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unfair to punish a man for following his instincts to get to his mate by any means necessary. He now understood what the man had gone through.
    Dragon ran all the way to the detention center. The decks and the people he passed were a blur. His mission could not be delayed. If anyone thought it odd the chief of security was running through the ship with only a pair of pants on, no one would dare mention it to his face.
    “Sir,” the ensign on guard snapped to attention the minute Dragon ran through the door. The young man didn’t know where to look for a brief moment. The most feared officer entered the detention center on a run, looking wild. Dragon’s huge, naked chest was rising and falling, trying to drag in air, the vicious looking scars criss-crossing his chest visible to the world making angry lashes across its heavily muscled surface. Dragon through his haze noted the ensign immediately looking around as if he was expecting an attack.
    Dragon noticing the young officer staring at his scars, and if he wasn’t mistaken witnessed a subtle wincing at their viciousness, quirked one eyebrow at the man and pegged him with an icy stare. The ensign’s eyes immediately snapped forward as if lashed with a laser whip.
    “Unlock holding cell one,” barked Dragon.
    “Sir?”
    “Did you not understand me, ensign? I asked for holding cell one to be unlocked. If this job is too difficult for you to perform, I am sure maintenance needs someone to scrape space debris from the hull of the ship.”
    The ensign practically tripped over his feet to unlock the holding cell. Dragon could almost see the man’s terror of the thought of putting on a space suit and floating around the ship. Maybe it was a threat he should use more often. It certainly received an immediate response.
    Dragon reached the cell as the solid containment wall shimmered out of existence. Tarlon looked up from the mountain of paperwork in front of him in surprise.
    Dragon’s massive chest heaved as if he had run a terk mile in the hot sun. “There has been a mistake.”
    Tarlon grunted. “I know. Please tell me the name of the slacker that let all this paperwork Fated Mates
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    stack up like this? It is going to take a lot longer than my sentence to get all of this logged in the computer.”
    “No, no,” Dragon growled as he paced like a caged tiger back and forth across the cell. “I was wrong. I made the mistake.”
    “Sir, you’re really confusing me right now. You’re going to have to explain what you mean.
    If you think you’re going to increase my sentence so I can finish all this, you have another thing coming, my friend. I understand my lack of judgment from a military perspective, but this paperwork is borderline cruelty.”
    “I didn’t know. I didn’t know…how it consumed you.” As Dragon paced, he unconsciously rubbed his mating mark back and forth over the hard muscles of his stomach.
    “It’s as if this yearning I have for her is clawing at my stomach trying to be released.”
    “You have been…mated?” whispered a stunned Tarlon.
    “My soul is on fire. This desire is consuming me. What should I do? Tell me, what should I do? I can’t go to her in this condition. I’ll pounce on her like a beast. What am I to do? What am I to do?” Dragon’s frantic state escalated exponentially as he continued to pace.
    “You must go now! You must go! The yearning will only get worse until it is uncontrollable. It will not ease, get better, or go away. Not until you have merged with your mate, body and soul.”
    Dragon breathed deeply hoping the cool air would quench the fire in his soul and settle the yearning beast threatening to take control of him.
    “Go to your mate,” Dragon sighed. “I had no right to separate you from her.”
    “You don’t have to tell me twice.” Tarlon jump up from the table and bounded out of the cell, only to stop and look back at Dragon with sympathy. “Sir, I am going to prep a shuttle and fly you