Her expression shifted—something in the set of her jaw, a loosening he hadn’t known she’d been holding. She pressed her palm flat against his chest, and the warmth of it moved through him like the first indicator of a fever breaking.
“Then let’s go.”
“Wait.”
She stilled.
He didn’t know how to begin. That was the problem—not the feeling itself, but the finding of words for it.
Xylo had always been good at the parts of life you could measure. The clinical. The physical. Give him a wound and he would close it; give him a fever and he would break it; give him a patient in crisis and he would work with steady hands until the numbers stabilized. Research, too—he could lose himself in it for days, chasing patterns, building answers from fragments, caring for others in the quiet ways that didn’t require him to expose his own ribs.
And he’d always thought words were one of his strengths.
Not performance like Odelm—no poetry meant to make a room sigh—but honesty. Calm explanations. Confessions spoken without drama. He could say hard things when they needed saying. He could sit beside someone in the aftermath and name the pain so they didn’t have to carry it alone.
Until he’d met her.
Selena had a way of stealing the breath right out of his lungs. Not with beauty alone—though she was painfully luminous even when she was exhausted—but with her mind. Her brilliance. The way she held a galaxy’s worth of pressure and still found space to be gentle. The way she adapted, accepted,endured—and somehow made all of it look inevitable, as if the universe had always been waiting for her to take its weight.
Being near her did something to him. Stilled his thoughts. Made his usual language feel clumsy and inadequate, as if any sentence he reached for would collapse under the sheer scale of what he meant.
And now she was watching him with the particular patience she reserved for moments she already knew were difficult.
That was the worst of it—she already understood. She was simply waiting for him to catch up to what she’d seen in him from the start.
He drew a slow breath, felt the air drag across his throat like resistance, and found the thread of it anyway.
“I know what you’re going to say,” she began. Something gentle in her voice, bracing-gentle—the tone she used when she was preparing to absorb a worry. “I know the mission has risks. I know the Chamber is—”
“It’s not you.”
The words came out flatter than he intended. He watched her blink.
“I trust Kaede,” he said. “I trust Zyxel’s bond-sense, and Ryzen’s knowledge of how they operate, and Euouae’s capabilities to read you in ways I’m not sure the rest of the clan fully appreciate yet. I trust that you have faced dangerous situations and survived them.” The galaxy-patterns along his forearm shifted faintly in the low light as his grip tightened. “It’s not you I’m afraid for.”
“Then what—”
“Zirene.”
The name landed differently. More weight. More edges. He watched her absorb it.
“Zirene is at the front.” The words came steadily now, not easier but with the particular momentum of something that hadbeen building pressure all evening. “I’ve been running scenarios in my head since sunset. Field triage. Psychic exposure. What I would do if I couldn’t reach him in time—”
“Xylo.”
“And in two days V’dim and Z’fir leave—same morning as you.” He kept going, because stopping meant returning to the suppression, and he had been suppressing since this morning and it hadn’t helped. “To hold the system perimeter. Which is right. Which is necessary. I understand every tactical reason it has to be them, at that position, doing that work.” His voice stayed level. He was very good at keeping his voice level. “But if something happens—I am here. In this room.” He stopped. Let the silence hold the rest of it. “With my sorted bandages. And absolutely no way to help them.”
She waited.
He said the thing he hadn’t let himself finish all evening.
“And if someone doesn’t come back. What do I do with a wound I have no instrument to treat?”
The medical wing was very quiet. The villa breathed around them—Destima’s jungle alive dancing in the night beyond the walls, the distant sound of the pool’s waterfall, the medwing’s steady ambient hum.
He was Primary. The first-bonded. The steady axis. The mate who carried the weight without showing the strain, who held without fracturing, who was perhaps—as Selena had once said to him, gently, in a private moment he still thought about—too good at appearing fine.
He was very tired of appearing fine.
