That was all he got out before he launched himself off the bench with a speed that suggested the waiting had been genuinely painful, the bright-eyed urgency of a cub who had a mission and information to report and was already calculating how quickly he could reach his clanfathers. He vanished through the terrace arch with the sound of running feet and what was already shaping up to be a very involved account of his new responsibilities.
Nocrez was on his feet a breath behind him—slower, but with no less purpose—and disappeared through the arch with more grace than his brother, already composing something more careful in his head.
The terrace went still.
Below us, the training ground came into view—stone walls curving around a wide stretch of soft white sand and rainbow grass that shifted in the evening light. I watched as my sons crossed the yard, their smaller forms swallowed briefly by the shadows cast from the upper walls before they reached the three males just finishing practice.
Even from this height, I could make out the easy familiarity in their movements. Weapons lowered. Shoulders relaxing. The end of drills marked not by command, but by the quiet understanding that came with routine.
Meti didn’t move.
She sat in my lap in the silence, small and warm against me, one paw still wrapped around mine. Not because she hadn’t noticed her brothers leaving. Not because she wasn’t listening to the distant sounds of voices rising from below.
Because she’d chosen to stay.
And Meti’s choices were always deliberate.
The amber light deepened toward orange—the warning that Destima’s sun would soon dip beneath the horizon. Long shadows stretched across the sand and grass below, softening the edges of everything they touched. Somewhere in the lower gardens, a night-blooming flower opened to the cooling air.
I could smell it from here—faint. Sweet. Waiting.
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow would be our last day here. The day after, my clan would split once more.
Meti’s hand squeezed mine. Small, firm. Unhurried.
“We’ll be okay, Mama.”
She didn’t look up at me when she said it. Kept her gaze on the yard—the empty training ground, the last amber light, the sky beyond the villa walls going soft at the edges. Her voice was quiet and even, carrying the certainty of something she’d already verified by whatever internal system she ran on.
“And so will you.”
I closed my eyes.
Pressed my face into the top of her silver head and breathed her in—clean-spice warmth, the specific impossible gift of her, the particular way she smelled like the best thing I’d ever done.
Downstairs: Neazzos’s voice, climbing in volume, something about shields and first-response protocols. Kaede’s response, too low to parse but unmistakably genuine. Then Nocrez, quieter, earnest, already sorting out meal schedules in his head.
My fierce, impossible, extraordinary cubs
Meti with her still-water certainty. Nocrez with his determined, bottomless love. Neazzos, already briefing his clanfathers with the seriousness of a soldier reporting to command.
They were ready. They’d been ready, maybe, before I’d been willing to see it.
Now I had to be ready to let them.
20
V’dim
The twin suns bled copper across the horizon, against the indigo twilight falling upon them.
V’dim stood at the railing of the villa’s observation deck and watched them sink, his tentacles curled in loose spirals around the stone balustrade. Not from cold. The evening air on Destima was soft, faintly salt-tinged from the inlet below, the temperature still holding the warmth of the afternoon. The curling was reflex. A tell he’d never quite mastered hiding.
Z’fir knew. Z’fir always knew.
He’d asked his bondbrother to relay the request himself—could Selena come to him here, when the evening light turned gold? He hadn’t given a reason. Z’fir hadn’t asked for one. They’d been bonded too long for that particular courtesy. One look, and Z’fir had nodded, and gone.
