"She enjoyed it." The man sneered at Swain from where he was sitting against a console, his hands tied in front of him. Swain felt his own hands clench on the controls, the weathered plastic creaking under his grip. He ignored the man so he wouldn't kick him, pushing down the memory of Kate's torn uniform and ring of finger sized bruises.
"All women do, but you could tell she was into it." Swain's jaw clenched so tightly he could feel his teeth pop. "She screamed so nicely."
Swain held his body still through sheer force of will but couldn't stop his mouth.
"Shut your fucking mouth."
The other man's lips turned up into a cruel smile.
"Oh, so you do speak." He flexed his bound hands and smirked up at Swain's wrists, scraped raw from where he'd frantically worked the rope off them, Kate's screams echoing every second he strained. "It's a pity you got lucky or I'd be having a second go at her right now."
Swain felt his blood go cold and forced down the equally cold desire that was building in his chest.
The man grinned again at his silence.
"Was it you she was calling out for when I was fucking her? Are you Swain?"
His control snapped and the cold focus he had been pushing down rushed over him, like water finding weakness in a dyke. Swain turned abruptly from the controls and reached down, his hands gripping hard enough into the man's shirt to tear at the worn fabric.
"Oh, ho! So he does have some fight in him!" He laughed as Swain dragged him to his feet and spun him.
He stumbled back a little as Swain shoved him, overbalancing and then righting himself. "What are you going to do, Navy man? You can't hurt me." He lifted his bound hands, stumbling back with another shove. "I'm tied up."
Swain enjoyed the flash of fear that finally made its way onto the man's face as he flicked a knife from his pocket and slid it under the man's bound hands.
"No, you're not."
The zip tie fell away and Swain used the hand he still had clenched in the man's shirt to shove him one last time.
Swain watched the man's face as he fell, watched when he realised that he would not hit the floor, watched him try to grab for the hatch as it fell past him.
Swain watched him hit the bottom of the hold, watched his skull split and the blood seep out of him, watched his limbs twitch with the last impulses of a dying brain.
"Swain."
She was standing in the doorway when he looked up, her uniform torn at the shoulder and her eye black. It was hard to tell her expression under the bruising.
He didn't regret what he'd done. But he regretted what she saw him do and what she would have to do now.
"I am sorry you saw me do that."
"Saw you do what?" Her voice was bland. She walked up next to him, looking down into the hold. " All I saw was a man attack you and when you pushed him off you couldn't stop him from falling." She looked back up at Swain. "There was nothing you could do."
"There wasn't." He told her and Kate shrugged. She reached down and picked up the sliced zip tie, slipping it into her pocket.
"It's even easier when it's the truth."
He reached out to touch her and she let him, leaning into his shoulder as they stared down at the corpse which had just begun to relax into death.
"Does Sally know what you are willing to do?" Kate asks him a few days later, leaning against the railing of the Hammersly.
He looks at her and then away, shrugging. "She does."
He's the only man she's let this close to her since. The captain had tried to touch her shoulder and she had shied away from him. Swain remembers the pinched look on his face as he pulled his hand back.
She stares at him. And he looks back, unfazed. "It's why I left the police."
She raises her eyebrows at him, demanding further detail.
"I knew how easy it was to get away with." He shrugs again, "He was her stalker and even with the connection I wasn't so much as interviewed."
He watched her realise what he was telling her. Waited for her expression to change.
"You've done this before." She says it, not like she's asking but like she's confirming it to herself.
"Once." He tells her, reaching out to touch her arm, a contact she does not shy away from.
"I've only killed for two people, Kate. You and my wife."
"Should I be honoured?" She asks him, a little sharply, a little wry.
Swain shrugs, "You can always tell them what I did."
Kate looks at him and sighs, deeply, releasing the tightness that had begun to build in her shoulders. She shakes her head and her exhaled breath sounds like a laugh.
"No." She tells him. "I can't."
"Okay." He tells her.
"Okay." She replies.