"Let go of my wrist or lose the hand, Captain."
Milo's voice comes out flat, almost bored, but his forearm is shaking against mine, tendon standing up like a wire pulled too tight. I've got him jammed against the container wall, badge still an inch off his throat, and he's still talking like he's got somewhere better to be.
"Not until you tell me what's behind that grate," I say.
"What grate."
"The scrubber. You keep looking at it like it's gonna bite you."
His eyes flick — half a second, no more — toward the vent housing bolted low on the far wall, and that's the tell. That's the whole thing right there. He catches himself doing it and his jaw goes tight, and for one second I watch a very controlled man almost lose control of his own face.
"You're imagining things," he says.
"I don't imagine things in a sealed lock with a ninety-minute clock and a smuggler's pulse jackrabbiting under my hand."
I didn't mean to say pulse. I meant to say wrist. But my palm is flat over the inside of his arm and his heartbeat is punching up through his skin fast enough that I can feel it in my own molars, and my patch — the one that's supposed to keep my head level around exactly this kind of thing — is already peeling at the edge where his shoulder ground into it during the first scuffle.
That's the problem. That's the whole entire problem.
He smells like copper and cedar and something under that, something my body reads before my brain does, and every second I stand here breathing it in is a second closer to not being able to make good decisions.
"You gonna arrest a scent, Captain?" he says, low, right up near my ear because the lock's forced us into eight inches of dead air. "Or you just enjoy having me pinned."
"Enjoy's a strong word."
"Your body's not saying strong word."
And that's when he moves.
It's fast — a hip check and a twist, using my own weight against the wall instead of his — and the next thing I know my spine is the one hitting corrugated steel, hard enough that the impact rattles up through my teeth, and his forearm's across my collarbone, bone grinding on bone, and my badge clatters out of my hand onto the grating.
"There," Milo says. "Now we're even."
"We are not even." I get a knee up between us, drive it into his thigh, and he grunts but doesn't let go, just leans his whole weight forward so we're chest to chest, breath slamming into breath, and I can feel every place his body's harder than mine and every place it isn't.
"You want your badge back," he says, "you're gonna have to want it more than you want this."
"This what."
He doesn't answer. He just tips his head, slow, deliberate, until his mouth is a half inch off the side of my throat — not a bite, not yet, just heat and the ghost of teeth — and my whole body goes electric and stupid at the same time, hips locking forward before I tell them to, and I hate that. I hate that more than I've hated anything in this whole shitty lockdown.
"Get off me," I say, and it doesn't come out like an order. It comes out wrecked.
"Say it again like you mean it."
I shove — both hands flat on his sternum, full weight behind it — and for one second it works, he staggers half a step, and I use it, I pivot us, slam him into the wall next to the scrubber housing instead of away from it, close enough now that his shoulder blade's an inch from the vent grille.
His whole body goes rigid.
Not from the hit. From the location.
"Don't," he says, and for the first time since the lock slammed, there's an actual crack in the flat voice. Real. Not performed.
"Don't what, Milo."
"Don't lean on that grate."
"Why."
"Because I will break your arm before I let you look behind it."
And he means it. I can see he means it, the way his whole frame's coiled different now, less about winning and more about guarding, and that tells me more than any file ever could — whatever's back there isn't cartel product, isn't cash, isn't a gun cache. It's something he can't afford anyone finding, badge or no badge, ninety minutes or nine hundred.
"Trade," I say, keeping my forearm bar across his chest, keeping him pinned but not pushing further. "You tell me what's in there, I back off the grate."
"You don't get to trade for that."
"I'm the one holding the override."
"You were holding the override." His mouth curls, not quite a smile. "Check your belt, Captain."
I don't want to look down. Looking down means taking my eyes off him for half a second, and half a second's apparently all it takes with this guy. But my hand goes to my hip anyway, on reflex, and the override clip — the one that unlocks the bio-seal, the one thing standing between us and staying trapped in here till the scrubbers cycle dead air for an hour and a half — isn't there.
It's in his fist. Down low, half-hidden against his thigh, lifted off me sometime between the wall-slam and now, and I didn't feel it happen. I didn't feel a damn thing except his heartbeat and his breath and the stupid, traitorous want climbing up my spine.
"You picked my pocket," I say, "while I had you against a wall."
"I told you." His eyes are dark, pupils blown wide in a way that's got nothing to do with the light in here. "Bad idea getting this close to me, Rourke."
The siren overhead ticks from red to a slower amber pulse — some system change I don't recognize, something new, something that means the lock itself just shifted state without either of us touching a panel.
And behind him, so faint I almost miss it under both our breathing, the scrubber grate rattles. Once. Like something on the other side just moved.
Milo hears it too. I watch it land on his face half a beat before he can smooth it back out — and for that half beat, he's not smug, he's not in control, he's a man who just realized the thing he's protecting isn't staying quiet anymore.
"Milo." My voice drops, all the heat bled out of it, replaced by something colder and a lot more dangerous. "What's alive back there."
He doesn't answer. He just tightens his grip on my override, plants his boots, and doesn't move an inch away from that grate.