Chapter 12 · Ninety Minutes

"Say it." Milo's teeth were still hooked in the skin over my collarbone, parked there, not biting down, just promising it could go either way.

"Say what." My voice came out wrong, torn up from the last twenty minutes of getting slammed into a steel housing.

"That you don't run this room anymore."

I grabbed a fistful of his hair and yanked his head back off my throat. Blood welled where his canines had broken skin — mine, his, I couldn't tell whose smell was whose anymore, cedar and something sharper, copper under both. He let me pull him off. That was new. Milo Drake didn't let anybody move him.

"I run the override," I said. "That hasn't changed."

"Yeah?" He was still braced over me, forearm across my chest like a bar dropped on a ride, weight settling instead of lifting. "Then get up and go use it."

I shoved him back — bone-on-bone, his elbow cracking mine, both of us grunting through it — and got my boots under me against the scrubber housing. My badge was still clipped where he'd pinned it an hour ago, dented now, the magstripe scratched half to hell.