The badge clips his throat before the door even finishes sealing.
"Move," I say, "and I open your windpipe instead of this hatch."
Milo Drake doesn't move. Doesn't blink. That's the first thing that pisses me off about him — the man's got six inches of laminated steel humming a half-inch off his carotid and he looks bored.
"Rourke." His voice drags out low, wrecked, like gravel through smoke. "Get your badge out of my throat before I break your wrist."
"Try it."
He tries it.
His hand comes up fast, wraps my wrist, and the container rocks with the impact when I slam him back into the containment wall to keep my grip. Bone-on-bone, his spine against corrugated steel, my forearm still locked under his jaw. The siren over our heads cycles from amber to red. Behind us the bio-lock finishes its rotation with a hiss and a clunk that means one thing.
We're not getting out until the wing clears.
"You hear that?" I say. "That's the seal. That's you and me, locked in a forty-foot can, until Command calls it."
"Then let go of my throat, Captain." He says my rank like it's a joke he's still deciding whether to laugh at. "Or we're gonna have a problem bigger than your override codes."
"I already have a problem. It's wearing your face and it walked my perimeter with a dump list in its jacket."
That gets something out of him — not fear, something worse. A slow curl at the corner of his mouth, teeth showing white against a jaw dark with two days of stubble. Up close he smells like cedar smoke and gun oil, leather gone warm from body heat, and under that, something sharper. Something that makes the back of my neck go tight and my badge hand not want to let go.
"Careful, Rourke." He says it soft, almost gentle, which is worse than a threat. "You're breathing me in."
"I'm restraining a smuggler."
"You're standing so close I can feel your pulse jump."
He's right. I hate that he's right. My heart's slamming against my ribs like it's trying to get to him through bone, and the suppressant patch on my inner arm — the one I put on six hours ago, the one that's supposed to keep exactly this from happening — feels like it's already losing the fight. I press the badge in harder to cover it.
"Where's the rest of your crew, Drake?"
"Outside this can, wondering why their radio's dead. Same as yours."
"You cut comms."
"I cut comms." He says it flat, no apology in it. "Figured if I was going down for running this perimeter, I wasn't going down with your whole quarantine wing listening in."
"Going down for what."
His eyes go somewhere else for half a second — toward the scrubber grate bolted into the far wall, toward the loudspeaker housing wired into the ceiling — and then back to me, and that's when I know. He's not scared of the badge. He's scared of what's on the other side of that grate.
"Nothing you need tonight," he says.
"Wrong. I need everything tonight." I shove off him half an inch, just enough to breathe air that isn't him, and it doesn't help — the container's small, the vents are dead, and every breath I take drags him back into my lungs. "You're standing in a federal bio-lock with a body I haven't ID'd yet and a scent trail I'm not supposed to be able to track this fast. So start talking, or I clip you to the rail and let Command sort it out when the seal lifts."
"You gonna cuff me, Captain?"
"If I have to."
"Funny." He tilts his head, slow, deliberate, baring more throat than any smart man hands a badge holding a weapon an inch off his windpipe. "Because from here it looks like you're the one having trouble letting go."
He's not wrong about that either. My grip's still locked under his jaw, and it's not procedure keeping it there anymore — procedure would've had me stepping back, calling it in, keeping the six feet regulation calls for. Instead I've got him pinned to steel with my whole forearm shaking and his pulse hammering against my knuckles, fast, too fast, matching mine beat for beat like our bodies already agreed on something our mouths haven't caught up to.
His knee drives up between us, testing the room I've left him, and I catch it on my thigh and grind him harder into the wall for it. The clang rings through the whole container. Somewhere above us a relay clicks, resetting, and the red light over the hatch strobes once before locking steady.
"That's twice you've tried me," I say. "You want a third?"
"I want you off me." But his hand hasn't let go of my wrist. If anything it's tightened, thumb dragging a slow line up the tendon like he's mapping it. "Or maybe I don't. Hard to tell with your badge cutting off the blood to my brain."
"Say something that isn't a threat," I tell him, "and maybe I let you breathe easier."
"I don't do easier." His hand finds my wrist again, not fighting it this time — holding it. Fingers dragging slow up the inside of my forearm, right over the suppressant patch, right where he shouldn't be able to know exactly where it sits unless he's already caught what's underneath it. "Neither do you. That's the whole problem, Rourke."
The siren cuts. Not off — down, into a low pulse that means the wing's gone to lockdown standard, no override for the next ninety minutes. Ninety minutes sealed in a forty-foot can with a man whose scent is already crawling under every wall I've got left standing.
"Ninety minutes," I say, more to myself than him.
"Then we've got time to figure out which one of us is lying."
I slam him back again, harder, shoulder blades cracking against the container wall, my whole body pressed into the space where there shouldn't be any space left, my knee wedged against his, his chest rising too fast under my forearm. His breath goes out in one hard shove against my jaw, hot, close enough to taste, cedar and copper and something underneath that isn't human anymore, not entirely.
"Last chance," I tell him. "Tell me what's behind that grate."
He's already twisting out of it before I've finished deciding I don't want to let go.