I grunt.
He steps closer, the thud of his heavy boots echoing through the empty conference hall. “Your mind wandered.”
“During their prattle?” I snort. “My mind wanders duringbreathing. I would rather wrestle a stone-beast than listen to that man speak of ‘synergistic relations’ again.”
Yorta huffs, the sound dry. “More than wandering, I think.”
I shoot him a look. “Choose your next words with care.”
But he only tilts his head, old bone-spurs dull under the ship’s soft lights. “You watched the girl.”
I do not answer. I shift my stance, crossing my arms. My claws tap against the metal bracers of my armor. Once. Twice.
“She doesn’t look like much,” Yorta says—simple, straightforward, not malicious. Just an older warrior stating what he sees.
A spark snaps inside me.
I turn. Slow. Deliberate. I let my eyes bleed that faint glow that vibrates under the skin, twin embers that lock onto Yorta’s face.
“She’s not a ‘much.’” My voice drops to a low rumble. “She’s mine.”
Yorta’s shoulders stiffen. For a heartbeat, neither of us moves.
Then he bows his head once. A warrior’s acceptance. But not understanding.
I don’t understand it either.
The pull is strange—nothing like mating heat, nothing like hunger or challenge-lust. It coils deeper, under bone, under flesh. A tether. Invisible. Stronger than instinct and older than blood.
What are you, little human?
The echo of her gasp—when I slapped her—buzzes in my ears like a sweet vibration. Her scent still clings to my palm. I flex my fingers, remembering the softness of her hip beneath my hand, the way her body gave just a little, like she was pulled toward the touch even as she tried to hide the reaction.
I want to hear her voice.
I want to see her bare skin flush that color again.
I cut the thought off, growling under my breath.
Yorta waits. Patient. Loyal. He has followed me through sieges and starvation and civil war, and still he watches me now as if evaluating the shape of this new obsession.
“Arnab will notice,” he says quietly. “Others, too.”
“I don’t give a rotting bone about Arnab,” I snap. “Let him challenge. I’ll tear his spine out through his throat.”
Yorta nods. “As you wish.”
I turn away before the tightness in my chest makes itself too obvious. My claws scrape lightly across the conference table as I pass, leaving shallow grooves. Let the IHC patch that later.
I stalk into the corridor, Yorta at my heels, the overhead lights flickering as the environmental systems shift to night-cycle settings. The ship smells too sterile, too clean. Not like Storder—where the air carries iron and leaf-rot and the breath of beasts sleeping under the roots of the mountains.
But I catch the faintest whisper ofherscent lingering behind us. The path she walked. The ground she touched.
It curls through my lungs, tightens something primal low in my gut.
We reach the suite assigned to me. Guards post themselves outside automatically—Reapers, loyal and stone-faced. I wave them off and close the heavy door with a thud.
Inside, the lights adjust to my preferred dimness. Shadows stretch long over the bone-plated furniture. I sit on the low bench carved from Storder stone, the weight of the room settling around me like armor.
