“Bond-grief. He was dead within six months. Stopped eating. Stopped sleeping. Stopped wanting to exist without her.”
The tears fell.
His gaze found hers and the grief there stole her breath. It was so raw and naked. “That’s what the mating bond means. Loving someone so completely that losing them destroys you.”
His hands came up, slowly, hesitantly, and wrapped around her wrists. At first she thought he was pulling her away, but then she realised he wasn’t.
He was holding on to her.
“I watched it kill my father. I swore I’d never let myself—” He broke off. “But then you walked into my house with your Christmas decorations and your stubborn optimism and I couldn’t... I tried not to...”
He closed his eyes. When he opened them, they blazed as he looked at her.
“I love you. I didn’t want to. I tried so hard not to. But I love you, Juni. And it terrifies me more than any pod nest ever did.”
More tears spilled down her cheeks, but she let them fall, holding his gaze with hers.
This was what he’d been fighting. Not her. His own heart.
And he loved her anyway.
“I love you too.” Her voice was thick with emotion. “I realized it at the festival. Right before they grabbed me. I was so scared—” She had to stop, breathe through the tightness in her chest. “I thought I was going to die without ever telling you.”
He brushed away her tears with a gentleness that cracked her heart wide open.
“You almost did.” His voice was destroyed. “Oh, lady… if I’d been slower. If Tarex hadn’t—” He couldn’t finish.
“But you weren’t. And he did.” She leaned into his touch. Let herself be held. “You saved me. Like you’ve been saving me since I got here, even when you were pretending not to care.”
A sound escaped him. Half laugh, half sob.
“I was never very good at pretending.” His forehead dropped against hers. “Not with you.”
She pulled back just enough to look at him.
“I know what the mating bond means now. I know the risk.” Her voice was steady. “And I choose it. I choose you. Grumpy, scarred, secretly-a-legendary-warrior you. All of it.”
“Juni—”
“I’m not finished.” She fisted her hands in his shirt, held him in place. “I don’t want to go back to Earth. I don’t want safe. I want this ranch and this colony and those ridiculous krulaati. I want Midwinter festivals and purple snow and arguing about what color snowmen should be.” Her voice cracked. “I want you. For as long as we have. Whether that’s fifty years or five hundred.”
He stared at her like she’d offered him something impossible.
“You’re sure.”
“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.” She pulled him down and kissed him. Soft at first, then deeper. “I choose the risk. I choose you.”
His arms wrapped around her. Crushed her against his chest, like he’d never let go.
“Mine,” he murmured against her temple. “My kelarris. My heart.”
She didn’t know what kelarris meant. But she understood it. Felt it in the way he held her. In the tremor that ran through his massive frame.
“Yours,” she whispered back. “All yours.”
She chose him.
And for the first time since she’d arrived on this frozen, purple-snow planet, she was where she belonged.
