“Reaching and holding are different.”
“I know.” Her thumb moved against his hand, a small deliberate press. “I’ll hold. V’dim. I promise you I’ll hold.”
He stared at her for a long moment.
Then she rose onto her toes and kissed him.
Not soft. Not reverent. Fierce—like she was making a vow with her mouth, like the promise wasn’t complete until he felt it at the bone. He put his arms around her immediately, using two tentacles to pull her close, sliding a third into her hair, and wrapping a fourth around the curve of her lower back with careful, deliberate pressure. She made a sound against his lips. Not distress. The opposite.
He poured everything into it. All the helpless fear. All the love that had nowhere else to go when she was about to leave. All the bone-deep pride in her, the awe that the Fates had put her in his path at all—this impossible, extraordinary human female who had walked into their lives and remade everything without trying.
When they broke apart, both of them were breathing harder than the effort warranted.
“The moment I feel you call,” he murmured against her temple, “nothing stops me. Not orders. Not fleet command. Not the Stars themselves. I will come.”
She pulled back just enough to see his face. Something fierce in her expression—and something that looked, quietly, like relief.
“And in return,” he said, “you trust Kaede. You trust your team. You don’t do anything reckless because you’re afraid we can’t get to you in time.”
She smirked. “Define reckless.”
His tentacle flicked lightly against her shoulder.
She laughed—small and warm and exactly what he’d needed.
The laughter faded slowly, the way warm things do when the air cools around them.
He kept her close. Couldn’t bring himself to put distance between them, not tonight, with the hours counting down and the bond carrying so much of his heartbeat into her and hers back into him that the boundary between them felt more like a suggestion than a fact.
One tentacle traced the line of her jaw. Another moved to her shoulder, slow and deliberate, mapping the curve of it with the particular attention he gave things he was trying to memorize. She let him. She always let him. That was one of the gifts she’d given them without ever making it feel like a gift—the patience of her stillness when they needed to learn her again, to press against her warmth and remind themselves that she was real and present and theirs.
He mapped her. The line of her collarbone. The angle of her shoulder where it sloped toward her neck. The soft hollow beneath her ear where her pulse lived close to the surface and he could feel it against his tentacle tip like a small, steady argument against all his fears.
Still here. Still alive. Stillhis.
Selena reached up and covered the tentacle at her jaw with her palm.
“V’dim.”
“I’m memorizing you.”
“I noticed.” Soft. “I’m right here.”
“You are now.” His fingers found the line of her waist and settled there. “You’ll be across the void in two days. Humor me.”
She turned her head and pressed her lips to the curve of his tentacle still cradled in her hand.
The sensation moved through him like a current. Not heat, exactly—deeper than that, something he felt in the bond more than the skin. Her warmth. The faint flutter of their connection acknowledging the touch and giving it back, amplified. He felt her affection clearly—felt the shape of it, the layered sincerity of it, the way it sat without condition or calculation.
He pressed his forehead down to rest against hers—that particular closeness, shared breathing, the bond stretching between them warm and luminous and more real than anything else in this moment. He could feel her the way he felt the Destima web: present, layered, complex. But unlike the web, unlike the population’s collective unease pressing at her shields, Selena’s thread in him was not anxiety.
It was home.
His hand slid from her waist. Moved lower. Came to rest, slow and reverent, against the slight swell of her belly.
Still small. Just beginning to be visible—the curve of it barely discernible beneath the fabric of her evening clothes. He spread his palm wide, feeling for the warmth of it. Feeling for the faint, barely-there flutter he’d found twice before. The biological miracle of new life curled inside her—Kaede’s daughter who was also their daughter, who was also the clan’s daughter. She belonged to all of them and none of them, singularly and everything to every single one of them regardless.
Selena covered his hand with both of hers.
