the hum of the engines and their breathing and the runaway beat of her heart, and he was there and she was there and it all felt right. She leaned forward and pressed her mouth—gently, lovingly—to the thin scar on the back on his neck. She could hear the breath catch in his throat as she let her eyelids slide shut, lashes sweeping lightly across his skin. The warm skin shifted under her touch and she pulled back, opening her eyes to meet his. They sat there for a moment, suspended in an eternal second of perfect understanding, before Aurie leaned back in. This time, Dom met her halfway and their lips met in a gentle kiss. Aurie hummed and opened her mouth, a shiver of pleasure running down her spine as Dominic copied the motion.
She leaned forward and he leaned back until he was lying down on the metal floor and Aurie had the top of her torso pressed against his chest, her legs kicked off to the side. Their breath mingled as they just lay together, Dom’s hand coming up to gently release Aurie’s hair from her ponytail and his other warm hand wrapping around her waist. She leaned forward and pressed her forehead to his neck, smiling.
“Think it’s worth it to try and hightail it to your room?” she asked quietly and felt her body be lifted slightly as he huffed out a laugh.
“I can’t think at all right now,” he told her. “Do you really think this is a good idea?”
“Do I think it’s a good idea to have sex with one of my kidnappers, who’s merry little crew I may or may not have been Stockholm Syndrome’d into joining, on the floor of the engine room?” she asked wryly. “I think it’s the best idea I’ve ever heard.”
It should probably have worried her a little more that she was telling the truth.
Dom was quiet for a moment. “If at any point you want to stop, or leave…”
Aurie leaned up and silenced him with a kiss. “I’ll let you know.”
Dom looked hard into her eyes before relaxing, whatever he saw in them extinguishing whatever fight he had left. “In that case,” he said with a smirk, “want to play doctor.”
A snort burst out of Aurie’s mouth before she could contain it. “Oh my God,” she said, giggling, “that was terrible.”
“No, no, really,” Dom said, his smirk splitting wider into a grin, “I think you need to examine me.”
“Stop,” Aurie commanded, collapsing back on top of him and rocking both their bodies with her laughter.
“Mmm, okay,” he said, slipping a hand under her shirt and rubbing soft circles on the skin of her back. “Let’s try something else instead then.”
Aurie shifted back to look at him, relaxed and beautiful and—for once—soft as he stared back at her, and leaned in to press her smiling mouth against his.
“Get naked,” she whispered into his lips. “Doctor’s orders.”
Dom leaned in and deepened the kiss for a moment before pushing her back and stripping off his shirt. He was every bit as well built as he had been when she had examined him, but this time there was the burning frisson in the back of her mind of the knowledge that she could touch. She ran her fingers lightly over the defined muscles of his abs, pleasure sparking through her at the way his stomach muscles tensed under her touch.
Dom tugged at the hemline of her blouse. “Your turn, Dr. Talbott.”
Aurie smirked and yanked her top over her head. She reached for the clasp to undo her bra, but Dom’s hands slid up her back and grabbed her as he sat up to kiss her. He pressed a languid open-mouthed kiss to her lips before peppering kisses along her jawbone and down her neck, leaning her back so he could trail his lips between her breasts as his fingers swiftly undid her bra and slid it down her arms. Aurie’s breath shuddered as the cool air hit her sensitive nipples. Dom looked up at her with those lazy, hypnotic eyes and slowly, almost teasingly, took one in his mouth. Aurie whimpered as he tugged lightly on it with his teeth, thumbing her other nipple with the hand that wasn’t at her back to keep her steady. On instinct, Aurie ground down, rubbing them together between two layers of clothing and making them both moan.
“How about we save foreplay for round two?” Aurie asked breathlessly.
“Agreed,” Dom said, pressing a kiss to her collarbone and they rolled apart to hurriedly strip off the rest of their clothing. Dom spread their shirts out on the floor and maneuvered her on top of them, settling between her thighs as he did so.
“Well, someone likes being on top,” Aurie teased.
“It’s only gentlemanly to volunteer to be the one who has to put ointment on their knees for the next few days,” Dominic told her, running his hands up the sides of her thighs. Aurie sighed happily and lay back, letting her legs fall wider apart.
“Are you on… I mean, do you have…” Dom started, suddenly uncertain.
Aurie snorted. “Of course. Get to work, will you?”
Dom raised an eyebrow in response and suddenly his clever fingers were sliding along the hot, wet juncture between her thighs. “Like that?”
“You’re not getting paid by the minute here,” Aurie huffed. “Mind hurrying up?”
“So impatient,” Dom said, his voice threaded with the barest shade of adoration, “and all for me.”
“Every inch,” Aurie promised. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind, please get inside me already.”
Dom leaned up to kiss her, bracing his hands on either side of her shoulders and kissed her once more as he slid into her. A gasp punched out of Aurie’s lungs as he filled her, her arms snapping up to wrap around his back.
“Move,” she told him, half a command and half a plea. Dom, ever the gentleman, obeyed her.
Kissing Dom had been like putting a piece of lightening on her tongue. The naked friction between them had threatened to consume her with its heat. But this, oh, this… this was something new, something powerful, something so overwhelming that Aurie didn’t have words to describe it. It was like she was floating weightless, her body eroded away and only Dominic above and the steadily growing feeling of white-hot pleasure the only things left in the whole universe. She’d made love before, but never like this. This was the connection of two souls through the stifled moans and heady gasps and sweat-slick skin.
“I’m going to…” she managed to warn Dom in a strangled breath seconds before her orgasm shuddered through her body, her nails scraping across his back as she moaned his name. Almost immediately after, Dom swore and grunted, collapsing on her and panting heavily.
They stayed like that, unable to find the energy to move, until the cooling sweat became uncomfortable enough for them to drag their exhausted bodies apart and fumblingly get dressed. “I’m, um. I’m going to go take
a shower, I think,” Aurie said without looking at him, suddenly and inexplicably shy.
“That’s smart,” Dom replied.
“Would it be okay—and you can say no—but, would it be okay if I stayed with you tonight?” She asked, dragging her eyes to his face to see his response.
Dom smiled at her like a sunrise, slow and bright. “Sure. I could use the quiet.”
FIN