As Catch watches her struggle, grasping the hook above her head with her hands to relieve the strain of the cuffs against her wrists, his gut clenches in that familiar way. If he didn’t know who she was, he might let himself appreciate it a while longer, the look of her trapped on that hook. Instead he clears his throat, which is suddenly tight, and gets on with it.
“Cadet Marsden. Your brother is highly regarded on this station.”
“Sir, I apologize for arguing with the clearance officer.” Her voice is soft in the near-dark, her tone firm but deferential in exactly the right degree. “It won’t happen again.”
“You’re not new to the Corps, cadet, but you’re new here. So I’ll give you one warning. Speak to me like that again and I’ll leave you in here for the rest of the week. The only words out of your mouth will be ‘Yes, Sir’ and ‘No, Sir.’”
“Yes, Sir.”
“If you talk back to any officer on this station again, he or she has my permission to have you on your knees, cleaning the toilets in the head for the next month. The men’s head.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“While they’re in use,” he clarifies.
She wriggles a little in the cuffs, trying to see him. “Yes, Sir.” Her voice wavers this time. She’s afraid he’s serious. He would be, if First wouldn’t kill him for it.
“Are you sure? You don’t sound sure.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Because if you’re not, I can leave you here to think about it. Someone will come to take you to the head and deliver the occasional meal, and you can just dangle and rethink your decision to come here. Will that be necessary?”
“No, Sir.”
If it didn’t smell so godawful in here, he might even draw this out. Let her sweat a little longer. But his irritation is dissipating just looking at her backside. He knows she’s not fragile or she couldn’t have made it this far in the Corps, but she looks delicate dangling from that hook.
He swipes his fingerchip over the scanner on the latch. The lock clanks and the door opens, and he enters the cell. He circles around her. The light spilling into the brig from the corridor skims her cheekbone. She looks up at him, her gaze direct.
Catch just hopes it’s dark enough that she can’t read his response.
First’s description of his little sister had been brief but clear. Or so Catch thought. “She’s a dork,” he said, when word got around to the other trainers that his sister was arriving today. When one of the assistant trainers asked what she looks like, First leveled him with a steel gaze and said, “She looks like me, shitrag.” First is huge. Just over six feet and broad-shouldered, lanky but muscular, with big hands, a square jaw, and thighs that could probably split a skull. So the image this conjured in Catch’s mind, and probably in the minds of the other trainers, wasn’t pretty.
Which might have been the point, in retrospect.
True, she does look like her brother; First just wasn’t clear what he meant. Yes, First is a hulking beast. He’s also graceful, somehow, lithe and athletic. And extremely good-looking. His sister’s been cut from a similar cloth.
Her eyes are dark in the shadows of the brig as she watches Catch, pupils overtaking that familiar blue. Her chest rises and falls in quick, shallow breaths, her full pink lips pressed together. She’s working very hard to look like she’s not losing her mind. Over the cuffs? The cell? Him? Catch can’t tell. He can’t seem to form a coherent string of thought at all.
And she just stares at him, uncertain. Waiting.
She doesn’t look angry or defeated, like he might expect. She looks alert, vividly humiliated, as she squirms on the hook. There’s fear, too, just beneath the surface, threatening to shake her apart, though she seems to have a handle on it—for now.
She also looks like she might just drop to her knees and suck his cock if he frees her—but that part is probably wishful thinking. Clearly she’s dying to be let free, but she doesn’t ask for it. Much as he might like her to ask. To beg, even. It’s the cuffs and the humiliation that get him. The tenderly bruised pride. But she’s not going to break. She’ll stay just as she is, her mouth shut, as long as he commands her to. This much he can tell by the deference in her gaze. His cock stirs at that look. An uncomfortably familiar pang of arousal roils low in his gut, even as he swallows it down.
First’s sister.
The thought snaps him out of it like an ice-cold slap in the face.
He leans in, so close he can feel her hot little breaths on his neck. Christ. He reaches up and grasps her slender wrist, feels her pulse beating against his thumb. He turns the cuff, exposing the clasp, and presses his fingerchip to it, disengaging the lock mechanism. When he lets her arm go, it drops like dead weight. He frees her other wrist and she stumbles back, heels dropping to the floor, and he catches her, his hand clamped on her upper arm. To her credit, she doesn’t protest. Doesn’t try to sell him a story about how that stuff in her ruck isn’t hers. She doesn’t say a thing.
“You’re going to keep yourself out of trouble, and I won’t tell your brother about this.” Strange, how he doesn’t sound like himself. Like this is just some scene he’s watching on the viz, some stranger playing Catch and doing a lousy job of it.
For a moment she looks stunned. Then she blinks and finds her voice. “Yes, Sir.”
He hooks a finger under her chin and holds her gaze, trying
